[1] Howard Morland, writing in Cardozo Law Review, equated the Born Secret doctrine to a permanent gag order on nuclear ideas and concepts.
[4] Writing for the Department, Nick Prospero highlighted concerns related to constitutionality; the stifling of scientific research and advancement; and that public pressure for open access to data in the areas of "health, safety and the environment" fueled this historic controversy, back to the days of the predecessors of the DOE such as the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration.
[5] In that case, the magazine The Progressive attempted to publish an account of the so-called "secret of the hydrogen bomb" (the Teller–Ulam design), which was apparently created without recourse to classified information.
[5] Many analysts predicted that the United States Supreme Court would, if it heard the case, reject the "born secret" clause as being an unconstitutional restraint on speech.
[10] The concept of born secret is reported as the only area of United States law where discussion of data and information already in the public sphere is defined as illegal.
[12] Quist, writing in 2002, notes that per Federal Register notices in 1967 and 1972, there exists only one known 'loophole' around nuclear technologies and born secret doctrines: According to current DOE procedures, research and development on methods of isotope separation other than gaseous diffusion or gas centrifuge can be carried out on an unclassified basis until that research shows a “reasonable potential for the separation of practical quantities of special nuclear material.” Thus, this area of atomic-energy information is not “born classified” but is classified only when it reaches “adolescence.” [6][13][14]In the early days of the American nuclear programs, a noted concern of scientists was fear of accidental violations of the Atomic Energy Act.
"[15][16] Aryeh Neier, writing in 1980 for the Index on Censorship in his essay, USA: 'Born classified' highlighted possible dangers and risks of the secrecy doctrine, and how they may have been used to lawfully restrict media coverage of plutonium and radioactive contamination from the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado; the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash where a United States Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress crashed at Goldsboro, North Carolina leaving a single Mark 39 nuclear bomb "one safety" from detonating outside of a small town; and how at Palomares, Spain, the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash from a mid-air collision led to the dumping of four B28FI Mod 2 Y1 thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs,[17][18][19] all of which fell to the surface.
[20] In 1976, Princeton University student John Aristotle Phillips designed, on paper, a working nuclear weapon to show how easily such technologies could fall into the hands of American adversaries, and was later nicknamed the "A-Bomb Kid" by the media in response.