A consensus among scientists maintains that the atomic bomb information that prosecutors said the Rosenbergs had conspired to give to the Soviets was of little value, except to corroborate what the Soviets already knew from other spies.
Energy Department officials from Secretary Bill Richardson on down have failed to provide adequate explanations for the disappearance and mysterious reappearance of two computer hard drives containing sensitive nuclear bomb information from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
This is how they still see things: whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death penalty.
The atomic bomb, the information bomb, and the demographic bomb.
Beyond the case of Mr. Bergersen, prosecutors in the last year have brought about a dozen cases involving China's efforts to obtain military-grade accelerometers (used to make smart bombs), defense information about Taiwan, American warship technology, night-vision technology and refinements to make missiles more difficult to detect.
As chief of the counterterrorism section at the bureau's Washington headquarters, Mr. O'Neill helped capture the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, coordinated information in the Oklahoma City bombing that led to the arrest of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and played a key role in the investigation of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.
A senior F.B.I. official spurns a roguish informant who warns of Mr. Abdel Rahman's activities before the bombing (his information eventually led to the arrests and convictions of the sheik and most of the conspirators).
Cale's life, like his songs, is permanently carpet-bombed with information.
Critics are skeptical, but it is unclear if bomb-making information would be so casually stored as to be available to burglars.
Even without firm knowledge that the supreme leader had ordered his scientists to assemble a bomb, such information could help guide analysis and decision making, which nobody can afford to approach lightly.
