Washington

The former director of intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory has been told that he can publish his explosive account of China's nuclear-weapons programme — if he accepts heavy censorship of the 500-page manuscript.

Danny Stillman, a physicist who retired from Los Alamos in 1993, filed a suit against the US government on 18 June, arguing that it had unlawfully exceeded its constitutional authority by blocking publication of his manuscript for 18 months.

But on 27 June, Stillman's lawyer, Mark Zaid, was given the manuscript, marked up by Pentagon intelligence officials. “They released about 85 to 90% of the manuscript and said the rest was highly classified,” says Zaid. “I sent the whole thing to Danny to examine. He may end up challenging the omissions on grounds that the information came from the Chinese and doesn't compromise our security in any way.”

Stillman made nine trips to China, with government consent, between 1990 and 1999 — six of them as a private citizen after he retired from the lab. His book, Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program, contains what may be the most detailed record ever of the country's nuclear-weapons activities, with information on its 46 nuclear tests and more than 2,000 scientists and engineers involved in the programme.

The Pentagon has argued that the book contains secret information that, if made public, would damage both US national security and its relations with China.

But some experts think that material in the book would undermine accusations that China relied on spying in the United States to acquire nuclear-weapons expertise. Irving Lerch, the director of international affairs at the American Physical Society, says that releasing Stillman's findings “would go a long way in eliminating the charge that foreign-born scientists, particularly Chinese, can't be trusted with our nuclear secrets” (see News Feature, page 10).