The limiting factor in terrorists making nuclear weapons is not an informational one. It is a material one: acquisition of fissile material. If they cannot acquire fissile material, they cannot make a bomb. If they have fissile material, they can make a crude bomb based on public domain information.

Giving them more information may not help them: the difficulty in implementing, say, advanced nuclear weapons designs, is less a matter of knowing what they are (again, much of that is well known) but in knowing the “art” of actual weapons assembly (crafting high explosive lenses of the right consistency and shape, machining the various radioactive materials into the right shapes, actually putting the pieces together without killing yourself in the process, etc.). Detailed plans for, say, a hydrogen bomb won’t help a terrorist one whit — the actual fabrication and assembly is vastly beyond their capabilities.

To put it another way: the “secret” of the bomb is generally agreed by most to be more material and tacit (“know-how”) than it is epistemic.

What’s the situation with the flu data? I’m not sure — it would require considerable expertise, and imagination, to know what’s dangerous and what’s not, and who could abuse it and who couldn’t, now and 30 years down the line, when presumably making custom viruses is going to be a bit easier than it is now. (I say “imagination” because the real security folks have that in scads — their entire mindset is bent on figuring out how someone could cleverly abuse the world.) If the barrier to misusing the flu is epistemic, as opposed to material or tacit, then censorship of some form (or classification of some form) might be prudent. If it is currently epistemic and tacit, but in the long term the tacit barrier will decrease (e.g. the creation of machines that allow easier use/misuse), then again, being conservative about information release might still be warranted. If the barrier is material (which I doubt), then the epistemic concern might be lessened.

What’s the situation? I don’t know enough about it to say, but if I were trying to make a responsible, rather than ideological, judgment on this, those are the sort of factors I would weigh.

Frankly, I am less worried about “terrorists” in the “folks in other countries living in caves” sense than I am of the anthrax-letter, “lone wolf” sort of person. Science suggests that only “responsible researchers” should have access to the data. Who are those? Anyone at an American university? Anyone at any university in the world? Anyone with a .edu address? If that’s the security system that’s going to be in place, then don’t bother at all with censorship. Even if it doesn’t leak immediately (in the name of science and all that), it’s essentially free.

On the other hand, if you start to really talk about how you evaluate “responsible,” now you’re talking about a security clearance system. Which is an entire other kettle of fish, and probably *shouldn’t* be confused with a civilian science issue.

The tricky problem here is that this is a muddle of civilian and military concerns. It’s bound to be fairly ineffective unless the scientists in question, and those who work in the same field, are all of the same mind about it. (Cf. the self-censorship of fission chain reaction data in the 1930s.)

Excluding the the specific point mutations from the study does absolutely nothing to prevent the imagined “bioterrorists” from reproducing this virus. Ferrets are widely available. H5N1 bird flu is widely available (as Chinese poultry farmers have once again been reminded). Just repeat the transmission study, and you should get a transmissible ferret version of H5N1. Of course, that’s just another reminder that we have more to fear from natural virus evolution than from any human-engineered pathogen.

Even if the “recipe” is subtracted from the publication, there is still value to publishing the article. Interested researchers always have the option of contacting the authors and doing some professional networking. I dislike the idea of access being legislated or regulated, but caution might be smart on a voluntary basis. If some person-to-person networking is involved in getting access to the research results, at least there’s more of a handle on who is using the data and why. Some people will get unfairly excluded under this system, and I admit that’s a problem.

But why would they bother? The experiments allegedly show that H5N1 can adapt to ferrets while retaining its virulence. So what? Contrary to the hype Fouchier has been feeding to reporters, the ferret model is actually a pretty poor predictor of human flu virulence. Sadly, there’s no shortage of simpler, cheaper, more reliable ways of perpetrating terror.

The practice of acting in terms of how we can prevent terrorism constricts us further and further into immobility, a result for which those who would use terror as a weapon — whether they live in caves in Afghanistan, or in offices on Capitol Hill — are hoping. The only way to defeat terrorism is to not be afraid.

Publish the damned results! Progress should always outweigh politics.

As for fears of recipes, etc., it would seem that mutating viruses isn’t that complex at all, if you have the means of a decent laboratory and some knowledgeable people. So even without this particular piece of research, people could still do those experiments. That these experiments have risks is obvious.