From George Johnson’s New York Times July 3, 2004 article “Los Alamos’s Super-Secret Heritage Shows Some Cracks:”
When science is conducted in secrecy it takes on the air of magic.
From its beginnings as an outpost of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos has operated in a state where the ideal of science as the free exchange of information has been indefinitely suspended, replaced by a conviction that there is safety in ignorance, that life is more secure when certain powerful ideas are kept among a few.
Peace through the nonproliferation of knowledge, another of the ingrained absurdities of the nuclear age.
Which reminds me of why cryptography (and quantum cryptography in particular) is so disturbing to me: does the universe really allow for the hording of information? Our unsharing universe? Of course, the type of knowledge Johnson is talking about, “scientific knowledge”, does appear to be open to everyone: you don’t get exclusive rights to the science when you discover it. But what if the universe didn’t even work that way? What if the mere discovery of some new bit of science closed the door for all others investigating the same phenomenon?