the pentagon papers
Nixon could have acted. He simply did not want to.
From the Pentagon Papers wikipedia page:
"President Nixon's first reaction to the publication was that, since the study embarrassed the Johnson and Kennedy administrations rather than his, he should do nothing."
um...he did act. did you really just not read the sentences that came after the one you quoted?
However, Kissinger convinced the president that not opposing the publication set a negative precedent for future secrets.[9] The administration argued Ellsberg and Russo were guilty of a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917, because they had no authority to publish classified documents.[23] After failing to persuade the Times to cease voluntarily publication on June 14,[9] Attorney General John N. Mitchell and Nixon obtained a federal court injunction forcing the Times to cease publication after three articles.[9] Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said:
Newspapers, as our editorial said this morning, we're really a part of history that should have been made available, considerably longer ago. I just didn't feel there was any breach of national security, in the sense that we were giving secrets to the enemy.[24]
The newspaper appealed the injunction, and the case New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713) quickly rose through the U.S. legal system to the Supreme Court.[25]
On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles based upon the Pentagon Papers;[9] Ellsberg gave portions to editor Ben Bradlee. That day, Assistant U.S. Attorney General William Rehnquist asked the Post to cease publication. After the paper refused, Rehnquist sought an injunction in U.S. district court. Judge Murray Gurfein declined to issue such an injunction, writing that "[t]he security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."[26] The government appealed that decision, and on June 26 the Supreme Court agreed to hear it jointly with the New York Times case.[25] Fifteen other newspapers received copies of the study and began publishing it.[9]
nixon did try to stop them, and he failed. miserably. and even if he had succeeded, it wouldn't have mattered since he didn't intervene until
after the material had already been released to the public. this is exactly the point that the folks on my side are making: the government can't erase memory, and it can't literally control everyone in the media.
this is exactly the example you say doesn't exist. the press got a leak of top secret documents, ran them, and the government was powerless to stop them.
I did a Google search for US Atomic Bomb secrets and couldn't find anything. The US Government seems to be doing a good job of keeping them secret from the public, regardless if one secret was transferred from one party to another at some point.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were mercilessly executed for what they did. They were parents of two small children. The consequence for leaking a US secret is the ultimate one: Death.
right; the rosenbergs were the parents of two small children and knew that they would be executed if they were caught stealing top secret nuclear documents, yet they did it anyway because they believed it was the right things to do more than they valued their own lives and the lives of their children. the state was not able to deter them from successfully stealing top secret documents and giving them to the soviet union.
the us didn't keep them secret. they were stolen and given to the soviet union. the soviet union had no motive to make any of that public. that's like, espionage 101.