A formula for the capacity of a quantum channel for transmitting private classical information is derived. This is shown to be equal to the capacity of the channel for generating a secret key, and neither capacity is enhanced by forward public classical communication. Motivated by the work of Schumacher and Westmoreland on quantum privacy and quantum coherence, parallels between private classical information and quantum information are exploited to obtain an expression for the capacity of a quantum channel for generating pure bipartite entanglement. The latter implies a new proof of the quantum channel coding theorem and a simple proof of the converse. The coherent information plays a role in all of the above mentioned capacities.

20 pages, LaTeX. Some errors in Chapter 4 and Appendix C corrected. More typos corrected. Appendix C improved. to appear in IEEE TIT