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Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 18. August 2006 / Timeline August 18, 2006

Version 3.5

17. August 2006, 19. August 2006


08/18/2006
National Security Archive Update, August 18, 2006
How Many and Where Were the Nukes?
What the U.S. Government No Longer Wants You to Know about Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 197
Washington, DC, 18 August 2006 - The Pentagon and the Energy Department have now stamped as national security secrets the long-public numbers of U.S. nuclear missiles during the Cold War, including data from the public reports of the Secretaries of Defense in 1967 and 1971, according to government documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive http://www.nsarchive.org .
Pentagon and Energy officials have now blacked out from previously public charts the numbers of Minuteman missiles (1,000), Titan II missiles (54), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (656) in the historic U.S. Cold War arsenal, even though four Secretaries of Defense (McNamara, Laird, Richardson, Schlesinger) reported strategic force levels publicly in the 1960s and 1970s.
The security censors also have blacked out deployment information about U.S nuclear weapons in Great Britain and Germany that was declassified in 1999, as well as nuclear deployment arrangements with Canada, even though the Canadian government has declassified its side of the arrangement.
The reclassifications come in an environment of wide-ranging review of archival documents with nuclear weapons data that Congress authorized in the 1998 Kyl-Lott amendments. Under Kyl-Lott, the Energy Department has spent $22 million while surveying more than 200 million pages of released documents. Energy has reported to Congress that 6,640 pages have been withdrawn from public access (at a cost of $3,313 per page), but that the majority involves Formerly Restricted Data, which would include historic numbers and locations of weapons, rather than weapon systems design information (Restricted Data).
Documents posted today by the National Security Archive include:
* Recently released Defense Department, NSC, and State Department reports with excisions of numbers of nuclear missiles and bombers in the U.S. arsenals during the 1960s and 70s.
* Unclassified tables published in a report to Congress by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird as excised by Pentagon reviewers.
* A "Compendium of Nuclear Weapons Arrangements" between the United States and foreign governments that was prepared in 1968 and recently released in a massively excised version under Defense Department and DOE guidelines.
* Canadian and U.S. government documents illustrating the public record nature of some information withheld from the 1968 "Compendium."
"It would be difficult to find better candidates for unjustifiable secrecy than decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," remarked Archive senior analyst Dr. William Burr, who compiled today's posting. "This problem, as well as the excessive secrecy for historical nuclear deployments, is unlikely to go away as long as security reviewers follow unrealistic guidelines."
"The government is reclassifying public data at the same time that government prosecutors are claiming the power to go after anybody who has 'unauthorized possession' of classified information," said Archive director Thomas Blanton. "What's really at risk is accountability in government."

08/18/2006

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