“These screw-ups happen”

mburtonk · Jun 2, 2009

If this were really important to WF, it would have been posted already. I'll post it anyway.

Apparently the Government Printing Office leaked some nuclear site information...oops. The best part seems to be that nobody seems to know whose fault it is.

This doesn't quite rank up there with some of our local boys losing a nuke last year, since that was actually a weapon.

The NYT seems to have taken it a little seriously with their headline.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=1&hp

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an on-line newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That publicity set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document was made public.

On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former Director of Central Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of Defense who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”

But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels are stored “can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out. It can become a physical security threat.”

The information, considered sensitive but not classified, was assembled for transmission later this year to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of a process by which the United States is opening itself up to more stringent inspections in hopes that foreign countries will do likewise, especially Iran and other states believed to be clandestinely developing nuclear arms.

President Obama sent the document to Congress on May 5 for Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its web site.

As of Tuesday evening, the reasons for that action remained a mystery. On its cover, the document attributes its publication to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. But Lynne Weil, the committee spokesperson, said the committee “neither published it nor had control over its publication.”

Gary Somerset, a spokesman for the Government Printing Office, said it had “produced” the document “under normal operating procedures” but had now removed it from its web site pending “further review.”

The document contains no military information about the nation’s stockpile of nuclear arms, or about the facilities and programs that guard such weapons. Rather, it presents that appears to be an exhaustive listing of the sites that comprise the nation’s civilian nuclear complex, which stretches coast-to-coast and includes everything from nuclear reactors to highly sensitive sites at weapon laboratories.
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“These screw-ups happen”

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“These screw-ups happen”

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