More Secrecy

by CKR

We're not allowed to know how many missiles and nuclear weapons the United States had during the Cold War. Never mind that the number is different now because we've been disassembling them; never mind that those numbers were trumpeted at the time because we wanted to scare the Soviets. Never mind that those numbers have been available for twenty or thirty years, and there's no way to take back all the electronic and other archives that may contain them.

Those numbers might tell the terrorists something.

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said the Pentagon excised the missile numbers. Under a 1998 law, Wilkes's agency focuses on scrubbing declassified documents for sensitive U.S. nuclear weapons information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to harm Americans, he said.

"It's not our call to do missile data," Wilkes said. "There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back," he added. "And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."

So Wilkes is telling the terrorists that some data that they have is currently classified.

We don't know why it is classified, but someone who is paying close attention might be able to guess.

Wouldn't it be more effective mis/disinformation to leave the information out there, no comment, no furor, for whatever purposes. It could have been exaggerated to counter the Soviet threat. It could have nothing to do with today's numbers.

In any case, those numbers are in the thousands. So this is going to tell the terrorists how to get them?

Seems to me that it would be much more effective to be proactively transparent on these numbers and related facts. The more available they are, the better the public can compare the Cold War threat with today's. The United States could even show that it is disassembling nuclear weapons as fast as it can. That might make for a call for more action on that front, like melting the pits down so they can't be reassembled, but exactly what targets do we need thousands of nukes for? That question is above Wilkes's pay grade, but it would be nice if someone would tell us.

Poor Mr. Wilkes must feel like King Canute standing before an electronic tide. But I guess his job pays the bills.

Kudos to the National Security Archive for making this public. H/T to Armchair Generalist for the link.