By Hans M. Kristensen The first public release of New START aggregate numbers since the United States and Russia in February extended the agreement for five years shows the treaty continues to limit the two nuclear powers strategic offensive nuclear forces. Continued adherence to the New START limits is one…
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For the past three years, the Trump Administration refused to provide an annual tally of the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile or the number of weapons that had been dismantled each year, though that had been the practice under the Obama Administration and through 2017. The Federation…
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By Hans M. Kristensen The United Kingdom announced yesterday that it has decided to abandon a previous plan to reduce it nuclear weapons stockpile to 180 by the mid-2020s and instead “move to an overall nuclear weapon stockpile of no more than 260 warheads.” The decision makes Britain the first…
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Shortly before the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued a directive that altered the process for preparing the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF, stripping out limitations on signals intelligence collection from the previous policy. The NIPF is perhaps the single most important administrative…
Read moreEquipped with a one million dollar budget for the current fiscal year, the Public Interest Declassification Board will hold its first meeting on Saturday, February 25. The Board, which…
Read moreThe challenges posed by so-called “sensitive but unclassified” information, and Administration efforts to bring order to this problematic policy area, were explored in “Government withholds ‘sensitive-but-unclassified’ information” by Lance…
Read moreThe House Government Reform Committee held an extraordinary hearing yesterday on the vulnerabilities of national security whistleblowers who challenge what they see as agency misconduct. “Breaking bureaucratic ranks to speak…
Read moreIn an unprecedented and previously unimaginable case, two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were accused last year of mishandling classified government information. Now they have…
Read moreThe Bush Administration’s practice of selectively declassifying information that advances its policy agenda while withholding other information that controverts that agenda is “kind of sleazy,” an analyst quoted in the…
Read more“…Find them in all the caves where they are hiding, and eliminate them like rats,” President Putin told the Federal Security Service, or FSB, on Tuesday, urging them to intensify…
Read moreA long-simmering dispute over the role and character of the Congressional Research Service now threatens to boil over in the form of a clash between CRS management and CRS analyst…
Read moreThe Central Intelligence Agency continues to make a mockery of its legal obligations under the Freedom of Information Act and the national security classification system. The Project on Government…
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