[Updated] The Biden administration yesterday afternoon declassified the number of nuclear weapons the United States possesses. The act reverses the secrecy of the Trump administration, which denied release of the number for three…
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Open source intelligence -- which is derived from open, unclassified sources -- should be recognized as a mature intelligence discipline that is no less important than other established forms of intelligence, the House of Representatives said last month in the FY 2022 defense authorization act (sec. 1612). The House directed the…
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Satellite images reveal that China is building a second nuclear missile silo field. The discovery follows the…
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To reduce the burden on traditional data centers, improving on DNA data storage could be the key The pace at which data - such as photos, videos, and social media posts - are being generated is ramping up drastically, exceeding the scaling limits of traditional silicon-based data storage technologies, and…
Read moreThe Department of Energy has released a sanitized version of its nineteenth report to Congress on inadvertent releases of classified nuclear weapons information through the declassification process. Out of…
Read moreSome notable rules and regulations on security policy that have recently been published include the following: “National Industrial Security Program Directive Number 1,” Information Security Oversight Office, January 27,…
Read moreFAS hopes the President will take the opportunity to send the right message to the American public and ditch political rhetoric in his State of the Union. FAS is deeply concerned that the nation is headed in the wrong direction on critical science issues that affect our health, national security, environment and economic future. The President has an opportunity to change that starting with his State of the Union address on January 31st. Specifically, we would like the President to take scientific research funding, science education funding, and biosecurity more seriously then he has in the past.
Read moreA couple of articles in the energy trade press [link] have said that President Bush may announce a major new energy initiative in the State of the Union Address. This is a program that has been in planning for over a year. Originally it was called the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative, or GNEI, pronounced "genie," but apparently the Administration decided that acronym was a bit too cute, with too many "getting out of the bottle" snipes. More recent articles in the Washington Post [link] and Wall Street Journal report that the program has been renamed the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and is not quite ready for prime time so will probably not appear in the Address but will be unveiled in a couple of months. [link] If it does get a mention, I will return to this on Wednesday. By all accounts, the centerpiece of GNEP will be plutonium reprocessing and recycling. This is one of those ideas that is great in theory but doesn't work in practice. The plan is to reduce nuclear waste by repeatedly recycling it through a new (in the US at least) type of power reactor, a fast neutron reactor. [more]
Read moreI am Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at FAS. I will be blogging facts, analysis, and declassified documents about new nuclear weapon systems, changes…
Read morePuzzled by references to non-disclosure agreements signed by reporters who are embedded with U.S. military forces, Secrecy News requested a copy of such a non-disclosure agreement from the Pentagon. But…
Read moreA layman might suppose that in the United States a telephone conversation cannot be intercepted by an intelligence agency such as the NSA except in compliance with the laws and…
Read moreIn a 2002 statement presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee, James A. Baker of the Justice Department Office of Intelligence Policy and Review questioned the constitutionality and the necessity of…
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