New Releases from the National Declassification Center
The National Declassification Center at the National Archives yesterday announced the availability of 240 sets of records that have recently undergone declassification processing.
Many of the record collections are listed in such banal or generic terms that it is hard to imagine they would attract any interest at all. (“Bureau of Naval Personnel Activity File, Personnel Accounting Ledger Records, 1952-1967”?)
But there are also a few items that will make at least some researchers’ hearts beat a little faster, such as three boxes of declassified “Cloud Gap Field Test Reports, 1962-69.”
Cloud Gap was an ambitious government project in the 1960s to establish the technical basis for new arms control measures. Previously disclosed Cloud Gap Field Test Reports on the verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons are posted here.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.