The Department of Energy has released a redacted version of its twentieth report on inadvertent releases (pdf) of classified nuclear weapons information found in declassified records at the National Archives. Upon examination of nearly 300,000 pages of public records, reviewers found 47 pages which they said should not have been released. Those pages were embedded in over a thousand pages of documents, all of which were removed from public access.
The defense contractor Sikorsky Aircraft has sued the Defense Department in an effort to block disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act of what it considers confidential commercial information, the Project on Government Oversight reported on its blog.
The record of a September 2005 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “ABLE DANGER and Intelligence Information Sharing” has recently been published.
The U.S. military must be prepared to respond to a deliberate or inadvertent incident occurring abroad that involves chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosives (CBRNE). Department of Defense Instruction 2000.21 on “Foreign Consequence Management,” (pdf) March 10, 2006, sets DoD policy on the subject.
Satellite imagery of RAF Lakenheath reveals new construction of a security perimeter around ten protective aircraft shelters in the designated nuclear area, the latest measure in a series of upgrades as the base prepares for the ability to store U.S. nuclear weapons.
It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.
Getting into a shutdown is the easy part, getting out is much harder. Both sides will be looking to pin responsibility on each other, and the court of public opinion will have a major role to play as to who has the most leverage for getting us out.
How the United States responds to China’s nuclear buildup will shape the global nuclear balance for the rest of the century.