Nuclear Weapons

This and That

03.24.06 | 1 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

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.

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