Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Pointer/Gordon/Watts/Samuels Turkey Neg

Nuclear Secrecy Good

DOE’s initiatives take place within a larger, government-wide effort to reexamine classification policy in the wake of the end of the Cold War. U.S. national security policy is no longer directed against the overarching threat of the Soviet Union and its allies. The primary concern of protecting information related to nuclear weapons has shifted to stemming the threat of nuclear proliferation. This complicates some aspects of maintaining the classification system. Protecting information about old nuclear weapons designs or outdated production techniques was formerly considered important but had a lower priority simply because a sophisticated nuclear weapons power like the Soviet Union already had such information. Now, however, protecting such information is essential because the would-be nuclear powers of the greatest proliferation concern are less technically sophisticated nations or even terrorist groups, and older (or generally simpler) design and production techniques might better match the capabilities of a potential proliferator. No forseeable new nuclear state would pose a threat to the United States and its allies comparable to the threat from the former Soviet bloc. Thus, information that could have helped the Soviet bloc war planners such as the size and composition of fissionable materials inventories or data on most past nuclear weapons activities (but not designs) that might reveal present total capability, is not longer as sensitive as it was once believed to be. Classification policy must reflect a balance of opposing values. Powerful and compelling reasons continue to exist for protecting genuinely sensitive nuclear weapons information even though considerable information is already in the public domain. Access to classified information is no longer necessary for a potential proliferator to construct a simple nuclear weapon, but such access could make it significantly easier to build such a device or to make it more effective. The Department would fail in its responsibilities if it did not protect certain design and production information, but the appropriate scope of the information that warrants such careful protection is difficult to define.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US government accidentally made public a secret report detailing its nuclear sites, programs and even exact locations of nuclear stockpiles, The New York Times reported Wednesday. "The federal government mistakenly made public (the) 266-page report," the Times reported, noting that the blunder was revealed Monday in an online newsletter about federal secrecy. "That set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public," the Times said, adding that by late Tuesday "after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday she had called for an investigation into the incident. "The disclosure of information related to nuclear facilities suggests that the current system does not provide adequate review and safeguards," she said in a statement. "Accordingly, I have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate immediately what led to the disclosure of this information and to make recommendations to prevent a similar disclosure in the future." Several analysts said the security breach was not devastating "given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly," the report said. "These screw-ups happen," the Times quoted John Deutch, a former director of central intelligence now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying. "It's going further than I would have gone but doesn't look like a serious breach." The information was described as "confidential but not classified," the Times added. David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security here, told the paper however that making the locations of nuclear material available "can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out."