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Recent Nuclear Declassifications and Denials: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good: New Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and Other Nonproliferation Issues

The Bad and the Ugly: Defense Department Denials on Dimona 1963, U.S. Aid to British SLBMs, SAC Censors Film on Airborne Command Posts

National Security Archive Washington, D.C., December 6, 2023 – Recent U.S. government decisions on the declassification of historical records on nuclear proliferation demonstrate the good, the bad and the ugly in the current national security secrecy system.

On the plus side are releases that add historically valuable information to the public record, such as the opening of documents that were reclassified after having been released at the National Archives, a newly declassified Kissinger-Nixon telcon, and U.S. embassy messages from 1980 on nuclear nonproliferation policies.

In contrast to these good releases are a number of bad and just plain ugly responses from the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force, among others, highlighting a persistent problem where government agencies—for whatever reason—try to maintain security classification restrictions even in cases where the information has already been released, sometimes decades earlier.

Some of the documents now released in full had been held up for 20 years by the review process initiated by the Kyl-Lott Amendment and related provisions, under which the Department of Energy effectively reclassified many historical records already opened to the public at the National Archives, although other organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force and some of the intelligence agencies, also got in on the act using their own authorities.

Another key document, the CIA’s own internal assessment of its intelligence failures (and successes) before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, includes details that were censored in 2012, and withholds details that the CIA published in 1992.

The ugliest cases demonstrate the Pentagon’s overreach. Defense Department objections led to the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo about the British submarine-launched missile program, a document that was declassified and published in full in the Foreign Relations of the United States series nearly ten years ago. The Pentagon also censored multiple 60-year-old documents about the Israeli nuclear program, apparently completely unaware of the huge number of declassified records already available on U.S. concerns about Israel’s nuclear intentions and the Dimona reactor in particular.

The examples included in today’s publication illustrate the deep and fundamental problems that plague the U.S. secrecy declassification system…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2023-12-06/recent-nuclear-declassifications-and-denials-good-bad-and

December 9, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA