[Infowarrior] - U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally

[Richard Forno]

June 3, 2009
U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its  
pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information  
about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs,  
including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for  
nuclear weapons.

The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an online  
newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That publicity 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.

On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the  
document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure  
were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive  
information were already known publicly.

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former Director of  
Central Intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now at the  
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I  
would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”

But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and  
International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks  
nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels  
are stored “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.”

The information, considered sensitive but not classified, was  
assembled for transmission later this year to the International Atomic  
Energy Agency as part of a process by which the United States is  
opening itself up to stricter inspections in hopes that foreign  
countries, especially Iran and other states believed to be  
clandestinely developing nuclear arms, will do likewise.

President Obama sent the document to Congress on May 5 for  
Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government  
Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its Web  
site.

As of Tuesday evening, the reasons for that action remained a mystery.  
On its cover, the document attributes its publication to the House  
Committee on Foreign Affairs. But Lynne Weil, the committee  
spokeswoman, said the committee “neither published it nor had control  
over its publication.”

Gary Somerset, a spokesman for the printing office, said it had  
“produced” the document “under normal operating procedures” but had  
now removed it from its Web site pending further review.

The document contains no military information about the nation’s  
stockpile of nuclear arms, or about the facilities and programs that  
guard such weapons. Rather, it presents what appears to be an  
exhaustive listing of the sites that comprise the nation’s civilian  
nuclear complex, which stretches coast to coast and includes nuclear  
reactors and highly sensitive sites at weapon laboratories.

Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American  
Scientists in Washington, revealed the existence of the document  
Monday in “Secrecy News,” an electronic newsletter he publishes on the  
Web.

Mr. Aftergood expressed bafflement at its disclosure, calling it “a  
one-stop shop for information on U.S. nuclear programs.”

In his letter of transmittal to Congress, Mr. Obama characterized the  
information as “sensitive but unclassified” and said that all the  
information that the United States gathered to comply with the  
advanced protocol “shall be exempt from disclosure” under the Freedom  
of Information Act.

The report details the locations of hundreds of nuclear sites and  
activities. Each page is marked across the top “Highly Confidential  
Safeguards Sensitive” in capital letters, with the exception of pages  
that detailed additional information like site maps. In his  
transmittal letter, Mr. Obama said the cautionary language was a  
classification category of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s  
inspectors.

The agency, in Vienna, is a unit of the United Nations whose mandate  
is to enforce a global treaty that tries to keep civilian nuclear  
programs from engaging in secret military work.

In recent years, it has sought to gain wide adherence to a set of  
strict inspection rules, known formally as the additional protocol.  
The rules give the agency powerful new rights to poke its nose beyond  
known nuclear sites into factories, storage areas, laboratories and  
anywhere else that a nation might be preparing to flex its nuclear  
muscle. The United States signed the agreement in 1998 but only  
recently moved forward with carrying it out.

The report lists many particulars about nuclear programs and  
facilities at the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories — Los  
Alamos, Livermore and Sandia — as well as dozens of other federal and  
private nuclear sites.

One of the most serious disclosures appears to center on the Oak Ridge  
National Laboratory in Tennessee, which houses the Y-12 National  
Security Complex, a sprawling site ringed by barbed wire and armed  
guards. It calls itself the nation’s “Fort Knox” for highly enriched  
uranium, a main fuel of nuclear arms.

The report lists “Tube Vault 16, East Storage Array,” as a prospective  
site for nuclear inspection. It said the site, in Building 9720-5,  
contains highly enriched uranium for “long-term storage.”

An attached map shows the exact location of Tube Vault 16 along a  
hallway and its orientation in relation to geographic north, although  
not its location in the Y-12 complex.

Tube vaults are typically cylinders embedded in concrete that prevent  
the accidental formation of critical masses of highly enriched uranium  
that could undergo bursts of nuclear fission, known as a criticality  
incident. According to federal reports, a typical tube vault can hold  
up to 44 tons of highly enriched uranium in 200 tubes. Motion  
detectors and television cameras typically monitor each vault.

Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the  
Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that  
tracks atomic arsenals, called the document harmless. “It’s a better  
listing than anything I’ve seen” of the nation’s civilian nuclear  
complex, Mr. Cochran said. “But it’s no national-security breach. It  
confirms what’s already out there and adds a bit more information.”