Screw up reveals US nuke sites

NY Times:

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On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.

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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.

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This sounds like more Obama goo-goo "smart diplomacy." In other words not too smart. I am glad to see the material was withdrawn after the Times inquiry. I have to question what the papers reaction to such a screw up by the Bush administration. While this information needs to be kept from terrorist, it was not nearly as valuable to the enemy as the disclosure of the terrorist surveillance program by the Times. That has to be one of the biggest screw ups by a major publication in the history of this country.

Some thought the Pentagon papers was a breach of intelligence, but most of the documents were historical in nature and they mostly made liberal Democrats look bad. The terrorist surveillance program was an on going intelligence operation to intercept enemy communications in a time of war. Its disclosure was just nuts.