United States “Accidentally” Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites

Always helpful for National Security – A list of secret nuclear sites accidentally released, but I have to question the word accidentally with all this kowtowing to foreign nations and namely the Muslim world.

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On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.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

These screw-ups happen?  Are you serious?  I’m sure that makes everyone feel much safer and correct me if I am wrong but I don’t recall a screw up this large, meaning the release of classified information, over the last 8 years!  We just had the first domestic terrorist attack on our nation since 9/11, yesterday in Arkansas where a 23 yr-old officer was killed and another was injured.  This is incredibly disconcerting.

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.”

Umm… you think?

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