GPO reveals confidential U.S. nuclear information by mistake

said he and his staff were trying to figure out how the document ended up being published. “Our best understanding is that this was sent to GPO by staffers of the House leader,” he said. “If we are going down this road, if we have a culture now where we go ahead and disclose everything, especially when it comes to national security, that is playing fast and loose with the safety of Americans.” Bond also said that it was possible that the security officer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee was “lax” in not stopping the publication of the document.

Lynne Weil, a spokeswoman for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “The committee reviewed the document from the Government Printing Office and neither published it nor had control over its publication by the GPO.”

She said the committee would investigate what happened. GPO officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday because their office had already closed.

Carter and Lake write that the pages of the document, which are marked “highly confidential, safeguards sensitive,” appeared on the GPO Web site, www.gpo.gov. An accompanying letter from President Obama dated 5 May said the United States “regards this information as ‘sensitive but unclassified.’” The document was sent to the House parliamentarian earlier this month and was forwarded to the GPO, said three congressional staffers who spoke on the condition they not be named because of the nature of the issue.

Two national security specialists said the disclosure did not pose a national security risk. Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists (FAA), praised the decision to publish the dossier. “It is significant on a few different levels,” said Aftergood, who first wrote about the publication Monday on Secrecy News, his Web site. “If you set out to compile a list of these facilities, you could do it, none of them are classified, none of them are unacknowledged, all of them have a measure of security, no one will be able to walk off the street and penetrate any of these facilities. Until we have insurrection in American cities, this information belongs in the public domain,” Aftergood said.

Nonetheless, the publication of a country’s declaration of facilities to the IAEA is unusual. Portions of Iraq’s declaration under Saddam Hussein leaked to the public. Otherwise, Aftergood said, he was unaware of any other time that a country’s disclosure had been released.

The Pentagon official said that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. nuclear installations beefed up physical security, but “we need to be mindful of the type of information that we make available through the Internet and we don’t want to do anything that might highlight potential vulnerabilities.”

Retired Army Special Operations Maj. Gen. Tim Haake said disclosing any information on the “location or disposition of our nuclear arsenals or supporting information being made freely available in one document is a threat on several levels.” A U.S. adversary “like North Korea or even Iran” could use the information to plan future attacks, he said. “At a lower level, it allows people with nefarious intentions to target employees at the facilities, for infiltration,” Gen. Haake said. “Now that they know where these locations are, they don’t have to break in, they can target things and people going in and out of any of these facilities. Some of the larger facilities have always been known, but it’s the smaller facilities that we’re concerned about and those assets that support our nuclear arsenal. Just think of how much money will we need to invest to enhance security at these sites that are now so exposed in this full document.”

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank, told Carter and Lake that most of the information disclosed in the document was related to Department of Energy programs touted in the past as developing methods to make it harder to divert nuclear material for weapons. “It is a bit ironic that nobody wanted this information to be made public,” Sokolski said. “Most of the listed programs are advanced nuclear fuel cycle and reactor initiatives that the Department of Energy sold to the [Capitol] Hill claiming they would vastly reduce the possibility of terrorists being able to divert nuclear bomb material from the commercial nuclear sector. Apparently, some people don’t think they are all that safe. If this is so, it might make sense to shut them down.”