Secrecy Versus Openness: Finding a Balance at the Department of Energy

Secrecy Versus Openness:
Finding a Balance at the Department of Energy

Proceedings of a Workshop held on November 29, 1999

John F. Kennedy School of Govenment
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Harvard University
789 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 0238

Introduction
Session I Summary
Albert Narath Steven Aftergood Session II Summary
Ray Kidder Troy Wade Matthew McKinzie Session III Summary Maureen Eldridge Appendix

Introduction

Nuclear weapons policy has been marked by a central tension between secrecy and scientific openness since its earliest days. Designing, producing, and maintaining nuclear weapons draws on knowledge from many fields of science and engineering and thus inherently requires sustained interaction with researchers working on relevant unclassified subjects that may provide insights into weapons problems. At the same time, governments have sought to control access to information about nuclear weapons in order to maintain technical advantages over other nuclear weapons states and to prevent nations outside of this small circle from acquiring nuclear weapons. Debates over how to strike an appropriate balance between nuclear secrecy and scientific openness have taken new twists since the end of the Cold War. Advocates of greater openness about nuclear weapons and related issues argue that maintaining nuclear weapons without conducting explosive tests requires increased reliance on unclassified scientific knowledge; that recruiting and retaining top-class scientists at the nuclear weapons laboratories requires letting them communicate with peers outside of the labs and publish their research where possible; that it is time to understand and address impacts of the nuclear arms race such as the environmental and health effects of weapons production; that protecting nuclear secrets effectively requires reducing the scope of restricted nuclear information and building "higher fences around narrower areas"; and that international cooperative efforts to improve protections for nuclear materials require reciprocal openness from the United States.

Conversely, many experts assert that hostile states and terrorist organizations are increasingly likely to seek to acquire nuclear weapons, and therefore that any information which could aid their efforts should be restricted. Conclusion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) gives countries such as China new incentive to seek information about nuclear weapons through espionage since they will not be able to derive it through their own nuclear testing programs. And Iraq's use of technologies and documents dating back to the Manhattan Project in its clandestine nuclear weapons program indicates that older nuclear information (a relatively low security priority during the Cold War) may require more stringent protection today.

The Managing the Atom Project held a workshop at Harvard University on November 29, 1999 to examine these competing arguments and discuss whether current U.S. policies were striking an appropriate balance between secrecy and scientific openness. The meeting took place as the Department of Energy (DOE) was upgrading its nuclear security policies in response to allegations of Chinese spying at the nuclear weapons laboratories. While the accuracy of these reports was and remains contested, several high-level reviews of the issue earlier in 1999 had harshly criticized DOE for lax security practices.1 In response, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson ordered a series of changes to DOE policies in areas including cyber-security, foreign visits and exchanges, and document declassification. Many of these actions were responses to more stringent Congressional proposals.

Discussion at the workshop centered on two issues: whether these reforms were likely to improve protection of key nuclear weapons information, and their impact on openness and scientific cooperation at DOE. Participants included senior officials from previous Republican and Democratic administrations and high-level scientific advisors to the U.S. government. Key points of consensus included:

agreement that effective nuclear security required targeted policies focused on identifying the most critical secrets and protecting them effectively, using technology as available (such as in reviewing documents for declassification) to allocate limited security resources as efficiently as possible;

a general view that current actions to protect nuclear information were not well focused or prioritized, and that some measures (such as a congressional requirement for DOE to re-review of thousands of documents over 25 years old that were scheduled for automatic declassification to ensure that they did not contain nuclear weapons information) were diverting security resources to relatively low-priority activities; and

concern that security upgrades at DOE laboratories (including laboratories performing exclusively unclassified work) were undercutting morale, making research more difficult, and potentially reducing rather than enhancing U.S. security by making it more difficult for the labs to recruit and retain top scientific talent.Events since the workshop support these views. Several reports have found that new restrictions on foreign visits and exchanges are constraining scientific work at DOE laboratories.2 The temporary loss of two computer hard drives containing sensitive nuclear weapon design information at Los Alamos National Laboratory, disclosed in June 2000, underlines concerns expressed at the workshop that in seeking to protect essentially all information that might be relevant to nuclear weapons, DOE risks diluting its security resources and leaving key information vulnerable to theft or loss.

This report includes summaries of workshop discussions and prepared remarks by all speakers who distributed their presentations in written form (several participants spoke without written remarks). Additionally, Bryan Siebert's PowerPoint presentation is available on the Managing the Atom Project's web page at www.ksg.harvard.edu/bcsia/atom.

We welcome responses to the questions raised in the report, along with recommendations on how to strike the right balance between secrecy and openness in the twenty-first century.

Jennifer Weeks
Executive Director, Managing the Atom Project

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Session I: Declassification and Openness at DOE After the China Espionage Investigations

Speakers in this session examined the history of DOE's efforts to reduce nuclear secrecy and assessed the impact of the China espionage controversy on the agency's Openness Initiative. They generally agreed that allegations of Chinese spying had all but halted progress in the field of openness. Many discussants warned that Congressional and agency responses to the spy controversy had had worrisome effects on both morale at the DOE weapons laboratories and nonproliferation cooperation with other countries, thereby potentially undermining rather than improving U.S. security. There was less agreement on the risk posed by past lab practices, the future prospects of openness, and what steps, if any, were needed to achieve a better balance between openness and security.

A. Bryan Siebert, director of DOE's Office of Nuclear and National Security Information (formerly the Office of Declassification), began by observing that openness did not mean indiscriminate declassification, as some critics had charged. Rather, openness allowed DOE to be accountable to citizens and to build the public trust needed for DOE to carry out its missions. Siebert then reviewed the history of openness and declassification, beginning with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (which required periodic review of information and release of any information that no longer required classification to protect the national security) and ending with more recent practices that evolved in response to increased concerns about health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons production. Siebert noted that since the spying controversy, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction, and asserted that the new focus on security measures such as polygraphs was having a chilling effect on lab personnel. As evidence, he observed that unclassified publications by lab scientists had decreased, and many lab employees were fearful about the impact of new security procedures that made it quite difficult to determine what information could be publicly discussed and what could not.

Siebert argued that openness supported important national objectives such as treaty verification, nonproliferation, and scientific research, and encouraged other countries to adopt similar policies. Moreover, he quoted former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Michael May, who warned that the open flow of ideas had been fundamental to keeping the United States in the lead in defense technology, compared to other nations that had more heavily emphasized secrecy. He concluded by insisting that openness was not dead, pointing out that declassification continued (although staffing levels had been flat for several years). What had changed, he argued, was the amount being declassified: Congressional requirements to re-review past declassification decisions had dramatically reduced the pace of declassification, and the general climate was not favorable to openness.

Albert Narath, former director of Sandia National Laboratories, described the natural tension between the need to protect national security and the need for openness (which, he contended, was required in a democracy and promoted scientific and technological progress). Public distrust of the DOE and increasing demands for openness after the end of the Cold War had led the agency to reconsider its openness policies, and in 1997, after the Fundamental Classification Policy Review (chaired by Narath), the agency had fundamentally reformed its approach to classification. Unfortunately, progress on declassification slowed dramatically in 1998. The discovery of documents containing RD (Restricted Data) and FRD (Formerly Restricted Data) on nuclear weapons in records transferred to the National Archives for declassification; allegations of Chinese espionage; and heightened worries about the "export" of unclassified information led to a host of new security restrictions and practices that, Narath argued, had had a negative impact on the DOE laboratories.

Narath contended that DOE now operated in an environment that was hostile to openness, but that the need for openness remained. He stated that real progress toward the related goals of greater openness and improved security on nuclear issues would require amendments to the Atomic Energy Act. Such amendments would allow for building even higher fences around particularly sensitive information, coupled with a robust policy of openness and declassification.

John M. Deutch, Institute Professor at MIT and former Director of Central Intelligence, asserted that concerns about counter-intelligence at the national labs were valid, noting that security at the labs had been an issue since the mid-1940s and that the labs were especially attractive targets for espionage. Deutch contended that the labs were strongly oriented toward collaboration, and that most such arrangements posed some degree of security risk-for example, discussions between U.S. and foreign nuclear weapon designers. Deutch therefore questioned the wisdom of most lab-to-lab exchange programs. He expressed concern that current policy responses to the Chinese espionage allegations, such as polygraphs and restrictions on foreign visitors, would be largely ineffective; at the same time, however, he argued against ignoring the problem or criticizing attempts to improve the situation, since until publication of the Cox Report the lab directors had not been sufficiently attentive to security. The problem, Deutch contended, was that mechanical controls were only part of the answer.

In terms of next steps to address nuclear security concerns, Deutch contended that further critiques of the DOE labs would only hurt recruitment and weaken U.S. national security. He also expressed doubt about the wisdom of pending plans to create an autonomous internal nuclear weapons agency at DOE with its own administrative functions, including security, counter-intelligence, and management. Dividing responsibilities in this fashion, Deutch argued, would create too many lines of authority, leading to weak leadership and inaction, and would make it more difficult to achieve successful results. Instead he recommended focusing on solutions-in particular, on making top management accountable for performance in counter-intelligence, and having one accountable individual in charge of managing each lab, with one accountable individual reporting to him or her on all aspects of counterintelligence.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists argued that the spy scandal had given additional momentum to critics' efforts to slow and reverse recent DOE declassification and openness efforts. More generally, he contended, the spy scandal had provided a new opportunity to attack DOE. Often these attacks included allegations that were plainly false-for example, charges that former Secretary Hazel O'Leary had leaked plans for the W-87 nuclear warhead. As a result, Aftergood stated that DOE's openness efforts had been scaled back and de-emphasized. The rate of declassification had slowed dramatically as DOE sought to comply with Congressional review requirements. Aftergood voiced concern about the impact of the new National Nuclear Security Administration and the possibility that Congress was reversing the trend toward increased openness on nuclear issues.

Discussion focused on the issue of what kinds of declassified information might be useful to proliferators and how they were most likely to acquire it. Many discussants agreed that access to weapon-usable uranium or plutonium remained the key barrier to producing simple nuclear weapons, and that many of the technologies for plutonium production reactors and reprocessing had long been in the open literature (along with at least some approaches to enrichment), but that information could help more advanced countries or groups refine and improve their weapon designs. There was disagreement over the extent to which proliferators were apt to target documents in national archives for weapons information, rather than seeking information more directly through human contacts or theft of classified information.

In response to questions about how DOE balanced the risks and benefits of specific declassification actions, several participants stated that technical experts were involved in these decisions, and that factors in favor of declassification included the potential nonproliferation benefits of releasing specific information or documents. However, the linkage between intelligence on proliferant countries and classification policy appeared to be weak: one participant asserted that the U.S. intelligence community had consistently failed to provide information to DOE on what information specific countries of concern needed most and might be seeking from U.S. sources.

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Contribution to "Secrecy vs. Openness" Workshop

Albert Narath

Classification decisions in the Department of Energy (DOE) have always had to contend with the natural tension that exists between two opposing interests. On one hand, considerations of national security define a need to limit access to information that might benefit a real or potential enemy. On the other hand, the governing principles of a democracy require that information generated by the Government be accessible to the public to the extent possible. It is also generally understood that secrecy impedes scientific and technological progress and should therefore be restricted to those topics where national security interests dominate.

This tension has posed especially difficult challenges in recent years for the Department of Energy. Public distrust of DOE related to concerns over possible impacts on public health, safety and environmental quality arising from nuclear weapon development, production and test activities have placed enormous pressures on the Department for greater openness. Controversies regarding the post-Cold War future of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, as well as growing demands by historians for greater access to DOE records have amplified these pressures.

The Department responded with in-depth reviews of its classification policy culminating in the promulgation of an "Openness" initiative as outlined in the Secretarial Press Conference of February 6, 1996. An "Openness Advisory Panel," chaired by Richard Meserve, was organized in July of 1996 under the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board to assist the effort. In August of 1997 the Panel issued its report "Responsible Openness: An Imperative for the Department of Energy" which offered wide-ranging findings and recommendations in support of the "Openness Initiative. Significant progress was achieved by DOE during the three years following the press conference: for example, according to DOE some 90% of the declassifications recommended by the "Fundamental Classification Policy Review" in its report of January 15, 1997 were approved and incorporated in the annual report RDD-5 ("Drawing Back the Curtain of Secrecy") released on January 1, 1999. Significant effort was applied during that period to revising the Classification Guides, declassifying documents, and engaging the Public in more intensive and informative dialogues.

Unfortunately, a number of developments beginning in late 1998 have raised questions about the "Openness Initiative" and slowed its tempo dramatically:

The contents of some NSI (National Security Information) documents subject to automatic declassification under Executive Order 12958 (1995) were found to contain RD (Restricted Data) and FRD (Formerly Restricted Data). (Classified documents covered by the Atomic Energy Act were specifically exempted from the Order.) The Kyl Amendment to the FY99 Defense Authorization Bill directed DOE and the Archivist to develop a plan for screening documents covered by the executive order. Subsequently, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson obtained Presidential agreement to an 18-month extension of the automatic declassification deadline.

Allegations of Chinese espionage involving advanced U.S. nuclear warhead designs rapidly cascaded into a series of independent reviews, all pointing to serious security lapses within the DOE complex. Whether the information losses and their national-security implications are as serious as alleged in these reports is currently the subject of acrimonious debate. Nonetheless, the repercussions have already been severe, including the reorganization of the National Security functions within DOE, enormously intensified security and counterintelligence measures (including a mandate to subject at least some fraction of employees at the three DOE weapon laboratories to polygraph screening), as well as restrictions in the laboratories' "Foreign Visits and Assignments" programs.

Simultaneously, escalating concerns over leakage of U.S. (unclassified) technology have given rise to stricter interpretations of what is covered under "Export Controlled Information". Especially difficult to implement are "Deemed Export" restrictions involving any controlled information that is released in the presence of foreign nationals be it abroad or at home. Since foreign nationals quite legitimately attend virtually every U.S. technical conference, the implications of the "Deemed Export" restrictions are clearly very serious.

The new security structures and practices have already had a chilling impact on DOE laboratory culture that can only sap the vitality of these institutions. There may be no denying that the balance between security and openness had shifted a bit too far toward openness since the end of the Cold War and that some degree of sloppiness had permeated security practices. However, what we are witnessing today is a heavy-handed (and certainly costly) return to Cold War approaches to handling perceived threats.

The fact that the "Openness Advisory Panel" of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board has not met publicly since its meeting at Hanford in February of 1998 is indicative of the extent to which the openness climate has deteriorated. Among other impacts, the renewed emphasis on tighter security appears to have caused a loss of DOE interest in pursuing some of the more far-reaching recommendations of the reports referenced above, especially those requiring amendments to the Atomic Energy Act. On a more positive note, there is some indication that DOE is attempting to act on a major recommendation, that of identifying more clearly the most sensitive information and building "higher fences" around that subset of classified information.
More generally, the nation appears headed toward increased isolationism in its policies. The recent Congressional moves away from a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban and in the direction of a National Missile Defense underscore this trend. The imperatives that led to the 1986 "Openness Initiative" have not lessened in importance or urgency. One can only speculate as to how soon a more balanced compromise between secrecy and openness can be agreed.

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Declassification and Openness at DOE After the China Espionage Investigations
Steven Aftergood

Allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage have generated potent political pressures to slow or even reverse recent trends towards declassification at the Department of Energy. Declassification policy has become a target and a casualty of intense partisan animosity, and the underlying rationales for openness-technical, bureaucratic, and political-have been obscured, perhaps beyond recovery.

Introduction

The impulse towards openness and declassification in nuclear weapons matters dates back to the early days of the nuclear age, and is almost as old as the more familiar impulse towards nuclear secrecy.

Henry De Wolf Smyth wrote, at the conclusion of his 1945 volume on Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, that:

In a free country like ours, ... decisions must be made by the people through their representatives. This is one reason for the release of this report. ... The people of the country must be informed if they are to discharge their responsibilities wisely.3

The release of the Smyth report-two days after the bombing of Nagasaki-was all the more remarkable because it is not self-evident that its technical content was actually required to inform the public.4

But controversy over increased "openness" also materialized early on, especially in connection with the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, and it would soon be exacerbated by reports of atomic espionage.

One Congressman, declaring his opposition to a civilian Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, warned against transferring "the secrets of the atomic bomb and of atomic energy" to a civilian entity. Another Congressman complained that "I have never been able to understand why anybody should want to give this secret away. It is safe where it is. Why turn it over to this Commission ... and run the risk of losing it? "5

An early connection between espionage, the loss of nuclear secrets and a looming threat to the security of the United States was drawn by Rep. John E. Rankin, a hardline member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, after twenty-two people were arrested in Canada for passing secret information to the Soviet Union in February 1946. Rankin condemned "those spies that had been down here... stealing the secrets of the atomic bomb, in order to use it against you and me and the rest of the American people."6

"In these and other statements on the House floor," Jessica Wang observed in her recent book on scientists in the early cold war, "conservative members of Congress repeatedly linked American security to the protection of secrets..." while scientists argued that there was no fundamental secret to protect and that "attempts to maintain the atomic monopoly would fail."7

This early oscillation between nuclear openness and conservative reaction, roiled by charges of espionage, would be recapitulated several times up to the present day, and most clearly over the past year.

The DOE Openness Initiative

The DOE Openness Initiative, introduced in December 1993 by then-Secretary Hazel O'Leary, was not simply a rejection of the usual bureaucratic imperatives; rather, it arose from a reevaluation of the agency's own self-interest, which required an improved relationship with the public, which in turn was perceived to depend upon greater openness.

The Openness Program was initiated with a simple objective in mind: to make the Department of Energy open, responsive and of service to its customers, the citizens of the United States. No less than the future of the department was at stake, for unless the DOE could operate in an environment of trust and fruitful dialogue with its stakeholders, the essential missions of the Department were in jeopardy either of being terminated outright or of being diminished in effectiveness to the point of abandonment.8

The promise, the success, and the failings of the Openness Initiative will not be recounted here in detail as they have been well documented elsewhere.9 But a few salient characteristics and achievements may be noted.

Fundamental Classification Policy Review. The fact that DOE undertook this systematic reconsideration of the validity of its classification categories is as significant as any of the results that emerged. One might suppose that such a periodic reconsideration would be an obvious component of any rational security program-but no other government agency has undertaken a comparable review of its classification policies and practices.

Declassification. Information was declassified at an unprecedented rate-though never as quickly as public consumers wanted or as officials seemed to promise-in the course of the Openness Initiative. Whole new categories of information entered the public domain concerning the history of nuclear explosive testing, the production of nuclear materials, and various other topics.

Opennet. The creation of an online database of declassified documents was another first for the DOE Openness Initiative, facilitating public access to hundreds of thousands of historically valuable documents.

The Role of Top-Level Leadership. Contrary to a common presumption of critics and supporters alike, the original impetus for classification reform at DOE preceded the Clinton Administration and the tenure of Secretary O'Leary.10 Nevertheless, it is doubtful that the Openness Initiative would have been carried out but for the leadership of O'Leary, who made it something of a personal crusade. At other agencies, and at DOE since O'Leary's departure, there has been no equivalent effort. An ongoing commitment from top-level leadership is evidently a prerequisite for this kind of bureaucratic reform.

The Openness Initiative was bolstered by new policies prohibiting classification of environmental, safety and health information; by the establishment of Site Specific Advisory Boards; by the promulgation of a new regulation governing classification; and more.

Though none of these measures constituted a complete solution to any important problem, collectively they manifested a seriousness of purpose, and a determination to fundamentally alter the character of DOE's relations with the American public.

Early Opposition to Openness (Dementia Pre-Cox)

Long before the Cox Committee report on Chinese espionage, opposition to openness and declassification at the Department of Energy became evident.

Within days of Secretary O'Leary's first Openness Initiative press conference on December 7, 1993, at least one conservative opponent likened the new initiative in all seriousness to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney wrote that O'Leary "chose Pearl Harbor Day to launch what was, arguably, the most devastating single attack on the underpinnings of the U.S. national security structure since Japan's lightning strike on the 7th Fleet 52 years ago."11

One might be tempted to dismiss such remarks as hopelessly ignorant and vulgar, except that they accurately represent the views of significant portions of the Republican leadership. It is such views-and not the presumed public interest in declassification-that would come to dominate Congressional reaction to the DOE Openness Initiative, especially after Republicans took control of Congress following the 1994 elections.

Congress Resists Clinton Administration Declassification Policy

Even though nuclear weapons information was specifically exempted from President Clinton's 1995 executive order on classification and declassification policy, conservative criticism of that order would focus on the Department of Energy and its declassification activities.

Executive Order 12958 on "Classified National Security Information" made a number of significant changes in policy that all tended to reverse prior presumptions in favor of open-ended secrecy, and to promote accelerated declassification. Most remarkably, section 3.4 of the order instructed that most historically valuable information more than 25 years old "shall be automatically declassified whether or not the records have been reviewed." This revolutionary provision was deemed necessary in order to break the longstanding declassification logjam, which had led to the buildup of over a billion pages of classified 25 year old documents, and to enable their cost-effective declassification and release.

The immediate impact of such automatic declassification was cushioned by an allowance for several categories of exempted information-including nuclear weapons information, which is governed by the Atomic Energy Act-and by a five year implementation period that would allow for the most sensitive records to be identified and reviewed in the traditional fashion.12

Even so, the practice of declassification without page by page review was authorized and even encouraged by the inordinate expense of other, more cautious approaches.

This represented a considered judgment by the Administration that the risks of automatic declassification-i.e., the possibility that some sensitive material would be inadvertently disclosed-were outweighed by the benefits of cost-effective declassification.

But this judgment was soon challenged by Congress (at the instigation of certain DOE officials), which refused to countenance the risks associated with automatic declassification. Although most DOE documents were already exempt from automatic declassification, the FY 1996 defense authorization bill included a provision urging abolition of automatic declassification and prohibiting declassification of any Energy Department documents without review:

The conference agreement includes this provision to strongly urge the President to immediately review and revise Executive Order 12958, which provides for the automatic declassification and public release of documents containing National Security Information within five years, regardless of prior review.... The conferees recognize that the Executive Order provides an exemption for the automatic declassification of restricted data [i.e. nuclear weapons information]. However, the conferees are concerned that some classified documents may contain restricted data information without reflecting that fact on the classification records. Therefore, there is no practical means to ensure the protection of restricted data and apply an automatic declassification system.13

This assessment was firmly disputed by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which oversees classification policy and implementation in the executive branch:

...Historical experience disproves the gravity of the threat.... Over a period of 25 years, the executive branch has declassified over 300 million pages of agencies' records in equivalent file series, most of which were declassified without page by page review. This bulk declassification has resulted in no evidence of harm to the national security generally, or proliferation of nuclear weapons information specifically.... ISOO maintains that pertinent or uncertain file series [that may contain Restricted Data] can be targeted for page by page review. We should not universally impose this same standard on the overwhelming majority of affected records in which the chance of finding unmarked Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data is no greater than the chance of finding it within unclassified collections.14

Opposition to automatic declassification-on asserted nonproliferation grounds-surfaced again in 1998. Senators Kyl, Shelby and Smith wrote to National Security Adviser Berger to warn of the dangers involved:

...It has been brought to our attention that, as a result of attempting to comply with E.O. 12958, some Restricted Data and/or Formerly Restricted Data [RD/FRD] has been improperly released and that much more is in danger of improper release in the near future.15

The concern was reiterated by Kenneth Baker of the Department of Energy:

Highly sensitive RD/FRD has been found embedded in documents in file series subject to declassification and released to the public under Executive Order 12958. Obviously, the intent of the Executive order was not to compromise our most sensitive nuclear secrets. It is equally clear that this problem poses a great national security risk.... Some of the compromised information found in these file series involved design information of special value to proliferants seeking to weaponize their nuclear devices, such as India and Pakistan. The last thing the U.S. Government should do is make it easier for potential nuclear weapons protagonists to have access to information to design their delivery systems and nuclear weapons in order to attack each other.16

From a different perspective, National Archivist John W. Carlin warned against overreaction:

To require that every classified document in any file be reviewed visually for RD and FRD would be prohibitive in terms of resources. As we attempt to institute risk management principles into our security classification system, such a requirement would be more retrogressive than has ever been practiced since declassification efforts began in earnest in 1972....The majority of records series do not contain RD or FRD and it would be a waste of time and resources to screen these files for the possible misfiled document.17

The outcome of this controversy was the passage of the so-called Kyl Amendment (section 3161 of the FY 1999 Defense Authorization Act) which suspended all automatic declassification for two months while the Administration developed a plan for protecting against inadvertent disclosures of RD and FRD. The plan would prohibit declassification of all classified records that had not been reviewed unless they had been inspected and certified to be "highly unlikely" to contain RD or FRD.18

Reaction Intensifies: The Impact of the China Espionage Investigations

By the time that allegations of Chinese espionage came to public knowledge, the dominant political climate in Congress was already hostile to declassification. By the end of FY 1998, the major innovation of President Clinton's executive order 12958-automatic declassification-had yielded an unprecedented, almost unimaginable 600 million pages of declassified documents.19 The declassification process had already been constrained by the 1998 Kyl Amendment, but Congressional reaction to the Chinese espionage scandal now threatened to slow declassification further, and even to reverse it.

The most direct impact of the China espionage investigation is contained in a legislative amendment offered on May 26 by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Declaring that "the damage to U.S. national security as a result of China's nuclear espionage is probably the greatest I have seen in my entire career," Senator Lott claimed to discern a relation between this damage and Hazel O'Leary's Openness Initiative a few years before. As part of a package of amendments offered in response to the espionage scandal, Senator Lott introduced one amendment (on behalf of Senator Kyl) concerning declassification:

The amendment proposes a mechanism for determining the extent to which then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary's "Openness Initiative" resulted in the release of highly-classified nuclear secrets. We already know, for example, that some material has been publicly released that contained highly-sensitive "Restricted Data" or "Formerly Restricted Data."While we are rightly concerned about what nuclear weapons design or other sensitive information has been stolen through espionage, at the same time we must be vigilant in ensuring that Mrs. O'Leary's initiative was not used, and any future declassification measures will not be used, to provide nuclear know-how to would-be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.20

The amendment applied the 1998 Kyl amendment retroactively to documents that had already been declassified under Executive Order 12958 prior to October 1998 (when the Kyl amendment took effect). That is, it required development of a plan to re-review the hundreds of millions of pages of documents declassified between 1995-98 to determine if they contained Restricted Data, unless they were certified as "highly unlikely" to contain such information. (Contrary to Senator Lott's remarks, the amendment has nothing to do with Hazel O'Leary or with declassification under the DOE Openness Initiative.) The amendment was included in the final version of the FY 2000 defense authorization bill and signed by President Clinton.21

This provision was adopted without hearings or any other sort of evidentiary basis that would justify it-a pending DOE report on inadvertent disclosures of RD/FRD during declassification has not yet been delivered to Congress. It will drastically slow the impressive momentum of the declassification program at DOE and elsewhere. Further, it will divert substantial resources from future declassification to the review of records that have already been declassified, nullifying at least in part the progress that had been made until now.

Congress went on to limit the available resources for declassification. After having in effect prohibited the cost-effective practice of automatic declassification, the House Armed Services Committee ironically complained that "The process of reviewing ... records to ensure that highly sensitive information, such as nuclear weapons design data, is not automatically declassified, is very costly."22 But rather than provide the requisite resources, the House proposed to limit all expenditures for declassification at the Department of Defense to $20 million, an unworkably low number. The final bill authorized the expenditure of $51 million, a more adequate amount.

Declassification at DOE: "Worse Than the Rosenbergs"

The unfolding of the Chinese espionage scandal provided a pretext for several members of Congress to suggest, as Senator Lott had already done, that there was a link between espionage and the Energy Department's declassification program-and to tarnish the Openness Initiative by association.

The following floor statement by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is notable for its fervor and incoherence:

Hazel O'Leary, President Clinton's Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1997, was the grand poobah of nuclear openness.... In fact, she massively declassified secrets and put them on the Energy Department's web site, including the diagrams of some advanced nuclear weapons.... See, the idea is if everybody had all this information, information about deadly weapons technology that we had spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing, that if everyone had it, well then, it might be a more peaceful world. This is worse than the Rosenbergs. This is looney tunes. This is someone who has a fanatical anti-American attitude in a position to hand over to our worst enemies secrets that put our young people and our country in jeopardy.... This was not a going-out-of-business sale on the part of the United States Government; this was a going-out-of-sanity sale on the part of the United States Government. Those who benefited the most were the minions of the People's Republic of China, the Communist Chinese....23

Rep. Curt Weldon was even more committed to this line of attack. On at least four occasions, he took to the House floor to lambaste Hazel O'Leary for having supposedly leaked the design of the W-87 warhead to U.S. News and World Report, a false accusation.

On July 31, 1995, this administration, not the Reagan administration, not the Bush administration, not the Carter administration, this administration leaked the design for our W-87 warhead to U.S. News and World Report. Not just the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iraqis and Iranians, anyone who would buy U.S. News and World Report on July 31, 1995 got a documented diagram of the W-87, which up until that point in time was classified.

Here is the color version of what the Department of Energy released to U.S. News and World Report. This design shows in some detail the way our most capable nuclear warhead works. It shows and explains the process, it shows and locates the technology, the fuel, the process, the activity, the physics of the way America's most capable warhead would work. This was not secretly stolen by the Chinese, that this administration maintains they found in 1995. This diagram was given to U.S. News and World Report by this administration in 1995, and reproduced in U.S. News and World Report.
...This was not some secret espionage capability of the Chinese. This was the Department of Energy, following Hazel O'Leary's desire to open up to the people of the world our most secret information about technologies important to our country.24

Every assertion in this harangue is wrong. The "design" of the W-87 warhead that appeared in U.S. News is not a design at all. It is an artist's conception based entirely on sources in the public domain. It was not a DOE document and could not have been given to the magazine by anyone in the Clinton Administration. Since it was never a government document, it was never classified. Nor did the underlying information originate with Hazel O'Leary or the Department of Energy. It was not "leaked" at all; rather, it came from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which was explicitly credited by the U.S. News graphic artist. Christopher Paine of NRDC confirmed that in 1995 he had indeed provided the information on which the illustration was based in 1995, and in retrospect he voiced doubts about the accuracy of the U.S. News artist's rendering.25

Although plainly false, the allegation was evidently too seductive for Rep. Weldon, an influential member of the Republican right wing, to let pass, and he erupted again and again:

Mr. Speaker, I say to Bill Richardson, tell the truth. ... Hazel O'Leary leaked the plans, which are in this magazine, for the W-87 nuclear warhead. Tell the truth, Bill Richardson.26

Disappointingly, no one in Congress would stand up to say that Weldon's charges were false.27 If Weldon and his colleagues intended to defame O'Leary and to place the DOE Openness Initiative in disrepute, they largely succeeded.

Where Are We Today?

At the beginning of the DOE Openness Initiative, then-Secretary Hazel O'Leary renamed the former Office of Classification as the Office of Declassification in order to emphasize the new priority of openness and declassification. But in response to the Chinese espionage scandal, Secretary Bill Richardson on May 11 announced that it would be redesignated the Office of Nuclear and National Security Information.28 The declassification program that DOE once boasted of became almost unmentionable.

Declassification review-which is required under the Atomic Energy Act-still continues at the Department of Energy, but under a cloud and under some difficult constraints.

In compliance with the new Lott Amendment, 47 DOE declassifiers were detailed to the National Archives as of last month to conduct surveys of the 450 million pages of historical documents that had previously been declassified and released under Executive Order 12958 to search for inadvertent releases of Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data. Since no money was appropriated for this new task, funding must come from resources intended for other declassification programs. This re-review of declassified documents under the Lott Amendment will probably take two years, according to DOE and National Archives officials.

In compliance with the 1998 Kyl Amendment, automatic declassification has drastically diminished, as every file series that is not specifically certified to be "highly unlikely" to contain RD/FRD is reviewed page-by-page. (Some officials say automatic declassification would have diminished anyway since agencies had already automatically declassified most of their "easy" files that did not require review.) DOE has trained over 860 reviewers from other agencies to spot RD/FRD in their files. DOE has conducted "quality control audits" on over 12 million pages (out of a set of 200 million pages) that had been declassified but not yet released into the public domain. Some RD/FRD was found and recovered.

Processing of Freedom of Information Act requests involving classified records requiring review has practically ground to a halt.

Conclusion

The momentum in favor of openness and declassification at the Department of Energy has by now largely dissipated. The champions of the DOE Openness Initiative and their considerable achievements have been mocked and slandered. The same congressional leaders who are eager to dismantle the arms control regime of the past several decades with no viable substitute warn ominously of the proliferation consequences of the inadvertent release of a stray document at the National Archives.

One unknown factor is the impact on openness and declassification of the new National Nuclear Security Administration, the entity established by Congress in the FY 2000 Defense Authorization Act to oversee the nuclear weapons production complex.

Offering a worst-case scenario, Rep. John Dingell warned that by creating the new semi-autonomous sub-agency, Congress was leading the country back into the darkest days of cold war secrecy and corruption:

This proposal ... recreates essentially the Atomic Energy Commission, one of the most secretive, one of the most sneaky, and one of the most dishonest agencies in government. They lied to everybody, including themselves, and the Congress of the United States, the Executive Branch....
We spent years trying to open this process to see to it that the Congress and the Members of this body know what is going on so that we could protect our constituents against the rampages of that kind of agency in the future... If we do not learn from history, we are going to repeat it. In just a few years the secrecy they are going to engage in, which will be practiced against this body and Members of the Senate and Members of the government and ordinary citizens, attorneys general and Governors, is going to lead to further abuses.29

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Session II:Has DOE Declassified Information That Has Contributed
Or Might Contribute to Proliferation?

Session II of the workshop addressed the question of whether DOE was known to have declassified information, either recently or in the more distant past, that had promoted the spread of nuclear weapons. A number of examples of past information releases that might have contributed to foreign nuclear weapons programs were offered (many of them by parties other than DOE), although no participant cited any examples of information declassified as part of DOE's recent Openness Initiative that had directly promoted nuclear proliferation. Concerns also focused on several other issues-most notably, the risk that nuclear weapons information, while remaining classified, might not be adequately protected, and the enormous range of information relevant to designing nuclear weapons that is widely available today in unclassified form. Many discussants expressed concern that recent DOE security measures, by trying to protect huge areas of information, would distract attention from building higher fences around the most sensitive data, and thereby make these problems worse rather than better.

Based on his own knowledge of how the United States had designed nuclear weapons, and of the kinds of civilian nuclear research ongoing in non-nuclear weapons states such as Germany and Japan, retired U.S. nuclear weapons designer Ray Kidder asserted that "The nuclear weapons design 'cat' is many decades old and by now is largely 'out of the bag.'" In particular, Kidder pointed out that the desktop computers now commercially available were far faster than those the United States had used to design miniaturized thermonuclear weapons, and that computer codes making it possible to calculate the behavior of matter at extremely high temperatures and pressures-key physics information needed for designing thermonuclear weapons-had been made publicly available by German researchers as part of civilian inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research.

Troy Wade, a former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs, warned that there had been "great risk" in what he described as a "rush to declassify" in the early days of the Openness Initiative, but said that he was much more concerned over what might happen in the next 25 years than what had happened in the past. He expressed particular worry about DOE's ability to manage information that is and will remain classified. Wade urged a number of steps, including creation of a risk-based declassification program and standardization of security clearances across agencies, in order to ensure that truly sensitive information would be appropriately protected.

Matthew McKinzie of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) discussed several cases in which, he argued, U.S. and Russian declassification decisions had made information available that could be useful to proliferators. McKinzie discussed specific cases involving Russian declassification of information that made it possible to easily calculate exactly how much plutonium was needed to achieve specific explosive yields, along with recent U.S. declassification of key hydrodynamics information (including data on the equations of state of high-Z materials such as uranium), as part of civilian ICF and astrophysics research. McKinzie stated that in NRDC's view, key information for designing simple fission weapons was widely available, and that therefore high priority should be planed on controlling fusion-related information that could help proliferators boost the power of nuclear weapons.

In discussion, a number of participants called for better targeting and prioritizing of security measures over nuclear weapons design information-for example, assessing more clearly the likelihood that proliferators would seek information from archived records versus from ongoing scientific research programs. There was general support for using measures such as statistical sampling to reduce the aggregate amount of records that needed to be managed, so that DOE and other agencies could more effectively protect information that was agreed to be highly sensitive. DOE is funding a small-scale research effort to apply technologies such as artificial intelligence to declassification (thus reducing the human workload), but the program was described as minuscule compared to existing requirements.

Conversely, participants expressed strong concerns that recent congressional directives requiring increased review of documents eligible for near-term declassification would increase the workload and make it more difficult for DOE to focus on protecting the most sensitive information. Skepticism was also expressed that restructuring DOE to create a National Nuclear Security Administration (as required by the FY 2001 defense authorization bill) would improve the situation, since this initiative would split off DOE's classification, declassification, security and counterintelligence functions from direct oversight over nuclear weapons activities.

Many discussants agreed that the information available as a result of civilian ICF research was problematic, but several participants concluded that these horses were largely out of the barn. John P. Holdren reported that in the early 1970s, he had attempted to get the issue of the potential proliferation impact of ICF work raised publicly, in order to promote better controls on proliferation-sensitive data, but security review delayed publication of the article for years, by which time some of the information of concern had already been released. This was cited as an example of security procedures undermining rather than contributing to security-and several participants feared this effect would be repeated in the future with the new security measures being imposed at DOE. A number of discussants argued that while many plutonium production technologies and some uranium enrichment technologies were in the open literature, there remained information in these areas that was important to control. Papers on the possibility of simple "quick and dirty" reprocessing facilities (originally circulated in the 1970s) were cited as examples of items that probably should not have been published, given the potential contribution such suggestions could make to nascent nuclear weapons programs. None of the participants, however, offered specific proposals for achieving improved controls over information which, while relevant to nuclear weapons, originated in entirely civilian research programs.

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Has DOE Declassified Information That Has Contributed Or Might Contribute to Proliferation? A Pre-Clinton Perspective

Ray E. Kidder
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Ret.)

My experience with DOE classification practice began in 1956 as a nuclear weapons design physicist in the Theoretical Division at Livermore, and later included theoretical work in inertial confinement fusion (1962), atomic-vapor laser isotope separation (1972), and the design of a reusable underground nuclear explosive (0.3 kiloton) test facility (1982).

Early History: "Shrinking" the H-Bomb

The first deliverable, solid-fuel thermonuclear device was successfully demonstrated (15 megatons) in Operation Castle at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Highly successful designs of efficient, high yield-to-weight/volume warheads were demonstrated in Operation Dominic at Christmas Island in 1962, including the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile and (prototype) Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. (I was co-chair of the design-review "pre-mortem" committee for Livermore devices tested in Operation Dominic). The United States "shrank" the H-bomb in only eight years.

China successfully tested its first solid-fuel thermonuclear device (3 Mt) in 1967. Assuming for purposes of illustration that China needed three times as long as the United States to shrink its H-bomb, it could have done so by 1991. China's last nuclear test occurred in 1996. This suggests that by 1996 China could have developed and tested small, efficient missile warheads on its own.

Early Official Publications of Nuclear Weapons-Related Information
1945 Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (the "Smyth Report")

1957 The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (rev. 1962), by Samuel Glasstone

1965 The Los Alamos Primer (declassified 1965), by Robert Serber

Only the release of the Smyth Report half a century ago has been considered questionable. The Los Alamos Primer of atomic weapon design was not declassified until after China exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964.