US reclassifies public data on US nuclear missile stocks
Washington Post: The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the US government long provided: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.
Despite the censorship from the DoE and DoD, the missile numbers can still be easily obtained from the public hearings mentioned in Congressional Record, or from the Russians and the UN, as the data was made public as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). "They are only making themselves look ridiculous," says Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council to Post reporter Christopher Lee.
