Abstract
The Clinton administration's remarkable efforts to reduce the scope of government secrecy and promote declassification of Cold War records may be an unfortunate casualty of the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal.
In a largely unsung success story, some 200 million pages of historically valuable records have been declassified each year for the past three years under the provisions of President Clinton's Executive Order 12958. Now, in the frenzy over reports of Chinese nuclear espionage, most of this activity may grind to a halt.
“Stolen U.S. nuclear secrets give the PRC design information on thermonuclear weapons on a par with our own,” warned the congressional Cox committee in its report released May 25.
But the fact is that it is hard to identify any damage resulting from the reported theft of nuclear secrets over the past two decades.
“To date, the aggressive Chinese collection effort has not resulted in any apparent modernization of their deployed strategic force or any new nuclear weapons deployment,” according to a panel of experts assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency and led by Adm. David Jeremiah.
While warning that future Chinese weapon systems may yet benefit from espionage, the Jeremiah panel noted in its April 21 report that “China has had the technical capability to develop a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) system for its large, currently deployed ICBM for many years, but has not done so.”
By blurring the difference between actual and hypothetical damage, critics of the Clinton administration have triggered a political tidal wave. In particular, the reported theft of nuclear secrets has cast a government-wide chill on declassification and may spell the end of the Energy Department's Openness Initiative. A few recent developments:
▪ Public access to some 200 million pages of 25-year-old documents that have already been declassified is being blocked until next year while officials re-review the documents at the National Archives for elusive nuclear secrets.
▪ The April 2000 deadline established by President Clinton for automatic declassification of most 25-year-old documents is being deferred by at least 18-36 months.
▪ The House Armed Services Committee has recommended that Pentagon spending for declas-sification be cut by about 90 percent.
▪ Energy's Office of Declassification has been renamed the Office of Nuclear and National Security Information to convey the diminished priority of declassification.
This is a wrongheaded and counterproductive response to the alleged Chinese nuclear espionage that misconstrues the function of declassification.
Declassification, properly conceived and executed, enhances security. Aside from its value for public policy, historical, environmental, or other matters, declassification is an essential component of an effective information security program.
Declassification winnows out information that no longer requires protection. In the absence of this winnowing, the universe of classified information rapidly expands out of control. Security resources are spread too thin in an ultimately futile effort to protect more than can be effectively protected.
The Energy Department's Openness Initiative was undertaken with precisely these considerations in mind, and it was designed to yield a net improvement in security. In the course of the initiative, dozens of categories of information were identified for declassification because they no longer warranted protection.
But in a little noticed move, the same initiative also specified 130 categories of nuclear weapons information for increased classification. (Because of bureaucratic lethargy, among other reasons, neither the recommendations for declassification nor for increased classification have been fully implemented.)
Today, huge quantities of historical documentation–whether minutes from Atomic Energy Commission meetings of 50 years ago or the most current and sensitive nuclear weapons information–may be identically classified as Secret Restricted Data. (Very little information is classified “Top Secret.”)
The public interest would generally require the disclosure of the former and the rigorous protection of the latter. Under current conditions, however, each receives exactly as much–or as little–protection as the other.
This widespread failure to distinguish between the truly sensitive and the no longer sensitive does a disservice to the public interest in disclosure–and to the public interest in effective security. But this elementary confusion is likely to persist at least until the current frenzy passes and a measure of clarity returns to classification and declassification policy.