January 20, 2000
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WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of documents made available to the public contained U.S. nuclear weapons secrets, an Energy Department review has revealed.

The declassified government papers held at the National Archives held nuclear weapons secrets that mistakenly had been left in, the review said.

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The Energy Department currently is reviewing previously declassified material as mandated by legislation passed in 1998.

Energy officials said Wednesday the declassified documents embedded with nuclear secrets were from other U.S. agencies, but declined to name the agencies involved.

Access to U.S. nuclear secrets has been a hot issue for Congress since accusations surfaced last year that China allegedly obtained information on U.S. nuclear weapons through espionage. Beijing denies that charge.

Under President Clinton's order, U.S. government documents older than 25 years must be reviewed for declassification.

The Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit group focused on national security issues, posted an unclassified executive summary of the report.

"This is stuff that represents information about old weapons, old tests," an Energy Department official familiar with the report told Reuters.

Classified information was left in the documents largely due to human error in which reviewers missed markings that showed the information was restricted, the official said.

"These things are of concern because they could be valuable to someone who was trying to develop a nuclear capability," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"I'm not saying that we've discovered anything that gives away the farm ... but there are bits and pieces of information that we've pulled off the shelves that are classified and should not have been there," the official added.

Of 948,000 pages audited by the Energy Department, 14,890 pages included restricted information that should not have been declassified, the report to Congress said.

"I recognize the gravity of these inadvertent releases," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner dated November 29, 1999.

Energy Department staff prevented the inadvertent release of nuclear secrets in about 2,250 documents that were in the process of being issued publicly, Richardson said.

There was only one case in which there was "compelling evidence" that classified information was used by a researcher, the report said. That information related to the deployment of nuclear weapons in a foreign country in the early 1950s, rather than nuclear design or production information.

The executive summary of the report said the restricted material inadvertently released included:

• Documents on "nuclear tests that provide insight into the level of weapon design technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s" and nuclear weapon systems that were either retired or never reached production and stockpiling
  
  
• Documents revealing U.S. "nuclear weapon design information from the test results of a specified nuclear test program"
  
  
• Documents that provided results of a specified U.S. nuclear test, the military and technical basis for atmospheric testing during a specified year, and a specific nuclear device with the date of the underground test
  
  
• Documents covering nuclear weapons use information such as yields of specific weapons and deployment and storage locations
  
  
• Documents covering nuclear weapons design information for increasing yields

The release of such information is of concern because it could benefit U.S. adversaries and "terrorist groups" as older nuclear weapons are easier to construct than current weapons, the report said.

"Nuclear weapons, it's the laws of physics that apply, and a weapon that worked well with a World War II design would still function today. So there are still parts of the weapons that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are classified," the Energy official said.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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