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U.S. re-classifying information on missile data

Washington: In a "surprise" move, the Bush administration has started re-classifying information on missile data that was available to the general public for decades and even to the erstwhile "enemy," the Soviet Union.

The National Security Archives said declassification decisions on nuclear weapons information by federal agencies "have taken a surprising turn" with security reviewers treating as "classified" information that has been public for decades. For years during the Cold War the U.S. nuclear arsenal included 1,000 Minuteman and 55 Titan II missiles; this information could easily be found in a variety of public record sources.

"For reasons that are truly perplexing, when the current reviewers open up archival documents from the Cold War, they are redacting those and other publicly-available numbers, even to the point of classifying parts of a public report by the Secretary of Defence," says a senior analyst of the Archives, William Burr in his latest finding.

Excessive secrecy

"Excessive secrecy continues to abound in another category of historical nuclear information: the overseas deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Information on the deployments that has been publicly available for many years is also being classified by U.S. government agencies," he added. - PTI

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