Secret nuclear records handy

Thursday, Sept. 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Inexperienced, ignorant or untrained reviewers often release classified government information without clearance, nuclear weapons researcher Chuck Hansen said.

Hansen himself has had great luck with his Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) requests.

Since 1971 Hansen has delved into nuclear weapons development and uncovered enough information to write a book -- "U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" -- and a CD -- "The Swords of Armageddon," listing 2,600 pages of documents.

All this without a clearance to review the top secret papers shelved at the Defense Department or the Department of Energy, he told those attending the 14th annual Nevada Test Site Classification/Declassification Symposium Wednesday night.

But Hansen's most recent FOIAs have been more heavily censored than ever, he said.

"I think that is a step backward for openness," he said.

Yet President Clinton and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary demanded openness within the DOE and began releasing tons of reports on human radiation experiments, plutonium inventories and secret weapons tests. The process is slow, since only a handful of people can read the papers.

Some of Hansen's best sources have been 45,000 documents improperly disclosed and available at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and notorious federal leakers such as Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who revealed that the H-bomb needed a "spark plug," much to the consternation of DOE officials.

Hansen said the DOE should urge the Defense Department to speed up its declassification process and take a realistic attitude toward available information to the public through the Internet.

At last year's symposium, the DOE for the first time opened some of its discussions on how to bring more records from the Nevada Test Site nuclear weapons experiments and billions of other pages of information out from under the blanket of national security where they have existed for almost 50 years.

This year the public heard records experts for three hours. The closed-door meeting went on for six hours at the Palace Station.

"It's a tremendous problem," said Troy Wade, executive director of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, and a former DOE employee for 31 years. "I think it is very important to continue to protect information truly classified."

Although Wade never expects to see nuclear weapons tested again at the proving grounds 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the Test Site could become an international laboratory for hazardous materials experiments or for processing weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor fuel, he said.

The handful of people who sat through lectures, however, were more interested in finding out what really exists at Area 51 -- the secret Air Force base about 150 miles north of Las Vegas where classified projects are tested and rumors of UFOs abound. Another concern was the threat of Nevada becoming a nuclear dumping ground.

Those subjects remained a mystery because the subject of the conference focused on the DOE's nuclear weapons projects.