[HN Gopher] To the Grave: Secrets, Sins, and Nuclear Insecurity
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       To the Grave: Secrets, Sins, and Nuclear Insecurity
        
       Author : prismatic
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2021-12-31 05:23 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | The trouble with excessive secrecy is that it's really expensive.
       | For bidding purposes, in my aerospace days we estimated that a
       | SECRET requirement doubled the cost, and a TOP SECRET requirement
       | increased it by far more. You spend a lot of time tracking
       | documents, signing things in and out, opening and closing safes,
       | operating separate systems at different security levels, and
       | having people doing make-work jobs while their clearance is being
       | processed. Plus the guards, fences, RF-tight metal rooms, and
       | such.
       | 
       | There's a people cost. The people working on highly classified
       | projects become experts in narrow areas but are cut off from the
       | mainstream. They stagnate in place.
       | 
       | Classically, the US has had three attitudes towards security -
       | military, intel, and nuclear. The military types see security as
       | time-sensitive. "Where the ship is now is secret. Where the ship
       | was yesterday is confidential. Where the ship was last week is
       | unclassified. Where the ship will be tomorrow is top secret." The
       | military needs to keep the lid on only until the enemy finds out
       | the hard way when and where the attack is happening.
       | 
       | Intel types obsess over "do they know that we know?" and "do they
       | know how we know?", and the tail chasing "do they know that we
       | know that they know?" This leads to a desire to keep sources and
       | methods secret for a very long time. This was very cold war, when
       | finding out even basic info about the USSR was hard. Don't know
       | what it's like now.
       | 
       | Don't know about the nuclear side.
        
         | photochemsyn wrote:
         | Classification in the nuclear world (DOE/NNSA in the USA) is
         | unfortunately often done to hide things like massive cost
         | overruns (Hanford cleanup costs for example), the scale of
         | environmental problems (like how much nuclear waste the US Navy
         | has dumped at sea and where that dumping took place, or just
         | how much radioactive fallout spread across the western USA due
         | to atmospheric testing in Nevada), and other things that really
         | shouldn't be classified. The Federation of American Scientists
         | regularly brings this up, most recently:
         | 
         | https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2021/05/nuclear-secrecy-reform...
         | 
         | There are of course many things that should be kept secret -
         | although I assume the secrecy surrounding the current
         | distribution of nuclear weapons on submarines, planes, missile
         | bases, etc. falls under the military secrets sector.
         | 
         | Blueprints for nuclear reactors are not really supposed to be
         | available, due the risk of being utilized by terrorists etc. to
         | inflict massive damage, but as I recall right after Fukushima
         | it was easy to find quite detailed drawings of that reactor
         | model online, which were useful for understanding how the
         | accident took place. There's a whole cyber division of the U.S.
         | government devoted to nuclear reactor security issues, a cousin
         | of US-CERT.
         | 
         | However, manufacturing fisson-type nuclear weapons, even the
         | D-T boosted ones that are small enough for ballistic missiles,
         | is really not that secret of a technology anymore - all it
         | takes is access to the required materials (plutonium and/or
         | enriched uranium), some working nuclear reactors, and graduate-
         | level metallurgical / chemical / electronics knowledge, plus
         | access to the historical non-classified research literature and
         | state-level support (This is how AQ Khan developed the
         | Pakistani nuclear weapons program, and even the relatively poor
         | state of North Korea managed it).
        
         | imwillofficial wrote:
         | The nuclear side is, "everyone who could do what we are doing,
         | already knows how, but we are going to pretend it's all secret
         | anyway and keep it classified for a very long time regardless
         | of how public the information becomes."
         | 
         | In nuke school I had text books classified secret that I later
         | purchased at Barnes and Noble
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-31 23:01 UTC)