5 ms·

To the Grave: Secrets, Sins, and Nuclear Insecurity

43 points by prismatic 5y ago

Animats 5y ago
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.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  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
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  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/ 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).

43 points by prismatic 5y ago

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.

imwillofficial 5y ago
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
photochemsyn 5y ago
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/ 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).