SECRECY NEWS is an email publication of
the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
Project on Government Secrecy. It provides
informal coverage of new developments in secrecy,
security and intelligence policies, as well
as links to new acquisitions on the Federation
of American Scientists web site. It
is published 2 to 3 times a week, or as events
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Among the Los Alamos documents preserved by Walker and Sublette
is a 1967 account of all known nuclear "criticality" accidents
as of that time.
A criticality accident is an unintended acceleration of the
chain reaction of neutrons in a mass of fissile material. In a
worst case scenario, supercriticality can lead to fuel melting
and explosion. Of 34 criticality incidents identified by the
Los Alamos report, six of them resulted in a total of eight
deaths.
Does public access to such reports matter? Would an ordinary
member of the public have any interest in a technical account
of past criticality accidents?
The answer is yes. In fact, twenty years ago the history of
nuclear reactor criticality accidents was at the center of a
public dispute over the safety of the small research reactor on
the UCLA campus before it was permanently shut down in 1984.
The Los Angeles-based Committee to Bridge the Gap, led by Dan
Hirsch, successfully challenged relicensing of the UCLA reactor
after pointing out that the water-cooled, graphite moderated
reactor core had positive reactivity coefficients, a
significant design flaw, and was vulnerable to an accidental
power excursion. Public access to technical reports bearing on
the problem played a crucial role in clarifying the issue and
ensuring public safety.
See "A
Review of Criticality Accidents" by William R. Stratton, Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory report number LA-3611, January 1967 (112 pages,
3.9 MB PDF file).
INTELLIGENCE REVIEW FOREVER
The state of U.S. intelligence is such that "It is not
surprising that hypotheses tend to harden into dogma, that
their sensitivity to changed conditions is not articulated, and
that new data are not sought to test them."
Remarkably, this critique of intelligence comes from the CIA
itself. And as perfectly apt as it may sound today, it was
written in 1971.
The same critique notes an imbalance between collection and
analysis, tensions between civilian and military intelligence,
and the structural weakness that limits the effectiveness of
the DCI.
The enduring relevance of these and other criticisms more than
30 years later suggests that efforts to reform the U.S.
intelligence bureaucracy are futile and possibly diversionary.
