An exhaustive list of America’s nuclear sites – including maps showing the location of fuel for nuclear weapons – has been accidentally posted on a government website, but the Obama administration denied that the leak had jeopardised national security.
The 266-page document, marked “highly confidential”, was removed from the website of the Government Printing Officelast night following media inquiries.
Barack Obama had ordered the report for the International Atomic Energy Agency in the hopes of prodding other countries, such as Iran, to submit similar classified information nuclear activities to the agency.
In his accompanying letter to Congress, Obama described the information as “sensitive but unclassified”. Nearly every page is stamped “highly confidential safeguards sensitive”.
“The enclosed draft declaration lists each site, location, facility, and activity I intend to declare to the IAEA,” he wrote.
It was not immediately clear how the report, with details of hundreds of US nuclear facilities, including reactor sites and confidential sites at weapons labs, ended up on the website of the Government Printing Office.
Its publication was first noted on Monday by Steve Aftergood, who publishes a blog on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The report contains information on America’s nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos in New Mexico, Livermore and Sandia as well as scores of other nuclear sites.
In its potentially most serious breach, the report provides a map showing the exact location of a storage site for highly enriched weapons grade uranium at the heavily guarded Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The Obama administration admitted the information should never have been released. But Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a statement that the disclosure posed no risk to security.
“The departments of energy, defence and commerce and the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] all thoroughly reviewed it to ensure that no information of direct national security significance would be compromised.”
Even so, some security analysts today raised concerns that thieves or terrorists could make use of the maps that show where the nuclear fuels are stored.
Kit Bond, the leading Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, told reporters it was a “virtual treasure map for terrorists.”
However, military and civilian experts concluded that the document – while offering an extensive account of the US nuclear complex – did not pose a serious danger as much of the information was already in the public realm.
“These screw-ups happen,” John Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defence told the New York Times. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”
