US government goofs up, releases ‘confidential’ nuclear site details

An exhaustive list of America's nuclear sites – including maps showing the location of fuel for nuclear weapons – was accidentally posted on a government website, though 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 Office 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", even though nearly every page is stamped "highly confidential safeguards sensitive".

President Obama sent the document to Congress on 5 May for Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its web site.

The publication of the document was revealed on Monday in an online newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures may pose. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public in the first place.

On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from the Government Printing Office web site.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.

But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels are stored ''can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out.''

As of  Tuesday evening, the reasons for that action remained a mystery. On its cover, the document referred to the committee on foreign affairs and ordered to be printed. But Lynne Weil, the committee spokeswoman, said the committee had ''neither published it nor had control over its publication''.

Gary Somerset, a spokesman for the printing office, said it had ''produced'' the document ''under normal operating procedures'' but had now removed it from its website pending further review.

The document contains no military information about the nation's stockpile of nuclear arms, or about the facilities and programmes that guard such weapons. Rather, it presents what appears to be an exhaustive listing of the sites that make up the nation's civilian nuclear complex, which stretches coast to coast and includes nuclear reactors and highly confidential sites at weapon laboratories.

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.