U.S. Publishes Guide To Building Atom Bombs To Web

Jeff writes "The New York Times is reporting that the feds have shut down the 'Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal' due to concerns from weapons experts that the 'papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.' One diplomat is quoted as saying, 'If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.' Indexes to older (less sensitive) documents (and some html from pdfs) are still cached at Google today. Rep. Pete Hoekstra pushed for the public release of the archive to help determine 'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'. Critics have said the archive was created to perpetuate misinformation about WMDs."

Comments

Hold on a sec....?

[argStyopa]

So, if I understand this correctly, the NYT (which insists that Saddam never really had any WMDs, and that any development program was phony) publishes an article critical of the administration for putting documents up the web from the so-called Iraqi development programs because they reveal too much information about bomb making?

Huh?

How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?