Privatization Limiting Access To Information

Knutsi sends us to the Federation of American Scientists' blog Secrecy News for a post on how privatization can affect access to research material. The blog tells how a Harvard researcher on the history of nuclear secrecy was denied access that would have been granted in the past. Some followup is in the comments to this reposting of the FAS story. "Los Alamos National Laboratory will no longer permit historians and other researchers to have access to its archival records because Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the private contractor that now operates the Lab, says it has 'no policy in place' that would allow such access."

Comments

Re:If research is or was

[OnlineAlias]

I work as a government contractor in a similar situation. All I can say is that "we" as contractors don't have any data. The data is still the government's, and we do whatever they say to do with it. I suspect what is going on here is that the guys overseeing the contract itself are ducking and not doing their jobs, as it is easier just to say the government doesn't have control over the data anymore. Fact is, the government still has the obligation to manage the data, they are just lazy and are putting their jobs off on the contractor.

It is not possible for the government to contract out government policy, as hard as they may try.

Re:Which company researched the bomb?

[dpilot]

From what I understand, the problem isn't getting U-235 to go boom, it's getting U-235.

You're quite literally sorting atom-by-atom, putting the U-238 in one bucket and the U-235 in the other, a 2% sort-by-weight problem. But really it's even worse than that, because one always hears about Uranium hexa-Fluoride, so it isn't 235 vs 238, you have to add 54 to each. That changes a 2.1% weight difference into a 1.7% difference. That's why they talk about thousands of centrifuges for refining.

So from what I understand, some sort of nuclear bomb really isn't hard, given the material. Of course making a *small* bomb really IS hard, as is getting the fissile material.