And that doesn’t even touch use of secrecy to cover up bad policy or just stupid stuff.

I will contribute my own anecdote about a visit to NARA about a decade ago Given my own proclivity for certain aspects of Air Force intelligence, I happened to meet with as much of a foot in the door as a historian without a clearance can get, which was to politely inquire if I at least had the RGs of interest about right. I knew what the answer to my inquiry most likely was, so wasn’t taken aback at being told that “someday” was the best idea they could give me about potential declassification timelines.

“And that doesn’t include all the stuff the Air Force came in and took back from us right after 9/11…” is basically a paraphrase of what I was told about the situation, perhaps just to reinforce the hopeless nature of my quest. Maybe in the Air Force’s haste, they grabbed stuff back and didn’t document their hasty withdrawals well? That’s probably more likely than some spy getting at it, as already noted.

Your recall of conditions in the stacks is interesting: “(This count is taken from RG 326′s Master Location Register, which, I might add, as I look it over again, has quite a few “item not on shelf during last inventory” notes in it, many for classified entries.)”

Obviously no way to know if there’s a connection, but does make one wonder how much of that went on and if it was all properly documented. After all, as you point out and someone else said perhaps only a little more eloquently, we have met the enemy and he is us when it comes to secrecy.

Interesting tidbit: Before the Bomb, secrecy of this scale in the government was most commonly associated with signals intelligence. Once the AEC set the standard with nuclear information, then every other potential user of secrecy in government was soon comparing their own situation in terms of their ‘secret powers’ to those of their nuclear cousins. Whose is stronger? Is ours ‘almost’ as secret as nuclear data? Massive secrecy envy. The Secrecy Race operated in parallel with the Arms Race it supported. Good thing we’re mostly better at keeping track of the hardware than the paperwork of the Cold War.

If you took this post and substituted the words ‘document,’ ‘record’ and related terms with ‘nuclear weapons’ you’d be making an argument almost identical to Scott Sagan’s in ‘The Limits of Safety.’ I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but either way it is a neat exercise in ‘comparative bureaucracy.’

Best,

Tim

Does this speak of a problem with the project of governance? Or is it just one of those “it’s not as bad as it seems”? Or is it a case of “you can’t understand it unless you’ve been there”? I certainly hope its one of the latter two.