Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States

Having worked with classified information on and off for most of my adult life and spent more than a decade chairing the Historical Review Panel (HRP) of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I am painfully familiar with the classification and declassification system. Despite my objections to several aspects of this system, I have come to take most of it for granted. As Alex Wellerstein says, by the mid-1960s the secrecy regime “had become so embedded in the fabric of American bureaucracy, and the American security mindset, that it is difficult to imagine anything different at this point” (p. 287). For me, therefore, it was eye-opening to read Wellerstein's deeply researched and thoughtful account of the evolution of the classification of information related to nuclear weapons, labeled Restricted Data (RD), as in the title of the book. Of course this is just one part of the total secrecy universe, but...