SECRECY NEWS
来自政府保密的FAS项目
Volume 2011, Issue No. 100
October 25, 2011

保密新闻博客://www.tumejico.com/blog/secrecy/

PURPOSE OF 1969 NUCLEAR ALERT REMAINS A MYSTERY

For two weeks in October 1969, the Nixon Administration secretly placed U.S. nuclear forces on alert. At the time, the move was considered so sensitive that not even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was briefed on its purpose. Still today, no conclusive explanation for the potentially destabilizing alert can be found. Even with full access to the classified record, State Department historians said in a new volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series that they were unable to provide a definitive account of the event.

Previous historical scholarship has inferred from selected declassified documents that the alert was somehow intended to communicate a firm resolve to end the Vietnam War by whatever means necessary. (See "Nixon's Nuclear Ploy" by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, National Security Archive, December 23, 2002; and "The Madman Nuclear Alert" by Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, International Security, Spring 2003.)

但是，根据机密记录，根据“国家安全政策”的新国务院销售量，该解释仍然未经证实和不确定。

"The documentary record offers no definitive explanation as to why U.S. forces went on this alert, also known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Readiness Test," the editors of the FRUS volume said (Document 59).

"There are two main after-the-fact explanations: first, that nuclear brinkmanship was designed to convince the Soviets that President Nixon was prepared to launch a nuclear attack against North Vietnam in order to convince Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate an end to the war in Southeast Asia" along the lines that previous historians have suggested.

The second proposed explanation is "that the President ordered the alert as a signal to deter a possible Soviet nuclear strike against China during the escalating Sino-Soviet border dispute." Consistent with the second interpretation, the FRUS volume provides new documentation of intelligence reports indicating that Soviet leaders were considering a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities.

Astonishingly, even the most senior U.S. military leaders were kept in the dark by the White House about the nature of the alert-- before, during and after the event.

"It is difficult to measure the success of this operation," wrote JCS Chairman General Earle G. Wheeler to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird on November 6, 1969, "since... the objectives of the test are unknown."

惠勒将军建议（文件92）说：“如果要从这种类型的操作中获得最大的利益，至少您和高级指挥官被告知目标和目标，这似乎是谨慎的。”

最后，美国秘密军事警报（仅有涉及美国核力量的少数此类案件之一）几乎没有明显的影响。中央情报局在1969年10月27日的备忘录中报道说：“苏联人没有反映出苏联的急切关注。”“在苏联或中国新闻媒体或外交活动中，没有反映美国军事警报姿势。”

在指挥1969年秘密警报的小型白宫小组中，也许只有亨利·基辛格（Henry Kissinger）保持活力和活跃。弗鲁斯编辑指出，他没有在回忆录中提到警报，除了在斜声明中，美国“提高了我们的个人资料，以表明我们对中国设施的威胁并不漠不关心”。

Frus领导解密，但有时会落后

At its best, the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series serves as a driver of declassification, propelling it farther and faster than it would otherwise go. But it's not always at its best.

1992年，国会制定了一项有关弗里斯的法律，该法律代表了仅持续的法定要求之一，以进行官方记录。（《原子能法》也构成了持续的解密要求，是想到的另一项法规。）1992年法律指示国务院以提供“彻底，准确，可靠的纪录片记录在美国重大的外交政策决定中，“事件记录后不超过30年”。这意味着持续的义务有及时解密历史记录。

The State Department has never met the statutory 30 year deadline. Nor has Congress effectively required that it do so. In fact, Congress has not even conducted regular oversight of the FRUS program, which has experienced significant turmoil in recent years.

But the statute has not been altogether forgotten or ignored, either. In numerous areas of historical research, FRUS represents the vanguard of declassification, opening up otherwise inaccessible collections for the first time. This is notably true in the latest FRUS volume on "National Security Policy" published last week. It includes previously unreleased material declassified specifically for FRUS, "some of it extracted from still-classified documents."

On the other hand, because the FRUS declassification process is often so slow and prolonged, it can produce erratic and misleading results. The latest FRUS volume began a declassification review in 2005 that was not completed until 2011. This created the awkward circumstance that information which may have been properly classified in 2005 could be withheld from release in FRUS in 2011 despite the fact that the information had ceased to be classified in the interim.

因此,包括新的FRUS卷ded a redacted version of President Nixon's 1971 National Security Decision Memorandum 128 on the FY 1972-1974 Nuclear Weapons Stockpile (Document 196). "The President approves a total stockpile of [deleted] for the end of FY 1973 and a total stockpile [deleted] for the end of FY 1974," according to the FRUS version which treats the stockpile numbers as still-classified information.

该文档的该版本未能认识到1973年和1974年的库存总数（在其他年份）被国防部长和能源部长在2010年5月被解释。

然而，这些信息在新的Frus卷中找不到，这表明需要改善解密过程的协调，以使其更加生产力。

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保密新闻是由史蒂文·艾伯德（Steven Aftergood）撰写的，由美国科学家联合会出版。

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