Tuesday, August 22 2006 10:35 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: In a 'surprise' move, the Bush administration has started re-classifying information on missile data that was available to the general public for decades and even to the erstwhile 'enemy', the Soviet Union.

The National Security Archives said declassification decisions on nuclear weapons information by federal agencies have taken a surprising turn with security reviewers treating as 'classified' information that has been public for decades.

"For years during the Cold War the US nuclear arsenal included 1,000 Minuteman and 55 Titan II missiles; this information could easily be found in a variety of public record sources," he said.

"For reasons that are truly perplexing, when the current reviewers open up archival documents from the Cold War, they are redacting those and other publicly-available numbers, even to the point of classifying parts of a public report by the Secretary of Defense," says a senior analyst of the Archives William Burr in his latest finding.

"Excessive secrecy continues to abound in another category of historical nuclear information: the overseasdeployment of U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Information on the deployments that has been publicly available for many years is also being classified by U.S. government agencies" he added.

What has been pointed out is that during the 1960s and 1970s, Secretaries of Defense produced public reports showing that at the height of the Cold War, the United States had 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles (1,000 Minutemen and 54 Titan IIs) and 656 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

"This and related information has also been available before in previously declassified documents, but now Pentagon officials excise the same numbers when they review documents. Although National Security Archive staffers have challenged the practice in mandatory review appeals, the number game continues to this day," Burr says.

Archive officials are saying that the numbers given by the then Defence Secretary Melvin Laird of American bomber squadrons and of the Tital Inter continental and Minuteman Missiles have now been redacted.

"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director has been quoted in The Washington Post.

Burr for instance has also talked of a 75 page memo sent by the former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 on military policy that contained numbers.

Astonishingly a declassified copy obtained in 1999 had left the numbers untouched but a 2006 version saw the Pentagon reviewers blacking out the numbers that included the number of heavy bombers the United States had in its arsenal.