Why would they declassify it at the 50 year declassification mark in 2006, when sensitive documents are regularly kept secret past 50 years?
Because it was irrelevant to their 2006 targeting strategy (and their current one), and they had reason to know that the people who mattered were aware of that, so they had no national security reason to keep it secret. Classification isn’t (supposed to be) a public relations tool.
Or because they screwed up and didn’t think it was a big enough screwup to try to claw it back.
Or because the stuff they keep secret is of an entirely different kind. We don’t know what that stuff is.
Or because they were playing 18-dimensional chess and trying to send some kind of message with the map… and that message could as easily be a lie as the truth. And for that matter, 2006 was 15 years ago and they might want to send a different (true or false) message if they were doing it now.
The bottom line is that the information content of a now-65-year-old map is nil. It would be more convincing to just speculate that they might hit China to avoid Chinese postwar dominance, than to treat that map as evidence one way or the other.
Because it was irrelevant to their 2006 targeting strategy (and their current one), and they had reason to know that the people who mattered were aware of that, so they had no national security reason to keep it secret. Classification isn’t (supposed to be) a public relations tool.
Or because they screwed up and didn’t think it was a big enough screwup to try to claw it back.
Or because the stuff they keep secret is of an entirely different kind. We don’t know what that stuff is.
Or because they were playing 18-dimensional chess and trying to send some kind of message with the map… and that message could as easily be a lie as the truth. And for that matter, 2006 was 15 years ago and they might want to send a different (true or false) message if they were doing it now.
The bottom line is that the information content of a now-65-year-old map is nil. It would be more convincing to just speculate that they might hit China to avoid Chinese postwar dominance, than to treat that map as evidence one way or the other.