The only nuclear target map thus far declassified by the United States suggested that China would also be targeted even in a US-Russia war, to prevent it from emerging as the strongest post-war economy.
Wait, what?
If true, this seems to strongly undermine the credibility of the U.S. in the eyes of most world leaders.
Especially the leaders of India, Africa, Brazil, etc., who would almost certainly share fears of being next on the chopping block.
I can’t see how this is possibly advantageous for the US government to suggest.
Why have some other contemporaneous documents been kept secret?
200X to 201X US government regularly decided 195X to 196X US government files weren’t suitable for release.
(And it obviously didn’t jump out from the secret archives by random chance. Folks must have physically sorted it, approved it, etc.)
If you mean that governments 50 years later don’t need to worry about how people perceive past documents, that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny since there are files relating to nuclear weapons policy made by governments long past that are known to be actively kept secret much longer than this one.
As in reviewers looked at them and decided to keep them secret for another 25 years because some subset of nuclear weapons policy files from the 1950s would be too damaging to the present day US and its foreign allies to release.
Clearly then it’s understood that people can perceive past documents to have a relation to current US attitudes, and that declassification officials have such a fear for some other contemporaneous documents.
EDIT: In other words, it doesn’t seem credible that some parts of 1956 policy are considered so potentially damaging to the present US by experts that they’re still secret today, while this part supposedly has no relevance at all.
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.
Wait, what?
If true, this seems to strongly undermine the credibility of the U.S. in the eyes of most world leaders.
Especially the leaders of India, Africa, Brazil, etc., who would almost certainly share fears of being next on the chopping block.
I can’t see how this is possibly advantageous for the US government to suggest.
That map is from 1956. It has absolutely no relevance to the current US attitude toward China.
Why have some other contemporaneous documents been kept secret?
200X to 201X US government regularly decided 195X to 196X US government files weren’t suitable for release.
(And it obviously didn’t jump out from the secret archives by random chance. Folks must have physically sorted it, approved it, etc.)
If you mean that governments 50 years later don’t need to worry about how people perceive past documents, that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny since there are files relating to nuclear weapons policy made by governments long past that are known to be actively kept secret much longer than this one.
As in reviewers looked at them and decided to keep them secret for another 25 years because some subset of nuclear weapons policy files from the 1950s would be too damaging to the present day US and its foreign allies to release.
Clearly then it’s understood that people can perceive past documents to have a relation to current US attitudes, and that declassification officials have such a fear for some other contemporaneous documents.
EDIT: In other words, it doesn’t seem credible that some parts of 1956 policy are considered so potentially damaging to the present US by experts that they’re still secret today, while this part supposedly has no relevance at all.
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.