These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security ArchiveThe National Security Archive, has released documents that show U.S. Intelligence failed to warn of India's nuclear tests despite tracking nuclear weapons potential since the 1950s.
Long before India detonated a nuclear device in May 1974, the U.S. Intelligence Community was monitoring and analyzing Indian civilian and military nuclear energy activities, according to documents released today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Those activities are at the core of the current controversy over the Bush administration's proposed legislation that would alter U.S. nonproliferation and export control laws and policies so as to allow full nuclear cooperation with India.
Today's posting consists of forty documents - whose original classifications range from unclassified to Top Secret Codeword - produced by interagency groups, the CIA, the State and Defense Departments, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The documents cover a forty-year time span, from 1958 to 1998.
The records were obtained by Archive Senior Fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson while conducting research for his recently published book, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (W.W. Norton).
The documents show that as early as 1958 the CIA was exploring the possibility that India might choose to develop nuclear weapons. The reports focus on a wide range of nuclear related matters - nuclear policy (including policy concerning weapons development), reactor construction and operations, foreign assistance, the tests themselves, and the domestic and international impact of the tests.
Documents from 1974-1975 and 1998 provide assessments of the reason why the U.S. Intelligence Community failed to provide warning of the 1974 and 1998 tests - assessments which are strikingly similar. They also include recommendations to address the deficiencies in performance that the assessments identified.
