I'm John Daphso with Henry Sikalski, the Executive Director of the Non-Proliferation Policy

Education Center.

We speak of nuclear weapons and that is a way of talking about

classification, especially when it comes to the US capabilities. But

classification itself, Henry has taught me these last two years is a runaway train

and having been identified as a problem

by news reports these last two years,

is there a change?

Henry, your measure, because there's legislation on this?

Yeah, well, I'd say we're at least now,

we've moved from being postful and proud of a bad system to at least

voicing concerns that we've overd done it so that we've moved from being I guess

complicit to at least being hypocritical about it. And what I mean by that is a law did just get signed by the president passed by both houses and both parties saying we've got to we've got to learn how to declassify.

We need to, you know, do the classifications more sensibly

and make sure that the key secrets are kept secret,

but we don't do a kind of press all button's approach

to get that to happen because what we've learned and what people now in positions of high responsibility in the government

and both parties are saying is when you overdo it make the rate of innovation go down. You make it impossible to deal with allies that you

absolutely need to be safe and to protect our form of government and you essentially make business so difficult that you can't defend yourself.

So I think that storyline has taken root.

As far as the practicalities of changing the amount that we classify, you're making

declassification happen, let's just be diplomatic and say that's a bit more of a work in progress.

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