Testimonials
“Drawing upon a trove of new documents, the authors provide a full length fascinating account of Nixon and Kissinger's madman nuclear threat making in 1969 against North Vietnam ... I didn't know any of this as I was copying the top secret Pentagon Papers that fall but if I had I would have given the Papers to the newspapers right away rather than two years later ... A gripping and essential read.”
“Finally a well-researched and well-written account of our leaders’ dangerous nuclear brinksmanship across the high years of the Cold War. There’s much here that’s new and much that’s troubling – for today as well as yesterday.”
“Thank you again for your recent trip to Spain. It was a pleasure to have you work with us in submitting evidence for the judicial case against General Augusto Pinochet. We will be relying on you to search for other declassified U.S. records that may be relevant to this judicial case, as well as to the cases of other human rights abusers in Chile which we are advancing. Your work is invaluable to the pursuit of truth and justice.”
“The National Security Archive at George Washington University maintains a trove of declassified government papers, including voluminous files involving national security decision making during the Cold War. Tom Blanton, the director, and his colleagues guided [research assistant] Gabriela and me through the archive’s collections, many of which are assembled and analyzed in thoughtful electronic briefing books. William Burr, a senior analyst, has edited several invaluable collections about nuclear weapons policy during the Cold War.”
For “outstanding collections of primary source materials in the fields of international or diplomatic history, especially those distinguished by the inclusion of commentary designed to interpret the documents and set them within their historical context.”
“Russia has reverted to authoritarian type, yet there are opportunities for human rights cases and accountability in the European context. We need from you any US documents you can retrieve on Chechnya and the enormous human cost of those wars. Such information is called ‘state secrets’ in Russia.”
“Masterpieces of History ... provides a fascinating array of sources from the late 1980s and early 1990, largely from Russian-language originals. Experts who have seen these documents already at conferences or the archive itself, as I did in the course of writing my book 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, already know how valuable they are.”
“There are lessons for handling Iran's nuclear program in the declassified CIA self-analysis of its misreading of the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's reaction to U.N. inspections of his weapons-of-mass-destruction program. Equally interesting in the report is how Hussein misjudged the capability of international inspectors and the responses — sanctions and then military action — that would come from the United States and its allies. Are these errors that Iran may be making?
“The ‘nuclear vault’ is the informal name given to a division of the privately funded National Security [Archive], now housed in the library of George Washington University on H Street. The [Archive], founded two decades ago, has devoted itself to getting millions of pages of top secret, classified national security documents declassified, primarily through the Freedom of Information Act. The nuclear vault, the repository for an astonishing compilation of confidential declassified discussions about the bomb, has been presided over for two decades by Dr.
“An important contribution came from Thomas S. Blanton and the National Security Archive in Washington, which provided key historical documents and analysis. I am also grateful to Anne Hessing Cahn for access to her collection of papers at the [National Security Archive]. Svetlana Savranskaya guided me with precision and patience through Cold War memoirs and documents.”
“Even historic documents like the KGB surveillance reports that you have found on me and the other dissidents have a political impact in today’s Russia, since there is a new crackdown against civil society, and since our president [Putin] once served the KGB, so we need more such documents both from the history and from the present.”
“This has been an extraordinarily impressive event. I felt for the first time in this morning’s session that I understood Soviet decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis better than in any other event since 1941.”
“Extraordinary primary documents on this and other SALT matters can be found in the Digital National Security Archive, “U.S. Nuclear History, 1969-1976: Weapons, Arms Control, and War Plans in an Age of Strategic Parity.”
“[The Chronology is] the most comprehensive, authoritative, objective and useful summary of the Iran-Contra affair available. It makes the pieces fall into place and brings the individual players into focus.”
“Journalists occasionally receive well- or not-so-well-intentioned leaks about past or present official misdeeds. Once in a while – less so these days – a congressional investigation or a commission unearths long-buried truths about government-gone-bad. But when it comes to consistently forcing important secrets out of the US government no journalist or investigator rivals the National Security Archive, a nonprofit outfit based at George Washington University.”