Policy Making and Diplomacy

Washington, DC, May 25, 2006 - Today the National Security Archive is publishing the first installment of the diary of one of the key behind-the-scenes figures of the Gorbachev era - Anatoly Sergeevich Chernyaev. This document is being published in English here for the first time. It is hard to overestimate the uniqueness and importance of this diary for our understanding of the end of the Cold War - and specifically for the peaceful withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Washington, DC, April 28, 2006 - Today the National Security Archive publishes for the first time 30 recently declassified U.S. government documents disclosing the existence of a highly secret policy debate, during the first year of the Nixon administration, over the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Broadly speaking, the debate was over whether it was feasible--either politically or technically--for the Nixon administration to try to prevent Israel from crossing the nuclear threshold, or whether the U.S. should find some "ground rules" which would allow it to live with a nuclear Israel.

Washington, DC, April 21, 2006 - Last month the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) put almost 320,000 declassified cables on-line when it opened up State Department document databases from 1973 and 1974. This is significant news for researchers, because the text of declassified diplomatic cables is now retrievable on the NARA Web site. Beginning in 1973, the State Department began creating electronic systems for transmitting cables to and from U.S. embassies.

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Previously released PDBs
Court documents
Declassified CIA documents on presidential briefings
Previous Postings
19 January 2006
CIA Secrecy Challenged on President's Daily Brief
UC Davis Professor Appeals Lower Court Decision Withholding Two 40-Year-Old Memos to LBJ
15 July 2005
Judge Grants Immortality to Presidential Privilege
Withholds Two 1960s CIA Daily Briefs to LBJ Despite Release of 35 Others With No Damage to U.S.
6 May 2005
Bush Administration Claims Presidential Privilege for LBJ Documents

Washington, D.C., December 14, 2005 - Secretary of State James Baker warned in 1991 that Japan's "bitter history" with the Koreas would "inhibit policy coordination," even though "Japan has important economic leverage on the North which the South will want to see used effectively" - according to a declassified cable posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., November 21, 2005 - Every work of history is not just a statement about the past, but a reflection of the era -- if not the precise year -- during which it was written. This is certainly the case with the now-declassified 1997 U.S. State Department study of the American effort to end the Bosnian war, the original version of which is now available. On November 21, 1995, the world witnessed an event that for years many believed impossible: on a secluded, wind-swept U.S. Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia agreed to end a war.

Washington D.C. October 26, 2005 - Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, who died in Moscow last week at the age of 81, was probably the best known "architect of perestroika." Soviet ambassador to Canada, then member of the Politburo and Mikhail Gorbachev's closest adviser, he could rightfully be called the "Father of Glasnost." Alexander Yakovlev rose through the Communist Party ranks to become one of the most vocal critics of the Stalinist past and a passionate advocate of democratization in the second half of the 1980s.

Washington D.C. August 23, 2005 - Next week, if all goes according to plan, the United States will resume six-party talks with North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia and host nation China on the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program. The parties are trying to reach agreement on a set of principles to guide negotiations that will lead to the dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear program and the threat it poses of a destabilizing North Korean nuclear weapons arsenal.

Washington D.C. July 1, 2005 - A decision to use nuclear weapons is one of the most politically, militarily, and morally perilous decisions that a U.S. president, or any leader of a nuclear state, can make. Recognizing that nuclear weapons differ from any other weapons because of their immense power and danger, President Lyndon B. Johnson once argued that a decision to use them "would lead us down an uncertain path of blows and counterblows whose outcome none may know." (Note 1) Johnson, like most U.S.

Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005 - President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger saw India as a "Soviet stooge" during the South Asia crisis of 1971, downplayed reports of Pakistani genocide in what is now Bangladesh, and even suggested that China intervene militarily on Pakistan's side, according to startling new documentation from White House files and tapes contained in the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series and reposted today by the National Security Archive.