| Let's assume the schematic depicts a genuine weapon, and that this was a massive redaction screw-up. I think the author is omitting the most likely explanation for why it wasn't redacted in future publications. It took from 2007 to 2024 for someone (him) to publicly notice this. If your job was to censor documents coming out of Sandia National Laboratories, and you screwed up this massively, what's your incentive to call attention to your screw-up? Better to just coast along, by the time you retire or move on to another job your ass is off the firing line. Ditto (but less so) if this was your co-worker or team mate, after all North Korea, Iran etc. already have access to the published document. What could anyone in your organization possibly gain from the ensuing shitstorm of admitting something like that? Has this person worked, well, pretty much anywhere, where people have a stronger incentive to cover their own ass and keep out of trouble than not? Or, that internal report and subsequent shitstorm did happen, but what do you do at that point? Make a big public fuss about it, and confirm to state actors that you accidentally published a genuine weapons design? No, you just keep cropping that picture a bit more, eventually phase it out, and hope it's forgotten. Maybe they'll just think it's a detailed mockup of a test article. If it wasn't for that meddling blogger... Edit: Also, I bet there's nobody involved in the day-to-day of redacting documents that's aware of what an actual weapons design looks like. That probably happens at another level of redaction. So once something like this slips by it's just glazed over as "ah, that's a bit detailed? But I guess it was approved already, as it's already published? Moving on.". Whereas a censor would have to know what an actual thermonuclear device looks like to think "Holy crap! Who the hell approved this?!". And even then they and the organization still need the incentive to raise a fuss about it. |