 about to begin today's webinar. Please stand by as I connect the line. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. And thank you for joining today's PIDB virtual public meeting. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the WebEx participant and chat panel by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. Please note all audio connections are currently muted. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the host. With that, I will turn the meeting over to Mark Bradley, Executive Secretary of the Board. So please go ahead. Thank you very much, Michelle. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another public meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board. Of all the public meetings, the board is held over the years. I think you'll find this one to be one of the most compelling and thought-provoking. This meeting is going to focus on a very important collection of historically significant records that trace their origins to a time when our country was locked in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union when we were testing atomic weapons in and around the Marshall Islands. Several months ago, Congress asked the board to conduct a feasibility study on how many records still remain classified about these tests, what it will take to declassify them and to make them publicly available. The board's conclusions can be found on the PIDB's website. And these conclusions have been sent to Congress and to the Secretaries of Defense and Energy. What the board will discuss this morning with the help of guest speaker, Walter Pinkas, formerly the Washington Post, and a scholar of the atomic testing on the Marshall Islands and around it is a microcosm of what the board has been saying for years. Namely, that our classification and declassification systems remain in dire need of reform because they are inefficient, too costly, and produce records that are too scattered to access. With that, I now turn this meeting over to Ezra Cohen, the PIDB's chairman. Ezra? Thank you, Mark. As Mark noted, in FY 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act included a section that mandated the public interest declassification board conduct a feasibility study on the declassification of information relating to nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands, including with respect to cleanup activities and storage of waste relating to such tests. The PIDB conducted a high-level study rather than a record-by-record assessment. This study includes the status of potentially responsive records created by federal agencies, departments, organizations, units, entities, national laboratories that participated in any aspect of nuclear weapons testing, environmental and human radiation testing, containment, storage, and cleanup activities between 1946 through 1989. As part of the study, the PIDB held meetings with stakeholders, including agency staff from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy. We met with congressional staff, congressional committee staff, State Department officials, representatives from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, historians, researchers, records managers, and archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration. The NDAA required that the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy support the study. DOD and DOE provided information and records that may be responsive to the study. The information provided at the record series level includes responsive component record type, volume, and classification level. This information will be included within the study. Lastly, the study took over about 600 hours of work. The staff of ISU and of the PIDB did an enormous lift here, and they did a fantastic job. And I, in particular, like to recognize the efforts of Sharmila Bhatia and Beth Fiddler, who were instrumental in putting this study together. As always, if you have any questions related to anything you hear today or on matters of the classification system in general, please send your questions to PIDB at narrow.gov. If we can get to them during the meeting, we will. If not, we will respond to them on the blog. And again, the email is PIDB at narrow.gov. I'll give a brief historical background. Well, actually, we're going to have Carter give the historical background. Carter, go ahead. Yeah, thanks, Ezra. As Ezra mentioned, this is a brief background to provide context for this report. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted more than 50 atomic and thermonuclear tests in and around and over the Marshall Islands. And as Mark mentioned, these tests occurred on the heels of the use of the atomic bombs and Nagasaki and Hiroshima against Japan at the conclusion of World War II, and occurred during the nuclear arms race with the Soviets. The tests were conducted on the Bikini Atoll and on or near the Nuitak Atoll. The Castle Bravo test, which was conducted on March 1, 1954 on the Bikini Atoll, was the largest test. And the detonation significantly exceeded the size that the government expected. Bravo was a thermonuclear fusion weapon, the largest weapon detonated by the United States. And as Walter Pinkus writes about in his book, the blast was equivalent to about 15 million tons of TNT, or more than 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. While the Marshallese were evacuated from the Bikini and Nuitak Atolls, the radioactive fallout impacted the inhabited Atolls and required an emergency evacuation of the residents. The inhabitants were exposed to radioactive fallout and not just the inhabitants. One of my favorite parts of the book was about a fishing trawler that the Japanese somehow wandered into the zone, ironically, called the Lucky Dragon. And I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. But the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands were exposed to radioactive fallout. The Department of Energy administers a medical program that serves those who are exposed to radiation during the Castle Bravo test. And the program provides medical care and treatment. The Marshallese were displaced from their homes and forced to relocate. The contamination of the land and the waters there also limited their ability to rely on agriculture and fishing for their food and livelihood. In the 1970s, the US constructed a containment structure on Runit Island, which is located on the Nuitak Atoll. This island is inhabited. The dome there contains over 100,000 cubic yards of radioactive contaminated soil, metal, concrete, and testing debris, which is encapsulated in a concrete inside an unlined nuclear test crater, which was created by the Cactus nuclear test in 1958. The cleanup activities alone exposed more than 6,000 military service members to radiation. Now the US is required to monitor the containment structure. And this is assigned to the Department of Energy. But the Marshallese are concerned that there is future risk with the rising waters. And as the dome itself begins to deteriorate, that's a bit of background. And I'll now turn it over to Alyssa Starzak to talk about some of the issues about our review. Thanks, Carter. So the PIDB has identified many challenges for a declassification project of records relating to nuclear weapons testing and cleanup activities in the Marshall Islands. So to begin with, multiple agencies have legal custody of potentially responsive records. Both the Departments of Defense and Energy and the National Archives and Records Administration have records. The challenges for any review and declassification project broadly include structural, organizational, and policy issues. Indeed, as Mark Bradley identified at the beginning, the challenges we identified highlight the overall challenges we have with declassification and public availability of records. Just to give you a sense of some of the challenges we witnessed in doing our review, we saw a requirement to search large volumes of records, including non-textual records like film for individual responsive records. We also saw that there was a need for technology and secure systems to process and review records, particularly ones that might be classified. And then there was a need to develop a process for multi-agency declassification review of records that have not been a session to the National Archives or are not included in the National Declassification Center process. To undertake a project like this would require new and dedicated resources. The project would require millions of dollars for technology, secure communications capabilities at various facilities across the nation where the classified records are currently stored, project management tools, redaction software, and web design and hosting. The project would require staff with security clearances to perform searches in digitized responsive records, conduct public access and declassification reviews, and design and manage the public-facing website. And those are just a sample of some of the challenges that we face. I'm turning it back to Ezra. Thank you, Alyssa. As Alyssa mentioned, through this study, we really found very real and present examples of how the classification system and the tools that we have to increase public transparency need to be modernized. With that, we'll turn to Walter Pincus, who joins us today. Thank you, Walter. Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for the Cipher Brief. Mr. Pincus was a reporter for The Washington Post for over 40 years and covered nuclear weapons and arms control and politics and congressional investigations. Last November, his book, Blown to Hell, America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islands, was published. His research began in the mid-1970s when he traveled to the Marshall Islands with Dr. Robert Conard, the long-time head of medical surveillance for the US Navy, and then the Atomic Energy Commission's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr. Conard was tasked with monitoring the health and treatment of the Marshallese, who were exposed to the fallout radiation after the Castle Bravo test. Walter? As a risk, thank you very much. I should say that my interest first was brought to the Marshallese back in 1966, when I was covering Congress in a past a bill that ended up giving each exposed person on a wrangler battle $1,000 in cash. And to get the money that had to sign a statement, say they would never again seek money for the US from their exposure. 82 people, men, women, and children. And I hate to admit it, I've covered it ever since, because I was intrigued by that story. My book was the result of two eras of research separated by more than 40 years. First research took place in the 1970s, when I read congressional hearing records, saw some original documents, interviewed many people. And as I said, I was involved in a trip to the Marshalls in 1974 accompanying Dr. Canard and his group on their annual medical examination of the Rongo app survivors of the Bravo test. And we also had a stopover on Bikini. After that, I wrote, I hate to admit, a 60,000-word article for the New Yorker magazine, which had paid for my trip to Rongo app. It went into galleys, but was never published in the magazine. At that point, Mr. Sean, the editor, said it had to be broken up into two articles. And he saw no opportunity for oncoming magazines for that much material. As a result, years later, it became the foundation for my book, Blown to Hell. The second period of research, which went on for almost six years, as I wrote the book, at the same time I was in the final years of writing a column for the post, it took place almost entirely online, although there were some interviews also. Most helpful initially was the collection of energy department documents released by Secretary Hazel O'Leary during the Clinton administration. Early on, I discovered a document which inspired me to really keep going. It was a previously classified transcript of an unusual three-day meeting held in early October 1967 called the Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of General War held in Princeton, New Jersey, and sponsored in part by the Defense Atomic Support Agency. They had held a conference back in January 1967 with a group of distinguished current and former government scientists. At that time, the talk was about the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The conference that I was interested in, again, had a similar group of scientists, and it discussed specifically the fallout from nuclear testing with the focus on the Bravo test, the resultant radioactivity contamination of Marshall Highlanders and Japanese fishermen. Participating in that conference's discussions were familiar names, Dr. Charles Dunham from the 54 Bravo test, Dr. Canard on the effects of the fallout on populations, Dr. Lauren R. Donaldson from the University of Washington on the ecological aspects of weapon testing, and Dr. Meryl Eisenberg of the psycho-social reactions to the bomb. The discussions, as would be expected, when scientists gather together, broaden out to include much more than just fallout and medical aspects of radiation exposure. The transcript, I had to admit it, ran 423 pages. No surprise, the participants at the time went beyond simply reviewing past scientific circumstances and events to include questioning why there is so much public misunderstanding about radiation. They also talked about whether it's caused misunderstandings by government officials who had trouble in difficult situations telling the truth about what had been going on. For example, it was agreed that the government had not told the truth initially about what happened to the Marshallese on Rongelab Hattall and Uderick Hattall. Rongelab 120 miles away from the explosion, Uderick was 300 plus miles. Nor did they assess the impact of the radio activity in the fallout. One exchange began at this meeting. And Dr. Canard complained, quote, when you talk to a public group, it's obviously just don't understand the simplest things about radiation, unquote. As I continued my research, more such documents turned up from amongst the newly released O'Leary materials put much more light even backwards on operation crossroads tests that had never been made public. In my original New Yorker Draft article, crossroads was less than three pages. In my book, it's nearly 90 pages. Most of that material came from DOE Historical Collections. The most important was a site, www.osti.gov. I have to admit, sometime in the past six years, historic documents available through that collection have changed. Fewer seem to be available. I found that out back in 2020 when I was preparing footnotes for my book and found materials I had gathered earlier and quoted from were no longer located on that website. One problem may be the changing nature of search engines. I found over the years, Google can react differently on different days and challenge the fine materials using the very same search words. Things are still changing in terms of what's available. Yesterday, on Wednesday, I should say, while preparing for today's meeting, I decided to test the web and see what a new researcher could find. First of all, I found Wikipedia and other sites use a site and a DOE site called www.wrf.eh.doe.gov to guide people to Project 4.1, the medical follow-up to the exposure of the Mars release. That site no longer exists. However, if you go to www.wrfi.gov, it's a new site from what I use and use their current reports channel in Earth 3M. There are items I never saw listed there in my research, even in past years. Some, too at least, were interesting enough to me on Wednesday to read through them yesterday. And I actually found items that I plan to use in my Cypher brief column that will appear next week. There is no guidance on the index other than the dates that were written to show whether they're previously classified or just part of public reporting of national laboratory work that has not been picked up previously by any of the media. I went through such an instance about writing about Los Alamos and my own history. And this is one of these things about classification I've always felt needed much more work as you people do also. Back in 1977, after I wrote the first stories about the so-called neutron bomb, then Los Alamos director Harold Agnew invited me out to the laboratory, gave me access to the Los Alamos Library, and put a pile of recently publicly released Los Alamos studies on my desk, all of which involve nuclear weapons in one way or another. When I returned to Washington, I wrote a series of stories for the Washington Post based on materials in those Los Alamos studies. One day after the second story was published, Agnew called me and told me he'd been ordered to reclassify all the studies he had shown to me that were previously not class. Let's see what happens next week after I publish what I read in the news studies. There's a wealth of information on nuclear weapons already publicly available and still to be mined. The questions in my mind are whether there are researchers interested enough to search for such material. As important, is there a public out there that cares enough to read what's written? For myself, as I approach 90 years of age, nuclear weapons, their past, present, and future of all subjects I believe are extremely important. For me, the Marshall League is not only represented a means to tell a story that should affect us all. They represented, and still do now, how the US used those Marshall Islanders to error. And therefore, the US has a continuing responsibility to care for them now and in the future. And now if you have any questions that we can try to answer them. Thank you very much, Mr. Pincus. That was fascinating, especially your comments about what's classified and declassified seem to shift over time. I really appreciate you sharing that with us. Ezra, can I interrupt you and tell you one more panic? Absolutely. Go ahead. Part of my odd past is in the 1960s. I twice ran investigations for Senator Fulbright's and the Center for Foreign Relations Committee. And in the first investigation, which was of foreign lobbyists, I had my first experience with classification. And we held all our hearings in closed session. And when time came to make them public, we had to get them clear. And said, I ran the process with the administration representatives to clear the records. And I still remember the first episode, which I had to do, with the Philippine lobbyists. And meeting with the State Department. And at one point, Chairman Fulbright had said during the closed hearing that the then President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, was a crook. And the State Department wanted to classify them. And if you ever knew Fulbright, he would never allow that to happen. And we ended up publishing it and a lot of other material that we fought over, and the world didn't end. That was my first experience with how arbitrary the whole system is. And as you mentioned in your report, the whole thing ought to be studied. Well, unfortunately, what you just described there is something we see and repeat itself a lot throughout the history of classification and declassification. But Michael, do you want to go ahead now with some questions? Sure, thanks, Ezra. And thank you, Mr. Pincus, again, for your briefing and your comments on the book. Do you see any comparison between the way the US government addresses the Marshallese and the present day with the development of modern weapons systems and the level of transparency to the public? Well, the modern weapon thing, which I also write about, I have to admit I've written about this stuff for so long. There are things that shouldn't be discussed when it comes to weaponry. And part of it is that people don't understand what weapons do and what they can do. And we're dealing now with a great group. I'm amused with all the interest, I'll give you an example, with hypersonics. We're now talking about hypersonics. The Chinese are the Russians ahead of us. We have to rush. Back in 1969, both the US and the Russians developed hypersonic weapons. They're just faster than the weapons we have, except for the forehead of an intercontinental missile. We can't stop them easily. And hypersonics are the same thing, except they travel at a lower level. And back in 1969, we decided, if you couldn't stop the incoming warheads, you couldn't stop hypersonics, we're no more difficult. But the hell that they've been re-brought ahead, they suddenly are a terrifying new missile we have to deal with, we have to build them ourselves. But they're really not much different from what we all ready face that we can't stop if there were a massive attack. It's a long way of saying people describe weapons doing more things than they can probably do. In this case, I sort of trust the military more than I do sort of exposing more of what a weapon can do. Thank you. I just have another question. You mentioned that in your remarks that there's still much to be mined. What would you recommend for a researcher who wants to take this up and follow your footsteps? I don't know. One, you have to have an interest in it. And I think I used to have trouble getting the post to print stories around nuclear weapons because I thought in the public's mind, the only thing I care about are numbers. Who's got more, who's got less nuclear weapons? If you grew up back in the 50s and 60s when there was still atmosphere testing, every nuclear test was a front-page story for days. One, when it blew up. And two, when the fallout traveled across the world. Once we went underground, nuclear weapons tests became bigger in some of them. And there were two paragraphs in the back of the paper. Nobody cared about what a weapon could do. They cared only about how many it had. And whoever had more was stronger. I always, ironically, thought the underground, the atmospheric test band was a detriment to people's understanding of how terrible nuclear weapons really are. And the whole lesson of fallout, which people don't understand, even back in the early days, they thought, well, if you stayed in your basement overnight and then came up, things would be fine. People don't understand that you can't eat. You have a danger of living in a wrong lab, even though they've been cleaned up twice because you can't get rid of the fallout. The understanding of nuclear weapons shouldn't be Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where by design, Oppenheimer and the other scientists detonated them 1,800 or 2,000 feet above the ground so the firewall wouldn't hit the ground or you didn't have fallout. You could go back, live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rebuild it. What people think about with nuclear weapons is Chernobyl, where nobody's going to live there for 40 years. And that was a minor explosion when it came to a weapon. Were there records that you would have liked to have included in your book that were unavailable due to the classification issues or privacy concerns? Well, it may be classification. It also may be that studies are put out by the labs and by people and don't get publicized so you don't know they exist. My experience Wednesday is a study that came out of Los Alamos in 2018. I don't know when it was posted. But it's like a cliff notes in my book. It reads exactly like my book. They've got a whole bunch of same examples I use. They clearly had the same material and more. I never saw it. Thank you. I have just one question and then we'll ask the other board members. But Mr. Pincus, what was the contemporaneous view of the US government when you were traveling around with Dr. Canard throughout the region? What was the view at that time of the injury and the effects on the Marshallese? I've got to be honest. We went to Bikini and the makeshift event there was we were examining new homes that have been built by a Marshallese company for the return of the Bikini and it's the first return. And we went inside and the Geiger counters went off. And it turned out the Marshallese had been told they had to import the sand used in the cement. And to save money, they used Bikini sand and they had to tear those houses down. And Rongelat, my attention was drawn not just to the examination. First thing is that one of my first memories was there was a Peace Corps volunteer living on Rongelat at the time who'd come from San Francisco. And she spent many hours complaining to me about how Americans were destroying these wonderful natives who should have stayed in their original genre and we brought gambling and liquor to the members. That was bizarre. Since I didn't speak the language, of course, I couldn't talk. The only people I talked to were the Marshallese representatives on the territories group. And they understood Dr. Canard, as people know, was caught in this terrible dilemma of trying to deal both with the arrival of thyroid problems. Every child under 19 had to have their siroids removed over a certain period of time because the radioactive diodine was strong with the siroids. And at the same time, deal with normal health. And there were people, including the Japanese anti-nuclear people, who were claiming that any kind of illness related to the bomb were very anti-American. And so they were using the Marshallese. So you had this feeling that there was anti-Americanism being promoted. And it just begun to infect the politics of the Marshall Island and still does. So I mean, Americans can understand how people can misuse facts for political reasons. And so there are, we have to face that in dealing with the Marshallese. But the fact is that we made an error in blowing up Bravo at the time we blew it up. And is the irony of all the things in the new study I read? Yes, sir. It is an honest acknowledgment in one of the studies I read, not that we misunderstood the wins, which we did, at the highest levels because we hadn't had that experience, but also we had an idea that the radioactivity would be captured in the stratosphere and would never return to Earth. And that was one scientific belief at the time, which was totally wrong. So we have a debt to pay for our mistakes. But our mistakes are geometrically promoted among the Marshallese in order if people can make political gain or I hate to say to get more money. And that's the problem. Thank you. Thank you for answering that. Do any of the other board members have questions that they'd like to ask? John Tierney, go ahead. Well, thank you, Ezra. Thank you, Mr. Pinkes. It's always a pleasure to hear you respond upon your past work and your ongoing activities. Given that the nuclear issue never goes away and certainly has diminished in the attention that a lot of people are giving it over the last couple of decades, I would be curious to know what you think would be a way to re-engage the public so that they're aware of this existential danger and the way that it connects with the environmental and climate change dangers that we have today so that we can get the public to raise its voice once again and get active on this issue. Another part of my ridiculous past line is I worked with CBS and did a documentary at which point we tried to show briefly what would happen if one nuclear weapon hit the United States. And at that time, I chose Omaha, which is where SAC was located. I don't know if you remember, there was an ABC program called The Day After. Sir. It ought to be shown once a year to remind people. I taught a seminar here at Washington for Stanford University and was always amazed how little students knew about nuclear weapons. And Dr. Perry's out there, and they talk about it a lot, but they don't talk about the impact of its use. Everybody talks about tactics and nuclear warfare, which is bizarre. But just to explain what one weapon could do, I mean, if Congress would just focus on that, there was never a study done, by the way, or an investigation of Bravo. Never. And the scientists at that 67th meeting agreed among themselves. They didn't understand why there was never any discussion of the mistakes made or the fallout. And it's probably worth redoing, re-looking at that. Thank you. Thank you, John. Any other questions? OK. Mr. Pinkas, thank you again. We really appreciate your insights. And we hope that this study will help the next generation of researchers really begin to dig into this issue. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and we're going to go through some of the findings and the recommendations that we make in the feasibility study. I'll just say that, again, as Alyssa mentioned, what we discovered here is that what we've been talking about, what the board has been talking about for many years, that the classification system and then the declassification system are well overdue for major reforms. And some of this can be solved through technology, but there are also major systematic changes that need to be made. With that, we'll start with Ben, who will go over the first challenge and recommendation that we find in the report. Sure. Thank you. First, to set the ground in terms of some of the granular details on the records, the records that may be responsive here are in the legal custody of the Department of Defense and Energy and the National Archives and Records Administration. The records are located in various locations throughout the country. For NARA, the locations would include facilities in Washington DC area, regional facilities, and the presidential libraries. DOD has records located within various components throughout the country. The Department of Energy has records located at its headquarters and the national laboratories, including Brookhaven, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia, and the Nevada National Security Site. In addition to these challenges, the records could be contained in larger collections of records that are not necessarily related to weapons tested in the Marshall Islands. I would commend to everyone Appendix D to the report, which goes into some detail in terms of identifying potentially responsive records in greater detail, and gives an idea of the scope of records locations across and within departments. Finally, as noted in greater detail in the report, the cross-agency equity reviews will be a challenge. Many of the records in the custody of agencies require equity reviews, and while Executive Order 13526 provides the authority for agencies to establish declassification centers, agencies have generally chosen not to establish such centers. So it will be, as laid out in the report, a challenge to set up a process for internal or cross-agency equity reviews, and the report discusses some of these past challenges that have occurred in terms of referrals between agencies for these. With that, I think I turn it over to John Tierney to discuss some of the volumes of records. Thanks a lot. I mean, I know this is somewhat boring for people that's not listening to numbers, but it's instructive. When you think of the magnitude of things that are involved here, the Department of Energy estimates 118,000 and 10 records that might be responsive. That's over 66,000 of the classified, 782 that are controlled unclassified information, and 50,656 that are unclassified. These records are in a variety of formats. They're paper, they're digital, audio-visual, and there are different levels of granularity that are reported in the process here. There's a document level, there are reels, there are boxes, so it goes on and on in that sense. The Department of Defense has estimated 16,000 FRC equivalent boxes. So that's totals an estimated 35 to 40 million pages that might be responsive. The classification level ranges from unclassified to classified, and the Department of Defense components provide different levels of granularity on their reporting. Some talk about the document level versus the page level versus the session box level, and on and on and on. So it's a very complicated and huge project to look at. Paul, I think you've got more to say about the cost. Paul Noel. Yes, thank you, John. And also thank you, Mr. Pankas, for your research and your book. We appreciate it. It's a big help. So what is all this gonna cost to do a declassification study and review? The Department of Energy estimated the cost for reviewing projected 3.8 million pages. To do this, they would require additional staff and they based their projections on hiring 18 new contractors and two new federal employees. The Department of Energy estimated it would cost $134 million at about $35 a page and take 23 years to redact 3.8 million pages of classified Marshall Islands documents. In addition, the Department of Defense, DOD, estimated it would cost between $60 and $80 million for Marshall Islands search, declassification review and public release process. These funds would support a staffing increase for program managers, records management personnel, digital archivists, records research analysts and declassification personnel. The DOD would also require technology investments. DOD anticipates classified records would have to be transported to the Washington, DC area for digitalization, review, declassification and public release processing. DOD would also require funding to either improve or build declassification collaboration and workflow systems. This would be a multi-year project which they estimated would take about five years. And finally, there's these clearance costs. Background clearances can take one to two years to adjudicate with the current backlogs. Currently it costs $5,410 for a tier five top secret SCI clearance and an expedited clearance costs $5,845. Unless clearances are ordered at the start of a project waiting for them can delay work from starting out if there is insufficient cleared staff. So this brings the total to a little over $200 million for the project. Thank you. Thanks, Paul Noel. I think I'm gonna cover the recommendation on what declassification and public access review project could look like, which is one of the things that we looked at as part of this feasibility study. And we have a few recommendations in particular. One, we think a project like this would require executive level leadership, direction and support with a senior level official from the Department of Energy to serve as the project leader. There'll also be a need for an interagency agreement on a project plan. So making sure that agencies work together. So declassification guidance for RD which is restricted data and FRD which is formally restricted data, national security and national security restrictions and other non-classification restrictions such as privacy. So the goal should be really to have an agreement for all agencies so that they're doing the same thing with respect to declassification and release. As part of the project, the agency should also consider digitizing records, especially those that contain relevant information and are historically significant. Mr. Pincus, I think you flagged the access questions which I think are really significant. And I think Carter will talk a little bit about as well. But to me, even if you release them, if they're not publicly accessible, they haven't done much good for researchers. Digitization would also improve that public access to records to make them available online instead of only in research rooms or by request. And then finally, one of the things that the PIDB has been recommending for a while is thinking about how to use advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to support declassification and public access review. We think there's a lot of potential in that for records in general, but for this study as well. Carter, I'll turn it over to you for the public access piece. Yeah, as Alice was saying, there's two main agencies that have records here. It's the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, individual components within those agencies. There's no centralized location for researchers to access information. So the Department of Energy has an online resource called OpenNet, which was set up as part of their openness and transparency initiative back in the late 90s, but over the years, records and bibliographic citations have been added to the OpenNet database and includes all the citations from the Nuclear Testing Archive. The Department of Defense and all of its components have their own repositories and there's no centralized resource to access records within these repositories. All of these repositories may have responsive records. For example, the Naval History and Heritage Command reported 13,250 boxes may contain responsive records. Many of these records are classified from top secret down to confidential and include restricted data and formally restricted data. So public access is a big challenge. Thank you, Carter, and thanks to everyone for informing us and going through with the public of the report's findings. I'll just say, in conclusion, that as Paul Newell walked through the numbers that DOE and DOD estimate what the cost will be to do this declassification initiative, should the government decide to do it, it's between $100 million and $200 million and some of the estimates actually go above $200 million. This is truly, I think, a shocking number to everyone. And what I think is really a wake-up call in this is that this is a limited topic. But now think about what it would cost to declassify records or improve public transparency on, let's say, a past presidency or another historical event that is even more sprawling than just this nuclear testing. The costs would be probably exponentially higher. And this really should be a very, very strong wake-up call to Congress, but also those throughout the executive branch that we have to come up with a better understanding of the nuclear system. And we also have to quickly develop and deploy tools. We have to take advantage of all the AI advancements that this country has made to be able to improve public transparency in a more efficient and cost-effective way. So I hope you'll enjoy the report. And again, please feel free to submit your questions at PIDB at narrow.gov. Melissa, anything else you'd like to add? And no, just to agree with you on that point, I think we looked at this process and recognizing the importance of the question of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. It does still emphasize how important it is to have a system that enables access to records in general, which we obviously don't always see in this case. And I think Walter Pincus in particular highlighted some of the challenges that he's seen as a researcher. And those are really problematic if we wanna learn from our own history. So I really, I just wanna echo Ezra's point. I also wanna thank Walter Pincus for joining us today. Really fascinating review for us. And also again, the staff for helping us prepare the report. They really did a terrific job in compiling information for us and collecting information. So thank you again and appreciate everyone for joining us today. Okay, well, thanks, Melissa. That concludes this public meeting of the PIDB. And we look forward to seeing everyone in a couple of months. Thank you. That concludes our conference. Thank you for using Event Services. You may now disconnect.