Science and Technology

The Top Secret Testimony of CIA’s MKULTRA Chief, 50 Years Later

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Washington, D.C., October 30, 2025 – The CIA experienced “as many failures as successes” in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency’s former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. “[T]he results of everything told us that the money expended, the effort expended, the security risk involved, when you add everything up … it was probably not a high pay-off program.”

Disappearing Data, Part II: Distorted Science and Deregulation

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Washington, D.C., September 30, 2025 - Eight months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has fundamentally distorted the federal information landscape as it continues to rewrite and erase resources about climate change, environmental justice, and climate diplomacy.

EPA Refuses to Disclose Talking Points for Meeting with Fossil Fuel Advocates

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Washington, D.C., August 4, 2025 - Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin met with longtime fossil fuel advocates Alex Epstein, Ted Ellis, and Marc Marie in a March 2025 meeting to discuss “novel ideas to help Administrator Zeldin deliver on President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the National Security Archive.

Investigating the Climate Impacts of Nuclear War

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Washington, D.C., October 30, 2024 - A 1983 study from scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory said that a full-scale nuclear war between the superpowers would “dramatically affect the atmosphere’s temperature, dynamic, precipitation, and chemistry,” reduce “the light reaching the surface in the Northern Hemisphere by 90% or more,” and could cause “a cooling of continental land areas by up to 30°C.”

The “Carbon Dioxide Problem”: Nixon’s Inner Circle Debates the Climate Crisis

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Washington, D.C., April 26, 2024 - High-level officials inside the Nixon administration debated climate change and the impacts of sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, and fossil-fuel consumption as early as 1969, according to declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.

78th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings: Revisiting the Record

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A newly declassified memorandum from the weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirmed early reports of fatal radiation disease even as Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves characterized the accounts from Japan as “propaganda.”

What’s Up There, Where Is It, and What’s It Doing?
The U.S. Space Surveillance Network

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Washington, D.C., March 13, 2023 – The 65-year U.S. effort to detect and track objects in space, from the days before Sputnik 1 to today’s much more crowded orbital environment, is the subject of a fascinating new article and briefing book posted today by the National Security Archive.

SOLAR SUNRISE After 25 Years: Are We 25 Years Wiser?

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Washington, D.C., February 28, 2023 - In February 1998, 25 years ago this month, the United States suffered a series of cyber intrusions known as SOLAR SUNRISE that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre called “the most organized and systematic [cyber] attack the Pentagon has seen to date.” Coming rapidly on the heels of ELIGIBLE RECEIVER 1997 (ER97)[1], a multi-agency, no-notice exercise that raised more questions than answers about how the governm

The Moscow Signals Declassified:
Irradiating Richard Nixon

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Washington D.C. September 22, 2022 - The Soviets exposed then Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, to ionizing radiation during his famous visit to Moscow in July 1959, according to declassified Secret Service records posted today by the National Security Archive. Using detection devices known as Radiac Dosimeters, Nixon’s Secret Service detail measured significant levels of radiation in and around Nixon’s sleeping quarters at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador, during the first days of his trip.

The Moscow Signals Declassified
Microwave Diplomacy, 1967-1977

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Washington D.C., September 15, 2022 - On December 9, 1975, as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger prepared to travel to Moscow for arms control talks, he placed an urgent phone call to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington. “I want to talk to you about the signal,” Kissinger told Dobrynin.