[Congressional Bills 105th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 2809 Introduced in House (IH)]







105th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                H. R. 2809

  To provide for the declassification of the journal kept by Glenn T. 
   Seaborg while serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                            November 4, 1997

  Mr. Stupak introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
                         Committee on Commerce

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
  To provide for the declassification of the journal kept by Glenn T. 
   Seaborg while serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. FINDINGS.

    The Congress finds the following:
            (1) Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg is a truly great American who has 
        made indispensable contributions in the development of nuclear 
        energy.
            (2) Dr. Seaborg is the co-discoverer of plutonium and eight 
        other elements, and, as a result of his discoveries on the 
        chemistry of these elements, he was awarded the 1951 Nobel 
        Prize for chemistry.
            (3) While serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy 
        Commission, Dr. Seaborg maintained a journal consisting of a 
        diary, correspondence, announcements, minutes of meetings, and 
        other documents of historical value.
            (4) In preparing the journal, Dr. Seaborg took care to 
        include only information which was not classified and could be 
        made public.
            (5) Before leaving the Commission, Dr. Seaborg submitted 
        the journal to the Commission's Division of Classification for 
        review.
            (6) Dr. Seaborg's journal was cleared by the Division of 
        Classification, virtually without deletion.
            (7) Twelve years later, in 1983, the chief historian at the 
        Department of Energy asked to borrow a copy of Dr. Seaborg's 
        journal in order to write a history of the Commission.
            (8) When the journal was returned to Dr. Seaborg three 
        years later, passage after passage was redacted, including 
        explicitly public information, such as the published code names 
        of nuclear weapons tests, and purely personal material, such as 
        his description of accompanying his children on a ``trick or 
        treat'' outing one Halloween evening.

SEC. 2. DECLASSIFICATION OF SEABORG JOURNAL.

    The Secretary of Energy shall return to Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg the 
journal that Dr. Seaborg prepared while serving as Chairman of the 
Atomic Energy Commission, in the original, unredacted form in which it 
was submitted for review to the Commission's Division of 
Classification.
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