[Congressional Bills 105th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[S. 1232 Introduced in Senate (IS)]







105th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                S. 1232

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


_______________________________________________________________________


                   IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

                           September 26, 1997

 Mr. Moynihan introduced the following bill; which was read twice and 
       referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 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.

    (1) Whereas Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg is a truly great American who has 
made indispensable contributions in the development of nuclear energy.
    (2) Whereas Dr. Seaborg is the co-discoverer of plutonium and eight 
other elements and as a result of these discoveries was awarded the 
1951 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
    (3) Whereas while serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy 
Commission (AEC), Dr. Seaborg maintained a journal consisting of a 
diary, correspondence, announcements, minutes of meetings, and other 
documents of historical value.
    (4) Whereas in preparing the journal, Dr. Seaborg took care to 
include only information which was not classified and could be made 
public.
    (5) Whereas before leaving the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. 
Seaborg submitted the journal to the AEC's Division of Classification 
for review.
    (6) Whereas Dr. Seaborg's journal was cleared by the Division of 
Classification, virtually without deletion.
    (7) Whereas 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 AEC.
    (8) Whereas 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 his 
journal which the prepared while serving as Chairman of he AEC. The 
journal shall be returned in the original, unredacted form in which it 
was lent to the Department of Energy in 1983.
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