The United States has accidentally published a top-secret, highly-classified, I’d-show-you-but -then-I’d-have-to-kill-you list of nuclear installations on the Internets.

OK, it’s not quite that bad. What they’ve gone and done is published a “highly confidential” disclosure document that was meant for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This document is part of the US obligation under the IAEA “additional protocol”—a set of rules that requires America to provide the agency with a list of the location and type of civilian nuclear facilities currently on its territory. You can find the whole document on Secrecy News, the excellent blog of the Federation of American Scientists website.

The key word there is civilian. This list doesn’t disclose anything about the facilities in which the US handles or dismantles its nuclear weapons. But it does have the addresses, details and sometimes schematics, of every other nuclear facility in the country (click the image for an example). Not exactly the sort of thing the government may have wanted to go public with in the post-9/11 world. The government is particularly sweating the publication of detailed information about the Y-12 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. “That’s of great concern,” energy secretary Stephen Chu told a congressional committee.

Of course there’s a silver lining, the document does show that the US is taking seriously its obligations to the IAEA.

UPDATE: Secrecy News has taken down the file, but nothing dies on the Internet. You can find it on WikiLeaks.

Image: Super-secret US archives/GPO