Also the mental models of proliferation are warped by secrecy. For instance, Iraqis got caught building Calutrons when the official line was to watch out for plutonium reprocessing and centrifuges... Despite the fact that the enriched uranium used for the first nuclear weapon used in war was produced with a Calutron!
Anyone responsible who thinks about this stuff, even if they don't have a security clearance, will look into the question of what the ethics are and what the legal consequences of secrecy laws are if you talk about certain things you think about. I had dinner with a nuclear scientist at a conference, for instance, who told me that he hadn't told anyone else about his concern that Np237 was the material that terrorists would most want to steal from a commercial reprocessing facility (if they knew what we knew) and I told him it was no problem because people from Los Alamos had published a paper with specifics on that a few years earlier.
Anyone responsible who thinks about this stuff, even if they don't have a security clearance, will look into the question of what the ethics are and what the legal consequences of secrecy laws are if you talk about certain things you think about. I had dinner with a nuclear scientist at a conference, for instance, who told me that he hadn't told anyone else about his concern that Np237 was the material that terrorists would most want to steal from a commercial reprocessing facility (if they knew what we knew) and I told him it was no problem because people from Los Alamos had published a paper with specifics on that a few years earlier.
I will leave it at that.