Steven Aftergood

Steven Aftergood (born 1956 in Los Angeles) is a specialist in physics and a political activist. He is a critic of U.S. government secrecy, generally favoring more openness. He directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy and is the author of the Federation blog/newsletter Secrecy News.

Aftergood has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (1977) and has published research in solid-state physics. He joined the FAS staff in 1989.

He spent years advocating against an operating research nuclear reactor at UCLA with the Committee to Bridge the Gap. Public protests led to its shut-down.

In 1991, Aftergood exposed the highly classified Project Timberwind, an unacknowledged U.S. Department of Defense special access program to develop a nuclear thermal rocket.

In 1997 he was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency which led to the declassification and publication of the U.S. government's total intelligence budget ($26.6 billion in 1997) for the first time in fifty years.

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