Inquiry Details Lapses Leading to Loss of Key U.S. Scientific Papers

The Naval Research Laboratory boxed up a vast collection of its records last fall--some telling of the development of radar and sonar and the early days of the U.S. space program--and sent them to the National Archives for safekeeping. In a bureaucratic foul-up, archives officials destroyed them instead.

After a four-month investigation, Archivist John Carlin, the government’s chief record keeper, issued a 28-page report Friday on what went wrong and promised to reform his agency’s procedures.

Destroyed--”pulped beyond recognition” is the archives’ term for it--were 4,200 bound scientific notebooks and 1.5 million pages of correspondence and technical memos.

“The historical record of our nation’s scientific and technological heritage has suffered a serious and irreparable loss,” Rear Adm. Paul G. Gaffney II, chief of naval research, said in a letter to Carlin when the loss was discovered.

Among the documents destroyed, Gaffney said, were records kept by American pioneers in high-frequency radio and the development of radar, the use of those technologies against Japan and Germany in World War II, “pathbreaking” acoustic and oceanographic research, the early history of the American space program with V-2 and Viking rockets, and records of the first U.S. satellite program and rocket-based astronomical research.

An archives investigation blamed a breakdown in communication between the archives and the Navy.

From now on, Carlin said, an originating agency would be sent a notice by certified mail when records are scheduled for destruction. Earlier, the archives said it sent a notice, but the Navy said it did not receive it.

Carlin said he has sought funds from Congress to revise the way the archives works with other agencies to evaluate and decide the disposition of records.