At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, the French army possessed a potentially decisive secret weapon, a sort of machine gun in an age when state-of-the art infantry rifles still were single-shots. Yet such was the secrecy surrounding the weapon that almost nobody had been taught how to use it -- too few to stave off disastrous defeats.

The same thing happened in 1939, when Hitler's tanks invaded Poland, yet fewer than 100 of Poland's 2,000 new, secret anti-tank rifles were deployed in combat. History is peppered with similar examples.

When the Nevada Commission on Homeland Security received its long-awaited statewide vulnerability assessment in April 2006, Gov. Kenny Guinn declared the document secret. Parts of it were released, but Jim O'Brien, Clark County Emergency Management director and the person supposed to devise plans to manage the aftermath of any potential terrorist attack, still had not seen the document in September.

"That is secrecy run amok," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. "If the emergency planners don't need to know, who does? If secrecy is properly employed, it serves the public interest. If it is abused, it threatens the public interest, and that seems to be the case here."

O'Brien said, "We are responsible for leading the consequence-management activity. ... Having a handle on what these professionals assessed as critical infrastructure and vulnerabilities would be helpful ... for what cops call 'hardening the target.'"

The Homeland Security Commission released a summary version of the study, but O'Brien said, "What that did was provide us what we already knew. ... Under the national infrastructure protection plan, there are sectors of the economy to be concerned about, such as banking, casinos, transportation assets and large public assembly areas. ... I kind of intuitively know what some of those are, but we hired these people to get the complete picture."

That picture apparently is outlined in appendices to the report that he has not been allowed to see.

The commission paid $500,000 to UNLV's Institute for Security Studies to do the study, but O'Brien thinks the bottleneck already has cost far more money. "For FY06 homeland security funding, we selected a number of projects we wanted to do. And one question was, 'Describe what the potential homeland security risks of not funding this investment are.' It's hard to answer such questions unless you know what the risks are."

Clark County received only $19.3 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for fiscal 2006, about one-third of what it requested.

There's another kind of fiscal impact: A report released in July by Reps. Tom Davis and Henry A. Waxman, Democratic minority members of the House Committee on Government Reform, said that in the Department of Homeland Security, the number of contracts awarded "without full and open competition" increased from $655 million to $5.5 billion, an increase of 739 percent. Even in the wider world of the entire federal government, such limited-competition contracts increased by 36 percent.

The findings of the 9/11 Commission, investigating the conspiracy that enabled terrorists with improvised weapons to hijack airliners and fly them into public buildings, included two salient points:

• No evidence exists that inappropriate public access to information played any part.

• Inappropriate secrecy, limiting the number of U.S. government officials told about intercepted al-Qaida plans to strike inside the United States, may have helped the conspirators.

Yet the U.S. government and many local governments have reacted with increased secrecy, rather than doing the reassessment of existing secrecy measures that the findings would seem to suggest. All over the United States, information sources that were formerly open have been slammed shut.

Gary Bass, founder of RTK NET (the Right-to-Know Network), a free online computer service to provide community groups with access to government data, cited one dangerous example.

"Under the Clean Air Act, there was something called the Risk Management Plan that a chemical company -- any company or public entity that stored dangerous chemicals such as chlorine or ammonia -- had to file. Prior to 9/11, the law required online disclosure of a company's worst-case scenarios. Within a week, EPA decided to take down this information."

Bass continued, "We already had risk management plans on the RTK site, and when EPA took them down, we kept them up. The Washington Post took our data and particularly looked at a facility right across the Potomac, called Blue Plains Waste Treatment, which had a 90-ton train car of chlorine sitting on the tracks. The worst-case scenario was with a rupture, it could go over the White House and the Capitol.

"The logic of concealing that information was that it was a blueprint for terrorism. But the flip side of the argument is that disclosure, in fact, caused the chemicals to be removed to a less vulnerable area, and the company to replace them with a less dangerous chemical."

In other words, secrecy might have reduced the situation's vulnerability to terrorism, but disclosure eliminated it entirely, and the danger of accidental disaster as well.

Any moral in that story has not been taken to heart by others, however.

In 2005, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman pointed out that carloads full of hazardous chemicals still were being routed regularly through Las Vegas and sometimes parked on sidings near populated areas. That year, Goodman was one of 51 mayors who backed a letter to Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge calling for advance information about hazardous materials shipments through their cities. The letter was spurred by a spill of liquid chlorine in Granitesville, S.C., that killed nine people and injured more than 200.

But the request was futile, Goodman said recently.

"I tried to address it with officials from Washington, and it's like the door is closed," the mayor said. "We are not getting any information about transportation issues, and I think it is outrageous."

Goodman added that before major holidays and events that might make Las Vegas an unusually juicy target to terrorists, local emergency personnel always ask federal authorities whether there has been any credible word of an actual threat. "We are told there are none, and that's the extent of the information we get. The same answer every time."

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 authorized new restrictions on release of hitherto public information about transportation, as well as critical infrastructure subject to sabotage and information possessed by any government agency regarding the threat of terrorist activity or ability to resist or prevent the same.

However, independently of those legislative provisions, "new protective markings for unclassified information have been created, while numerous others have been updated, broadened or used with increasing frequency," said "Pseudosecrets: A Freedom of Information Audit of the U.S. Government's Policies on Sensitive Unclassified Information," published in March by the National Security Archive.

The study pointed out that the Homeland Security Act mandated information sharing and also directed the president to "identify and safeguard homeland security information that is sensitive but unclassified." President Bush delegated the latter to the secretary of homeland security, but no formal steps to do so have been announced, and it was not until December 2005 that Bush formally directed department heads to develop standard procedures for handling sensitive but unclassified information, including that relating to homeland security. A stated goal was "timely and accurate dissemination of terrorism information to state, local and tribal governments, law enforcement agencies, and private sector entities."

Under the Freedom Of Information Act, the study sought policies from 43 different federal agencies, many of which provided little relevant information. From the 28 that did provide substantive responses, it was learned that while 10 agencies limit the authority to designate information to be "protected" from public disclosure, almost as many, eight, permit any employee of the agency to do so.

Information controlled entirely by local authorities may flow more freely. Chuck Bolding, a security sergeant at Las Vegas Hilton, said, "There's a lot of effort to get appropriate information out to ordinary working people who might see something. For instance, Metro has given classes to the maids and porters at a number of hotels, and if a maid walked into a room and saw a map of Las Vegas on the wall, and maybe some computer equipment you wouldn't expect to be there, I think she'd say something. There's a 24-hour hot line where you can report suspicious activity. I think this is a well-directed effort."

But five years after 9/11, Las Vegas' front-line fighters in the war on terror still don't know where attacks can be expected.

Just seven months after its publication, the instruction manual for the French rapid-fire gun reached troops. But that was too late.