DATE: Thursday, November 20, 1997           TAG: 9711200447

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   44 lines

ARCHIVES, NAVY POINT FINGERS AFTER DOCUMENTS ARE DESTROYED

Naval Research Laboratory records that ``chronicle some of the most significant technical achievements in the 20th century'' were inadvertently destroyed by the National Archives.

They were ``pulped beyond recognition,'' the archives said Wednesday. The archives and the Navy blamed each other.

Fed into the pulper sometime last summer were 4,200 scientific notebooks and 600 boxes 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, wrote to National Archivist John Carlin, protesting the destruction of the records.

Among the lost records, Gaffney said, were correspondence by American pioneers in high frequency radio, works by the inventors of radar ``and the war records of the application of these technologies in the campaigns against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.''

Also lost were records of ``path-breaking acoustic and oceanographic research'' and materials tracing the early history of the American space program with V-2 and Viking rockets, records of Vanguard, the first U.S. satellite program, ``and much more,'' Gaffney said.

The papers, dating from the 1930s through the 1980s, were destroyed at the archives' facilities in Suitland, Md., and the remaining pulp was sent out for recycling, the agency said.

The archives said that ``in accordance with established procedure'' it had sent the Office of Naval Research notice that the records would be routinely destroyed 90 days later unless it heard otherwise.

``Though the Navy responded to other notices that came with this one, it raised no objection to carrying out the scheduled disposal of the laboratory material,'' the archives said.

Dick Thompson, a Navy lab spokesman, said the laboratory did not receive the notice and did not know of the records' destruction until last July.

Carlin said he ordered an immediate investigation and put his deputy, Lewis Bellardo, a veteran archivist, in charge. Gaffney asked for more - an independent advisory board to evaluate the archives' ``disposal policies and processes.''

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