Academic literature on the construction of dangerous things I'm sitting at some boring ethics lecture and was surprised that few academics worked with formally classified or otherwise dangerous information. 

I'm curious how this knowledge is published, stored, and disseminated in practice.

A few ideas come to mind:


Research on the blast radius of munitions
Imaging and communication systems for military hardware
Culture of pathogens such as Anthrax


What happens if your research was commissioned by the DoD?
For the US Department of Defense there is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). It is like PubMed Central but for DoD documents. Some of the content has been cleared for public release and is open to the public. Much of the content, however, has not been cleared for public release and access is controlled by a DoD employees common access card (CAC) and the network that DTIC is being accessed from. Not cleared for public release is not the same as classified/secret/top secret. Access to classified material is again CAC controlled and requires a dedicated computer on a protected network. I think, but am not sure, that DTIC is the gateway to much of the classified literature within the classified network.