Believe me when I say that this type of treatment happens all the time in the UK, some really amazing stuff is done here and generally there is no recognition whatsoever or classified the moment they are churned out. I think it has a lot to do with our limited resources, so ingenuity has to shine through.
It has do with paranoia and a government and civil services that have managed very nicely for 200years by automatically keeping all successes and failures secret.
GCHQ invented public key encryption in the 70s years before RSA. But instead of publishing it and making money for British companies and giving British citizens a way to keep their money safe they kept it secret. Note, that keeping the invention secret doesn't improve the security of any data encrypted with it.
They were given permission to publish it in the late 80s - a decade after it was making lots of money for R,S and A. But the permission was pulled at the last minute because the publishing of Spycatcher was proving embarrassing for the government and the natural knee jerk reaction was to keep everything - however tangentially related - secret again.
