Map of Los Alamos National Laboratory
Graphic Source: DOE

One of the subjects that I have talked about from time to time at About Facts Net is the poor security that exists in places that are supposed to be the most secure in the world. These places just happen to be the nuclear weapons laboratories that are supervised by our own government. If a person was in charge of security in a private agency and was told there was a leak at one of their facilities and that information might even have been smuggled out, what would they do? Well it seems if you were in the government and in charge, you might just move to have it hushed up and do not much of anything else. Most people in private industry would investigate and try and find the culprits and correct the situation, but then, of course, they are not political and have to worry about their jobs, because their jobs are based on results.

The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration was dismissed yesterday on 4 January 2007. By the time you read this, two weeks will either have passed or I will post it ahead of time. His name was Linton Brooks and he was in charge of the agency since May 2003. He was in charge of many different facilities, but one of the main ones was the infamous laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Why do I call it an infamous Laboratory? This is not because of what they are doing there, but more because of the security problems that have cropped up their over the years. The security at this lab has become a joke the world over. The worst part of this entire mess is that the Los Alamos lab handles some of the most secret and important projects in the world.

Sandia National Laboratory
Graphic Source: EPA

Here is a statement from the laboratory itself, " Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and global security concerns." Sounds pretty good doesn't it? It is a shame that security at the lab was so poor.

There was a meeting in 2004 of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee. The Chairman and it's ranking member called Brooks to account on "RECURRING SECURITY BREACHES AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY." Brooks had been personally urged to correct this problem which was referred as to kindly as security lapses. Ranking member Reyes stated,"Frankly, I have run out of patience on this issue. Our investment in the vital work being done at Los Alamos is considerable in terms of money and responsibility. Accountability, when our country's safety and security is at stake, must be priority one." What the subcommittee was talking about was the fact that the year before, security breaches were found at the lab and a year latter when they visited it, they were not sufficiently corrected.

Classified information has a way of disappearing from the lab. Two floppy disks of info disappeared from the lab, but no one wants to be a whistle blower because of what happens to them. Two security officers with law enforcement experience were hired to clean up the corruption at the lab. They uncovered fraud, security problems and over 200 stolen computers. The officers were dismissed. A settlement had to be reached with them and it cost the tax payers over a million dollars. Don't think that was the only time good was rewarded by a punishment. The assistant to a senior lab official caught him stealing and reported it to higher ups. They contacted his boss and told him what was going on. There is a story that the assistant's life was threatened, but that he continued to help the FBI on the case. When the case was over he was transferred. I have no way of verifying this, but the story goes that he is now in an empty office staring at the ceiling. Supposedly a memo went out about no finger pointing. It is said that there are more cases of this type that occurred at the lab, but I think you get the idea.

One of the security breaches in our nuclear laboratory is missing keys. You would think that a thing like a key would have to be checked in at the end of the day and then signed for in the morning. It was reported to CBS news in 2004 that keys were missing and that the government was sending lock and key experts to all the labs to assess the problem. The fact that over 200 of these keys were missing and that some of these keys gave access to the most secret parts of the lab is indeed troubling. The missing keys belonged to The Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was part of the Manhattan Project, Sandia National Laboratory, and The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Here is the worst part of the entire key thing. In some, if not all of the labs, the locks were never changed and in some places the keys allowed you to walk up to the last set of glass doors before the reactor. Are our national labs safe? What do you think?

Financial abuse has also been found at several national labs. In one case authorities found that lab employees were buying hunting equipment with lab funds. An unverifiable account stated that one lab employee used his lab card to buy a Ford Mustang. If that is true it has to be the height of gaul. As bad as this stuff is, and there is plenty more of it, I would like to look at the question of missing data.

These labs develop our weapons. That is one of their principal jobs. Needless to say that weapons development must be top secret, yet data has disappeared many times from the labs. What is the sense of spending millions or even billions of dollars to develop a weapon if that information is easily stolen? Wouldn't we be better off without that weapon?

In 2000 nuclear weapons secrets were found to have disappeared from the Los Alamos, New Mexico, National Laboratory. It disappeared from a vault and was stored on hard drives and disks in the most highly classified area in the lab. It contained both U.S. and Russian nuclear secrets. The way that the crime had been found was when an employee found the containers that were supposed to house the hard drives and the disks empty. If this was the most secure area in the lab, I would hate to see what is going on in the rest of the place. To be fair, the lab replied that it didn't know if the material was inadvertently destroyed, stolen or lost. That's great isn't it, nobody knows what is going on there? Want to hear more? Police during a drug raid in a trailer park found three USB memory sticks that had secret information from the lab on them. They had been found with a 20 year old drug user and his girl friend. Tell me this wasn't a crime and just misplaced data. In other missing data cases, the lab was know to have stated that a prior missing two disks never existed.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight said the lab has not done much to clean up its act. The problem is when you actually have those materials that are supposed to be protected inside the lab and you find them outside the lab in the hands of criminals — that should worry everybody," Brian said.

There have been many other events that have taken place at these labs and it is a wonder that it has taken so long before someone has decided that it is time for a new administrator. What has the president been think all this time? Again to be fair, the security problem existed before Mr. Brooks took over his position, but it seemed to have continued while he was in office and it took the powers that be from 2003 to now to do something about this. If this didn't get to be such a hot political problem would anything ever have been done about this?