Mail an article...

Report: Nuclear Labs Vulnerable to Attack

Security at the nation's nuclear weapons labs is so lax that the facilities have repeatedly failed drills in which mock terrorists captured radioactive material and escaped, according to an article in Vanity Fair magazine. "Some of the facilities would fail year after year," said Rich Levernier, who spent six years running war games for the U.S. government. "In more than 50 percent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn't fire a shot, because we didn't encounter any guards." These failures occurred despite security forces at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and other nuclear facilities knowing the dates of the drills months in advance, according to the story in next month's Vanity Fair.
This is not good.

Why do they still have jobs?

Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees nuclear-weapons security, said Monday that the department has increased security funding by more than 50 percent to protect against terrorist attacks. "Allegations of a 50 percent failure rate in security tests are simply untrue," Franklin said. The report also says Levernier, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Department of Energy, was stripped of his security clearance in 2001 after raising security concerns. Levernier has filed a whistleblower lawsuit arguing that he was illegally removed from his duties. Franklin denied that allegation. "We do not punish federal employees who are doing their jobs by pointing out potential weaknesses in safety and security," he said.
Ah, now I see. Grain of salt time.
Posted by: Steve White 2003-10-07

http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19545