Lapse Halts Work at Los Alamos
SAN FRANCISCO — University of California officials announced Thursday that they had ordered an immediate and indefinite halt to all classified work at Los Alamos National Laboratory after the discovery last week that two classified computer disks had gone missing at the nuclear weapons design lab run by the university.
Making the announcement at a meeting of UC's governing Board of Regents, Los Alamos director Peter Nanos described classified research as the lifeblood of the New Mexico facility but said the work could not go forward until an investigation assessed the risks from this and other recent security lapses.
Especially troubling, Nanos said, was his discovery that a number of scientists at the lab appeared to believe that they did not have to follow the lab's rules for handling classified material.
"It's a problem of culture," said Nanos, who referred to such employees several times as "cowboys." "We have to turn that around."
Last week's incident was the third involving misplaced or missing computer disks in eight months, but Los Alamos and UC officials have made clear that they consider it by far the most serious. While saying they cannot disclose the nature of the material on the disks, except that it was being used for current research in the weapons physics section, they have described the loss as extremely grave and "intolerable," given the lab's key role in the nation's security.
The latest problem could also further jeopardize any effort by the university to hang onto its historic role in managing Los Alamos and two other national laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Last year, allegations of lax security and management failures at Los Alamos prompted Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to announce that he would require UC, for the first time, to compete for the contract to run Los Alamos. Congress later ordered that other national lab contracts, including those for two more UC-run facilities, also be put up for bid.
UC officials say they have yet to decide whether to compete for the contracts. A recent poll of UC's faculty showed strong support for trying to keep the labs. A faculty debate on the matter had been scheduled for Thursday at the regents meeting but was postponed.
Abraham said in a statement Thursday that he was ordering two top department officials, Deputy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow and Linton Brooks, who heads a departmental agency that oversees the labs, to lead the inquiry into the recent security lapses. He also expressed frustration that the lab had yet to correct what he described as "systemic flaws."
