Even 7-Eleven Has Cameras

If the FBI has found no evidence of spying in the case of the two missing Los Alamos National Laboratory hard drives, as Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Wednesday, then how to explain their mysterious disappearance and their equally enigmatic reappearance last week? A plausible answer is that a lab employee took them from their vault, misplaced or forgot about them, then returned them to the secure lab area after their absence was noted, causing a major security flap.

FBI investigators are said to be focusing on a few employees of the lab’s X Division, which designs nuclear weapons. If espionage can be ruled out, if the information on the hard drives about U.S. and other nuclear weapons systems wasn’t compromised, the national security implications of their disappearance are less serious than first feared. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be concerned about.

Only now are steps being taken to tighten the astonishingly slack security in the X Division. Employees can no longer casually remove material from the vault without logging in or out. No longer will scientists be allowed to keep highly secret material in their offices. Authorization to enter the vault must now be obtained in advance. And when the vault’s custodian steps away, the vault will be locked and the alarm will be set.

A mystery even greater than what happened to the missing hard drives is why these minimal procedures weren’t always in place, and why safeguards as commonplace as TV security cameras--found in virtually every convenience store--weren’t on 24 hours a day in the vault.

Scientists tend to have little patience with secrecy. They believe that creative work requires the free discussion of ideas and problems and free access to information. In most cases that’s true, but when it comes to nuclear weapons, other rules must apply and must be enforced.