Lapse Halts Work at Los Alamos

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.”

The investigation of the missing disks “indicates widespread disregard of security procedures by laboratory employees,” Abraham said. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”

Nanos, the lab director, also disclosed a recent incident in which two “objects” -- a watchdog group has described them as computer hard drives -- were not properly signed out by the researchers using them and were missing for hours. He said this incident, along with the missing disks, had prompted his recent actions.

He said Los Alamos officials would conduct a wall-to-wall inventory of all “classified removable electronic media,” the lab’s term for CDs and floppy disks. The lab will also move all such disks into secure centralized libraries as soon as possible.

Officials declined to say how long the probe and shutdown would last but indicated that the lab’s classified work could resume section by section as the investigation proceeded through various components of Los Alamos.

UC President Robert C. Dynes has ordered Nanos to report to him on the status of the investigation and the lab’s efforts to improve its handling of classified computer disks.

Dynes and many regents expressed chagrin Thursday at the lab’s continuing problems.

“Part of me wants to say get rid of the ... lab, fire everybody and start over because we don’t need the grief,” Regent Ward Connerly said. “But I also want to do what’s right for the country.” He said he did not believe that rival institutions, given the complexity of the lab’s research and the sensitivity of its mission, were likely to do a better job.

Other regents appeared to bridle at a suggestion by Nanos and his boss, S. Robert Foley, UC vice president for lab administration, that such incidents were likely to occur again, at least until the lab eliminated its reliance on computer disks for classified weapons research.

The process of switching to disk-less computers at the lab is expected to take up to two years, the officials said.

“I am not prepared to accept that there will be more incidents of this nature at that laboratory,” Regent Judith Hopkinson said. “There’s a major failure here.”

Some critics of UC’s management said the steps announced Thursday were not enough and called for the contract’s immediate termination.

“At this point, the University of California has lost any credible claim of being a competent or trustworthy steward of our nation’s nuclear materials and secrets. Secretary Abraham should terminate their contract to manage Los Alamos immediately, before they further put our national security at greater risk,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of POGO, a Washington-based watchdog group.