The Enemy Within

Snoozing guards at Los Alamos, missing vials of plutonium oxide... Yes, the headlines in late June were announcing "security lapses" again at national labs and nuclear weapons plants. It seems that an Al Qaeda terrorist could roll up to the gates of the Sandia National Laboratories, haul out an RPG and catch America napping yet again. Sounding all brisk and efficient, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham acknowledged a recent critical report from the General Accounting Office and has taken standard evasive action, in the form of that whiskered veteran of bureaucratic ass-covering, the "security review." At Sandia, Dave Nokes, vice president for national security, was picked as the sacrificial goat and forced to resign.

The mess at Los Alamos has had its humorous side. Lillian Anaya, a Los Alamos equipment buyer, thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But the number she called had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, so she wound up buying a Mustang instead--with government money. Or so say Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who recently cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing (though I still don't quite understand why she got the Mustang).

Let's get back to the larger picture and the obvious question: Whom do they think they're kidding? To talk about terrorist opportunity offered by slack security just at Los Alamos and Livermore is like saying that hijackers would try to board planes only at Logan and Atlanta. There's scarcely a state in the union that hasn't got tanks or barrels of nuclear waste, or decommissioned reactors saturated with radioactive materials. Most Interstates carry trucks hauling mobile Chernobyls around the country.

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