SOMETHING is clearly wrong at the United States’ top-secret National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Work in the sprawling desert facility where the technology that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki was first perfected and tested was suspended last week after top secret files were found to be missing. Four years ago when forest fires raged around the facility, it was also reported that computer hard drives containing highly sensitive information, apparently including procedures for the disarming of nuclear warheads, had been stolen. It was later claimed that the hard drives had turned up but some analysts wondered if this were not a feeble damage-limitation exercise. In addition, advanced nuclear material has disappeared, members of staff have frequently been reprimanded for lax security and the director himself was fired last year suspected of having stolen computers and other equipment.
These are simply not the sort of debacles that should be happening at such a crucially important installation. If, despite repeated lessons, Los Alamos and its sister nuclear weapons institutions at Sandia and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California really are not secure, then it is little short of a scandal.
The United States is busy seeking to limit the spread of nuclear weaponry to everyone else but the Israelis. It has invaded Iraq allegedly to stop its WMD including nuclear weapons program. It has persuaded Libya to abandon its nuclear plans, is hectoring Iran because it thinks it is still working to acquire an atomic arsenal and has adopted a sometimes aggressive approach to North Korea which certainly already is a nuclear power. To Washington’s mind Russia’s ageing, diverse and allegedly poorly guarded nuclear-weapons stockpile represents a considerable risk of nuclear material or actual warheads falling into the hands of terrorists. Thus America has closely involved itself in the decommissioning of obsolete Soviet-era weaponry.
At the heart of Washington thinking on nuclear weapons is the basic contradiction that is does not want more countries to acquire their own devastating weapons systems but has absolutely no intention of giving up its own extremely powerful nuclear armory. Why not? Because Americans are the good guys whose massive armament enables it to be the global good guy. Along the way, US muscle wins it lucrative contracts and great influence but Americans think this is only their due, as the good guys.
The limitations of this naive world view have been laid bare in Iraq but few of the voters to whom George W. Bush will be appealing come November yet seem to understand this. Maybe it will be easier for them to grasp the extreme seriousness of the loss of nuclear secrets from under their very noses. It could well be that the damage inflicted by these events is significantly greater than that caused by Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan. What the losses of Los Alamos secrets do make perfectly clear is that the Americans need to put their own nuclear house in order if their attempts to sort out everyone else’s are to carry any weight.
