Late in Latching the Gate

The nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, once among the most zealously guarded of government facilities, have suffered from lax security for nearly two decades, a new study has found. In a report to a House committee, the General Accounting Office says efforts to address security problems at the labs “languished for years without resolution.” The GAO, Congress’ investigatory arm, reports that since 1980 it has issued 32 warnings about the labs’ vulnerability to espionage and recommended nearly 50 measures for better security. Most, it indicates, were ignored.

The situation described by the GAO in many ways parallels the findings of a bipartisan congressional panel chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), though that report notably emphasizes alleged successful spying at the labs that allowed China to advance its own nuclear weapons program. Months after getting the Cox panel report, the Clinton administration has yet to declassify and release those parts of it that don’t compromise intelligence interests. The report no doubt is an embarrassment to the Energy Department, which took over management of the labs in the late 1970s. As the GAO review makes evident, embarrassment is in order.

What remains to be clarified is how the department, from its earliest days of managing the labs, could be not only so obtuse to the imperatives of security but so resistant to remedying the failures pointed out to it by the GAO and later by the FBI, which conducted counterintelligence for the labs in the early 1990s. The FBI gave up that effort in frustration over the Energy Department’s failure to improve its security procedures. Among the most serious unaddressed problems: ineffective controls over foreign visitors from “sensitive” countries. Only 2% of visitors from China, for example, were subjected to background checks.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says the department is now taking “very aggressive steps” to safeguard nuclear secrets. Unfortunately, it appears that the horse has long since escaped the barn and was last glimpsed galloping toward Beijing.