ChicTribune

Mock terrorists breached security at weapons plants

By Stephen J. Hedges and Jeff Zeleny Washington Bureau Published October 5, 2001

WASHINGTON -- America's 10 nuclear weapons research and production facilities are vulnerable to terrorist attack and have failed about half of recent security drills, a non-government watchdog group has found.

U.S. Army and Navy commando teams penetrated the plants and obtained nuclear material during exercises designed to test security, according to the Project on Government Oversight report, being released Friday.

In a drill in October 2000 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, "the mock terrorists gained control of sensitive nuclear material which, if detonated, would have endangered significant parts of New Mexico, Colorado and downwind areas," the report says.

In an earlier test at the same lab, an Army Special Forces team used a household garden cart to haul away enough weapons-grade uranium to build several nuclear weapons.

In another test at the Rocky Flats site near Denver, Navy SEALs cut a hole in a chain link fence as they escaped with enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs. They were discovered only as they left the facility.

Government security rules require the nuclear facilities to defend themselves against the theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or through sabotage.

A spokeswoman at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a branch of the Energy Department, declined Thursday to comment on the report.

The report is based on information provided by 12 whistle-blowers, according to Danielle Brian, the non-government watchdog group's director, as well as declassified Energy Department material that describes the security exercises.

The repeated security breaches are cause for serious concern, Brian said, because Energy Department employees were warned before each security exercise but still failed to stop would-be terrorists in more than half of the drills.

"These are tests where the security forces are necessarily dumbed-down so that they know the tests are coming," Brian said. "They are very restrictive tests [but] they're still losing half of the time.

"No one thought it really mattered, until two weeks ago," Brian added.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon have raised alarms about security concerns, from local community responses to chemical and biological weapons to the security at nuclear power plants.

Nine of the weapons facilities are within 100 miles of cities with more than 75,000 people. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is near the San Francisco metropolitan area, which has more than 7 million people. The Rocky Flats site is near Denver, home to 2.6 million people.

Eight of the 10 weapons plants contained a total of 33.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium. Experts say it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to craft a nuclear bomb.

The study has drawn the attention of the House Reform Committee, which has launched its own review of security measure at the nuclear weapons plants.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of a national security subcommittee in the House, declined to discuss the report. But he issued a statement indicating he was "deeply troubled" that the nuclear facilities failed security tests even though they had been alerted in advance.

"We want to know what DOE is doing to resolve this deficiency, both in the short term and in the long term," Shays' statement said.

Security tests at the nuclear weapons facilities are simulated on computers and run as drills between an invading terrorist force and the plant's security team. Participants strap on devices similar to those from a laser tag game.

When someone is "killed" by an opposing force, they must lie down and end their participation in the exercise.

-- Anonymous, October 05, 2001