Blaming the 7 July disappearance of two classified computer disks on a few employees flouting rules, on 15 July Los Alamos National Laboratory Director G. Peter Nanos called for a complete stand-down, or work stoppage, at the lab. “Critical missions and essential functions,” relating mostly to the lab’s stewardship of the nation’s nuclear weapons, are the only exceptions. A couple of weeks later, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham broadened the stand-down for activities involving classified removable electronic media, or CREM, to all Department of Energy sites.
Then, in mid-August, reports circulated that the supposedly missing disks never existed. Citing an FBI investigation, the reports, which first surfaced on a New Mexico television station and which neither LANL nor the FBI would confirm at press time, said there was a mix-up in accounting for bar codes, not actual classified material.
LANL’s future is threatened, Nanos told employees in mid-July—before the existence of...
