Back in the day, secu­rity at the country’s nuclear labs were tested by Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. Not any more.
Today, the Energy Department has its own 40-​​person team, trained to “think like ter­ror­ists,” that con­duct mock attacks on nuclear facil­i­ties. National Defense mag­a­zine claims that these guys are the “cream-​​of-​​the-​​crop of DOEs secu­rity guards.“
Glenn Podonsky, direc­tor of the DOE office of inde­pen­dent over­sight per­for­mance assur­ance, crows, “Were as good as, if not bet­ter than, any mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion we have today.“
Maybe. But given the Energy Department’s lame record of defend­ing its bases, a team of grand­moth­ers with their hips recently replaced could prob­a­bly make off with a pile of uranium.

Security guards at the country’s lead­ing nuclear store­house have been cheat­ing dur­ing antiter­ror­ism drills — per­haps for as long as 20 years, accord­ing to a report released Monday by the Energy Department’s inspec­tor gen­eral.
And now, watch­dogs in Congress and beyond are ques­tion­ing whether the tons of enriched ura­nium at the Y-​​12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are really safe at all.
“First off, heads should roll,” said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-​​CT), who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform’s National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee. “I can assure you, my com­mit­tee will be fol­low­ing up in a very direct way.“
Y-​​12 is America’s main facil­ity for pro­cess­ing enriched ura­nium. It stores nearly all of the country’s reserve of about 5,000 “sec­on­daries,” the ther­monu­clear hearts of hydro­gen bombs.
When a team of Y-​​12 rent-​​a-​​cops racked up a per­fect score dur­ing an antiter­ror drill June 26, offi­cials there were shocked. How could the guards have per­formed so well, they won­dered, when a com­puter model had pre­dicted that the defend­ers would lose at least half of their con­fronta­tions?
The answer was sim­ple: The guards cheated. They had seen the com­puter mod­els of the strikes the day before they were launched, ren­der­ing the test “tainted and unre­li­able,” accord­ing to the report. And this wasn’t the first time it had hap­pened.
“From the mid-​​1980s to the present,” con­tract secu­rity guards had been given the plans to the attacks before­hand, noted Inspector General Gregory Friedman. The defend­ers knew ahead of time “the spe­cific build­ing and wall to be attacked by the test adver­sary,” and they knew “whether or not a diver­sion­ary tac­tic would be employed…“
If that wasn’t a big enough advan­tage, “man­age­ment would iden­tify the best pre­pared pro­tec­tive force per­son­nel and then sub­sti­tute them for lesser pre­pared per­son­nel,” accord­ing to the report. “Based on spe­cific attack infor­ma­tion, trucks or other obsta­cles would be staged at advan­ta­geous points to be used as bar­ri­cades and con­ceal­ment.“
The guards got slaugh­tered the few times they didn’t cheat, said Ronald Timm, who spent six years as an inde­pen­dent secu­rity ana­lyst at Y-​​12.
During one test, sim­u­lated ter­ror­ists took a mock, 44-​​pound ura­nium pack­age, and “got out­side of the fences in 38 sec­onds,” he said. “People were shocked out of their minds.“
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: When are the Democratic pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates going to go after the Bush admin­is­tra­tion on nuclear secu­rity? That’s what a for­mer senior Energy Department offi­cial wants to know. Recall all the [Republicans] on Capitol Hill beat­ing up Clinton and [then-​​Energy Secretary] Hazel [O’Leary] for their fail­ures,” the offi­cial e-​​mails Defense Tech. “What has changed?“
AND MORE: Rep. Shays notes that nuclear secu­rity test­ing has got­ten much harder since 9/​11. “The basic assump­tion used to be, ter­ror­ists had to get in and get out [of a place like Y-​​12]. And get­ting out was so dif­fi­cult,” he tells Defense Tech. “That’s changed since September the 11th. Now, we’ve got to assume that all they want to do is get in. And that’s much more dif­fi­cult to stop.“
AND MORE: At the Pantex nuclear facil­ity, “work­ers dis­man­tling an aging nuclear weapon secured bro­ken pieces of high explo­sive by tap­ing them together,” accord­ing to the AP.
“Homer Simpson has appar­ently relin­quished his post at Springfield nuclear plant,” declares the Register.
AND MORE: “Nice story, but ‘heads should roll’ — don’t make me laugh,” says one insider. “If Shays wants to get at the prob­lem, he ought to go down the hall and talk to the labs’ pro­tec­tors over on the Senate side.“
AND MORE: What’s left of Libya’s still­born nuclear pro­gram has just been shipped to Y-​​12. Oy.