Local police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man’s records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said.
Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.
The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file.

While the FBI won’t comment, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has some insights.

According to unconfirmed sources, the information was classified as Secret Restricted Data which means it would involve nuclear weapons data and may have concerned detection of underground nuclear weapons testing. Also unconfirmed, the person in possession of the information worked either in Technical Area 55 where all of the Labs plutonium is stored or in the X Division which handles nuclear weapons design data for a maintenance subcontractor of the Lab.

POGO also notes six previous security incidents at LANL since 9/11. No wonder that many of the DHS exercises feature dirty bomb scenarios — they must be worried about domestic terrorists getting too much National Lab material…
– Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist
UPDATED 10:20 AM: It should be noted that this isn’t Los Alamos’ first drug-related incident. Back in 2004, local authorities evicted a man who had lived for years in a cave on lab property. from a cave on Los Alamos National Laboratory land where they say he apparently lived for years with the comforts of home a wood-burning stove, solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity and a satellite radio. Ten marijuana plants were found outside the cave, and the fellow inside was charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.
UPDATED 4:15 PM: Whatever you do, be sure to check in regularly at the POGO blog, where they’ve got all kinds of fun rumors floating in. Police docs, too.
UPDATED 10–26: J. here — let me clarify that I believe the combination of classified LANL documents and potential theft of radioactive isotopes from domestic sources (universities, medical labs) is what ought to get people excited about this incident. Obviously we don’t know what’s in the documents that makes them classified, and I am not suggesting that LANL might be the source of loose plutonium material. But unless LANL tightens up their security procedures and trains/screens its employees and contract support better, its leadership ought to be on notice.

New pits have been cast and have undergone a gauntlet of tests and computer modeling, but, of course, not underground nuclear tests. Some scientists at the labs, and in the greater nuclear policy community, are ready to certify the pits as functionally equivalent to the Rocky Flats pits in every way. One of these scientists is Raymond Jeanloz, a professor of planetary science at UC Berkeley who does not work at Los Alamos, but is one of the countrys foremost scientific advisors on nuclear issues, and has served as lead author on several JASON studies on stockpile stewardship.
But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins that is, only as part of RRW.
Ironically, one of these scientists is Dr. Hecker the grandfather of the TA-55 pits. He stands by his decision to switch manufacturing techniques, and he insists that the new pits are of excellent quality, but he denies that the labs have been able to test the pits as exhaustively as Dr. Jeanloz claims.
To make matters worse, Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz disagree just as vehemently on the subject of plutonium aging. Dr. Hecker claims that not enough is known about the different processes which take place as plutonium metal ages to predict safely when aging will begin to affect the dynamics of the pit implosion and therefore the yield of the warhead primary. He therefore claims that the only responsible thing to do is to replace the current pits after a conservative 50-year shelf-life and to keep replacing the pits every half-century. This schedule would keep the nuclear labs perpetually busy building, certifying and installing new pits.
Dr. Jeanloz doesnt buy Dr. Heckers claim that plutonium aging is poorly understood. He points out that the nuclear labs have learned so much about plutonium aging just in the last six years that theyre planning on wrapping up a major review of pit lifetimes this coming fall (see page 58 of this report).
Dr. Jeanloz is convinced that the review will give estimates of pit lifetimes “substantially” longer than 60 years. If he’s right (and he may not be alone), then there’s no need to keep up a high rate of pit production to say nothing of RRW. Of course, whether the results of that review will be published if the NNSA doesnt like what it sees is anyone’s guess.…
Taken as a whole, the dispute between Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz over pit aging and remanufacture offers a useful behind-the-scenes view of the sorts of arguments which are shaping the technical debate over RRW. Of course, plutonium aging is far from being the only concern behind the drive for RRW. Other parts of the nuclear explosives package, such as the high explosives and the secondary, also raise serious technical concerns. And the political and institutional forces driving RRW, which in some cases have little to do with technical issues, are a whole other subject.
But plutonium science has been, historically, a relatively open field, with much of the progress in the field reported regularly in the open literature. The plutonium aging issue therefore allows us a rare glimpse at the type of scientific and technical debates whose outcomes will determine the future of the nation’s nuclear weapons infrastructure and stockpile.
In my fourth and final post on RRW, I’ll discuss where RRW stands today, and examine briefly some of the political issues raised by the program.
– Haninah Levine

While some members of the stockpile policy community argue that something like change-control discipline can be applied to nuclear components, too, others believe that if any modification is going to be made to the nuclear explosives package, a broader set of changes has to be made to the warhead design try to offset any possible drop in the performance of those modified components.
In brief, the changes being contemplated by those in the latter camp would increase the performance margins of warhead designs. The performance margin is the difference between the energy which the primary stage is expected to produce and the minimum energy needed to set off the secondary stage essentially, the warhead’s margin of error.
Since increasing the performance margin would require modifications to warhead designs that go well beyond what change-control discipline would allow, it would require an entirely new philosophy of stockpile stewardship. This philosophy is to be put into practice through a program known as Reliable Replacement Warhead.
RRW was introduced into the fiscal year 2005 Department of Energy budget by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water Subcommittee. Hobson, a noted budget hawk, believed that the Bush Administrations latest nuclear weapons program, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) or “nuclear bunker buster” would be both costly and unnecessary, not to mention harmful to the nations non-proliferation posture. His committee therefore cut all funds for RNEP, and allocated the funds instead to a “program to improve the reliability [and] longevity… of existing weapons and their components” and RRW was born.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that “sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear,” and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that “this is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons.“
Even today, though, Brooks continues to advertise RRW as an “enabler” for the transition to a “responsive infrastructure” which will one day “provide capabilities, if required, to produce weapons with different or modified military capabilities”. And the official DOD website on “Stockpile Transformation” (the generic name for RRW and related plans) boasts of a goal of “develop[ing] warheads for next-generation delivery systems” seemingly a direct contradiction of Hobsons injunction.
This ongoing back-and-forth about RRWs purpose inspired the Congressional Research Services comment, quoted in my earlier post, that “many find RRW to be confusing.“
In the third post, I will discuss the changes which are being made to the warheads’ nuclear components, and examine the debate over whether or not those changes require a wider set of modifications to the warhead designs and therefore RRW.
– Haninah Levine

During the Cold War, high turnover was the key to maintaining confidence in the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. New weapons were constantly being designed, built, tested and added to the stockpile, allowing older weapons to be retired, or relegated to reserve status; warheads rarely accumulated more than a couple of decades of shelf life, at most.
Once a production run of warheads had made it into the stockpile, odds were slim that any of the warheads in the run would be tested again. The exception to this rule were the relatively small number of so-called “stockpile confidence tests” which took place during the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and the primary stages which were occasionally taken from stockpile warheads for use in tests of new weapons concepts.
While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as stockpile surveillance, was intended to catch production defects and aging-related deterioration to any of the warhead’s 3000 components. Most of these components are located outside of the warhead’s nuclear subsystem, so their full range of functions could be tested without a nuclear test.
The knowledge base developed over forty years of stockpile surveillance (beginning with the introduction of sealed-pit designs in the late 1950s) laid the foundations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), which was officially born in 1994.
Three events which took place at the end of the Cold War led to the creation of SSP. In 1989, the Rocky Flats site in Colorado, where all the plutonium “pits,” or triggers, in the stockpile had been produced, was shut down after years of egregious health and safety violations. In 1992, shortly before its dissolution, the USSR declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. In response, Congress passed a similar testing moratorium, and the President George H. W. Bush announced an indefinite moratorium on the introduction of new weapon designs into the stockpile. The era of high stockpile turnover was over, and the Stockpile Stewardship Program was born.
The Stockpile Stewardship Program was organized by Congress from the Department of Energy’s existing stewardship activities in the 1994 Defense Authorization Act. The program was part of a new policy aimed at keeping the nation’s bomb-making skills and facilities in suspended animation in case a new nuclear arms race were to break out.
In keeping with this policy, resources which were cut from bomb-making and nuclear testing activities were channeled to the three activities necessary for stockpile stewardship: improving the nuclear complex’s understanding of the science of warhead performance and aging (known as “stockpile science”), keeping an eye out for signs of deterioration as warheads age (“stockpile surveillance”) and repairing problems which may arise (“warhead life extension”).
You can find more details about these three activities in the paper I mentioned earlier (including some worrying reports about the problems SSP has had coordinating the different activities).
In the next post, Ill be focusing on warhead life extension, and looking at the debates over how to replace old warhead components as an example of the technical controversies behind the scenes of the RRW debate.
– Haninah Levine