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Uh, well, no Mr. President, you see, it isn’t exactly like a Sit-N-Spin …

Frank Munger has great stuff on his blog again.

I missed this but, in September 2005, Y-12 General Manager Dennis Ruddy told reporters that the United States is actually operating centrifuges from Libya in order to gain insight into other countries nuclear weapons programs. Ruddy’s comment appeared in a story by Munger in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, as well an AP stories (full text of the AP story in the comments).

Munger put the relevant section about operating Libyan centrifuges on his blog. Here is the full quote from his September 26, 2005 story (“Libyan nuclear equipment still at Y-12”):

In an interview last week, Y-12 general manager Dennis Ruddy initially declined to talk about the Libyan equipment.

He later acknowledged that government experts are still visiting Oak Ridge to scrutinize the centrifuge components. “That’s a cooperative thing between us and the lab (ORNL),” he said.

Ruddy added, “There’s a lot of interest in the things that we brought back from Libya because of lot of them, looking at them, measuring the tolerances, setting them up and operating them, to a certain extent tells us how close people are to be able to get a system that can work all the way to bomb-grade material.”

I guess we should have assumed that. Still, kind of makes you take a second look at the most recent Iran NIE — especially that INR reference to “foreseeable technical and programmatic problems” — huh?

Ruddy’s comment, Munger suspects, resulted in a decision by Y-12 contractor BWXT a few weeks later to pull Ruddy’s security clearances and relieve him of his post as general manager (“Ruddy relieved of Y-12 duties,” October 12, 2005).

Bolstering Munger’s suspicion is the timing of Ruddy’s dismissal and the fact that, whenever Munger asks ORNL employees about Libya, folks clam up. “Every time I ask a question with that word in it,” Munger writes about Libya, “Oak Ridge folks act like I’ve asked them for the PIN to their bank cards.”

Yesterday, the Project on Government Oversight “confirm[ed] another breach involving unauthorized release of classified data via email that occurred last week. The Lab has officially designated the incident an Impact Measurement Index-1 (IMI-1), the highest threat level …”

The Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck explains the incident as yawner, basically a common mistake:

[Los Alamos National Laboratory] spokesman Kevin Roark confirmed this afternoon that a lab employee emailed a classified document within the lab on the lab’s “yellow” network. It’s an internal network, but because it is connected to the outside world via the Internet, you’re not supposed to use it for classified stuff.

POGO’s Pete Stockton told me this afternoon that in addition to the improper use of the yellow network, the classified document in question was emailed to a lab employee who does not have a security clearance, which would also be a problem.

Andy Lenderman in The New Mexican reviews the archives to identify “22 Category 1 incidents at Los Alamos from 2002 through 2004 [and] 35 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the same time frame.”

Some folks are suggesting that we should go easy on Roy Lee Oakley—the inept contract worker attempted to sell sections of a gaseous diffusion barriers to an FBI agent posing as a French embassy employee—on the grounds that gaseous diffusion is “obsolete and [has been] replaced by cheaper and more efficient methods of uranium enrichment.”

Obsolescence is irrelevant from a proliferation stand-point. As one might infer from Iraq’s pre-1991 EMIS program, “obsolete” technologies are still perfectly adequate to make nuclear weapons. Peter Zimmerman nailed this in one of my favorite articles, Proliferation: Bronze Medal Technology is Enough:

To acquire a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery missiles, a country does not need to take home the gold medal in the military-technology Olympics. It can strive merely for the bronze medal and obtain an arsenal that can deter its neighbors with the threat of nuclear destruction. Indeed, for a state seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, success with older, tried and proven technologies—whose names can be found in college textbooks, and which are components of commercial products—is preferable to failure in developing the most modern weapons used by the more advanced states. Thus, Iraq’s rediscovery of the electromagnetic isotope separation system (EMIS, or calutrons) as an alternate means of enriching uranium (rather than relying on imported technologies that might have been embargoed) set a precedent that others are likely to follow. The bronze medal earns a developing country a place on the winners’ podium; failure in the pursuit of a high technology does not. (Orbis 38:1, Winter 1994)

In addition to EMIS, Iraq before 1991 also pursued a gaseous diffusion program just as China did to produce fissile material for early Chinese nuclear weapons. GD might not be the preferred route but than again, you can’t always get what you want.

Hell, once you’ve chosen enrichment over plutonium separation, you’re already making big compromises.

Of course, an interesting question is what information a would-be nuclear state would acquire from examining a sample of the classified material.

Given that the composition of the barrier material is the major technological challenge, my guess (and it is a guess) is that the harm might be significant—measured in terms of saving months or more of research—even if the scientists used the barrier for nothing more than confirmation that another method of enrichment (such as EMIS or centrifuges) would be a better investment.

Update: Here is the indictment.

Gee, first we had the Los Alamos Meth Lab case, then the Sandia Stalker, and now Oak Ridge has A. Q. Oakley.

NNSA should have its own episode of Cops.

Roy Lynn Oakley, a Bechtel Jacobs contract employee at Oak Ridge, attempted to sell sections of a gaseous diffusion barrier—not uranium as some mistakenly report, but the technology to enrich it—to an FBI agent posing as a French espion. I haven’t seen the indictment yet, but DOJ put out a statement:

Specifically, Count 1 of the Indictment charges that on January 26, 2007, Roy Lynn Oakley, having possession of, access to, and having been entrusted with sections of “barriers” and associated hardware used for uranium enrichment through the process of gaseous diffusion which constituted appliances within the meaning of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and which involved and incorporated Restricted Data within the meaning of Title 42, United States Code, Section 2014(y), and the said, Roy Lynn Oakley, having reason to believe that such data would be utilized to injure the United States and secure an advantage to a foreign nation, did communicate, transmit, and disclose such data to another person in violation of the Atomic Energy Act, specifically Title 42 United States Code, Section 2274(b).

The Knoxville News-Sentinel, which published the excellent courtroom drawing by R. Daniel Proctor (above), has the best coverage so far. If you read one story, read Frank Munger and Jamie Satterfield’s trash or treason story in the News-Sentinel.

Basically, Oakley—far from being A Q Khan—took a couple of broken sections home, then tried to sell them rather ineptly.

Oakley’s lawyer, the feisty Herb Moncier, is calling the diffusion barriers “trash.” “Moncier said Oakley’s job was to break up metal rods so they could be thrown away,” according to AP’s Duncan Mansfield. “Moncier did not know what the rods were made of, but said they were not uranium or dangerous.”

Tubes, Not Rods

Did not know what they were made of. Yeah. Hey Herb, maybe you should figure that out before trial. I humbly suggest grabbing a copy of the classic Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation by Allan S. Krass, Peter Boskma, Boelie Elzen and Wim A. Smit.

Krass et al provide a very clear explanation of sintered nickel powder tubes—which sound a lot like Moncier’s “rods”—why they are so hard to produce and, implicitly, why a would-be nuclear state might want to take a look at our “trash”:

It is now easy to understand why a barrier is quite difficult to produce. The actual methods used by various countries are classified, but it is known that the United States used sintered nickel powders, while those in the new French Tricastin plant are “ceramic.”

[snip]

Whatever the material, it must be bonded under high pressure and temperature into sheets only a few microns thick. These very thin sheets must be able to withstand pressure differentials of the order of 0.3 to 0.5 kg/cm ² for many years without failure.

[snip]

The barrier must be assembled in a way which will maximize its area of contract with the gas. In US gaseous diffusion stages this is done by manufacturing the barrier in the form of sheets of cylindrical tube bundles.

[snip]

The individual tubes which make up the barrier must be small enough to provide a large surface area for diffusion but large enough to permit easy flow of the process gas. Again, no information is available on the size of the tubes, but if it is assumed that the tubes are about 2 m long and 1 cm in diameter, then about 160,000 of them would be used in such a stage. This can be compared with some of the early US stages which contained several thousand tubes each.

The best part of all of this is that Oakley thought the French might want our obsolete gaseous diffusion technology, even though Areva is planning to decommission their own diffusion plant once George Besse II, a URENCO centrifuge plant, comes on line at Tricastin.

Still, Oakley called the French embassy in Washington to offer the broken tubes. “They laughed at him,” according to a document filed by Moncier.

Laughed at him … then presumably called the FBI.

Bad boys, bad boys …

Jack Abramoff is a pimp compared the University of California/Bechtel team that just won another contract to manage a national laboratory.

This time its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, birthplace of the Calutron.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Department of Energy plans to announce the reliable replacement warhead contract today:

The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation’s first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.

The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.

Teams of scientists in California and New Mexico have been working since last year to develop the new bomb, using the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The weapon is known as the reliable replacement warhead and is intended to replace aging warheads now deployed on missiles aboard Trident submarines.

The contract decision was made by the Nuclear Weapons Council, which consists of officials from the Defense Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Energy Department. Plans were underway Thursday to announce the award this afternoon.

The article also has some info on the design that was selected, and why it looks like Livermore will be taking the lead:

The design details are secret, but Livermore’s version utilizes major components that had been tested — though not produced — for a Navy bomb about two decades ago.

By contrast, Los Alamos selected a design that involved an atomic trigger and a thermonuclear component that had been tested individually.

However, the two elements were never tested together, said Philip Coyle, who serves on scientific advisory committees and formerly was deputy director at Livermore.

The Los Alamos design is said to contain highly attractive features, including innovative mechanisms that would prevent terrorists from detonating the bomb should they gain access to it, experts said. Those use controls were cited by military officials as a key factor in developing the weapon.

Another wayward youngster at our national labs. I am going to have to create a separate category for these stories:

A woman is accused of using a computer at a national laboratory to hack into a cell phone company’s Web site to get a number for Chester Bennington, lead singer of the rock group Linkin Park.

According to an affidavit filed by the Department of Defense Inspector General, Devon Townsend, 27, obtained copies of Bennington’s cell phone bill, the phone numbers he called and digital pictures taken with the phone.

Seriously, isn’t the bigger crime that she couldn’t stalk someone cool?

The amazing John Fleck issues a plea “for a little calm while we wait to see what was actually on the mobile home meth lab jump drives ”:

When the national news media went all apedung over Wen Ho Lee back in March 1999, it seemed reasonable. After all, no less than the New York Times suggested Lee may have been spying for the commies. It turned out not to be the case.

Then in 2000, the national news media went all wildness over missing hard drives at Los Alamos that contained scary nuclear weapons secrets. They ended up not to be missing after all. Sort of.

Then the national news media went all scarified over missing “classified removable electronic media” containing more scary superscary nuclear secrets in 2004. This was so scarybad they actually shut the whole lab down, in order to determine that the things had never existed in the first place.

Do you detect a pattern here?

I feel so dirty.

John has a point—the good people at Los Alamos have been subjected to some pretty ugly attacks by folks in Washington, attacks that often are about the independence of the labs, refusal to hear opposing views or some fleeting beltway power grab.

I … I just … no … this is so wrong.

Let’s say you live with your boyfriend in a mobile home, from which he supports himself by selling methamphetamines.

Query: What could possibly be worse than having the neighbors call the police after overhearing your domestic dispute, resulting in a police raid that finds the meth?

Answer: The police also finding the documents marked Secret Restricted Data that you’ve improperly removed from you place of work, Los Alamos National Laboratories.

For the whole sordid story, POGO gets dirty, with a little help from the Los Alamos Monitor and the Associated Press .