LOS ALAMOS: 20 MORE DISKS GONE?

Just when you think it can't get any worse... it gets worse. Los Alamos is already shut down for security breaches and safety violations. Now, a watchdog group is saying that the lab lost track of as many as twenty classified computer disks.

That would make at least the fifth major security breakdown in eight months for the country's leading nuclear weapons lab. Six decades after it help usher in the atomic era, Los Alamos is all-but-shuttered as employees get retrained in handling secrets, and facilities are re-checked for classified information. In an e-mail on Friday, lab director Pete Nanos threatened mass firings, if needed, to make the security lapses stop.

"Talk about a place out of control," said Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a long-time critic of lab management.

Under Los Alamos rules, every CD, Zip disk, portable hard drive, and floppy with secret data – known collectively in lab-speak as "classified removable electronic media," or "CREM" – has to be individually marked with a bar code, so the items can be easily tracked.

But, in what is becoming an increasingly familiar refrain at Los Alamos, those security guidelines seem to have been ignored, according to POGO. Nearly thirty-five disks with secret information were kept in a lone container, marked with a single bar code. Of those, only fifteen have been accounted for, internal documents show. That leaves the whereabouts of about twenty classified disks unknown. "Employees with access to these disks have been ordered to look for them at home," POGO said in a statement.