Demonstrators today . . . terrorists tomorrow???

In Doofus Of The Day #625, we saw how three demonstrators - including an 82-year-old nun! - were able to penetrate the security surrounding the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Now more information has emerged about how serious a security breach it was.  Frank Munger reports:

Dr. Bill Bibb, a retired DOE official who once headed the nuclear defense activities in Oak Ridge, said he's not sure if Y-12 will ever recover from the damage to its reputation.

"The plant has always had a certain mystique that it was impregnable. You can't buy that back for no amount of money," Bibb said.

He added: "I can't emphasize enough how serious this is. In my mind, this is as grievous an error as I can ever remember in the defense complex."

Within days of the event, the top leadership at the plant contractors -- B&W Y-12, the government's managing contractor at Y-12, and WSI-Oak Ridge, the protective force contractor -- had been removed from their jobs, and a slew of security experts were brought to Oak Ridge. The National Nuclear Security Administration has refused, so far, to say what if any federal officials have been demoted, fired or relocated as a result of the security failures.

The security stand-down at Y-12 lasted about two weeks, during which thousands of plant workers underwent refresher courses on the do's and don'ts of security, and operations resumed Aug. 16. But things, by no stretch, have returned to normal.

One Y-12 official described the daily scene at the Jack Case Center, the plant's main office complex, as intense, with a bunch of folks with unfamiliar faces striding down the halls to their next meeting. The number of investigations into the security breach and Y-12 operations may already be in double figures.

A report released Friday by DOE's Office of Inspector skewered almost every aspect of Y-12's security, saying the response to the breach was inept, the equipment was faulty, and the leadership was missing in action.

The toughest scrutiny will come, according to Bibb, when the NNSA and its contractor officials are called before Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is planning a Sept. 12 hearing on the incident.

What if they hadn't been pacifists?

A question that's driving investigations and has crossed many minds is this:

What if the middle-of-the-night intruders in late July had been a group of armed-and-trained terrorists instead of a trio of pacifists bearing candles, flowers and the Holy Bible?

Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with the Project On Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has been a frequent critic of DOE security, said that's a very scary prospect.

"The guard force, the way they responded, would have been dead as a doornail," Stockton said. "If, indeed, that was a real attack and had approximately a dozen guys, highly trained with explosives and all kinds of other materials, they could have gone through the wall of the HEUMF."

In a worst-case scenario, terrorists could have gained access to vaults where stocks of highly enriched uranium are stored and used the fissionable material to create and detonate on the spot an improvised nuclear device with a Hiroshima-like yield, Stockton said.

"You simply cannot allow hands on the material (highly enriched uranium)," he said.

Stockton said he doesn't think the Department of Energy really knows what to do at the moment so they're trying a little bit of everything, including force-on-force exercises to test the capabilities of the Y-12 guards.

"I think they're in chaos at the moment," he said.

There's more at the link.

In hindsight, it seems our Doofus Of The Day award to Oak Ridge's security personnel wasn't entirely appropriate.  It should have been the Dangerous Dumbasses Award!





Peter