(originally published 7/2/2014)
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) just released a report on the security program in place at several critical US sites for weapons production and storage, and it has some pretty tough things to say about the state of the security management of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
The report was produced as the result of an inquiry into the security management provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for some of the most sensitive sites in the country, such as the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and other similar sites. The Y-12 facility, located near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is charged with the production and storage of nuclear weapons and weapons-grade uranium. It is one of the primary producers of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon components in the United States.
However, like a lot of government programs and organizations, the NNSA is subject to budget cutbacks, even in regards to sites like the Y-12 plant. During the years of 2009-2012, NNSA implemented a series of cost-reduction measures, many of which were in the area of security. As a result, security staffing and controls were reduced or removed at Y-12 and other facilities – so much so, that the security posture of the sites may have been degraded to the point of significant vulnerability.
And in July of 2012 those newly-introduced vulnerabilities were exposed by a security breach at the Y-12 facility. On 28 July 2012, a group of anti-nuclear protesters were apprehended on the grounds of Y-12, in the process of hanging banners and splashing blood on the side of a building located within the Protected Area, the most sensitive area of Y-12, where production of nuclear warheads occurs. The three protestors, religiously motivated and (luckily) peaceful, surrendered upon detection and did not offer resistance.
However, some troubling details emerged about the breach. Among them –
- the protesters were apparently not detected until they reached the Protected Area, and not sooner;
- the breach was detected by a perimeter detection system, but there was no corresponding video (for example) of the incident as it occurred, leaving the security personnel to wonder what had tripped the unit. In other words, they had no way to distinguish whether the intruder was a deer who’d wandered onto the property (which apparently happens from time to time), or was a human intruder. Further, they had no way to determine how many intruders had tripped the perimeter;
- there was nothing to stop the intruders from reaching the Protected Area once they’d cleared the initial perimeter;
- they were confronted by a guard who was apparently heavily armed, but was only a single guard, due to budget cutbacks in guard staffing;
- the building they were splashing blood on was not just any building – it was, in fact, the newly-constructed storage facility for the largest supply of weapons-grade plutonium in the United States.
The facility, prior to the breach of 2012, had largely been regarded as impenetrable and highly secure. But the actions of a former nun, housepainter and gardener undermined that aura of invincibility. And, as a result, the NNSA began to re-evaluate its cutbacks and implement new security controls.
However, the GAO’s report finds that these controls, and indeed the overall security management program of the NNSA, to be lacking direction and focus. Indeed, according to the report, NNSA officials themselves describe their own security program as “chaotic” and “dysfunctional”. The GAO found no real roadmap or overall strategic approach to security at the NNSA, and as a result security measures have been implemented in a haphazard manner, almost guaranteeing the presence of vulnerabilities even now.
Time will tell as to whether the NNSA is effective at implementing the necessary programmatic structures in place that it’s going to need in order to have an effective security management program. One troubling indicator is that it’s been almost exactly 2 years since the Y-12 breach, and such issues are still in place. Another cause for concern is the final line in the summary of the GAO report, where it states that the “NNSA risks putting in place short-lived or ineffective responses to its security problems, on which GAO and others have reported for more than a decade”, indicating a potentially more systemic problem in regards to security management – in an agency principally dedicated to security.
