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Los Alamos Nuclear Arms Lab May Be Moved

July 8, 2002

The Department of Energy is moving to close a nuclear weapons facility in New Mexico that critics have said is highly vulnerable to a terrorist attack, according to employees at the site and members of Congress who have been briefed on the issue. The lab and all the nuclear- weapons-grade materials at Technical Area-18 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be transferred to a test site in Nevada, the sources say.

The facility was the site of the "garden cart" incident in 1997, in which Army Special Forces units tested its security by wheeling in a Home Depot garden cart and stealing more than 200 pounds of nuclear material. In another test in October 2000, mock terrorists gained access to enough nuclear material to cause a sizeable nuclear detonation.

The site has a $23 million annual budget and houses several nuclear burst reactors, several tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium and plutonium and other sensitive nuclear devices. TA-18 is on the floor of a steep canyon and has long been considered by security experts the most vulnerable nuclear weapons facility in the DOE complex.