Just another day, another way for America's nukebusters to hone their deployment speed. The strange case of Los Alamos National Lab's traveling hard drives has, at the very least, called the group's handling of nuclear secrets into question. At time of writing, investigators were reportedly focusing on the activities of three Los Alamos scientists and NEST members in their effort to discover where the digitized data disappeared to before being found behind a copier over the weekend. The hard drives contain information on nuclear warheads that NEST needs if forced to dismantle them. Lax security or no, dismantlement is a core job for which NEST remains prepared, say experts.
NEST is a sort of volunteer fire department for the atomic age.
Virtually all of its approximately 1,000 members have other jobs within the US nuclear weapons establishment. They are nuclear physicists, engineers, experts in conventional explosives, chemists - the whole panoply of people needed to understand the awesome power of splitting atoms. The group was founded after a 1974 incident in which the government suspected, for a time, that a nuclear weapon had been hidden in Boston. Though the alarm was false, a stumbling response to the threat convinced US command authorities that they needed a better plan. NEST's first line of defense is a computer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California.