Clinton asked Rudman, who chairs the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to undertake the study. But his energy secretary, Bill Richardson, has moved aggressively to show that DOE can restore security itself. The Rudman panel dismissed this as insufficient and called for an independent nuclear security agency, or at least a semiautonomous unit within Energy. The tiff should not obscure serious questions. Who oversees nuclear weapons has been a worry since their invention.
Security needs to be balanced against vital scientific exchange.
That the balance is out of kilter is evident in cases like that of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist suspected of sharing nuclear design secrets with China. Lee, it turns out, may never face charges. But crisis is the mother of reform in Washington.