Remember the missing Los Alamos hard drives?

Remember at Los Alamos Labs, when they were missing those two top secret hard drives of information after the fire, and they turned up "behind a copier" a month or so later?

What was on those files? Documentation for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, about details of all sorts of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons.

NEST uses it to detect and defuse them obviously. But this information of course must inevitably say how the arming mechanisms and triggers work.

Suppose you were a crazy bearded one who had bought some a-bombs from a sleazy chechen gangster. But it didn't come with instructions.

And now you want to blow it up as a terrorist weapon.

What do you need?

A) how to shield this weapon from people trying to detect it

B) information about the arming and triggering system.

Alot of top-secret nuclear information is about how to design a bomb, or how to design and manufacture the various pieces of a bomb. Secret material for an enemy state who wants to develop a nuclear weapons production program.

But if you bought or stole a bomb, those would be irrelevant.

For that purpose, there is no single better source of information than the NEST documentation after the original instructions---and for preventing detection the NEST information is key.

Which is precisely what was stolen in Los Alamos. Those two hard-drives that showed up behind the copier were *put there* by somebody on the inside. In the initial search, they had scoured over that same room and it is clear that they were NOT there in the beginning.

I think that there was an inside espionage job to remove and copy and replace the hard drives back, and it was interrupted by the fire, at which point somebody went looking for the drives unexpectedly. If it hadn't been for the fire, nobody would have known, and they would have been returned to their original locations after being copied. Obviously after they went missing the security codes on the vault or whatever were changed so the perp wouldn't have been able to return them to their original location.

Wow my compliments on a very insightful tie in to the rumored stolen nukes, sounds like the wrong guy was fingered (setup) by terrorists or government- take your pick.

actually that is a different case from the Wen Ho Lee case. Two different espionages at LANL.

i am of two minds about that one. I do not believe Lee is the major perp.
The FBI idiotically focused only on him and did so so obviously and loudly that the real perps completely went underground and covered up the evidence. Total bungling of a major espionage.

however, his explanations are not entirely kosher either. What I think

1) there was very certainly major successful espionage by China on the W-88 design. That is clear by other evidence.

2) Lee was not the primary source of this material. It came somewhere else in the chain.

3) Therefore there was a larger spy ring which got away with it.

4) Lee did not actually commit espionage, but he downloaded material in the hope of possibly eventually selling it to China. His career at LANL wasn't doing so well and he was bored.

the stolen NEST drives though are much worse. a terrorist attack is far more likely than a chinese missile attack.