Free Republic

In June 2014, a worker at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee was surprised to find U.S. nuclear secrets inside a trash bag marked for disposal along with standard rubbish. Taking a closer look, the worker found 19 more documents in the bag that were either marked classified or were later determined to contain information that should have been labeled secret. A dozen more bags of trash sat nearby, awaiting transport to an open landfill where Y-12 workers routinely dump garbage with no bearing on national security. When employees of Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services, Y-12, LLC, the contractor...

The Biden administration is vacating a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of World War II-era scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In a written statement first shared with The Hill, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision barring Oppenheimer’s clearance went through a “flawed process” and noted that there was evidence of bias. “In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and...

Scientists who have worked for more than a decade on a multibillion-dollar project to mimic the energy of the hydrogen bomb in experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have encountered so many difficulties, they have already missed their deadline and are unlikely to achieve success soon, government experts warn. The lab's National Ignition Facility was designed to be a substitute for underground tests of nuclear weapons, which had become a political impossibility by the early 1990s. Without testing, the nation has no way to determine the safety and reliability of its aging arsenal of atomic weapons. The National Ignition Facility...