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NYTimes.com

Article published May 15, 2008

Nuclear lab fails terrorist exercise

May 15, 2008

By Bill Gertz - Armed security agents posing as terrorists broke into a secure area at a nuclear weapons laboratory during a recent test, exposing flaws in the protection of stockpiles of plutonium and uranium coveted by terrorist groups and rogue nations seeking to become nuclear powers.

The "force-on-force" exercise at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California pitted two teams of special-operations-trained commandos: one that attacked use of simulated explosives, and a team of defenders who tried to keep them out, said Bush administration officials familiar with the test.

The test was part of regular drills designed to test nuclear defenses and included the attackers' use of all-terrain vehicles and torches to cut through metal barriers, the officials said.

A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Energy Department unit that oversees the laboratory 50 miles from San Francisco, said the security problems were revealed in the penetration test, which was first reported by Time magazine.

NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes declined to comment on the details of the exercise but stated in an interview that the initial results were "disappointing" and "highlighted the need for improvement."

"This is precisely the reason why we have these kinds of assessments done to test our security," Mr. Wilkes said. "We are constantly testing our security ... to find areas for improvement."

"The nuclear material at the site is secure, and we have the best security in the government," he said.

The "attackers" were commandos who are part of security teams that guard other U.S. nuclear facilities in the country and were part of a seven-week review of laboratory security at Lawrence Livermore. The simulated attack took place in late April.

The attacking force also began the exercises inside the laboratory's perimeter fences and other defenses inside an area called the Superblock, where nuclear material is stored, the administration officials said.

"The attackers were given tremendous insider knowledge, personnel, site access, facility information and communications advantages that would be highly improbable in a real-world scenario," one official said.

Defenders were limited from firing their weapons inside the area, another advantage for the simulated terrorists.

A Dillon Aero Gatling Gun, capable of firing at high rates, also did not work properly for the defenders because of a hydraulic problem, but the problem has been remedied, the officials said.

Four areas during the security inspection were found to be "effective," while four had ratings showing the need for improvement, Mr. Wilkes said.

One key lesson was that the laboratory"s protective forces need to train more often within the actual area they are protecting, he said.

"Immediate compensatory measures were put in place after the inspection, including additional security police officers and relocation of material to more secure storage locations," he said.

"No material or sensitive information at Lawrence Livermore National Lab is at risk, and the security at the site remains strong," he said.

All plutonium at the facility will be removed in four years, he said.

The NNSA said in a statement Friday that a recent "security assessment" identified several areas needing improvement.

Lawrence Livermore is part of the nuclear weapons complex and conducts research on plutonium pits used in nuclear weapons.

Laboratory spokeswoman Susan Houghton said some personnel were reassigned as a result of the security review and one immediate step will be to increase the training of the protective force officers. "We've accelerated training, and we're training against more real-world threats," she said.

The anti-nuclear group Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which monitors security at Energy Department facilities, said in a statement that the penetration drill shows the problems of security at the facility.

"The hydraulic system used to raise the gun from its hiding place inside the back of a small truck failed, making it impossible for the gun to be fired," POGO said, noting that the group has been critical of the deployment of the gun because of its one-mile range that poses a danger to nearby residences.

The group also stated that special response teams of armed security guards were involved in tactical failures during the drill.

"It is important to emphasize that Livermore's security problems are not the fault of the guard force, who have complained about their lack of training and poor tactics," said POGO senior investigator Peter Stockton. "In fact, two security officers were fired for raising these problems."

Time magazine, which first reported the penetration drill in its Monday editions, stated that the attacking force was able to penetrate Building 332, which contains about 2,000 pounds of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium.

The mock terrorists gained access to a payload of simulated fissile material inside the facility.

A POGO report on Lawrence Livermore security problems last year stated that contract security guards are not equipped to adequately secure the site and have limited capabilities to communicate with local police.

"As a result, coordinating an effort to recapture stolen [special nuclear material] is virtually impossible," the report said.

A POGO report from March stated that the laboratory has been unable to meet U.S. government security requirements and was given a waiver from the Energy's nuclear security administration.

"This action comes at a time when experts warn that the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing," the report said.

Michael Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate hearing last week that al Qaeda in particular is continuing to seek unconventional weapons.

"Most troubling is the judgment they will continue to try to acquire and use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear materials in attacks," Mr. Leiter said.

Other senior U.S. intelligence officials have said that one threat scenario is for terrorists to set off a radiological bomb — a conventional bomb laced with nuclear material to enhance its lethality.

Stealing or constructing a nuclear bomb for use in an attack would be more difficult but not impossible.

"More than anywhere else in the nuclear weapons complex, it is essential to prevent terrorists from accessing the nuclear materials at Livermore," said Danielle Brian, POGO's executive director. "Suicidal terrorists would not need to steal the materials; they simply could detonate them into an improvised nuclear device on the spot. That is why it is urgent to remove those materials from the lab, rather than settling for the [Energy Department's] drawn-out timetable of removing the materials by 2012. We hope this debacle will finally light a fire under [the Energy Department] and accelerate their schedule."

May 14, 2008 

Earthquake in China Highlights the Vulnerability of Schools in Many Countries

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

NYTimes.com

The enormous loss of life in collapsed schools around China’s quake-stricken Sichuan Province could have been significantly reduced using known methods for designing or retrofitting structures in earthquake zones, several experts on global hazards said Tuesday.

But China is just one of many countries with known earthquake vulnerability that has been slow to transform schools — a keystone of any community — from potential death traps into havens, these experts and some community campaigners for school safety said.

Hundreds of students are thought to have perished in schools during the earthquake, among more than 13,000 deaths in all.

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

While earthquakes can sometimes exact a far wider toll on other public buildings, school collapses are particularly wrenching, development officials and experts say, because students are often what propel a struggling nation from poverty to prosperity.

In 2004, the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study, “Keeping Schools Safe in Earthquakes,” concluding that schools “routinely” collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced.

“Unless action is taken immediately to address this problem, much greater loss of life and property will occur,” the report says.

The risks are growing, experts say, as populations in poor regions continue to rise and the world, rich and poor, shifts ever more toward urban centers, many with well-charted seismic threats.

In recent years, there have been deadly school collapses after earthquakes in Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey. Most notably, in Pakistan on Oct. 8, 2005, at least 17,000 children died as more than 7,000 schools collapsed after a powerful jolt shook a mountainous region near the Indian border.

Similar risks, and delays in reducing them, exist in countries rich and poor from the Americas across Europe and Asia.

In 2006, Brian E. Tucker, an earthquake expert who runs a private group, GeoHazards International, presented a study on schools to the Economic Cooperation Organization, a group of 10 countries in Europe and Asia. The analysis found that 180 million people, including 40 million school-age children, faced “an earthquake risk equal to that of northern Pakistan.” Dr. Tucker also was a co-author of the 2004 O.E.C.D. report.

Delays in addressing such threats sometimes result less from financing and engineering than from societal inertia, given competing problems and the unpredictable nature of earthquakes, said Ben Wisner, a former geography professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a founder of the Coalition for Global School Safety.

Often, money and technology are not the issue, he said, so much as access to basic information about risks and simple ways to bolster buildings.

“On the whole, the cost of designing and building a school, say, a three-story junior high school in Mexico City, is only about 5 percent higher,” Dr. Wisner said. “You don’t necessarily design a building to avoid collapse, but design so that it’s a survivable collapse. You want large voids so they can be accessed by rescuers.”

There have been some successful efforts to reinforce schools, in places including Katmandu, Nepal, and parts of Turkey, he said. Progress often is a result of persistent pressure by a particular engineer or safety campaigner.

The successes are far outnumbered by places that still face calamity on the scale of that seen in Sichuan, he and others said.

And the risks are not limited to poor or emerging countries. In Vancouver, British Columbia, parents’ groups have been agitating to accelerate a decades-long program aimed at bringing schools up to modern earthquake standards.

While there is no reliable global tally of unsafe schools in quake zones, regional snapshots are chillingly clear. A report being presented at an international conference on school safety, coincidentally beginning on Wednesday in Islamabad, Pakistan, says that more than 80 percent of schools in Pakistan are unprotected from shocks like the one in October 2005.

The inertia is one result of a range of factors, including deep poverty in some places and political immobility in others. In some countries and cultures, inaction is shaped by a fatalism that somewhat indemnifies governments from responsibility for what are seen as “celestial” acts, said Thomas Parsons, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif.

“It’s so disappointing to see these things happening again and again — little kids caught in a collapsed school building,” Dr. Parsons said. “As always, in the short term we are balancing the probable event against real, right-now problems. But in the long term, probable becomes inevitable.”

Around Sichuan, the earthquake may well have raised the danger level on nearby faults, Dr. Parsons said, noting a 2007 paper mapping the region’s unstable underpinnings.

David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai.

Chertoff Pushes Cybersecurity Goals

By JORDAN ROBERTSON

AP Technology Writer

7:17 PM CDT, April 8

Federal cybersecurity officials are trying to develop an early warning system that alerts authorities to incoming computer attacks targeting critical U.S. infrastructure, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday.

Chertoff's keynote speech at the RSA security conference, however, was light on details about this and other initiatives, many of which he said were classified.

Some security experts said the idea of an early warning system seemed far-fetched.

Robert Graham, chief executive of Atlanta-based Errata Security and an expert on computer-intrusion prevention, said current technology can only detect when a hack has already occurred -- and even then the breaches usually happen too fast for an early warning.

"Technologically, all we can do is a post-warning system -- you've been hacked," he said. "It's instantaneous. It's not like a hurricane or missile coming at you that you can track coming toward you. It's just there."

Chertoff did not say how the government plans to detect and flag computer threats as they sneak into government networks. But he did acknowledge the technical challenge in developing such a system.

"It's going to be hard. It's hard technically. It's hard because to some degree it requires working together," Chertoff said in response to a question. "The fact that something's hard doesn't mean, 'Let's not do it because it's going to be difficult.' It means, `Let's roll up our sleeves and get started.'"

Chertoff said the system would improve upon the government's current tools for analyzing computer threats, which he said are built on "fundamentally a backward-looking architecture" -- that is, they scrutinize threats coming into the networks and work backward to identify the nature and source of the attack.

He was referring to the "Einstein Program" run out of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, a partnership of the homeland security department, other public agencies and private companies. The Einstein program is an automated process for collecting and sharing security information.

U.S. officials have acknowledged that hackers have broken into the networks of at least one government research laboratory and even the Pentagon over the past year and are intensifying their attacks.

A well-targeted attack could cripple financial institutions or air traffic control systems or expose U.S. secrets to enemies.

Chertoff said there are too many openings into government networks for criminals to explore and exploit with viruses or other malicious code.

One of the homeland security department's goals is to winnow the number of Internet access points into government agencies from the thousands that exist today to about 50, Chertoff said. He gave no timetable or details on how the plan would be implemented.

Chertoff's speech focused heavily on his pitch to recruit private-industry security researchers as the government beefs up its cybersecurity staffing. The government needs to recruit from private industry because many critical networks are operated by private companies and they need each others' expertise, he said.

He did not say how many new cybersecurity jobs the agency wants to fill with private-industry professionals, but he said the initiative is a high priority because the power of the government alone is "insufficient" to fully combat the threat.

"The federal government cannot promise to protect every system or every home computer from attack," he said.

DHS Holds Cyber Storm II Exercise to Further Cyber Security Preparedness and Response Capabilities

Release Date: March 10, 2008

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting the largest cyber security exercise ever organized. Cyber Storm II is being held from March 10-14 in Washington, D.C. and brings together participants from federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the international community.

Cyber Storm II is the second in a series of congressionally mandated exercises that will examine the nation’s cyber security preparedness and response capabilities. The exercise will simulate a coordinated cyber attack on information technology, communications, chemical, and transportation systems and assets.

“Securing cyberspace is vital to maintaining America’s strategic interests, public safety, and economic prosperity,” said Greg Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. “Exercises like Cyber Storm II help to ensure that the public and private sectors are prepared for an effective response to attacks against our critical systems and networks.”  

Cyber Storm II will include 18 federal departments and agencies, nine states (Calif., Colo., Del., Ill., Mich., N.C., Pa., Texas and Va.), five countries (United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and more than 40 private sector companies. They include ABB, Inc., Air Products, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company Inc., Harris Corporation, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Microsoft, NeuStar, PPG Industries, and Wachovia.

Cyber Storm II objectives include:

• Examining the capabilities of participating organizations to prepare for, protect against, and respond to the potential effects of cyber attacks
• Exercising strategic decision making and interagency coordination of incident response in accordance with national level policy and procedures
• Validating information sharing relationships and communications paths for the collection and dissemination of cyber incident situational awareness, response and recovery information
• Examining means and processes through which to share sensitive information across boundaries and sectors without compromising proprietary or national security interests

For more information on Cyber Storm II visit:http://www.dhs.gov/xprepresp/training/gc_1204738275985.shtm

NYTimes.com

February 12, 2008

Report Warns of Threat to Campus Reactors

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — The risks of a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor on a college campus, and the potential consequences, have been underestimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Congressional auditors say in a report.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, said the commission had overruled expert contractors who thought differently, and misrepresented what the contractors had said.

Security requirements at the reactors have changed little since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to the auditors, even though many of the reactors still run on enriched uranium, which terrorists could convert into an atomic bomb. In contrast, the rules for civilian power plants have become much stricter, the report said.

An unclassified version of the audit found uncertainty “about whether N.R.C.’s assessment reflects the full range of security risks and potential consequences of an attack on a research reactor.” The audit said that the rules “may need immediate strengthening” and that more parts of research reactors were probably vulnerable to damage than the commission assumed.

Research reactors typically are less than 1 percent as powerful as civilian power reactors, and they usually do not operate under pressure, so there is less energy available to spread radioactive material in case of attack or accident. They are used for scientific research, training and making medical isotopes.

But while power reactors are surrounded by fences and guard towers, the research reactors are often in buildings on densely populated campuses. Some have added concrete Jersey barriers to protect against truck bombs, and better doors. But the “first responders” who would arrive if intruders set off an alarm are most likely to be the unarmed campus police officers, the audit said.

Government nuclear experts brought in by the commission paint a grimmer picture, the report said.

The nuclear commission’s estimates of vulnerability are “not supported” by experts from Sandia National Laboratories, Idaho National Laboratory and the Department of Homeland Security, the auditors said. The Idaho experts said that a terrorist attack could have “significant consequences” and a “high socio-economic impact,” the auditors said.

The nature of the outside experts’ concern is not made clear in the unclassified version of the report, but truck bombs or other bombings have been issues in the past. An article in Science and Global Security in 2003 pointed out that several research reactors had been destroyed by accidental runaway reactions, and that controls were in place to prevent those, though they could be disabled. The nuclear cores of research reactors are usually much more accessible than the cores of power reactors, the article pointed out, often sitting at the bottom of an open tank. Debris thrown into the tanks could clog cooling channels, it said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asserted that it was the Government Accountability Office, not the commission, that had misrepresented the position of the outside experts, and made “unsupported assumptions.”

Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who requested the audit, said of the commission: “They’re making assumptions and wishing the threats go away. It’s very disconcerting to me.”

“They don’t want to burden the licensees,” Mr. Shays said.

The commission licenses 33 research reactors, 26 of them to universities and colleges.

But Luis A. Reyes, the commission’s executive director, said in a letter of rebuttal to the accountability office that the auditors did not cite any intelligence information to show that terrorists had the “highly sophisticated methods and skills” that the report said were within their capabilities. The audit “lacks a sound technical basis,” Mr. Reyes wrote.

The G.A.O. “failed to acknowledge key scientific facts,” he added. His response, attached to the unclassified version of the report, which is to be released soon, did not contain any specifics.

David Lochbaum, a reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group that often raises safety concerns, said steps designed to prevent thefts of fuel from nuclear reactors might have raised the potential for radioactive releases.

To prevent theft, Mr. Lochbaum said, reactor operators have started putting highly irradiated fuel, which is much more radioactive, into their cores, making it impractical for a terrorist to carry fuel away. But that raises the amount of radioactive material available for release.

For 30 years, the Energy Department has been working toward designing new cores for the reactors that would do the same work with low-enriched fuel. In some cases it has completed the designs, but no money is available to convert the reactors; in others, it is still working on the designs.

Research reactors are a threatened species. With a long drought in the construction of power reactors, many universities have shrunk or closed their nuclear engineering departments.

Las Vegas Sun

October 04, 2007

Vulnerable Germ Labs Tough to Identify

By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -

Federal terror-fighting agencies can't identify all the American research laboratories that could become targets of attackers, congressional investigators have found.

The Government Accountability Office asked a dozen agencies whether they kept track of all the labs handling dangerous germs and toxins, or knew the number. All responded negatively.

The findings were prepared for a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Thursday.

The government regulates 409 laboratories approved to work with 72 of the world's deadliest organisms and poisons, including anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria.

But less is known about other labs that work with organisms that cause whooping cough, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, meningitis, typhoid fever, hepatitis, herpes, several strains of flu, rabies, HIV and SARS.

The GAO said U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, told its investigators they need to track all labs that could be vulnerable to terrorism.

U.S. intelligence agencies said they already are handicapped by the failure of some foreign countries to regulate the shipment or possession of biological agents.

The Associated Press reported this week that American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing as more labs do the work.

No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented cases reflect poorly on procedures and oversight at high-security labs. In some cases, labs have failed to report accidents as required by law.

The GAO report disclosed that inspectors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention visited a high-security lab at Texas A&M University in February 2006, just 13 days after one worker was exposed to Brucella bacteria. Inspectors were not told about the exposure. The worker eventually became seriously ill, but recovered.

Patchy electrical grid now failing, Iraqis say

Power has been cut throughout country four times recently

Sunday,  August 5, 2007 3:42 AM

By Steven R. Hurst

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand and fuel shortages, and because provinces are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said yesterday.

Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and four nationwide blackouts have occurred during the past two days. The shortages are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion began, he said.

Meanwhile, Iran and the United States will meet Monday in Baghdad to discuss ways to ease Iraq's security problems, Tehran's ambassador to Baghdad said.

The meeting -- to discuss a committee Iran and the U.S. agreed to set up last month to deal with security issues -- would be the countries' third in recent months on Iraq. The first round in May broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to visit senior leaders in Iran on Wednesday.

The U.S. has accused Iran of fueling violence and supporting militants in Iraq, but Tehran has denied the allegations.

Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital also has been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.

Karbala province, south of Baghdad, has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital, the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

"We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it," said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market. "We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having."

Electricity shortages are a perennial problem in Iraq, even though it is atop one of the world's largest crude-oil reserves. The national power grid became decrepit under Saddam Hussein because U.N. sanctions after the Gulf War limited the country's ability to buy parts or equipment to upgrade the system.

For Iraqis, the power outages make life almost unbearable in the summer months, when average daily temperatures reach up to 120 degrees.

Sabotage is compounding the problem. Of the 17 high-tension lines running into Baghdad, only two are operational. The rest have been vandalized.

"What makes Baghdad the worst place in the country is that most of the lines leading into the capital have been destroyed. That is compounded by the fact that Baghdad has limited generating capacity," al-Shimari said.

"When we fix a line, the insurgents attack it the next day."

Fuel shortages also are a major problem. In Karbala, provincial spokesman Ghalib al-Daami said a 50-megawatt power station had been shut down because of a lack of fuel, leaving the province without water and electricity the past three days.

The electricity problems come as leaders are trying to deal with a political crisis that erupted when the country's largest bloc of Sunni political parties withdrew from the government.

President Bush called Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi to urge them to try to preserve political unity in the country, where al-Maliki's government is under a stiff challenge from rival political forces and insurgents.

Talabani, a Kurd, and Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, provided few details of the conversations.

Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the death of a Marine during combat Thursday in Anbar province.

The U.S. military also issued a statement saying its forces killed four suspects and captured 33 others yesterday in raids in northern Iraq and along the Tigris River Valley.

In northern Iraq, a prison riot was brought under control two days after it broke out.

The riot at Badoosh prison outside Mosul, about 220 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved nearly 65 inmates. Iraqi guards killed one who was trying to escape from the prison yard and wounded two other inmates in the prison, the U.S. military said in a statement.

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