
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 14, 1991                   TAG: 9103140073
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WEAPONS-DESIGN PAPERS MISSING

The Energy Department is unable to account for 10,000 classified documents at its Livermore atomic weapons laboratory, including secret papers on weapons design, according to a congressional investigation.

Although department officials played down the problem as a bookkeeping shortcoming, the General Accounting Office said that no one "can provide assurances that the national security has not been damaged."

The GAO investigation into security at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco was requested by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who released the report Wednesday.

Dingell, in a letter to Energy Secretary James Watkins, asked that department officials explain why they believe the concerns are merely a matter of bookkeeping, and not security.

He suggested that the department was engaging in a "numbers game" that could have serious national-security implications. "Even one document pertaining to the likes of nuclear weapons design falling into the wrong hands could be disastrous," Dingell wrote Watkins.

The Energy Department, responding to the GAO findings, told investigators that the missing documents are believed to be a result of administrative and clerical errors - and not theft.

The department estimated that the unaccounted documents represent 1 percent of the total number of classified documents that are kept at the Livermore lab. "The laboratory has been in compliance with all DOE rules for classified document handling and accounting," the department said.

The GAO investigators said that a review last summer found about 12,000 classified documents could not be located at the laboratory, which is owned by the government, but operated under contract by the University of California.

Since then, officials at the laboratory have accounted for 2,000 of the documents, but as of early January "over 10,000 documents were still missing," the GAO said.

The GAO said the missing documents apparently cover a wide range of subjects including nuclear- weapons design, X-ray laser design, papers on nuclear-weapons material such as plutonium, and photographs of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons tests.

The report criticized the DOE and laboratory operators for failing to install a centralized record-keeping process.

by CNB