Lie Detectors: On Secrets and Hypersecurity in Los Alamos

Abstract

The U.S. nuclear complex has always been haunted by the possibility of spies. At Los Alamos, some of these ghosts have names—Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, for example—while others remain elusive, like the third Soviet agent long rumored to have worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.1 Since the end of the Cold War, however, espionage, like the U.S. nuclear arsenal itself, has seemingly receded in the American imagination, psychically exiled as an increasingly quaint relic of a (nuclear) age now assumed past. Hence the widespread shock and bewilderment in 1999, as accusations of atomic espionage arose from the center of a surprisingly vibrant U.S. nuclear complex in New Mexico. Even more sensational than the initial accusations in March 1999 that China had covertly attained design information about the most sophisticated nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal was the announcement a month later that a U.S. nuclear weapons scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory had illicitly downloaded to nonsecured computers almost the entire archive of nuclear weapons design codes developed during the Cold War era of nuclear testing. Of fourteen high-capacity