Don’t touch that; you don’t know where it’s been.

After a panicked search for two computer hard drives missing after this spring’s disastrous fire, the Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory have revealed that no one really bothered to keep track of their whereabouts even before the fire.

The hard drives were part of an emergency response kit designed for use in disarming nuclear devices. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that information about taking apart a nuclear warhead could be reversed to show how to put one together, nor to realize that the United States still does have enemies who would be delighted to know how to disarm our nuclear weapons. And who’s to say it wouldn’t be possible to alter the data on the hard drives? The possibilities seem alarming, to say the least.

It’s disturbing to learn that the lab had instituted no strict procedures for inventorying the devices. A scientist claims to have seen them a month before their absence was discovered, but testimony before Congress reveals that the last time anyone actually checked to make sure they were where they belonged was shortly after Jan. 1, as part of a Y2K inventory. The amount of time required to transfer data from a hard drive is short. Someone bent on stealing those secrets would not need to keep the hard drives, only borrow them for a few hours. Then they could be slipped back into their normal storage place.

Indeed, they may have been.

Without a paper trail that offers evidence of the whereabouts of the hard drives at every point in their existence, it’s going to be impossible to prove that they were missing at all. It seems fairly apparent that they were, but without such a log, there’s no way to determine when they might have been ‘borrowed’ and who might have had access to them at that time.

This isn’t the first security breach at Los Alamos to reach the news lately, so it’s possible that the secrets were already out. That hardly justifies the lab’s failure to maintain adequate security, including the common-sense practice of inventorying classified materials, controlling access to them, and recording their use. That’s pretty basic; libraries do it, after all.

It’s especially disturbing in light of the fact that just days before the fire broke out, the lab co-hosted a seminar appropriately entitled, ‘Wildfire 2000: Los Alamos at Risk.’ ‘It's not a matter of if but when wildfire will again threaten the Lab, Los Alamos and surrounding areas,’ an organizer said then. Her words were prophetic, but apparently not so chilling that lab managers understood that they might soon have to flee, leaving their secrets unattended. That’s an eventuality that should have been understood. The planning should have been in place.

‘Espionage is very hard to guard against,’ said former Sen. Warren Rudman, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. ‘You win some and lose some. Here you’ve got a situation where there’s just sloppy accountability and record keeping.’