LONDON, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- A New Mexico drug bust revealed a crucial leak of British nuclear secrets, a British newspaper has claimed.
The London Daily Express newspaper reported Sunday that details of Britain's super-secret Trident submarine-launched nuclear missile program were discovered on computer drives hidden in a mattress that were found in an Oct. 17 drug among other classified materials from the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. They were in the possession of a female technician who worked at LANL.
The British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI-6 and the CIA "want to know if the woman stole the material to feed a drug habit, or if she was working for a terror group or a foreign intelligence service," the newspaper said.
"To fix this problem isn't rocket science -- or even nuclear science," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, said in a statement this week. "As POGO recommended in 2001, the entire weapons complex should have gone media-less immediately by removing the capacity of classified computers to copy data onto disks of any kind. There is simply no excuse for Los Alamos to continue to have this vulnerability."
POGO said it had received internal emails circulated among U.S. Department of Energy officials that revealed British diplomats in Washington had contacted the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy to ask for a clarification of the Daily Express report.
