September 29, 2014

DOE IG Criticizes NNSA Secure Transportation Over Response to Security Incident

By ExchangeMonitor

Officials within the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Secure Transportation did not report or properly assess a “deliberate example of unauthorized access to nuclear weapons,” the Department of Energy’s Inspector General said yesterday. DOE’s IG released only a summary of its Sept. 24 inspection report yesterday, raising questions about OST’s human reliability program, though the information released included very few details about an incident that has not been previously made public. The program is in place to ensure only qualified access to nuclear weapons, but the IG said OST officials didn’t make sure an agent that had been temporarily removed from the HRP program was subject to limited access.

The full report was not released because it is listed as “Official Use Only” and contains information protected from disclosure, the IG’s office said. There was also confusion about the responsibility of agents to immediately report a potential security incident, and OST officials also didn’t properly complete a report on the issue, skewing the conclusions of an OST Internal Affairs investigation, the IG said. “We determined that an OST Internal Affairs investigation into allegations of questionable HRP program management practices at the Agent Operations Central Command may have reached a flawed conclusion relating to the Unit Commander’s actions because it relied on the results of the Report of Security Incident/Infraction,” the IG said.

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