DoD News Briefing
Thursday, January 7, 1999, 1:45 p.m.
Presenter: Kenneth Bacon, ASD (PA)
Kenneth Bacon, ASD (PA)
..............
Q: Do you have anything on the report that China received information about the W88 nuclear warhead via the Los Alamos --
A: All I can tell you on that is that it is under active investigation by the FBI, and they should probably be the people to talk about that.
Q: Can you say anything about whether standards have been tightened at the --
A: Yeah. Standards have been dramatically tightened at the Department of Energy labs. This was -- this issue involves Department of Energy laboratories where work on nuclear weapons is done. And in the middle of the last decade, the government identified security problems at Department of Energy laboratories and a series of steps have been taken, some in the last few years, to improve security and reduce the possibility of compromise to our nuclear weapons program. Some of those actually were outlined in the article you referred to, but they involved increasing budgets for counterintelligence, increasing personnel for counterintelligence, setting up new counterintelligence forces and intelligence offices at these labs and taking some other steps that deal with computers and information transfer at those labs. So there have been a number of steps taken in the last several years.
Q: Can you quantify at all the suspected amount of damage that might have been done here?
A: I cannot.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan1999/t01071999_t0107asd.html
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