nuclear-news

Inadequate security of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile

Supercomputers that guard America’s nukes lack adequate planning, GAO finds — Government Computer News Bloomberg By William Jackson * Dec 10, 2010The supercomputer systems used to assess the safety and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile do not have adequate contingency and disaster recovery plans in place to ensure availability following a disaster, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office.

The systems are housed in three Energy Department national laboratories: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. The National Nuclear Security Administration oversees them. Although all of the labs have components of contingency planning in place, the plans have gaps and have not been regularly tested, threatening the ability of the labs to perform their missions, GAO found.

“NNSA has not provided effective oversight to ensure that the laboratories have comprehensive and effective contingency and disaster recovery planning and testing” GAO concluded. “Further, due to lack of planning and analysis by NNSA and the laboratories, the impact of a system outage is unclear.”

Supercomputers that guard America’s nukes lack adequate planning, GAO finds — Government Computer News

December 11, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA