Lab Worker Steals Nuke Secrets
He was planning to sell the secrets to a "unspecified" country. I would like to know which country. If he was planning to sell it to a state sponsor of terrorism, he should be charged with treason. After all, we are engaged in a War on Terror. That includes terrorists and the countries that harbor them.
Federal prosecutors on Thursday accused a low-level contract worker at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — birthplace of the nuclear bomb — with stealing highly classified information about how to make enriched uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons.
The suspect was allegedly caught trying to sell it to someone he thought was representing another country, someone who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent. Federal officials will not say which country the agent was pretending to represent.
Federal officials told NBC News that the suspect worked as a contract employee at East Tennessee Technology Park, located on the Oak Ridge reservation.
He worked at a site that is conducting clean-up on Cold War items that are being decomissioned.
WNBC’s Jonathan Dienst reported the suspect was arrested Thursday.
Sources reportedly said money, and not ideology, was the motive for the theft.
An official announcement about the sting was expected later in the day.
The alleged security breach was discovered before it could do any damage, officials said. But the incident also exposed another serious security breach at the national laboratories.
Last fall, for example, a large cache of classified documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was discovered when police, looking for drugs, conducted a search of a mobile home.
The man who stole classified documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and was selling them to Iran, was charged with violating a trade embargo. You read that right, he was charged with violating a trade embargo.
