In a February 3 memo obtained by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the DoE criticised the lab for the loss of three computers from a LANL employee's home earlier in January. It said that 67 machines were found to be missing (spokespeople have since upped the number by two), and that 13 computers had been stolen or lost in the past year.

"In treating this initially as only a property management issue, my staff and I, and apparently the cyber security elements of the laboratory, were not engaged in a timely and proactive manner to assess and address potential loss of sensitive information," said the memo, from the Los Alamos Site Office of the DoE, to Los Alamos National Security, which governs security at the site.

"This fueled greater concern as initial laboratory reports, which were reviewed at Headquarters (HQ) and at the Los Alamos Site Office (LASO), used vague terminology and made assertions that suggested significant weaknesses in individual controls, organizational management approval, accountability systems, configuration management, etc," continued the memo. It also expressed frustration at LANL's lack of knowledge about compliance status.

This is not the first time that LANL has suffered from secuity problems. According to the Open Security Foundation, personally identifable information on 1,000 individuals was lost by a contractor at the lab in 2006, while another contractor had displayed the names and social security numbers of 500 individuals who had entered certain lab sites. More recently a BlackBerry owned by a lab employee was said to have been lost in a "sensitive foreign country".

LANL is one of three laboratories contributing directly to nuclear weapons research, the other two being Livermore and Sandia. LANL have been competing to produce new warhead designs as part of a Bush adminstration plan to revitalise the nuclear arsenal with a range of new, more flexible and reliable warhead designs.