US:US energy secretary Samuel Bodman has sacked the head of the country's nuclear weapons programme, Linton Brooks, because of security breaches last year at weapons facilities, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The dismissal comes in the wake of embarrassing security lapses for the National Nuclear Security Administration, including the October 17th discovery by police officers of computer flash drives containing classified information in the trailer home of a contractor who had worked at the Los Alamos laboratory.
That incident led to a critical report in late November by the energy department's inspector-general, who said that security procedures in key areas at the Los Alamos laboratory were "non-existent, applied inconsistently or not followed".
While Mr Bodman refused to elaborate on his statement, the removal of Mr Brooks comes as Democrats, determined to hold oversight hearings on the nuclear laboratory's security problems, take control of the House.
Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is a senior member of the House energy and commerce committee, said in a statement on Thursday: "I am afraid that it will take more than a new boss to fix the problems, which are far more systemic and pervasive in nature."
In the Bush administration Mr Brooks has been an advocate of building a new generation of nuclear weapons over the next decade, devising post-Cold War missions for nuclear weapons and modernising US nuclear weapons facilities, some of which date back to the 1940s.
The October incident was only the latest in a string of security lapses. Earlier, Mr Brooks had failed to tell Mr Bodman when a computer hacker stole the personnel records and social security numbers of 1,500 energy department contractors. - ( LA Times/Washington Post Service)