Official News - page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: SOME OF OUR EXPLOSIVES ARE MISSING

Firms may lose stuff when employees help themselves to items in the stationery cupboard, but the situation at US defense labs is a bit more serious. An audit held last year found that hundreds of conventional explosives at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, couldn't be accounted for. Plastic and powdered explosives, detonators and rocket motors were all missing.

This worrying fact is taken from a report released recently by the US Department of Energy's Inspector General. "Extremely dangerous and potentially destructive materials may be subject to theft or diversion," it says.

Nice use of euphemism there - diversion. Will burglars in future claim they weren't stealing the DVD player, just diverting it?

Whatever they call it, it's one thing for lax security to allow someone to walk out with a box of paperclips, but surely they should be keeping track of explosives a little better than this!

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page