Lawmaker Says Nuclear Security Efforts Failing

Nuclear weapons laboratories have taken few measures to reduce their vulnerability to truck bombs and protect shipments of nuclear material from takeover by terrorists, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives stated in a letter to the Department of Energy.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said in the Jan. 23 letter that the agency has failed to correct long-standing security problems at 10 of its facilities and has not treated the new terrorist threat with urgency.

Markey, who since 1997 has accused DOE of having lax security measures, used a September 2001 report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight as the basis for his latest charges.

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