The bad news is that two hard drives containing secret nuclear weapons information recently "went missing" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory.

But the WORST news is that this type of thing really is NOT news anymore in the Clinton-Gore Administration. In fact, it's becoming frighteningly - and maddeningly - routine. The Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., summed up perfectly the collapse of efforts to preserve national security during the Clinton years. The Center for Security Policy referred to "[W]hat is increasingly being seen as a 'culture' under the present Administration - a phenomenon that might be called the 'Clinton-Gore insecurity complex' - characterized by inattention to, if not actual hostility towards, the most fundamental principles regarding personnel, information and physical security."

It will take some time to sort out what actually happened at Los Alamos. But the basic facts are bad enough. For weeks, perhaps months, computer hard drives containing very sensitive information about nuclear weapons, were missing and unaccounted for. Worse still, those responsible failed to report the problem promptly. Even Los Alamos Lab Director John Browne conceded that there had been "a serious loss of control over classified information at my laboratory."

But the real problem is that this "loss of control" is not confined to Los Alamos. It is not confined to the Department of Energy. It is in fact a virus of neglect, incompetence and malfeasance that has spread throughout the Clinton Administration - from top to bottom.

Here is just a partial list of the national security blunders and outrages that have occurred on the Clinton-Gore watch:

• The Cox Report into loss of defense secrets to the People's Republic of China concluded that even though our government learned in 1995 that the Chinese had stolen sensitive nuclear submarine missile technology, this fact was not reported to President Clinton for at least two years!!!!
• A year AFTER the Clinton Administration learned of Chinese thefts of nuclear secrets, the Administration actually relaxed controls on the sale to China of high performance computers needed to design and maintain nuclear weapons.
• Wen Ho Lee, now jailed and awaiting trial on charges of mishandling classified information, was allowed continued access to secret nuclear data for more than 17 months after FBI Director Louis Freeh warned former Clinton Administration Energy Secretary Federico Pena that Lee should be denied access.
• The Clinton Administration's former director of the CIA, John Deutch put highly classified material from the CIA on his home computer. He also used it to send and receive e-mail, which, of course, made the computer and its contents more vulnerable to hackers. Once again, the Clinton-Gore Administration took its time about reporting what had happened to Congress.
• In January a laptop computer with highly secret code word information disappeared from the U.S. State Department Building in Washington, D.C., and in 1998 a man calmly walked into an office near Secretary of State Madeline Albright's office, snatched up a stack of classified briefing papers and disappeared.
• Earlier in the Clinton Administration, his then Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary actually banned the use of badges that indicated the level of security employees had been granted. Her reasoning - The badges were discriminatory.

Once again, this is just a PARTIAL list of the security lapses and failures that have become all too common during this administration. Of course, this pattern could make us dangerously vulnerable to a hostile foreign power or rogue terrorist group. But this continuing neglect of security duty has other destructive consequences. Among other things, it creates unfair suspicions about all areas of our government's scientific work and hurts our efforts to pursue legitimate, very worthwhile research.

For years, responsible members of both political parties, including the members who UNANIMOUSLY signed the Cox Report have warned of the serious security problems. It is long, long past time for this Administration to get its national security house in order.