Word: warhead
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Deep in some industrial warren, perhaps in Pyongyang, engineers carefully machine a nuclear bomb. On the other side of Asia, maybe in Tehran, chemists fill bomblets with deadly nerve gas. Farther west, let's say in Baghdad, scientists ladle toxins into a biological warhead. U.S. officials don't have, or at least won't reveal, the intelligence that proves such sinister work is afoot. But they believe it is happening. More important, they fear it is only a matter of time before one of those nations--North Korea, Iran or Iraq--lobs a missile toward...
Missed. Again. The $12.5 billion U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) program suffered another setback Tuesday night when it failed its most elaborate test to date. An interceptor missile fired from a Pacific atoll failed to hit a mock warhead deployed by a missile fired in California. Although the system managed to destroy a mock warhead last October, it was later reported to have been a lucky accident after the interceptor missile had locked on to a decoy balloon that drifted close to the target. "I call the Pentagon all the time and sometimes they can?t transfer my calls...
...irresponsibly ruined their reputations. Wen Ho Lee, in jail pending trial on 59 charges that he compromised sensitive military documents while working at Los Alamos, was the subject of a very public investigation into whether he was the mole who gave China design secrets about the W-88 warhead. But Lee says he was singled out for investigation because he's Asian and was maliciously painted as a patsy by the FBI and the Justice and Energy departments to draw attention away from their flawed security. Lee charges that the agencies illegally leaked information about his private life...
...rehabilitation of Wen Ho Lee continues. According to Friday's Washington Post, investigators say an analysis of a document turned over to the CIA by a former Chinese government official shows that, much like the Nile, the leaks of plans for the top-secret W-88 warhead could have a number of possible sources. The reason: The plans the Chinese drew up from them were too inaccurate to have come from the lab where the warhead was designed...
...others, including Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin Corp. or even the Navy, could be responsible. None of this comes as any surprise to critics of the FBI's handling of the case. "Those of us who've covered this have always known that information about the W-88 warhead was available in many corners and to many contractors," says TIME Justice Department correspondent Elaine Shannon. "It remains to be seen if the investigators can narrow the trail of that document enough to do anything useful...