Staff writer Ian Hoffman reports for the Oakland Tribune. Excerpt:
In an about-face, top U.S. nuclear weapons officials said they plan on scaling back polygraph testing for thousands of weapons scientists and workers, in part to avoid driving them away.
Yet the U.S. Energy Department’s proposed reduction of polygraph testing still would leave enough top scientists at labs such as Lawrence Livermore and Sandia subject to a flawed test that falsely could brand hundreds as security risks.
Senators commended DOE deputy secretary Kyle McSlarrow for recommending his agency retreat from testing 20,000 workers, to routine testing of 4,600 scientists and random testing for 6,000 others.
His proposal would mandate testing for scientists who have high-level knowledge of nuclear weapons designs or access to top-secret intelligence. It would eliminate testing mostly for workers who handle, guard, transport or authorize the shipment of nuclear weapons materials.
At Livermore alone, the new policy would relieve almost 600 employees of routine polygraph testing once it takes effect, most likely in several months.
But lawmakers and scientists questioned why the agency still is relying on a test that a National Academy of Sciences panel found was likely to miss real spies and terrorists while mistakenly flagging honest defense scientists as disloyal.
“It is still a voodoo test that jeopardizes these people’s careers without being an accurate or reproducible test,” said Livermore nuclear safety engineer Bill O’Connell, former president of a lab union, the Society of Professional Scientists and Engineers. “This reform still does not get at the basic program of why they’re using an inaccurate test for screening even 5,000 employees.”