Two crises brought weapons-lab security under fire: First, the ongoing case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born scientist fired from the Los Alamos, N.M., lab last year for copying classified nuclear weapons info to portable tapes, several of which are missing. Lee has been in jail since December and awaits trial on 59 felony counts.

The second is the case of two missing computer hard drives containing classified information that went missing as a fire roared near the lab. Employees failed to alert officials that the disks were missing for three weeks. Fear abounded that the disks had been shared with foreign powers, but when they finally surfaced two weeks later (behind a copy machine in a secure area) an FBI investigation concluded that they had not been tampered with.

But that didn't stop the alarm bells ringing in Congress. Hearings about the security lapses are ongoing, and the calls for greater vigilance at the nuclear weapons lab have come both from Republicans and from the Clinton administration, which has been attacked for years for alleged inappropriate ties to China. On Wednesday, University of California officials complained that budget cuts have made it impossible to maintain sufficiently tight security at the labs, which the university runs jointly with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Still, some scientists say the security problem is being exaggerated for political reasons. "What's going on in Washington with all the hearings, it's completely unrelated to any real problem at the labs," asserts Hugh Gusterson, a professor of science and anthropology at MIT. "It's all about party political advantage. If you look at the statistics this year, the security violations have been less in number than in previous years. I know the media has conspired to give this impression that security has gotten lax at the labs, but I don't believe it's true."

Gusterson thinks politicians are shooting themselves in the foot. "The Republicans in Congress and the administration between them are pretty much wrecking the nuclear weapons program. If you're against nuclear weapons I guess they're doing the right thing," Gusterson said. "But it is ironic to have disarmament by Republicans who are doing it in the name of increased national security."

The pressure on the DOE is causing a backlash in the scientific community. An article in Sunday's New York Times documented the dwindling number of Asian and Asia- American scientists applying for and accepting jobs at Los Alamos. Academic groups are calling for a boycott of the national weapons labs because they say a system of racial profiling is going on, with scientists of Asian descent systematically harassed and denied advancement. DOE officials have denied the allegations.

Asians and Asian-Americans make up more than a quarter of science and technology doctorates at the nation's top universities. Without them, the talent pool of weapons designers would be drastically depleted.

"Disgracefully, there is evidence that the racial profiling issue is real," says Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. "This is not a concoction of hyper-sensitive activists. The larger issue is the vitality of the lab, and it's just amazing to me that that is being missed by Congress."

But it's not just Asians and Asian-Americans who are feeling the scrutiny. Across the industry, talented scientists are looking at the government's treatment of Wen Ho Lee, polygraph testing of lab employees and the security response as proof that working for the government carries too much risk and not enough reward.

"I'm told that a lot of the weapons designers are talking about looking for new jobs, especially the younger ones," Gusterson says. "And the older ones are talking about early retirement.

What's more alarming than the security breaches themselves is the level of paranoia about them, according to Jessica Stern, senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "There's nothing more critical to U.S. national security than protecting legitimate secrets," says Stern. But the current uproar over lapses at Los Alamos is only making matters worse.

"There does seem to be a kind of McCarthy-type atmosphere developing," Stern says. "I think there is a fine line between prudence and paranoia. We may be slipping over the paranoid edge of that line."

Stern now works on national security and terrorism issues. But from 1992-94, she worked at the Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., one of three national labs that develop nuclear weapons technology -- the others are Los Alamos and Sandia (which has sites in New Mexico, California, Nevada and Hawaii). She says she's heard from colleagues that the Lee case has angered many scientists who believe, whether he is guilty or innocent, that the way he has been treated is grossly unfair.

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