Missing Gold v. Missing Plutonium

I saw this report today about how a computer upgrade allegedly is responsible for the loss of 2.7 tons of gold from Africa's largest refinery:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-25/africas-largest-refinery-finds-27-tons-gold-missing-after-computer-system-upgrade

Sounds like BS, right? Maybe not.

But I think most people would agree that it is more important to ask what kind of computer system the US Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track its inventory of weapons grade plutonium. Hopefully it's a more robust system than the one used to track IRS emails or someone's gold inventory, right?

I used to subscribe to the Government Accounting Office (GAO) report service, and several years ago I noticed the following report. Yeah, I know it's been almost 20 years, but this report made quite an impression:

AIMD-95-165 Poor Management of Nuclear Materials Tracking System Makes Success Unlikely

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Energy's (DOE) progress in developing a new nuclear materials tracking system, focusing on: (1) DOE actions to implement previous GAO recommendations concerning the system; and (2) whether DOE is adequately addressing key system development risks.

GAO found that: (1) DOE has not implemented any of the GAO recommendations regarding new system planning and analysis and has no plans to do so because it believes its planning is sufficient and delaying the system would lead to unnecessary costs; (2) DOE does not know if its new system will meet users' needs or be cost-effective; (3) DOE has not addressed the subcontractor's failure to document its system development process and to place its software under configuration management, or its failure to require acceptance testing before taking delivery of the system and plan for parallel operations of the new and old systems to check the new system's performance; and (4) the risk of system failure is high, since DOE does not know the status of the system development effort or whether certain system components will perform as required.

You can read the entire report here:

http://www.gao.gov/products/AIMD-95-165

The bottom line of the report is this: DOE implemented a system for tracking weapons grade material that had not been under configuration control, without verifying that it tracked properly with the inventory of the existing system, and apparently without reconciling any inventory shortfall that may have existed when turning off the old system and switching to the new one.

I thought at the time that if someone in the US or its allied governments (e.g., Israel ?) wanted to divert US plutonium into an illegal weapons program, this would be the way to do it. GAO probably had similar suspicions, but note well that even they were not able to get DOE to correct the obviously insane deficiencies in DOE's push to implement the new system.

So, I have no idea whether 2.7 tons of plutonium (or any other amount) disappeared when DOE's new computer system was put in place ... but then again neither apparently does anyone else, including DOE itself.

I've also heard speculation that the reactor vessel of Israel's weapons material production plant at Dimona is burned out (from neutron embrittlement). If they are continuing to expand their inventory of nuclear weapons they must have acquired a new source of plutonium. Did the DOE provide it in 1995? I bet we'll never know for certain.

2.7 tons would be a lot of bombs, wouldn't it?

Update: Here's a report from Veteran's Today which documents more details of the theft and diversion of US nuclear material:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/09/01/iaea-investigators-audit-reveals-us-not-iran-the-problem/