Los Alamos National Laboratory's hard drives, found Friday, belong to NEST, a pager-wearing, high-tech band of weapons scientists trained to snoop out and disarm a lost, stolen or homemade nuclear weapon.
To search in crowded cities they disguise themselves as telephone repair crews, secretaries or delivery people. They may cruise the streets in pizza vans or postal trucks, scanning for telltale signs of radiation. Or they may walk hotel hallways with briefcases stuffed with electronic gizmos.
If they ever came face to face with a real terrorist nuclear weapon, the highly classified information on the now-famous laptop hard drives would crunch the available information and spit out suggestions on how to disarm it.
Scientists say the laptops are a master reference work on nukes, a "Dear Abby" of virtual atomic advice.
"When we go to the field, we take information that we have about (bomb) designs that we know about, or may have studied, so the people working with this unknown thing can make comparisons with something we know," said Alan Mode, who heads the NEST effort at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Is it a danger? Will it go off?
The laptops contain gigabytes of detailed data about the design of U.S. nuclear weapons, foreign nuclear weapons and weapons that might be invented by terrorists.
By the very nature of the information, said one U.S. scientist, the missing hard drives are more highly classified than the weapons design codes downloaded by Wen Ho Lee, the jailed Los Alamos scientist accused of mishandling nuclear secrets.
Members of NEST — the Nuclear Weapons Search Team — have responded to calls for 25 years. As far as is publicly known, they have never found a terrorist nuclear bomb, either sophisticated or crude. But it they do, they'll face it with an expensive array of high-tech instruments to gather information to feed into the laptop programs.
They'll inspect the unknown bomb with robots such as the "Automated Tether Arm Manipulator," a remote-control machine equipped with stereoscopic video vision. They'll use radiation detectors that can pick out the distinctive "radiation signature" of specific types or uranium or plutonium. Sensitive heat detectors can determine how many pounds of the radioactive metal are involved.
Heavy-duty X-ray machines can peer inside for shapes, "basically like when you go to the dentist," said Darwin Morgan, a spokesman for NEST headquarters in Las Vegas.
Other machines can be rolled forward to bombarded the device with neutrons and gamma rays, revealing yet more information.
All these measurements go into the laptops, which crunch the data and render advice on disarmament.
"We have techniques to allow us to look at the outside, potentially to look at the inside," Mode said. "The more information it can tell us about how it is it's put together, then the better off we are in our attempt to take it apart."
The virtual catalog of nuclear weapons information might provide help to a terrorist organization that had stolen a Russian or U.S. weapon, several scientists speculated. U.S. weapons require entry codes, and have anti-tamper devices that can render the weapon useless by wrecking internal components.
But the laptop data might offer hints about how to get around the safeguards, the scientists suggested.
NEST was formed in 1975. On short notice, teams of two experts or several hundred scientists, engineers and support staff can be sent to the field. Most NEST members work for Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, the Energy Department or private contractors.
Huge caches of equipment are kept at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas and Andrews Air Force base near Washington. Planes, helicopters and vans stand ready to go.
For NEST members, pagers are a way of life. "If they're a crucial person and they're going on vacation, we either have a back up or we know where they are," said Morgan.
Last year, a NEST squad was sent to North Dakota in the dead of winter after someone claimed a nuclear device was on a train. The train was stopped and searched, but nothing was found.
NEST worries not just about bombs, but terrorist threats to scatter radioactivity. NEST members are equipped to go undercover on a radioactive hunt without creating panic. The team is famous for its disguises, prowling city streets with sophisticated detection gear hidden in a bogus pizza delivery van or a postal truck.
Searchers may ride bicycles in scruffy clothes, their equipment hidden in a backpack. During an training exercise, well dressed searchers may stroll hotel hallways with detectors in briefcases or purses.
"They can walk into an office building, sports arena, or down a busy street and not draw any attention to themselves," Morgan said.
A large amount of research at the weapons laboratories has gone into techniques for disarming what is known in the business as an "Improvised Nuclear Device."
In some cases, a power water knife, or "liquid abrasive cutter" might be used to cut through metal without creating sparks or heat.
If a device is deemed too tricky to dismantle, but safe to move, it might be transported to the Nevada Test Site, where the experts would "Wrap it in high explosives, drop it in a hole like we used to use for testing nuclear weapons, and destroy it," Morgan said.
The assumption is that a terrorist device would be booby-trapped. If it can't be moved or disarmed, NEST members would try to detonate the conventional high explosives without causing a nuclear chain reaction.
If they succeeded, it would create a mess — plutonium scattered around — but a devastating nuclear explosion would be avoided.
Most NEST members hold other jobs at the weapons labs, but train frequently. The missing hard drives are much on their minds.
"Everyone desperately wants them found," Mode said. "They in fact are sensitive material."