AMY GOODMAN: We go now to New Mexico. Over the last weeks, we’ve covered the fires that have ravaged Los Alamos and wiped out many homes and a number of communities. And we’re going now to a reporter with the Albuquerque Journal, Ian Hoffman, who’s been covering these issues, as well as the latest loss of the hard drive disks and what’s happened in Washington with the hearing and the confirmation of General John Gordon.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ian Hoffman.

IAN HOFFMAN: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. On the issue of the missing hard drives, can you just give us an update on what happened?

IAN HOFFMAN: Well, as we had a wildfire that was kind of covering a mountainside above the town on one day, moved four or five miles in just about three-and-a-half hours, there was this nuclear emergency search team that decided they didn’t want to be caught unprepared for an emergency, for a nuclear accident or terrorist incident, of the type that they are trained to deal with, and they went into an evacuated building — it’s the core of the laboratory, the administrative building — and were going to retrieve, basically, all of their gear, and they found these two drives missing. And they contain quite a lot of information about a variety of nuclear weapons designs in order to aid them in identifying designs in the field and disarming them or rendering them safe.

And it’s quite an awful embarrassment for the laboratory and comes after an especially tough 20 months. One day before the laboratory director learned about the missing hard drives, he told me in an interview that these preceding 20 months, given the kind of the Chinese spy furor in Congress and the Wen Ho Lee case and the fire and a few other kind of lesser travails for the laboratory, that this has, without a doubt, been the most trying period in history for Los Alamos.

AMY GOODMAN: I know there’s going to also be a major protest outside the lab, as there was last year, August 6th and 9th, on the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over the development of new nuclear weapons. But you just mentioned Congress, Ian Hoffman, and I wanted to end by asking you about the significance of the confirmation yesterday of Air Force General John Gordon, now deputy CIA director, as the head of this new agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration.

IAN HOFFMAN: Well, the new agency, the NNSA, represents what its supporters would consider the most profound reform of the Department of Energy in about 25, 26 years. And really, it kind of breaks away all of the weapons work and some naval reactor work at the laboratories and various sites all across the country, and places them under a new kind of assistant secretary, who can — has some ability to report directly to Congress and to the White House. The question that everyone is — the big tension here has been over what degree of control the secretary of energy will have over the new agency. Will Bill Richardson’s appointees for oversight over security issues, environment, safety issues, counterintelligence — will they be able to influence the actions of or countermand the actions within this new agency? And, you know, the —

AMY GOODMAN: Is it seen as a political hit on Bill Richardson?

IAN HOFFMAN: Well, it’s turned out that way, because of Richardson’s objections to the way in which a fairly bipartisan, but Republican-led group wants to style the agency. He’s now being cast as being obstructionist, of frustrating the one best cure for some of these security issues that emerged last year. And I think, from everybody I talked to, there’s a perception out there among the Republicans that, you know, this is a huge political vulnerability for Richardson that they’d like to exploit to, basically, doom his chances to be a contender for vice-presidential nominee to Al Gore and, through Richardson, basically have some continuing attack by proxy on Bill Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Ian Hoffman, for being with us and giving us this quick update from New Mexico. Ian Hoffman is a reporter with the Albuquerque Journal.

And that does it for today’s program. By the way, we are going to be looking at a song that has had significance over many decades, “Strange Fruit,” and we’d like you to call in and let us know the first time you remember hearing it. You can call our hotline and describe your story at 212-209-2999, 212-209-2999. Democracy Now! produced by David Love and Jeremy Scahill. Anthony Sloan and Matthew Finch are our engineers. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.