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The US House of Representatives last week approved a 60-day moratorium on visits to US nuclear weapons laboratories by visitors from ‘sensitive countries’. This forestalls the enactment of a more radical two-year moratorium.

The moratorium was approved as part of a package of 26 measures aimed at tightening laboratory security in the wake of the Chinese spy scandal. These were passed as part of a bill authorizing spending by the Department of Defense in the year 2000.

The 428-0 vote on the package, authored by congressmen Christopher Cox (Republican, California) and Norm Dicks (Democrat, Washington), virtually assures that the measures will be retained when House and Senate conferees meet to reconcile differences between their respective versions of the bill.

The moratorium will start 30 days after the bill becomes law, and is intended to be in effect while the Department of Energy (DoE) institutes new vetting procedures for foreign scientists. The Secretary of Energy may waive the moratorium on a case-by-case basis.

The bill applies to foreign visitors to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, and The Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee.

A harsher, two-year moratorium on visits by scientists from sensitive countries including China, India and Russia was proposed by congressman Jim Ryun (Republican, Kansas) but defeated on a vote of 159-266.

The votes came two days after the chief science adviser to President Clinton warned that a “xenophobic” Congressional reaction to allegations of Chinese spying could imperil scientific excellence and national security at the three US nuclear weapons laboratories.

In a speech to the US Civilian Research and Development Foundation, Neal Lane, the director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, said that a Congressional moratorium on lab visits by foreigners “would severely hamper our efforts to control the post-Soviet arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, not only because it would block collaborative activities here, but also because it would immediately lead to curtailment of US access to sites in Russia”.

He warned that a moratorium would hurt the labs' participation in international science, calling the proposals “bad for science — and bad for the nation”.

Also last week, an advisory committee to DoE secretary Bill Richardson published a report backing international collaborations at DoE laboratories, which it described as “essential to the scientific and technological strength of the United States”.

“These types of collaborations ⃛ can be conducted without jeopardizing national security and should be continued,” says the report from a working group of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, which was mandated in March to examine the department's Foreign Visits and Assignment Program.

Ryun challenges both Lane's criticisms and the findings of the report. “We cannot continue to sacrifice our national security in the name of science,” he says. “Many of our most sensitive national secrets have been stolen, while there has been little progress in non-proliferation efforts throughout the world. It is time that Congress addressed the lack of accountability for security in our national nuclear laboratories.”

The report to Richardson comes on the heels of a joint statement from the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, that “inappropriate restrictions on foreign visitors to DoE laboratories could weaken the United States scientifically and prompt retaliation” (see Nature 399, 294; 1999).