For most of its nearly 60-year history, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has served, and served well, a dual role as a center of scientific inquiry at the highest level and as a repository of this nation’s most precious nuclear secrets. In recent years, the scientific inquiry has been upstaged by administrative incompetance, and the repository of secrets has become a sieve.

The Senate’s appointment Wednesday of CIA Deputy Director John A. Gordon, an Air Force general and physicist, as head of the new nuclear-weapons agency within the Energy Department should do much to plug the leaks. The department’s disinterested response to the latest, and most outrageous, breach suggests the incompetancy part still needs work.

The latest outrage is, of course, the disappearance from a vault of two computer hard drives. Past losses has been of information on how to build nuclear weapons; these hard drives contain instructions on how to detonate them. The discovery that the drives were missing was made by lab staff on May 7 but not reported until May 31. No one seems to how long the drives had been gone before their absence was noticed. The assertion by administrators that the drives are merely misplaced and not stolen remains unsubstantiated and increasingly unlikely. How can it get worse?

Here’s how. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson declined to appear before the Senate Wednesday. Irate senators of both parties directed questions about lax security and the delay in getting Gen. Gordon on the job to an empty chair. Secretary Richardson did, however, find time later to tell reporters his department had been “adequately represented” at the Senate hearing by a deputy.

It’s an astonishingly inadequate response to the distinct possibility that terrorists may now know how to set off nuclear warheads — not just this country’s warheads, but all those unaccounted-for warheads rattling around the former Soviet Union. In the past, the Clinton administration has been able, with considerable justification, to lay the blame for the culture of indifference at the nuclear labs on previous administrations. This one, coming as it does after numerous promises of improvements, belongs to this administration alone.

Although it is crucial that this particular crime be solved, a process that includes fixing blame, it is even more important that a remedy is found. The creation of the semi-autonomous agency Gen. Gordon now leads is a first step. The formation of two discrete panels on enhancing lab security, one headed by former Sen. Howard Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the other put together by the University of California, is another.

The final recommendations of these panels may be that the new semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration should be completely autonomous from the Energy Department — overseeing this nation’s nuclear-weapons program is simply too big a job for a federal agency that has a hard enough time carrying out its primary task of ensuring reliable supplies of gas, oil and electricity. Until then, this nation — this entire world, in fact — can only hope that whoever took those hard-drives from Los Alamos carried away with them some of the incompetence that also resides there.