Denouncing a “culture of arrogance,’' the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory suspended 19 employees on Thursday, many of them senior scientists, and said they could be fired if two computer disks of classified data were not recovered. Shortly before summer monsoon lightning crashed into the mountains above the nuclear weapons laboratory, the director, George P. Nanos, addressed workers in some of his harshest words yet about a series of security and safety violations in recent years. Los Alamos employees are in “suicidal denial,’' Dr. Nanos said at a news conference. He said they persisted in a “culture of arrogance” and a belief that the laboratory was so important to national security that their jobs could never be in jeopardy.
