A disturbing video of teenagers pointing a gun at one of their peers, taunting him, has led to a police investigation in New Mexico.

The video, in which a reportedly autistic boy is cornered in a bedroom while another kid holds a weapon up to his face, shows at least two other teens laughing and yelling.

One, referring to the gun, says "It's f***ing loaded, b*tch," then props his foot up on a bed. He tells the boy, "Kiss my shoes." The other says, "dude, you better f***ing kiss his shoe."

NBC affiliate KOB.com reported the video was recorded in January, but only recently posted onto Facebook. The father of the boy who was being taunted shared the video, which was taken down from Facebook, with the news station; the faces of all the teens have now been blurred to protect their identities.

The 16-year-old boy who was being terrorized in the video was autistic, his father told KOB.com.

Calls from NBC to the Los Alamos police department were not immediately returned, but the school district confirmed the incident took place at a house in Los Alamos, off of school grounds.

"There were not any arrests," Los Alamos Superintendent Gene Schmidt said. "Two detectives did come onto our campus to interview potential witnesses. From what I understand, later on, a citation was issued."

KOB.com reported that the teen with the gun was charged with aggravated assault, but it was not clear if the other teens faced charges or if anyone was physically harmed.

The students all attended Los Alamos High School, Schmidt said.

He couldn't comment on disciplinary action in the case, but said, "We do have an active protocol when the school is concerned that bullying may or may not be taking place. We work very actively to set up a safety plan for those people involved. ... Our administrative team was aware of this investigation, and a parallel universe was developed in which safety plans for students at the high school was developed and deployed." 

A leading U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory recently discovered its computer systems contained some Chinese-made network switches and replaced at least two components because of national security concerns, a document shows.

A letter from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, dated November 5, 2012, states that the research facility had installed devices made by H3C Technologies Co, based in Hangzhou, China, according to a copy seen by Reuters. H3C began as a joint venture between China's Huawei Technologies Co and 3Com Corp, a U.S. tech firm, and was once called Huawei-3Com. Hewlett Packard Co acquired the firm in 2010.

The discovery raises questions about procurement practices by U.S. departments responsible for national security. The U.S. government and Congress have raised concerns about Huawei and its alleged ties to the Chinese military and government. The company, the world's second-largest telecommunications equipment maker, denies its products pose any security risk or that the Chinese military influences its business.

Switches are used to manage data traffic on computer networks. The exact number of Chinese-made switches installed at Los Alamos, how or when they were acquired, and whether they were placed in sensitive systems or pose any security risks, remains unclear. The laboratory - where the first atomic bomb was designed - is responsible for maintaining America's arsenal of nuclear weapons.

A spokesman for the Los Alamos lab referred enquiries to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, which declined to comment.

The November 5 letter seen by Reuters was written by the acting chief information officer at the Los Alamos lab and addressed to the NNSA's assistant manager for safeguards and security. It states that in October a network engineer at the lab - who the letter does not identify - alerted officials that H3C devices "were beginning to be installed in" its networks.

The letter says a working group of specialists, some from the lab's counter intelligence unit, began investigating, "focusing on sensitive networks." The lab "determined that a small number of the devices installed in one network were H3C devices. Two devices used in isolated cases were promptly replaced," the letter states.

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The letter suggests other H3C devices may still be installed. It states that the lab was investigating "replacing any remaining H3C network switch devices as quickly as possible," including "older switches" in "both sensitive and unclassified networks as part of the normal life-cycle maintenance effort." The letter adds that the lab was conducting a formal assessment to determine "any potential risk associated with any H3C devices that may remain in service until replacements can be obtained."

"We would like to emphasize that (Los Alamos) has taken this issue seriously, and implemented expeditious and proactive steps to address it," the letter states.

Corporate filings show Huawei sold its stake in H3C to 3Com in 2007. Nevertheless, H3C's website still describes Huawei as one of its "global strategic partners" and states it is working with it "to deliver advanced, cost-efficient and environmental-friendly products."

The Los Alamos letter appears to have been written in response to a request last year by the House Armed Services Committee for the Department of Energy (DoE) to report on any "supply chain risks."

In its request, the committee said it was concerned by a Government Accountability Office report last year that found a number of national security-related departments had not taken appropriate measures to guard against risks posed by their computer-equipment suppliers. The report said federal agencies are not required to track whether any of their telecoms networks contain foreign-developed products.

The Armed Services committee specifically asked the DoE to evaluate whether it, or any of its major contractors, were using technology produced by Huawei or ZTE Corp, another Chinese telecoms equipment maker. ZTE Corp denies its products pose any security risk.

In 2008, Huawei and private equity firm Bain Capital were forced to give up their bid for 3Com after a U.S. panel rejected the deal because of national security concerns. Three years later, Huawei abandoned its acquisition of some assets from U.S. server technology firm 3Leaf, bowing to pressure from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The committee evaluates whether foreign control of a U.S. business poses national security risks.

In October, the House Intelligence Committee issued an investigative report that recommended U.S. government systems should not include Huawei or ZTE components. The report said that based on classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE "cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence" and pose "a security threat to the United States and to our systems."

William Plummer, Huawei's vice president of external affairs in Washington, said in an email to Reuters: "There has never been a shred of substantive proof that Huawei gear is any less secure than that of our competitors, all of which rely on common global standards, supply chains, coding and manufacturing.

"Blackballing legitimate multinationals based on country of origin is reckless, both in terms of fostering a dangerously false sense of cyber-security and in threatening the free and fair global trading system that the U.S. has championed for the last 60-plus years."

He referred questions about H3C products to Hewlett Packard. An HP spokesman said Huawei no longer designs any H3C hardware and that the company "became independent operationally ... from Huawei" several years prior to HP's acquisition of it. He added that HP's networking division "has considerable resources dedicated to compliance with all legal and regulatory requirements involving system security, global trade and customer privacy."

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Albuquerque Journal via AP

The Los Alamos National Laboratory could become the home to a $6 billion research center.

SANTA FE, N.M. -- At Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists and engineers refer to their planned new $6 billion nuclear lab by its clunky acronym, CMRR, short for Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility. But as a work in progress for three decades and with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, nomenclature is among the minor issues.

Questions continue to swirl about exactly what kind of nuclear and plutonium research will be done there, whether the lab is really necessary, and — perhaps most important — will it be safe, or could it become New Mexico's equivalent of Japan's Fukushima?

As federal officials prepare the final design plans for the controversial and very expensive lab, increased scrutiny is being placed on what in recent years has been discovered to be a greater potential for a major earthquake along the fault lines that have carved out the stunning gorges, canyons and valleys that surround the premier U.S. nuclear weapons facility in northern New Mexico.

Final preparations for the lab — whose high-end price tag estimate of $5.8 billion is almost $1 billion more than New Mexico's annual state budget and more than double the lab's annual budget — also comes as a cash-strapped Congress looks to trim defense spending and cut cleanup budgets at contaminated facilities like Los Alamos. It also comes as the inspector general recommends that the federal government consider consolidating its far-flung network of research labs.

Despite the uncertainty, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nation's nuclear labs, is moving forward on final designs for the lab. Project director Herman Le-Doux says it has been redesigned with input from the nation's leading seismic experts, and the NNSA has "gone to great extremes" to ensure the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude.

Most seismic experts agree that would be a worst-case scenario for the area. But many people who live near the lab — and have seen it twice threatened by massive wildfires in 10 years — see no reason for taking the chance.

"The Department of Energy has learned nothing from the Fukushima disaster," said David McCoy, director of the environmental and nuclear watchdog group Citizens Action New Mexico, at a recent oversight hearing. That's become a common refrain since last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a meltdown at one of its nuclear plants. "The major lesson of Fukushima is ignored by NNSA: Don't build dangerous facilities in unsafe natural settings."

Lab officials say CMRR is needed to replace a 1940s era facility that is beyond renovation yet crucial to supporting its mission as the primary center for maintaining and developing the country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. While much of the work is classified, they insist the lab's mission is to do analytical work to support the nearby Plutonium Facility, or PF-4, which is the only building in the country equipped for making the pits that power nuclear weapons.

Watchdog groups, however, call it an effort by the DOE and NNSA to escalate the production of new nuclear weapons and turn what has largely been a research facility into a bomb factory.

And they are not giving up their efforts to halt the project. The Los Alamos Study Group, headed by Greg Mello, one of a number of area activists who have made a career out of monitoring LANL, has two lawsuits challenging the project and what he says is the federal government's refusal to look at alternatives despite the increased seismic threats uncovered in 2007 that have sent the price tag soaring.

Mello spends his days poring over every available public document on Los Alamos and the nation's nuclear program. And he makes frequent trips to Washington to lobby against funding for CMRR, which he says is an unnecessary attempt to "open the door for an overall expansion in intensity and scale" of the nation's nuclear weapons program.

At just about every public hearing related to the labs, Mello lines up with a regular group of aging hippies, retired scientists, former lab employees, residents of nearby pueblos as well as housewives and grandmothers from Santa Fe and other neighboring communities to oppose CMRR and anything and everything related to an expansion or continuation of the nuclear mission at Los Alamos.

While much of the public outcry over Los Alamos in recent years has focused on lagging cleanup efforts of radioactive waste and hazardous runoff into the canyons that drain into the Rio Grande, earthquake danger and the potential for catastrophic releases of radiation from existing facilities was front and center at a recent meeting in Santa Fe of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, appointed by Congress to oversee the nation's nuclear facilities.

"The board believes that no safety issue problem in (the nation's nuclear complex) is more pressing than the plutonium facility's vulnerability to a large earthquake," the board's chairman, Peter Winokur said in reference to efforts to reinforce PF-4.

The board has worked closely with NNSA to ensure CMRR is designed to withstand a major quake, so Winokur said the board is not concerned about that project — "as long as they follow through."

It's that follow through that has watchdogs concerned.

"Los Alamos doesn't have that safety ethos needed for a facility that will store the bulk of the nation's stockpile of plutonium," Mello said

Winokur agreed that safety remains a concern at the lab.

Since the last contractor took over operations in 2006, he said, "It's fair to say they have improved safety at the sites." But he pointed to two recent memos about deficiencies in nuclear safety programs that he said underscore the fact "that the operations out there are very challenging and that there is plenty of room for improvement."

Asked if he thought it was wise to spend billions of dollars to keep the nation's nuclear weapons operations centered on an earthquake-prone mesa, Winokur said his mandate from Congress is to oversee safety, not second guess major policy decisions.

"I'll leave that to Congress and DOE about whether or not they want to build a facility of that nature in that region of the country where they do have a fairly large earthquake threat," Winokur said.