NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists at a U.S. weapons lab complained more than two weeks ago that captured Iraqi documents containing sensitive nuclear information were available on the Web site that the government shut down on Thursday, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

A senior federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Times that scientists at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory protested some of the weapons papers on the site to the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy, in October. But the objections "never perked up to senior management," the Times quoted the official as saying. "They stayed at the mid-levels."

Managers at the security administration passed the warning to their counterparts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversaw the Web site, the Times said, citing the official. And as a result, according to a nuclear weapons expert, the government pulled two nuclear papers from the Web site last month. The dangers of the documents, which were captured during the war, had been recognized at Livermore and in the wider community of government arms experts, he said.

"Those two documents were on everybody's list," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The Times said federal officials were conducting a review to better understand how and when the warnings had originated and how the bureaucracy had responded.

The Bush administration set up the Web site in March at the urging of Republicans in Congress who said that public access to such materials from Iraq could increase the understanding of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein. It was shut down after the Times inquired about the disclosure of nuclear information and the experts' complaints. Among documents posted were roughly a dozen that nuclear weapons experts said constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

While Democrats have called for an investigation, the scientists' two-week-old complaints, as outlined by federal officials on Friday, indicated for the first time that warnings about the site had come from the government's own arms experts as well as from international weapons inspectors, the report said.

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