Hayden Wants UC to Have Greater Say at Nuclear Labs

Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) on Monday pressed the University of California to intensify oversight of two nuclear arms laboratories it runs for the federal government and to play a bigger role in the nation’s weapons policy.

In a hearing at UC Berkeley, Hayden suggested that the university give its faculty--through the 61-member Academic Senate--a veto right over the selection of three new senior officials who will be hired as liaisons between the UC system and Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories.

“This strange relationship between the university and weapons makers is going to go on for a long time,” Hayden said after the hearing. “The priority is going to be to make it work in a way that is consistent with the university’s standards.”

UC President David P. Gardner announced plans last month to hire three officials who will serve as watchdogs, receive access to classified material and shuttle between the labs and university headquarters in Berkeley. The positions, created partly in response to Hayden’s call for more oversight, have not been filled.

While the university plans to seek the Academic Senate’s advice about the appointees, Hayden and several speakers at the hearing said the faculty’s governing body should have the additional right of giving its consent.

But UC Vice President William Frazer, Gardner’s aide in charge of the labs at Livermore, Calif., and Los Alamos, N.M., said, “The university doesn’t work that way.”

Frazer said the Academic Senate is an advisory body that has no veto right over other appointees of the UC president. The body, which rules on matters of curriculum, has not officially sought a say in the selection of the laboratory watchdogs.

Frazer said the university has increased its oversight markedly in recent years and cited the plans to hire staff for that purpose as the latest example.

Most laboratory scientists want to remain under the umbrella of the university, believing that it gives them academic freedom and the right to speak out on matters of defense policy.

“I am committed to more openness,” John Nuckolls, said Lawrence Livermore laboratory director. “I think it is in the interest of the lab, the university, the country and the world.”

But while the lab is not outwardly opposing Hayden’s efforts, outgoing Energy Secretary John S. Herrington charged recently that Hayden’s “motives aren’t oversight--it’s to cripple the lab.”

Hayden termed such criticism an “overreaction.” Noting that the money for oversight goes through the Legislature, Hayden asked, “What are we supposed to do, turn our backs?”

The university has managed Lawrence Livermore since 1952 and Los Alamos since 1943. UC receives $13 million a year for its administrative services. But the Department of Energy provides the bulk of the labs’ $2-billion annual budgets and controls most policies and projects that the labs undertake.

Hayden said he hopes that with an increased watchdog role, the university might gain a say in the nation’s weapons policy “in a restricted sense.” If it were more active, the university could better protect laboratory dissidents whose views differ from those championed by the laboratory administration.

Hayden said the secretive nature of the laboratory can result in “brilliantly conceived wrong directions.” With increased faculty involvement, he said, the university can act “as an agency of civilian control of the military.”

Hayden pointed to the case of Roy Woodruff, a top Livermore scientist who criticized as overly optimistic claims in the early and mid-1980s from several scientists at Lawrence Livermore about the potential of creating a Star Wars defensive shield against attacks of Soviet missiles.

“If we had a better process, we might have moved more prudently and saved this admininistration a lot of money that has already been committed,” Hayden said.

Hayden’s effort to increase the university’s oversight resulted in a legislative resolution adopted earlier this year that the university ensure academic freedom, that work at the labs is sound and that lab findings are reported objectively to the government.