U.S. Probes Lawrence Livermore Lab

Congress is conducting at least four investigations of possible security and conflict-of-interest problems at the top-secret Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapons facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, congressional sources said Thursday.

The newest probe, launched in July by a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, focuses on the terms under which the lab transferred new computer technology to a company led by former lab scientists who had helped develop the technology.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the subcommittee, has raised ethics questions about the deal, although lab and company officials deny any wrongdoing.

Congressional sources involved in the probes disclosed Thursday that lab officials are also under investigation for allegedly “failing to protect important security assets” at the site, near Livermore.

The sources, who spoke on the condition they not be identified, declined to reveal details of the security lapse but said John Tuck, the Department of Energy undersecretary, acknowledged in a closed hearing in July that the problem posed an unacceptable risk to national security. Immediate corrective actions were promised, they said.

Plutonium and other sensitive materials are used at Lawrence Livermore in nuclear weapons design and research activities. The lab, one of three major weapons design facilities, is operated by the University of California under an Energy Department contract.

The Dingell subcommittee is also investigating the national security implications of an allegation by Roy Woodruff, formerly a leader of the lab’s weapons program. Woodruff contends that he was blocked by lab superiors from writing to national security officials in Washington in 1983-85 to dispute optimistic projections by physicist Edward Teller about the X-ray laser weapon being developed there.

The X-ray laser uses the energy of a nuclear explosion in space to destroy enemy rocket boosters.

Separately, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is probing allegations of thefts of government property at the lab. This probe was launched last year after Dingell’s panel was told in a public hearing that some lab employees had sold computers and other government assets for drug money.

Internal Investigation

The lab in 1986 launched its own investigation of drug trafficking by employees after a number of workers became involved in drug-related incidents and arrests. Dingell later accused the Energy Department of pressuring the investigators to drop the matter just days before they were to enter the highest-security sections of the lab.

Dingell stepped up pressure on Energy Secretary James D. Watkins to review UC’s management of Lawrence Livermore by pressing him for information about the circumstances of a licensing deal the lab made earlier this year with n-Chip Inc., a Livermore-based company started by former lab scientists.

The department’s internal auditors are also investigating the licensing deal at the request of the department’s San Francisco field office, which oversees the lab operations.

In a July 7 letter to Watkins, a copy of which was made public on Wednesday, Dingell called the awarding of the license to n-Chip to commercially develop a technology known as laser pantography “highly curious.”

Exclusive License

He cited “the appearance of a conflict of interest” in granting an exclusive license to a company whose top officials include at least three people who helped Lawrence Livermore develop the technology.

Laser pantography is used for connecting computer chips in a way that permits supercomputers to be compressed to the size of a cigarette pack.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Philip Dauber, the chairman of n-Chip, said his company and the lab took special care to meet all ethical and legal requirements for the licensing deal. He called it a “normal, usual patenting agreement.”