‘Transfer’ Program Offers Defense Discoveries to Commercial Business : Technology: Along with the Cold War, some military secrecy is ending. Weapons research labs have opened their doors to private industry.

An outbreak of peace has Sandia National Laboratories and its two top-secret weapons labs rolling out the welcome mat. They are encouraging private industry to see what breakthroughs they have to offer.

Federal officials have declassified some technology and are spending money on programs aimed at finding nonmilitary uses for such know-how.

They call it “technology transfer,” and they see it as a way to maintain vitality now that the country is becoming more concerned about economic competition abroad than military might.

“This lab is dedicated to enhancing the security, prosperity and well-being of the nation, so if the major concern now is economic security, it’s safe to say this lab will be involved,” said Gerold Yonas, director of laboratory development at Sandia, one of three top-secret U.S. military research labs.

(The others are Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, N. M., and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore, Calif.)

Yonas, who was President Ronald Reagan’s first chief scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative (“star wars”) project, said that Sandia doesn’t have “a bunch of exciting widgets sitting on the shelf waiting to be dusted off.”

What the lab does have to offer is experience, research and development capabilities and talent that now can be put to commercial uses.

Already, Sandia has assembled a consortium of metals companies looking for ways to use sophisticated “specialty metals” that were developed for the cruise missile. They are able to withstand extreme heat and stress.

Some military electronics technology may be useful to semiconductor companies. Imaging, a technique used to find hidden airplanes and moving targets, may be helpful to computer makers. A host of weapons systems could have applications for medicine, from new ways to release medication over time to better diagnostic systems.

“We can put sensors in a weapon and know exactly what it’s doing,” Yonas said. “The question is, can we use that on a human being?”

Sandia scientists know weapons, but they don’t know medicine. That’s why they’re inviting medical companies to join them.

“There’s a whole new class of medical applications, but the field doesn’t know we exist,” Yonas said.

The walls began to come down after the military spending law of last December modified the Atomic Energy Act to permit--in fact, encourage--the three Department of Energy labs to negotiate agreements directly with industries and universities.

“The bill explicitly states that technology transfer is a mission of DOE’s programs,” said Dan Arvizu, Sandia’s technology transfer and policy department manager.

Earlier federal legislation promoted technology transfer from NASA and other scientific endeavors, but specifically excluded the three national weapons labs.

“Everybody wanted to keep them under wraps because they were doing defense work,” Yonas said.

Peace, the “p-word” as Sandia scientists call it, made the change possible.

“There was a lot of intense debate over whether this would dilute us from our defense mission,” Yonas said, “but there was a lot of public discussion that economic competitiveness was a national issue, probably more so than the Soviet threat.

“And if you’re not working on the nation’s important problems, you’re not going to attract the top people,” he added.

Sandia has $5 million this year to take the lead in technology transfer and has already identified 15 programs for industry--from developing a way to test a diabetic’s blood sugar without drawing blood to building a sophisticated thermal-imaging system for police searches.