COLUMN ONE : Learning to Live Without the Bomb : Once at the heart of history, the last of America’s nuclear arms designers ponder their future in a nation that no longer needs them.

Tom Thomson just wants to keep doing what he knows best.

What he knows, perhaps better than almost any other physicist in the United States today, is how to design weapons that harness and unleash the explosive energy of the atom.

As a weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he helped create 25 successful nuclear weapons, one so powerful that a fault line at the Nevada Test Site is named after it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which chronicles the field, calls Thomson the dean of Livermore’s weapons designers.

But Thomson and his colleagues are now bomb builders for a country that has not manufactured a nuclear weapon since 1990.

More than at any time since scientists detonated the first atomic weapon at Alamogordo, N.M., in 1945, these researchers and the federal weapons labs that employ them face insistent questions about what role they should play in serving the nation.

“If you don’t need the product, what do you need the factory for?” asked one weapons scientist.

Of the millions shouldering arms or manufacturing armaments during the Cold War, it was the designers of thermonuclear weapons who made it unlike any other conflict in history.

Thomson, 48, came of age as a physicist in an era when the struggle for national security redefined science in the public interest. The Cold War mandate was to keep peace by making weapons so powerful that to use them at all was to risk the destruction of civilization.

For more than two generations, researchers like Thomson at Livermore in the Bay Area and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico raced to outdo each other in creating nuclear weapons.

But when the Berlin Wall fell five years ago, it was a signal that they had outlived their usefulness on the laboratory front lines of the war against communism.

By the time the last Russian soldier left Berlin this year, money for U.S. nuclear weapons research had dropped by one-quarter. Dreams of the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, which pumped billions into basic weapons research, had faded. As a treaty to reduce strategic nuclear forces took effect this month, those who raced to build weapons of mass destruction are dismantling stockpiled warheads and cleaning up the environmental mess the Cold War created.

In the United States, there are no more than 80 experienced thermonuclear weapons designers like Thomson. Many are retired. At Livermore, there may be less than 20 left, said David A. Nowak, the soft-spoken computational physicist who runs the laboratory’s defense systems group.

Thomson wonders what he will be doing next year.

“I can’t really write a resume and tell people what I did in any detail,” Thomson said.

“I worked on bombs.”

Thomson’s situation is one part of an uncertain future facing thousands of physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers who help implement the designers’ ideas at the giant weapons laboratories, managed jointly by the University of California and the Department of Energy.

In the first major examination of the labs since the end of the Cold War, an independent team of experts marshaled by the White House and an Energy Department commission are evaluating whether federal labs have outlived their usefulness. The commission is expected to make its recommendations in February. Congress is debating whether the weapons labs should be broken up as costly Cold War relics or consolidated into one facility, while President Clinton this week vowed to cut more than $10 billion from Energy Department spending.

Last year, Livermore, Los Alamos and the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., which fabricated field-ready weapons, spent more than $3.4 billion and employed 24,000 people--still near the peak of their Cold War spending despite several years of belt-tightening. But much of the money is spent on cleaning up nuclear waste. Funding for nuclear weapons, although sizable, is declining steadily.

“The (research) budgets of the labs have been going down noticeably and painfully,” said senior science adviser Gregory Canavan at Los Alamos. “Los Alamos has a terrible problem. It is the same at Livermore. There is real pain this year.”

There is little public sympathy about the limited prospects of the U.S. scientists who stocked the Cold War arsenal with an array of imaginative doomsday devices. In all, the Energy Department spends about $6 billion a year on research facilities, most of it concentrated at nine major laboratories that grew out of the effort to build the first atomic bomb.

With their exotic accelerators, photon sources and beam machines, the labs were cathedrals of a research community that Caltech science historian Daniel Kevles calls “a kind of secular establishment--with the power to influence and obtain state resources largely on faith and with an enviable degree of freedom from political control.”

For the first time in a generation, the political power of the scientists who sponsored them has been challenged by congressional critics in both parties intent on reining in a scientific “culture of cost overruns.”

This scenario contrasts starkly with the situation in Russia. There, the prospect of unemployed weapons experts is so alarming that an international consortium raised $70 million to subsidize out-of-work Soviet scientists. The goal is to prevent them from selling their nuclear weapons expertise to Iraq, Libya, North Korea or another unfriendly potential nuclear power.

At least 300 Soviet bomb builders are believed to have enough expertise to design workable nuclear weapons, while another 60,000 scientists have the related technical skills, such as rocketry or advanced electronics, needed to construct thermonuclear bombs.

“The knowledge is something that really should be contained as much as possible,” said David S. Dearborn, a 45-year-old weapons physicist at Livermore who has had a direct hand in five underground nuclear weapons tests since 1983. “There is real concern that an experienced weapons designer from the Soviet Union could help someone skip over a couple of steps to make something really nasty.

“Here in the U.S., though, it is expected that most of the people who have been involved in this work are clever enough that they can find another job,” he said. But, he added, economic realities have changed that expectation somewhat. “The recession has not helped,” he said. “Unemployment for physics is at high levels.”

No one, however, questions the probity of America’s retiring bomb makers.

“Most of the people I know who are involved in this recognize what a very poor choice it would be for nuclear weapons to appear in some segments of the world,” Dearborn said.

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Beyond the security issue, though, is the more basic question of purpose. Without the central problem of nuclear war and national survival to stimulate their imagination, lab researchers may find that the wellspring of innovation has run dry.

George Craig worries about this. Steeped in the enigmas of high-energy physics and the secrecy of nuclear weapons work, Craig has devoted his life to devising ever-more ingenious weapons of mass destruction.

As defense research budgets nose dive, Craig, 53, who has been a mid-level weapons physicist at Livermore for 20 years, says he has become a displaced person.

Earlier this year, he was ordered to either find a research project that did not involve nuclear weapons or seek employment elsewhere. Ever since, he has been trying to reinvent himself as a scientist.

“I am an aspect of a problem that is facing science in the United States,” Craig said. “The Cold War is ended and now the scientific troops are being disbanded.”

Born the year the United States entered World War II, Craig has pursued a career shaped by the technical challenges of national defense--from work on thermonuclear weapons to studies of “Star Wars” lasers.

The Cold War cloistered him. It defined what he studied, where he went to work and what he did when he got there. In 1991, the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist, his last big weapons project--the Free Electron Laser--was canceled.

Now, Craig said, “I am working my ass off” to get into biomedicine.

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In search of a peacetime purpose, the people who helped bring the world nightmares of mutual destruction and dreams of space-based defenses have declared war on breast cancer, global warming, gas-guzzling automobiles--on anything, in fact, that can be seen as boosting the nation’s advantage in the new, economic world war.

Nowhere is the changeover more apparent than at Livermore--where the director was forced out amid charges of mismanagement this year and where budgets are falling twice as quickly as at other facilities.

Behind Livermore’s armed guards and barbed wire, researchers are beating swords into plowshares as fast as they can.

Officials say that under the aegis of weapons work, they have built up a priceless storehouse of expertise on fundamental problems in science and engineering--such as basic research into the forces that consume the centers of stars or refinements in high-speed computing, radiochemistry and precision optics.

In the hands of scientist Laura N. Mascio, for example, imaging software developed to recognize incoming warheads was transformed into a mammography device to detect breast cancer more effectively.

Other researchers are designing a better flywheel battery, making the clothing industry more competitive in the world market, developing neural net supercomputers for the IRS and helping Chrysler build better cars.

Cooperative research agreements with industry are at record highs. More than 700 companies have signed up with an Energy Department lab, up 70% in two years, officials said. Livermore has more than 100 such contracts.

Nonetheless, they occupy no more than about 5% of Livermore’s work force, lab officials said.

To keep their scientists employed, Livermore and other labs have aggressively solicited new business by moving into such fields as law enforcement, environmental cleanup and human genetics.

“In the past year, I have been inundated with weapons people and engineers who want to work with us,” said Arthur V. Carrano, director of Livermore’s Human Genome Center. “A lot of people in the weapons programs were looking for new venues and a lot of them got interested in health care.”

Critics eager to see weapons research curtailed even further contend that the labs are overestimating their ability to function as incubators of new industrial technology. They doubt that labs dedicated for so long to the exotic demands of warhead design can ever adjust to the more fickle demands of commercial entrepreneurs.

“The problem for the weapons labs is to avoid becoming hired guns, so to speak, for whoever wants to buy their expertise,” said Kevles at Caltech. “National labs ought to have some overarching goal that is related to the national purpose.”

Despite the enthusiasm for civilian research, some scientists are concerned that the labs face a crisis of creativity. “If the nuclear weapons program will not be the main source of technology advance in the labs in future years, what will be?” ask experts at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

In the meantime, the White House and Energy Department teams, along with congressional experts, are reappraising the marriage between science and the federal government.

In all, hundreds of federal laboratories, which receive about $25 billion a year--more than one-third of federal research funding--are under evaluation. Defense Department labs spend about $11 billion a year. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spends $3.5 billion annually. Under one proposal, the entire Energy Department could be abolished. Even the venerable U.S. Geological Survey, the nation’s oldest federally supported science organization, has become a candidate for closure.

“The question facing them is whether . . . large parts have to be written off as dinosaurs. Collectively, they desperately need a mission,” said Stuart W. Leslie, a Johns Hopkins University historian and author of “The Cold War and American Science.”

“The whole notion of endless scientific frontiers and basic research as the key to American security and prosperity is being re-evaluated,” he said.

No longer do the technical challenges of military preparedness command such a share of national resources. No longer can researchers garner big taxpayer-funded grants simply by holding out the possibility of a military application.

The prospect of a more conservative Congress next year makes some weapons lab scientists more optimistic about future funding, but most experts believe that the pressure to cut costs and reduce the budget deficit will outweigh any effort to revive military research budgets.

“When the Cold War ended, science lost its last remaining bastion of support--the fact that it was regarded as essential to national security,” said Robert Park, a former Los Alamos physicist and a spokesman for the American Physical Society, which represents many U.S. physicists.

“Now who needs it?” he said.

Tom Thomson knows that no one in the United States needs his special skills now.

But he has an eye on the day when his expertise will once more be in demand.

With nuclear tests banned for the foreseeable future, Thomson and his colleagues are studying ways that thermonuclear blasts can be simulated in the laboratory and studied in detail. Other designers are committing their expertise to videotape and CD-ROM disks, where it can be preserved for bomb makers as yet unborn.

In the interim, defense planners are laying the groundwork for the sophisticated scientific “stewardship” of the 3,500 thermonuclear warheads the United States intends to keep on hand in the decades to come--more than the country had in 1958. Those warheads--each with far more destructive power than the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima--are intended to be the keystone of U.S. military superiority for the foreseeable future.

Ironically, the scientist who was so instrumental in creating many of them believes today that they are useless.

Speaking with an openness rarely found among security-conscious nuclear weapons researchers, Thomson said he cannot imagine why anyone today would ever want to use these warheads, precisely because they are too powerful. They are, he said, “spite weapons” designed for annihilating a superpower in a nuclear Armageddon. They would be useless against the smaller military targets of a more modern, limited conflict.

“Why should we assume the weapons that won the last war will have anything to do with the next war?” Thomson asked. “I can’t think of any target for anything in our stockpile.”

He is quick to say he sees no credible nuclear threat for at least the next decade, but in his view that is no reason to give up on weapons design. He sounds wistful when he muses on the possibilities of a new generation of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that “could take out an aircraft carrier in the Pacific” yet elude detection.

“I don’t see any need to build the things,” he said, “but we ought to have an active (research) program.”

For Thomson, Dearborn, and Livermore itself, the future of such research is embodied in what until recently was one of America’s most closely guarded scientific secrets--a tiny pellet shaped like a cold capsule. The pellet, called a hohlraum, is used to trigger nuclear fusion in an experimental process called inertial confinement fusion.

The pellet would be used in a proposed $1.1-billion laser lab, called the National Ignition Facility. When barraged by lasers, the pellet ignites in a fusion reaction that promises a way to examine the titanic forces in a thermonuclear blast without field-testing a bomb.

In October, spirits at Livermore were buoyed when Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary approved a proposal to build the test lab there--one of the largest defense and energy projects of the next decade.

But there is no guarantee Congress will fund it.

Livermore scientists already have the NOVA laser--the largest and most powerful laser ever made--to simulate weapons effects and conduct about 300 intricate experiments every year that probe the basic physics of nuclear weapons. But that laser is not powerful enough to simulate fusion bombs. The proposed facility would generate temperatures above 10 million degrees Fahrenheit--the kind of heat created when a hydrogen bomb explodes.

Critics insist that there is no need for the more powerful laser. The National Ignition Facility, they say, is only an expensive sandbox to keep scientists such as Thomson occupied.

“But,” countered Thomson, “kids can learn a lot in a sandbox.”

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The Bombs They Built

By the best available estimates, the United States has 14,900 nuclear weapons today, compared to 29,000 nuclear warheads in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union. The precise number of nuclear weapons, their locations, yields and production histories are still secret.

How Bombs Work:

The atomic bomb starts a fission chain reaction in uranium or plutonium that, in a fraction of a second, unleashes intense radiation and explosive power equal to thousands of tons of dynamite. Today such fission bombs are mostly used as triggers in thermonuclear weapons.

Detonator

Explosive

Casing

Uranium or Plutonium Sphere

Neutron Source

***

The hydrogen bomb uses a fission bomb to compress deuterium and tritium at extremely high temperature to cause instant fusion, producing a blast equal to millions of tons of TNT.

Detonator

Explosive

Casing

Uranium or Plutonium Trigger

Fusion Fuel

Uranium Jacket

Neutron Source

***

How Times Have Changed:

U.S. strategic force levels today, as measured by the number of warheads, are the same as they were in 1972. Russian strategic weapons are believed to be at the same level as they were in 1982. By 2003, the number of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons will be equivalent to those in 1962, just after the Cuban missile crisis. Russian strategic nuclear forces will have returned to their 1976 level.

Bigger Than a Breadbox:

The 100 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium produced by the United States is so dense that it all could fit in a 6-by-6-foot box.

Trying Them On for Size:

The five declared nuclear powers--the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China--acknowledge conducting 2,031 nuclear tests since 1945. More than half of those were by the United States.

How Many Is Enough:

Since 1945, the United States has produced about 70,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union is estimated have produced about 55,000.

The Big Bang:

The explosive power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked in 1960 at about 19,000 megatons, or to 19 million kilotons.

Where Old Bombs Go:

The Energy Department’s Pantex plant near Amarillo, Tex., is the custodian of more than 6,000 bowling-ball-size “pits” of highly toxic plutonium retrieved from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Operational Nuclear Weapons: A Sampler

Weapon Developed Kilotons Number Bombs B-53-1 1962 9,000 50 B-61 1966 10-300 750 B83/B83-1 1983 1,200 650 Submarine ICBMs W76/Trident 1978 100 3,000 W88/Trident 1988 475 400 Cruise Missiles W80 1981 150 1,000 W80-1 1990 150 400 ICBMs W62/Minuteman III 1970 170 610 W78/Minuteman III 1979 385 610 W87-0/MX 1986 300 525

Sources: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; U.S. Department of Energy; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; “How Things Work by David Macaulay,”Nuclear Weapons Databook; Natural Resources Defense Council.

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Reinventing The Atom Shops

In the years after World War II, the federal government set up nine major national laboratories to capitalize on the expertise generated by building the first atomic bomb. Today, the Energy Department spends about $7 billion a year to operate them and its other research facilties. The labs are trying to find a new role--and new funding--in the post-Cold War world, while President Clinton wants to cut $10 billion in Energy Department spending.

The U.S. Energy Department’s National Laboratories

1) Los Alamos: Nuclear weapons, nonprolifertaion, remote sensing, advanced materials.

Employs: 7,249.

Budget: $1.24 billion.

2) Lawrence Berkeley: Nuclear and particle physics. Performs no classified research.

Employs: 2,618.

Budget: $307 million.

3) Lawrence Livermore: Nuclear weapons, fusion, human genome.

Employs 8,000.

Budget: $1.17 billion.

4) Sandia: Nuclear weapons, advanced materials, energy.

Employs: 8,450.

Budget: $1.4 billion

5) Pacific Northwest: Hanford Nuclear site clean-up, climate change.

Employs: 4,239

Budget: $525 million.

6) Idaho Engineering: Radioactive waste disposal, biotechnology, chemistry.

Employs: 7,182.

Budget: $737 million

7) Argonne: Advanced fission reactors, fusion, energy.

Employs: 5,271.

Budget: $694 million.

8) Oak Ridge: Nuclear energy, waste management, environmental protection.

Employs: 5,132

Budget: $772 million.

9) Brookhaven: Particle physics, nuclear medicine, biology.

Employs: 3,576.

Budget: $503 million.

Changing Ways at the Weapons Labs

While spending on weapons work represents a smaller piece of each lab’s overall budget today, the absolute level of weapons spending has stayed the same.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Science, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.