Controversy Over Nuclear Espionage Hits Bomb Scientists Hard : Secrecy: Taking the spying uproar personally, workers at Los Alamos bridle at complaints of a “culture” of lax security and arrogance at the weapons labs.

To Merri Wood, he was a colleague and fellow member of a small community of scientists--those who build nuclear bombs and know how to keep secrets.

Now she doesn’t quite know what to make of Wen Ho Lee.

Is he spy or scapegoat? Either way, she says, “There are no winners in this.”

The uproar over the loss of nuclear secrets to China, which has preoccupied politicians in Washington for months, is nowhere more personal than among those like Wood who live and work on the rugged mesa in northern New Mexico where, 54 years ago, scientists in secret and isolation built the world’s first atomic bomb.

A weapons computer scientist fired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory last March, Lee is still under investigation on suspicion that he gave China secrets about America’s nuclear arsenal.

He denies the allegation, but the investigation has unleashed an avalanche of charges about lax security and plain inattention when it comes to protecting nuclear weapons secrets. A culture of scientific arrogance, the politicians and pundits have become fond of calling it.

And the Los Alamos lab, 43 square miles of rugged cliffs, pine forests and high desert scrubland, is at ground zero of the spying brouhaha.

Already the mishandling of the Lee investigation has brought calls for discipline against a highly respected former lab director, and many of the scientists here worry about a backlash that could harm the lab’s ability to attract top talent in years to come.

Ironically, the Los Alamos scientists seem to know little more than the rest of America about what Lee may or may not have done.

“We don’t know what the truth is. We don’t know how much was really compromised, and we don’t know if Wen Ho is really guilty or not,” said Wood, who came to the lab 20 years ago with a PhD in physics to work on weapons design.

If he’s “guilty of incredible stupidity . . . he probably deserved firing but doesn’t deserve to be roasted internationally,” she continued. “And if guilty of espionage . . . how dare he do this?”

The words have a sharp edge to them, uncharacteristic for this scientist, who has a love of dance and has reared two children. She has spent most of her professional life helping to design the most lethal weapons of mass destruction and considers her co-workers as close family--the people who consoled her when her mother died and were with her when she went through the trauma of divorce.

“We do not deserve being tarred with a broad brush,” she said in an interview, dismissing suggestions that there is widespread disregard for security at Los Alamos. “There are a lot of us who have worked under difficult circumstances for a long time because we know security is important and we put up with it. Security is a way of life.”

On this she is not alone.

“You don’t cuss in church, and you don’t talk about classified information,” said Stephen Younger, a physicist who has designed bombs, seen them carve huge craters into the Nevada desert, and now heads Los Alamos’ weapons program.

Younger bridles at complaints by a presidential advisory panel of a “culture” of lax security and arrogance at the weapons labs.

“No one understands better what nuclear weapons can do than designers,” Younger said. “When you walk out to a crater that you’ve made and see this crater hundreds of feet in diameter and you know you held that object in your hand and you know everything about it, and it did this. You understand the need for secrecy.”

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There is a casual, relaxed feel to Los Alamos on the surface that belies the tensions. At midday a cafeteria is filled, with not a single coat and tie to be seen. Shorts and sneakers are not out of place.

“It’s very laid-back, but very intense intellectually,” said Terry Hawkins, who spent 25 years in Air Force intelligence and has been at Los Alamos for 11 years, now as a manager in programs dealing with nuclear nonproliferation.

The lab boasts 4,615 physicists, engineers and computer specialists with advanced degrees. Fewer than 900 of them work exclusively on nuclear weapons, and only a handful are actually designers. The 450 foreign visitors, including 93 from China, are not allowed “behind the fence,” as the divide between top-secret and unclassified research is known.

To work inside the fence is to work on the weapons programs. Once it was where new weapons were created; now it is where physicists and nuclear engineers use the world’s fastest computers to develop complex codes to assure, short of actual testing, that a bomb will actually work if needed.

Only those with special “Q clearances”--a level beyond top-secret--are allowed behind the fence, where engineers and physicists discuss over lunch the most hush-hush details about America’s nuclear arsenal.

For nearly a quarter-century, Wen Ho Lee worked in this environment as part of a weapons-design team. Even while under FBI suspicion for three years, the Taiwan-born computer specialist had daily access to the country’s most secret warhead codes.

After he was fired, it was disclosed that Lee had mysteriously transferred into his unclassified computer network thousands of files of super-secret “Legacy” codes--an archive of warhead development going back decades.

Lee continues to live in his modest, neatly landscaped one-story house in White Rock, a 15-minute drive from the lab. With one exception, he has declined interviews. In an appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” he denied giving China any secrets, although acknowledging the computer file transfers.

“I do not believe that Wen Ho is a criminal. He’s basically an honest man,” said Bryan Kashiwa, a computer scientist who has worked with him. Whatever he did, “I don’t believe he did it with any malicious intent.”

“The word ‘scapegoat’ comes up a lot,” said David Gurd, a physicist who works in the non-weapons areas. His wife, Pam, a computer programmer at the lab, isn’t so sure. “I think there’s something to it,” she said.

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The Lee investigation already has had a deep--and some say long-lasting--impact on the Los Alamos lab, one of the nation’s two nuclear weapons labs.

It was selected by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1943 for its isolation.

Younger says he has no problems with the new security measures ordered by the Energy Department. But he worries about overreactions.

“If you put a big fence around this place and say you can’t interact with the outside world because your work is too secret, this program will fail; the weapons program will fail,” he said. To maintain nuclear weapons without actual testing, “we need the very best science and technology available,” and sometimes that’s from a foreign country, he said.

Other scientists sense an unnecessary backlash has already begun, especially against the hundreds of foreigners who do unclassified research at Los Alamos. They question why they’re being singled out when no espionage or loss of secrets has ever been linked to a foreign visitor.

“There’s a high sense of anxiety, not just among foreign nationals but U.S. citizens too,” said Rajan Gupta, who came to Los Alamos from India 13 years ago as an Oppenheimer Fellow and decided to stay.

Some foreign scholars involved in exclusively non-weapons research complain that funding for projects is harder to get, their access to unclassified computers has been restricted, and their freedom of movement has been constrained.

Nothing has caused more of a stir than plans to require widespread polygraph testing of thousands of scientists with secret clearance. Some fear careers may be ruined by false readings.

Electronic mail also will be more closely monitored, and lab workers have been told to report “close and continuing contacts” between U.S. scientists and researchers from “sensitive” countries.

“The need to protect sensitive and classified information has never been an issue,” said Gupta. But he argues that the current atmosphere could be “disastrous for science at Los Alamos” and its ability to attract not only foreigners but American researchers.

“You are constantly being reminded that . . . tomorrow they could just decide, ‘We don’t really want you here.’ That is a very demeaning situation,” he said.

And many of the scientists question whether the loss of nuclear secrets was anywhere near as extensive as the rhetoric from Washington would suggest. Or whether the losses even occurred at Los Alamos.

No one may ever know how China obtained its information about the W-88 miniaturized warhead around which the Wen Ho Lee investigation is centered or even if it came from Los Alamos, U.S. intelligence experts acknowledge.

A report by a presidential intelligence advisory panel as well as a recent congressional report questioned why the FBI focused exclusively on Los Alamos when it first pursued the alleged theft of the W-88 warhead data in 1996, when such information also was available elsewhere.

That may all be irrelevant to Los Alamos and its scientists, though.

Klaus Lacker, a native of Germany who has worked at Los Alamos for 15 years, including five years on classified research, worries about the impact on general scientific research if the issue becomes embroiled in presidential politics.

“People here haven’t got the feeling that it’s hit bottom yet,” he said.