Regents Scrutinize UC’s Role in Security at Nuclear Weapons Labs

Weighing academia’s goal of freely exchanging ideas against national security’s need for secrecy, the University of California Board of Regents on Thursday began reexamining its own responsibilities in plugging leaks at the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories.

In a rare “regents only” meeting, the board was briefed by leaders of the Department of Energy facilities who have tightened lab security measures amid criticism in Congress that they have ignored possible Chinese espionage and other potential losses of classified information.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who said he has been “deeply troubled” by security breaches, asked UC President Richard C. Atkinson to set up an independent panel to determine if the university should play a bigger role in safeguarding secrets at the labs it has managed for more than 50 years.

Bustamante, who is a regent by virtue of his elected office, said he has been disturbed by news reports “scapegoating the university, implying that the university has not done its job.”

“The university was told that the federal government was handling security,” Bustamante said, an arrangement UC officials have always accepted. “I think we need to challenge that.”

Atkinson called the independent panel a “very good idea,” but said before the meeting that he wanted some time to consider all of the implications before moving forward.

If such a panel is formed, it will join half a dozen reviews of security policies and practices at the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe, N.M., and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of Oakland.

Critics in Congress have pounced on the labs and the Department of Energy, complaining of sloppy management since the FBI began investigating a former Los Alamos nuclear weapons computer scientist for possible espionage on behalf of China.

The Energy Department on Thursday released a statement saying, “We are interested in any suggestion that the regents might have to help [the Department of Energy] further strengthen its security and counterintelligence programs.”

The regents’ self-examination on Thursday was prompted by a letter Bustamante sent to Atkinson last month, asking how UC officials handle the “inherent conflict” between the scientists’ need for openness and sharing of information, and the absolute need for secrecy about some research to protect national interests.

“I don’t approach a critical analysis of this issue lightly,” he wrote. “But it might be time to rethink the nature of this relationship.”

Atkinson responded that “the apparent tension between security and intellectual inquiry and openness is an inherent fact of life for Livermore and Los Alamos, independent of who manages these laboratories.”

He wrote that “effective security and excellent science are not mutually exclusive,” noting that lab researchers interact with scientists worldwide to stay at the cutting edge of their fields. “If these interactions were diminished, the quality would decline and our national security would suffer.”

Bustamante said he doesn’t believe the university should end its relationship with the labs. Neither should the university be so passive, he said, given that the FBI only recently discovered that a former lab employee had transferred computer files on nuclear weapons from a classified system at Los Alamos to an insecure office network between 1983 and 1995. The FBI has no evidence that the top-secret material was provided to anybody else, but it has not ruled out the possibility. No charges have been filed.

“There is clearly enough blame to go around,” Bustamante said of the security breach. “The important part is that we never let it happen again, if we can possibly avoid it. We should be more engaged.”

UC’s Contracts Expire in 2002

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, besides announcing stepped-up security measures last week, said the University of California will not be granted an automatic extension as lab manager when its current $25-million annual contract expires in 2002.

Energy Department officials quickly moved to clarify his statement, saying that it is too early to determine what will happen to the UC contracts. That decision, a spokesman said, will not “be contemplated until 2001 at the earliest.”

The University of California has managed the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore weapons labs--as well as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which does unclassified research--since they were opened in the 1940s and early ‘50s. UC has never had to compete for the contracts, said lab spokesman Rick Malaspina.

In the post-Cold War era, a growing portion of lab work is no longer classified, ranging from AIDS and cancer research and mapping human genes to energy conservation.

Although the regents refused to comment after their closed-door session, some of their debate over academic freedom and national security was foreshadowed in a flurry of letters in recent weeks.

Frank W. Clark Jr., a longtime lawyer and regent, wrote that regardless of the recent allegations, he had “seen nothing to date of tangible evidence that there have been any violations of national security at either of the laboratories.”

Furthermore, he said, the university often must balance intellectual openness with a need to know, particularly in certain high-stakes medical and scientific research, “which we keep extremely confidential until such time as the applications for the patents are filed.”

William T. Bagley, another longtime regent and lawyer, suggested that the regents not try to micromanage such national security concerns, and instead “allow the university administration and the Department of Energy to ‘handle’ any problems that we have. The university gets along very well except--at times--when the board [of regents] inserts itself into administrative offices.”