A Climate of Despair Nears Critical Mass at U.S. Labs

The nation’s premier nuclear weapon laboratories are losing highly trained staff, failing to attract new scientists and suffering from plummeting productivity and morale in the wake of embarrassing security scandals and intense scrutiny from Washington.

If left unchecked, senior managers and scientists at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories warn, the mounting problems soon may undermine the labs’ core mission: guaranteeing the safety and reliability of the nuclear weapon stockpile.

In three dozen interviews, officials insisted that they are moving quickly to tighten security and accountability at the labs. But they fear that micromanagement from Congress and the Energy Department over the last 16 months has done more harm than good.

“It’s destroying the nuclear weapons program in this country,” said Houston T. Hawkins, a security director at Los Alamos and former head of Air Force nuclear weapon programs. “This incessant, negative body-slamming of this institution is harming the national security.”

Numerous audits and investigations over the years have documented lax management by the University of California, which runs the labs under contract with the federal government, inadequate oversight by the Energy Department and porous security. And outside critics long have argued that the labs operate as independent fiefdoms that are resistant to reform.

But Congress’ creation of the new semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to oversee the labs and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson’s plan to restructure the university’s contract to manage the two labs have added to a mood of uncertainty and paranoia. Many of the new restrictions are seen as arbitrary and unwarranted.

Scientists feel like “we’re inside Stalag 17,” said C. Bruce Tarter, director of the Livermore lab, where attrition is the highest in years. “The microscopic focus of the outside world on the minutia of security has got to end.”

The impact is most dramatic inside the X Division, the top-secret area of Los Alamos that is directly responsible for maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal since Washington in 1992 suspended all underground nuclear tests consistent with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

“It’s been devastating,” said John C. Browne, director of the Los Alamos lab. “Productivity is very, very low in the X Division now. People are very depressed. It’s hard to come to work and be creative. They feel they’ve worked 20 or 30 years and now people are questioning their motives and abilities.”

Merri M. Wood, a 21-year veteran of the X Division who is in charge of maintaining the stockpile of B-61 thermonuclear bombs, said that morale is “the lowest I’ve ever seen” among the division’s 300 scientists and engineers.

“To get anything done now is very, very difficult,” Wood said. “We don’t talk about program deadlines anymore. They’re gone. The division is just dysfunctional.”

The FBI has treated part of the X Division as a crime scene, complete with yellow “do not cross” tape, as a federal grand jury investigates the still-unexplained loss in late March and reappearance in mid-June of two computer hard drives containing nuclear weapon data. Officials said that indictments are likely.

As a result, vaults containing top-secret blueprints, documents and other classified materials in the X Division remain sealed. The use of classified computers has been sharply curtailed. And FBI interviews with hundreds of scientists have created what Browne called a “general atmosphere of fear” that even an inadvertent error could lead to firing or prison.

The hard-drives case followed the highly political investigation of Wen Ho Lee, an X Division nuclear code developer. Lee has been jailed since December, awaiting trial for allegedly copying 50 years’ worth of classified nuclear weapon development and testing data onto an unsecure lab computer system and high-density portable tapes. Seven of the tapes are unaccounted for.

“The message [the X Division has] received from the rest of the country is, ‘You all are guilty of Wen Ho Lee’s downloading and the missing hard drives,’ ” Browne said. “It’s not fair. People are hurt and angry.”

But other parts of Los Alamos, nestled atop a rugged mesa in northern New Mexico, also are hurting.

“There are more people considering leaving than I’ve ever seen in this lab,” said Siegfried S. Hecker, a Polish-born scientist who first came to Los Alamos as a graduate student in 1965 and served as director from 1986 to 1997. He now runs a program that helps Russia secure nuclear weapons and materials.

As Hecker spoke, one member of his staff knocked on the door to say a final goodbye and another arrived moments later to discuss his future. “People are saying, ‘Maybe it’s not worth it anymore,’ ” Hecker said.

So far this year, 187 of the lab’s full-time employees have left Los Alamos, including 96 scientists and engineers. That compares to 137 scientists and engineers in all of last year, and 139 the year before.

But a disproportionate number of the scientists leaving the two labs are Asian American. Many complained of “an atmosphere of distrust” after the Wen Ho Lee case first hit the headlines in March 1999, according to Manvendra Dubay, an Indian-born scientist who heads the Asian American diversity working group at Los Alamos.

“FBI agents came in here and said all Chinese-looking people were potential spies,” he said. “They said things like, ‘Why are there so many Chinese restaurants here?’ ” A total of five Chinese restaurants serve the 19,000 people in Los Alamos and White Rock, the two communities closest to the lab.

Asian Americans constitute 2.4% of the work force at Los Alamos and their numbers at Livermore are similar.

Equally troubling has been a sharp drop in applications from Asian American scientists and postdoctoral students. The number of Asian American applicants for prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at Los Alamos, a traditional entry position, has dived from an average of 28 in each of the last two years to only three so far this year.

“It’s almost tantamount to ethnic cleansing at the labs,” said Hawkins, the lab’s international security director. “No one intended that . . . but that’s what’s happening.”

Many Asian Americans charge that Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan, was targeted for selective prosecution because of his Chinese ethnicity. They also complain that conditions of his incarceration are far too severe.

Chinese-speaking agents monitor Lee’s weekly visits with his family, for example, and the 60-year-old scientist is shackled when he is allowed out of his cell for an hour of heavily guarded exercise each day.

Two groups, Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education and the Assn. for Asian American Studies, have urged Asian and Asian American scientists to boycott the labs. The issue is critical because at least one-fourth of those in U.S. graduate schools in physics, mathematics and engineering are of Asian heritage.

“Most of the Asian American community feel Dr. Lee has been treated unfairly,” said Chang-Lin Tien, former chancellor of UC Berkeley, where a majority of graduate students in science and technology are from China. “It’s not just affecting people going to the labs. It’s affecting people going into science.”

Other young scientists are also shunning the labs. In 1998, 68 postdoctoral students of various nationalities were deemed worthy of committee review for special fellowships at Los Alamos. Last year, 65 got the nod. This year, only 38 were considered.

“We’re losing the best of the best,” said Allen Hartford, head of the postdoctoral science program at Los Alamos.

Plan to Force Polygraph Tests

One reason, officials said, is the plan last summer by Energy Secretary Richardson--given wide press attention--to force 5,000 lab scientists to undergo polygraph tests to screen for potential spies.

Lab staff members furiously denounced the tests as unreliable and ill-conceived and some still wear buttons emblazoned, “Just say No to Polygraph.” The Energy Department later scaled back so that about 800 people, mostly in special access programs, now must take the tests. But that figure may grow under recent congressional legislation.

By most accounts, recruitment has also been hurt by Congress’ decision last October to slash funding by one-third for unclassified lab-directed research and for official travel to scientific conferences. Young scientists at the labs are affected as well.

“It’s very hard to make a name for yourself in this environment,” said John L. Sarrao, 33, who researches new compounds.

Lab veterans fear that the recruitment and retention problems will undercut their ability to function as the current work force nears retirement. The average age in the X Division, for example, is 54. So the men and women who designed and tested America’s nuclear weapons will soon be leaving.

Other new rules also are under fire. Energy Department nuclear weapon funds account for 75% of the lab’s $1.3-billion annual budget. But except in special cases, the department and the labs last year barred using those funds to support scientists from 26 “sensitive countries”--including China, Russia, Taiwan and Israel--for even unclassified work.

Moreover, under a moratorium imposed by Congress last fall, the only foreign scientists allowed to visit the labs are those working to ensure the security of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and related programs. Otherwise, experts from “sensitive” countries cannot even visit unclassified work areas to discuss unclassified research without signed approval from Energy Secretary Richardson.

“You can get waivers but it’s not worth it,” said Gregory W. Smith, who does unclassified research in thermal acoustics.

Charles Keller, head of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Los Alamos, said he has waited three months for permission to invite Soroosh Sorooshian, an Iranian-born professor at the University of Arizona, to address his group on hydrology. Sorooshian is a member of numerous scientific panels, including the National Academy of Sciences.

“He advises the White House,” said Keller, who plans to take early retirement at 62 next April. “But he can’t come here to talk about water resources. Why? Because he’s an Iranian. So he’s a terrorist.”

Sidney Drell, a member of a presidential commission that issued a scathing report on the labs last year titled “Science at its Best, Security at its Worst,” says that the pendulum now has swung too far.

“The kind of loose management and casual atmosphere at the labs has to change,” said Drell, a professor emeritus at Stanford. “But you don’t want to get so rigid in security that you harm the science. That’s the danger now. They’ve created a siege mentality.”

No one yet argues that the nation’s nuclear weapons are in imminent jeopardy. And Los Alamos researchers still produce world-class science in disciplines as disparate as the study of magnetic fields in the brain and computer modeling of ocean currents.

That has not been easy. Many at the lab lost their homes when the Cerro Grande forest fire closed the lab for nearly three weeks in May and destroyed 400 nearby houses. The blaze was finally extinguished on July 20 and President Clinton has signed special legislation to provide $661 million to help victims of the blaze and to rebuild damaged lab facilities.

But with scorched hills and raw memories on all sides, many here are stunned to see Los Alamos now pilloried in public. Lab bulletin boards are plastered with newspaper and magazine cartoons mocking “Lost Alamos,” portraying the security staff as the Three Stooges, and showing a street vendor offering “Los Alamos Hard Drives--$5.95 each.”

Labs Largely Shielded From Outside Criticism

The shock has been magnified because the labs were largely shielded from outside criticism during the Cold War. “The perception is we’re a little arrogant,” said Mark Hodgson, who develops satellites to monitor nuclear tests. “And it’s true. We are arrogant. We think we’re a national treasure. Maybe we really don’t have a connection to reality.”

But many veterans complain in frustration that they are being blamed unfairly for implementing orders from Washington in the early 1990s to ease security rules.

In February 1991, in response to a George Bush administration initiative for government-wide standards on handling of classified information, the Energy Department eliminated “cradle-to-grave” tracking of secret documents that could have an impact on national security. The labs had used bar codes and other special markings to track each secret document.

In May 1992, the department similarly ended custody controls for Secret Restricted Data, which concerns nuclear weapons. And in January 1998, it told the labs to stop tracking top-secret information. Funding for security, meanwhile, was steadily cut and the number of guards reduced.

Each time, protests by senior lab officials were overruled.

“We were told if we protected information above Energy Department standards, it would be regarded as an unallowable cost, and if we proceeded, it would be regarded as waste, fraud and abuse,” Hawkins said.

Energy Department officials did not just discount pleas from the scientists. In at least one case, they misplaced a written appeal.

On March 1, 1999, according to testimony before a House Commerce subcommittee this month, the directors of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories (Sandia builds nonnuclear components of nuclear weapons) sent a joint signed fax to the Energy Department in Washington urging reinstatement of the bar codes and other tracking systems as quickly as possible.

But T.J. Glauthier, undersecretary of Energy, told the hearing that the department did not log faxes as they arrived and aides had been unable to locate the document.

The deeper problem is that the weapon labs--like the rest of the national security complex--have been slow to recognize and respond to the threat of the Internet, when a click on a keyboard can instantly transmit a trove of secret data to unseen recipients around the world.

The trove is immense. Los Alamos guards 6.5 million classified X-rays, documents, computer hard drives and other materials in its 96 vaults. If printed out, officials said, the secrets would fill 10,000 miles of bookshelves--or 20 times the capacity of the Library of Congress. But Los Alamos did not install a firewall to prevent unauthorized access to its unclassified computers until August 1998. And it did not move to stop staff members from downloading classified data to Zip drives and other portable media until last year.

A 50% boost in spending for cyber- and other security since the scandals has helped. In recentweeks, the lab has changed locks on its vaults, begun inspections of classified work areas and restored bar codes to 18,000 high-volume computer hard drives and other electronic media, among other moves.

Further changes are likely after Sept. 5, when the fledgling National Nuclear Security Administration is scheduled to complete a systemwide security review. But Gen. John Gordon, the new head of the agency, warned that he has no “magic answer” on how best to create a proper balance between security and science.

“The problems are not simple and they don’t lend themselves to simple fixes or solutions,” Gordon told a House Armed Services special oversight panel on July 11.

Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist who was a key member of the secret Manhattan Project team that built the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos and then helped found the Livermore lab, said that one answer is to protect only the most sensitive secrets and declassify the rest. “We are keeping secrets that leaked long ago,” said Teller, 92, who still works at Livermore.

Cutting-Edge Science and Tools

Like Los Alamos, Livermore trumpets its cutting-edge science and tools. But the mile-square complex, 50 miles southeast of San Francisco, has come under heavy fire for mismanagement of the $3.2-billion National Ignition Facility, the world’s most powerful laser. The Energy Department confirmed that construction was four years behind schedule and $1 billion over budget.

“People didn’t understand the complexity of assembling all that equipment,” said Bruce Warner, the new deputy project manager of the facility.

Construction now appears on track. But Livermore scientists are livid about some of the security rules dictated by Washington since the lapses at Los Alamos.

“The environment has become very repressive,” said George C. Miller, a 28-year Livermore veteran who is the lab’s associate director and was the chief designer of the B-83 nuclear bomb and the W-84 nuclear warhead.

Attrition has jumped as a result. So far this year, 317 people, including 130 scientists and engineers, have left Livermore. That compares to a total of 240 last year, including 102 scientists and engineers, and 203 the year before, including 71 scientists and engineers. In recent exit interviews, two-thirds said that they were unhappy with the negative climate at the lab or were concerned about their future.

“What’s frustrating to me is the perception that security here is bad and that we’re out of control,” said Bill Bookless, deputy assistant director for defense and nuclear technology at Livermore. “The result is we have no credibility.”

Almost without exception, scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore warned of far worse problems, including a mass exodus of skilled staff, if the UC contract to manage the labs is terminated, as several members of Congress have demanded.

Pulling the contract is not likely, but others apparently are willing to step in. When the last five-year UC contract was up for renewal in 1997, the University of Texas wrote a letter expressing interest in taking over in a consortium with the University of New Mexico and a possible private partner. Others point to the Lockheed Martin Corp., which manages the Sandia complex.

“You don’t have to look very far to find another contractor, and they probably can do a better job,” said Chris Mechels, a retired Los Alamos computer expert who is now an outspoken critic of UC management.

Most lab staffers insisted that the UC system provides irreplaceable independence and prestige. Many also cited UC’s generous retirement and pension packages, as well as guaranteed in-state fees at UC campuses for children of lab employees. UC officials, in turn, said that they have managed the labs since 1943 as a public service.

Doubts Among UC Faculty Members

But the recent scandals have raised doubts among many faculty members.

“We keep reading in the paper that the labs are a den of idiots and spies and we’re responsible,” said Lawrence B. Coleman, chairman of the UC Academic Council. “The faculty is embarrassed. And incensed. I think a substantial number are saying: ‘Let’s lose the labs.’ ”

UC President Richard C. Atkinson insisted that the nation would suffer most if UC loses its role.

“The university can survive very well without the weapons labs,” he said. “But I don’t think the nuclear labs and the whole defense establishment can survive without the scientific leadership the university provides.”

Not everyone agrees. In 1989 and again in 1996, two UC faculty panels called for ending the university contract. The head of the most recent review, Dr. Warren M. Gold, professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, said that his group’s criticism is still valid.

“The whole system of management and oversight is flawed,” he said. “Can someone else manage the labs? Well, we’re not managing them now.”

Some UC officials blame the Energy Department for a lack of direction, citing overlapping and competing lines of authority.

But James F. Koonz, UC executive director of lab operations, said that the labs also are at fault. Stricter management of lab administration and operations saved $150 million over the last three years, he said. But the reforms did not affect security.

“We tried,” Koonz said. “But the security world is immune. We couldn’t touch it.”

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Nation’s Premier Nuclear Weapon Labs

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Livermore, Calif.

Created: 1952

Budget: $1.334 billion

Employees: 8,060

Mission, as stated by the laboratory: To ensure that the nation’s nuclear weapons remain safe, secure and reliable and to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons worldwide. This mission enables Livermore programs in advanced defense technologies, energy, environment, biosciences and basic science to apply its unique capabilities and to enhance the competencies needed for our national security mission. The laboratory serves as a resource for the U.S. government and as a partner with industry and academia.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos, N.M.

Created: 1943

Budget: $1.2 billion

Employees: About 7,000

Mission, as stated by the laboratory: Los Alamos National Laboratory’s central mission is enhancing the security of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials worldwide. Its statutory responsibility is the stewardship and management of the nuclear stockpile.

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Sandia National Laboratories

Albuquerque

Created: 1945

Budget: $1.4 billion

Employees: About 7,500 (including all Sandia-related sites)

Mission, as stated by the laboratory: As a Department of Energy national laboratory, Sandia works in partnership with universities and industry to enhance the security, prosperity and well-being of the nation. It provides scientific and engineering solutions to meet national needs in nuclear weapons and related defense systems, energy security and environmental integrity and to address emerging national challenges for both government and industry.

Compiled by Jacquelyn Cenacveira, Los Angeles Times News Research