Abstract
Since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons scientists at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory have faced an unanticipated threat to their work, from politicians and administrators whose reforms and management policies—enacted in the name of national security and efficiency—have substantially undermined the lab's ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile. Morale and productivity have suffered at Los Alamos—and at the nation's other weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore. The institutional decline of Los Alamos has occurred in three distinct phases: beginning with an overreaction to the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee's downloading of secret computer codes, exacerbated by the heavy-handed leadership of Admiral Pete Nanos, and continuing under new management by a for-profit company that focuses more on personal bonuses than on scientific achievement. The author writes that security lapses at Los Alamos are not, as media and government officials have portrayed them, the result of a culture of arrogance and carelessness. More likely, they are symptoms of structural flaws in the workplace, but it is easier to stereotype and scapegoat scientists than to address these structural problems.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, established by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the remote high desert of New Mexico during World War II, is one of two nuclear weapons design laboratories in the United States. The other, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, sits on the edge of California's wine country. Famous for developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Los Alamos is now a $2 billion-a-year enterprise that sprawls across 43 square miles of piñon-covered desert mesas. I have been studying the tiny, esoteric cadre of American nuclear weapons scientists since 1987, when a very tolerant group of faculty in my graduate anthropology program agreed to let me see whether I could do for nuclear weapons scientists what older generations of anthropologists had done for headhunters, cannibals, and polygamists. Call me the Margaret Mead of the weapons labs, if you like.
When I first made contact with America's nuclear weapons scientists in the waning years of the Reagan administration, they were reeling from the Nuclear Freeze movement's energetic attempts to put them out of business. In 1982 and 1983, about 2,300 people, chanting that Livermore and Los Alamos were US Auschwitzes, were arrested for civil disobedience at the Livermore Laboratory. Having survived the antinuclear protests of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War a few years later, American nuclear weapons scientists are now finding that the main threat to their craft comes from an unexpected source: politicians and administrators who are supposed to be on their side. As so often seems to be the case, well-meaning attempts to make the country more secure are having the opposite effect.
Nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos now say that morale there is the worst it has ever been in the lab's seven-decade history, and that Los Alamos's ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile has been substantially undermined. This institutional havoc has been wrought not by the left but by congressmen and government officials claiming to act in the name of national security and efficiency. They framed Los Alamos as an institution in need of reform and, by "improving" management practices, reduced the laboratory's effectiveness. Their counterproductive actions were often justified by an assumption, largely erroneous, that Los Alamos had an organizational culture characterized by arrogance and carelessness.
Act 1: The Wen Ho Lee affair
The institutional decline of Los Alamos began on March 6, 1999, when the New York Times published a front-page story (Risen and Gerth, 1999) titled "China stole nuclear secrets for bombs, US aides say." The article said that "a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American" had stolen nuclear weapons design secrets on behalf of the Chinese. Within days, after Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson leaked his name to journalists off the record (Stober and Hoffman, 2001), Wen Ho Lee was publicly identified as the spy on TV broadcasts and in newspaper stories around the country. For months, until Lee was finally arrested and charged on 59 counts of mishandling national security information, cable TV news crews camped outside his modest Los Alamos home, hoping for a glimpse of the quiet man accused of being the new Julius Rosenberg. Convoys of FBI agents trailed Lee and his wife whenever they went to the store for milk.
On December 10, 1999, Lee was arrested. Described as an extreme danger to US national security, he was held in solitary confinement for 278 days awaiting his day in court. When he was finally brought to trial, the case against him rapidly fell apart; 58 of the 59 counts against him were dropped, and he was released with time served for one count of mishandling classified information. "I believe you were terribly wronged," said Judge James Parker, a Ronald Reagan appointee, from the bench. "I am truly sorry that I was led by our executive branch of government to order your detention last December" (Lee, 2001: 2).
While Lee was clearly a victim of racial profiling and media-enabled hysteria about Chinese espionage, this is not to say that he had done nothing wrong. He had, in fact, removed from the lab computer copies of top-secret nuclear weapons simulation codes, a serious offense for which he surely deserved to lose his clearance and his job. There is no evidence, however, that he ever gave the codes to a foreign country or that others at the lab had engaged in similar misdeeds. Indeed, many of Lee's colleagues were horrified to hear of what he had done. When asked whether other scientists illicitly copied or took home secret documents, one Los Alamos weapons designer told me, "What Wen Ho did was like driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone."
Nevertheless, media accounts reinforced the perception that Lee was not an aberration but rather a symptom of a culture of laxness at Los Alamos. For example, FBI Director Louis Freeh responded to the Lee case by saying that "the culture [at Los Alamos] has not been security-conscious" (Deseret News, 1999); he demanded tighter rules for the handling of the lab's secrets.
During the following summer, the notion that Lee represented something more pervasive hardened when an audit found that two disks containing sensitive nuclear weapons design information were missing from the vault where they were normally stored (Santa Fe New Mexican, 2000). Coming before the charges against Lee were dismissed, this discovery amplified perceptions of what USA Today (2000: 26a) called "a culture of security sloppiness" at Los Alamos. Senators, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were accusing the labs of "being encased in a culture of indifference and arrogance" (Guthrie, 2000). One senator, Richard Bryan of Nevada, was said by the Las Vegas Review-Journal to be deeply concerned about "a culture of seeming unconcern about security" at not just Los Alamos but other nuclear weapons facilities as well (Tetreault, 2000). The Albuquerque Journal (2000) editorialized: "[D]ue for some attitude adjustment is the scientist-king culture in the national laboratories, which has resisted past attempts to bring greater security and accountability into the workplace."
The missing disks showed up behind a copy machine at the lab within a few days of being reported missing. It was generally believed that a scientist had taken them to his or her office without returning them in a timely fashion. If so, they would have been kept in a safe in the scientist's office, and the disks' contents would not have been compromised. In other words, they were assumed to be the classified equivalent of overdue library books. Nevertheless, an onslaught of investigation and reform ensued. FBI agents descended on Los Alamos, administering polygraphs to weapons scientists, commandeering their offices, and, in some cases, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night and driving them two hours to Albuquerque for interrogations. A new federal agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, was created to superintend the weapons labs and a general, Eugene Habiger, was put in charge of overseeing security at Los Alamos and Livermore. Meanwhile, weapons scientists were taken away from their weapons work for retraining, and new security procedures were adopted—whether necessary or not. One of the country's most senior nuclear warhead designers was dejected that summer when I visited Los Alamos and found him going through all of the secret papers in his locked file cabinets, complying with a new management directive to stamp "secret" on the second-to-bottom page of each report in case the bottom page, already stamped "secret," fell off. This is what he was doing instead of ensuring that the warhead assigned to him was in good working order.
One legacy of the Lee and missing-disk incidents was a widespread narrative in the media and among political officials that the scientists of Los Alamos had developed a culture of arrogance and noncompliance, and that US national security was endangered by it. This increasingly powerful perception was, to a considerable degree, grounded in processes of collective misrecognition. While Lee had made illicit copies of weapons simulation codes, all but one of the criminal charges against him were found baseless, and the weakness he had exploited in the lab's security system was immediately closed through the removal of floppy disk drives from lab computers. Nobody else would ever be able to make copies of weapons codes as Lee had.
As for the missing disks, their brief sojourn away from the vault was surely a product not so much of a dysfunctional culture at Los Alamos but of the difficulties posed by its built environment. Los Alamos's sister lab in Livermore did not have problems with missing disks, partly because it had moved to a diskless system, accessible by secure cable, for much of its classified data and partly because it did not insist on a central repository for all removable disks at the lab. With Los Alamos's requirement that disks be stored in a central repository, although they were used by scientists spread across several mesas within a vast territory, the lab had a situation almost guaranteed to generate missing disks. Still, it is easier to blame nuclear weapons scientists for a "culture of arrogance" that fits populist sloganeering about overeducated elites than to investigate structural factors and material practices that may be causing problems.
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