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The Political Assault On Los Alamos National Laboratory
Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has a great article on the troubles at Los Alamos over the last decade. 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."
Are atomic weapons still needed ? i think they aren'T.
aaaaaaa
"Hoping Nanos would take the hint, employees planted âoefor saleâ signs on his lawn in the middle of the night. He once came out of church to find an obscene bumper sticker had been affixed to his car while he was praying. Things eventually got so bad that Nanos had a safe room installed in his home. In May 2005, faced with an unmanageable situation, Nanos abruptly resigned. âoeThe corks they are a-poppinâ(TM) tonight,â reacted one poster on the blog."
The guy may not have been a pleasure to work with, but if this is not a sign of sloppiness and arrogance (and severe lack of human compassion and discipline), then I don't know what is.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
...the idea of disappearing into a cloud of vapour at any time doesn't scare me anymore. I grew up with dive-under-the-desk drills, "Protect And Survive", "Threads" (which terrified me the first time I watched it) and "When The Wind Blows" (which made me cry). I'm so used to Government using scare tactics to get its own way I'm slap happy to them.
What does frighten me is the fact that people are still scared of what TPTB to put it bluntly, won't ever do because they have too much to lose; TPTB know people are scared because people are dumb, panicky animals and that is ripe material to rob, rape and pillage.
You can't rob, rape and pillage radioactive ash.
Those who have everything they want at a whim are more afraid of losing it than those who have to scrimp, save, recycle, reuse and fight for it. I don't know why, it's just the way I see it. Probably some primal thing which says "You can't take it with you - you leave this world as you entered it, cold and naked." Or maybe I've just accepted the inevitability of corporeal mortality.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Given the nature of the work and it's importance to National Security (I won't argue that point) the work of the individuals at LANL should be supervised and standards maintained; no question about it. I do agree that congress and previous administrations have over-reacted to situations but then again, we're talking about the stewardship of the nuclear arsenal here. Also, when have we never seen congress over-react to an even perceived problem where national security is concerned. The people who work at LANL have to be creative in what they do because since the Test Ban treaties they're work focuses on more theoretical simulations than actually getting to set off a nuke, and creativity and discipline don't necessarily go hand in hand, that also has to be realized. Leslie Groves had the same problems when they were building LANL and the first atomic weapons and he constantly was frustrated with the scientists because of the cultural differences between the military and academia. Despite all of this and under the tightest security all it took was a few sympathetic individuals to let the secrets out that gave the Soviets a huge leap in their project.
I think what has to happen with places like Livermore and LANL is that congress and the administration have to work to maintain the secrecy necessary to protect the stockpile but also let the people flourish within the confines of the work being done. Those individuals realize the importance of the work and do their best day in and day out to do that job well, so it's not wholly necessary to put clamps on them that create barriers to their well being and satisfaction with their work.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
One wonders if Richard Feynman could work there now if he were still alive, given his hobby of safecracking and lockpicking to leave prank notes. But hey, it's not like they were doing anything important, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#The_Manhattan_Project
Anyone know if there are any eccentrics left at the labs, or has it really been purged of 'weird people' like Feynman?
The Department of Energy has been saved from elimination because Rick Perry forgot about it.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is far more likely to actually be working with classified documents that if released or stolen would prove to be terribly harmful to the US than, say, what happened to the State Department recently. What Wen Ho did was not like "driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone," rather it was like driving 100mph through a residential neighborhood while dozens of kids were walking across the street as their bus was unloading. It's so reckless and irresponsible that "even if he didn't kill someone," it shows an unacceptable lack of concern for the safety of others and his community.
I know many slashdotters like to chuckle about overclassification, but consider where he was working. Is it really wrong for the federal government to put its boot firmly up the ass of a scientist who works at one of our two nuclear weapons laboratories when he thinks basic procedures are beneath him?
About 20 seconds of effort yields the following: The total number of warheads of all levels of readiness stands at 9,962 warheads (with another 589 in "inactive stockpile" waiting to be dismantled). That is plenty to lay waste to any major country but hardly enough to destroy the world's military forces, let alone the world itself.
The 2% of the stockpile you recommend would be about 200 warheads, which might be enough to deter Iran, but not (in my opinion) China -- and certainly not both at once.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
They should just outsource the handling of nuclear weapons to a contractor. It's much cheaper and safer that way.
Bomb makers don't get to make bombs? My heart is broken. Boo-hoo for them; happiness for the rest of us.
There's a difference between "punishing a guy for mishandling classified documents" and "having a fucking Cabinet member give his name to the press as a spy and traitor when there was no evidence of that fact at all".
What happened to Wen Ho Lee was the DOE director Richardson, a cabinet level Hispanic, former UN ambassador, former congressman, was widely expected to the the vice presidential running mate. This happened on his watch and the republicans were determined to destroy him for something that was not even his fault (the infractions occured before his time in office). He in turn massively over reacted. The FBI went nuts. Wen Ho Lee was put in solitary confinement and only allowed to have one book at a time. I've no doubt Wen Ho deserved jail time, but even the judge who let him out said he had be abused by the process. But the over reaction continued to play out politically and the lab was the loser.
So strip him of his job, his home and his security clearance. But don't leak his name to the press and make him hounded for months, followed by keeping him in an isolation cell on suicide watch for nearly a year by misleading a judge about the possibility that he might flee to China. For Chrissake, the man was from Taiwan, not China, and had a natural born American wife and children. Red hysteria at its worst, and this under a supposedly freedom-loving and rights-respecting Clinton administration.
For those that love W don't read this post. It isn't for you.
Put Pete in charge of the nuke_you_lerz people. He's gota son named George. Oh and the guy that runs the horsey show, put him in charge of that, whatcha call it, rescueing department.
-- W
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
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.
The case did not "fall apart" when it went to trial, because it never went to trial. I'm also struggling to comprehend how the case could have "fallen apart", because they found classified information in his house and his unclassified computer, and what other evidence do you need for charges of mishandling classified information? (note: the case did "fall apart", in that he should have been charged with much more but wasn't, but the 59 charges were legit)
Here's how espionage cases against people with clearances are always handled : you are charged with whatever crime you are guilty of, then are offered a plea deal for a lesser offense in exchange for two things. First, you must honestly relate everything you leaked, so the damage to national security can be assessed, and then you must promise a newly discovered silence about matters classified. For obvious reasons the vast majority (I can't think of any who haven't in recent history) of the accused take the plea deal and never go to court.
Except for Wen Ho Lee. He refused to plea down to a lesser charge (in this case a single charge), as most of these people do. So they stuck him in solitary, because without agreeing to #2 he was still a threat to national security. Finally, after 278 days he relented and accepted the plea deal. He got off lucky, because the FBI botched the investigation and he could have been prosecuted for a good bit more -- export violations for one, for discussing nuclear information with Chinese scientists.
The arrogance charge is right on the money. The relaxed attitude toward the law from people at the lab is astounding. The mere fact that Wen Ho Lee has become something of a martyr is proof.
...but this doesn't happen in a vacuum.
To suggest that the 'poor scientists at Los Alamos' have a difficult time being messed-with by the politicians is a touch disingenuous unless one mentions that the facilities have had a spate of data losses, espionage, and a number of other problems that have given the political class a REASON to stick their noses in.
And while we're at it, I'm going to guess that this exact same cri di couer could have been issued by scientists in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s. IANANS, but I'm going to guess that the level of government crap Los Alamos' scientists have had to put up with is extremely high pretty much ALL the time.
-Styopa
people motivated only by personal gain, with little to no working knowledge of the operation, have put in place measures that prevent workers from doing their jobs effectively, without bothering to consult with those workers about how to do things properly. So Los Alamos is being run like pretty much every branch of government and every business in America.
He was guilty of taking weapons simulation codes.
Not being able to prove that he gave the codes to the Chinese is different from him being innocent.
The big question then becomes, if you really think he wasn't giving them to the Chinese what exactly do you think he was going to do with them outside the lab?
I just read the entire paper. Before reading it I was neutral and largely ignorant of Los Alamos' problems and culture. After reading it I tend to believe that the culture there is indeed one of arrogance and privilege and that the author, Gusterson, is their mouthpiece.
The paper is not even close to a scientific treatment. It is a series of conclusions, allegations, and characterizations more suited to a letter to the editor (or a Slashdot rant like this one) than a NSF funded study report. He never once describes the scientific culture that is the subject, nor does he analyze it. Nor does he analyze the management. He simply hurls characterizations and insults at it. The paper reads like a list of grievances brought forward by a shop steward.
To use Gusterson's words against him. He says, "Recent condenmations of Los Alamos have been based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of its culture." But his paper does exactly that, it seems to be based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of the management.
I'm still ignorant of the actual culture at Los Alamos. However, if there was a calcified culture of arrogance and privilege, and that culture sent forth someone to present their views, I would expect it to sound exactly like Gustafson's paper. If that paper were the only evidence, I would say "Fire them all."
Ironic, isn't it? It wasn't too long ago that it was the left that was the greatest political threat to Los Alamos and LLNL.
But today, as the article points out, it is the right, mostly starting with the Bush Administration. I'm no fan of people scapegoating George W. Bush for all of the ills of the nation, but here is a case where his administration had a profoundly negative effect upon national security. The same kind of paranoid mismanagement on a gross scale that gives you TSA cavity searches every time you get on a plane is gutting the intellectual and scientific capabilities of these institutions.
It is a further irony that we criticize fundamentalist Muslim nations for impeding the progress of science and technology, but we are allowing this to happen in our own backyard. We owe much of our technology today-- the internet, integrated circuits, a national highway system, GPS, etc to nuclear defense research and spending.
We are told we cannot compete with developing nations for manufacturing, and must do so through science and innovation. But when scientific research and scientists are undermined, then what future do we have?
The failed policies of the Bush administration and Bechtel's seizure of power must be reversed. Nuclear science should be returned to the capable hands of nuclear scientists, not a for-profit corporation that has proven hostile to science and scientists all in the name of short-term profit. Bechtel has acted against the national security interests of the US and is not fit to hold a government contract. The truth is that government-funded science does produce tremendously useful results, and nowhere has that been more apparent than in nuclear defense research. We cannot afford to lose that.
Nano obviously misunderstood why the people were working there. It was fun. Big ass machines making big bangs and sparks, working with the raw elements of nature, doing things no one else was doing. But a dweeb like him telling so many boffins to march to his tune? He was taking the fun out of it. There are other jobs out there, or there's retirement. He couldn't force them to work at Los Alamos and so they left. Why should any citizen be forced to work someplace that makes him miserable? People vote with their feet all the time. Only pocket dictators think this is wrong.
as a non-scientist working at LANL, I would say that this article is spot on.
After reading the article, I don't disagree that Wen Ho should have been fired and declassified. However, the government not only "put its boot firmly up the ass of [Wen Ho]", but firmly up the ass of two (formerly) world-class research institutions (and yes, they do other research besides nuclear weapons research there - papers on nuclear weapons don't get published in peer-reviewed journals.)
This is a classic example of "big government." They should have slapped the original LANL admins on the wrist after Wen Ho, but instead they cleaned house and wasted a lot of money on Bechtel.
Why is Richardson's ethnicity relevant?
I don't know anything about LANL, I have never been their, so I am (maybe) just guessing.
To give people an idea of just how sensitive this type of data is, this is basically what is already known publicly about making a lightweight fusion-boosted warhead that can be put on a rocket:
The ideal fissile material is Plutonium-239. It should contain less than 10% Pu-240 and ideally less than 2% Pu-240
This can be made in research reactors, using technology available in public literature.
The amount used in a simple implosion bomb is 4-6kg
It can be extracted from spent nuclear fuel by a solvent extraction process using the PUREX process ( which is again described in open litterature )
A 2-point explosion system can be made by using an air-gap lens. Detailed analysis of how such a lens could be shaped is available in open litterature.
Boosting the device is best done with an equal mixture of pressurized Deuterium and Tritium. About 5 grams total is needed.
Deuterium is readily available on the open market, and Tritium can be produced from lithium in a research reactor.
The plutonium can be stabilized in its delta phase by addition of about 3% gallium.
To prevent oxidation the plutonium can be gold plated.
Now, however:
Optimal yield is achieved when the deuterium-tritium reaction burns close to completion while the fissile material is still in a dense configuration. This means the fission chain reaction ought to start early enough to heat the hydrogen isotopes to ignition temperature quickly, but not too early as that may result in inefficient compression. The exact timing of the initiating neutron pulse is therefore very important, and depends on the precise characteristics of the bomb. Determining the optimal timing is believed very difficult without nuclear testing.
If the information he copied detailed the dimensions, composition and timing of the fission primary, then such information leaking to the public would essentially allow anybody that acquired weapons grade plutonium and tritium to create a highly compact nuclear warhead, small enough to fit on a rocket or easily hidden in a small space. The very first device to make use of this technology had a weight of about 40 pounds, and a yield similar to that of the Hiroshima bomb.
Speaking as the author/creator/owner/maintainer of the original LANL, The Real Story blog, http://parrot-farm.net/lanl-the-real-story/, and as a person who spent 20 years on staff at LANL, I can tell you that Hugh Gusterson's paper, if anything, understates the levels of incompetence, arrogance, and these days under its new corporate ownership, the *greed* demonstrated by the management of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The place had become nearly completely dysfunctional during the Nanos period, and is now simply treading water. The primary goal and business plan these days is to ensure that the annual award fee is received in it's entirety. Science has taken a back seat to making money for the LLC that now owns the contract for running the place.
--Doug Roberts LANL, Retired 2005
The DoE was the third department that Perry couldn't recall.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
People with that level of clearance know what the consequences are if they fuck up or somebody is out to get them and that they can be shut away in solitary for a very long time while due process is taking its time.
Hell even when they leave that world under good circumstances, they have an anally inserted tracking device that follows them for years.
I met the guy a few times, actually. He was a temporary director for my department and still works in our company. Very nice guy, very willing to sit down and talk with anyone. I don't know about his attitude towards the sciences, but when it came to new technology in navy projects he's like an excited 12 year old in a candy story.
Work on them at home? Not every security breach is a deliberate attack by whatever foreign power is closest to the perpetrator's ethnicity. Ignorance, arrogance and laziness are far more powerful and widespread forces of destruction.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Republicans are racist, duh
I enjoyed reading it
Los Alamos was always a weird superposition of wild-eyed scientists and military hardasses. They were Bohemian geniuses and visionaries, but they were surrounded by armed guards from the start, and they built an atomic bomb. The superposition persisted, against all odds, as the decades went by. If it has finally collapsed now, then I suppose that's a shame, but the wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.
When I was a post-doc doing strictly civilian stuff in theory division in the middle 1990s, I worked and socialized with people who would have fit in pretty well with Feynman and Oppenheimer. We pretended we were in a place like Cambridge or MIT, but we wore badges. We stayed outside The Fence. On the building's top floor there was a gate with a palm reader. Every paper we wrote had to be vetted by the lab's full-time censors, to make sure our work on quantum information and black holes wasn't giving away any nuclear secrets. We got paid unusually well to be post-docs, and after our couple of years we mostly went on to other places, in the academic mainstream. But Los Alamos was a cool experience, and though I don't really understand why the Lab paid us to do it, we did some neat stuff.
Theory Division was a small and probably quite atypical part of the Lab. I think we did have a very different culture than a weapons lab was supposed to have, but I don't think we did any harm by it. We had no secret material to guard or lose; we were outside The Fence. Heaven knows why the Lab paid us to do stuff unrelated to its primary mission, but it did so knowingly and deliberately. Maybe we were some sort of PR exercise. It's whatever happened to the other lab divisions, the big ones, that is the real story. I mention my experience in 'T' division just as a sidelight.
Indeed. What few people seem to realize is that while the principles of nuclear weapons are simple indeed... the actual engineering is anything but.
The real problem in our society isn't the lack of STEM graduates... it's the lack of enough people who work with real world stuff and raw materials to appreciate this.
What reason did he have for removing top-secret nuclear weapons simulation codes from the lab?
wen ho lee was making backups of his explosion simulation code because he was sick of it getting destroyed by the incompetent IT managers at LANL. he threw some of them in a dumpster. they had absolutely zero, nothing to do with the w-88 warhead, he didn't even work on that project.
there were literally dozens of FBI agents assigned to the Wen Ho Lee case. they kept him in solitary confinement for months on end, something they dont even do to child rapists and murderers, or even nazi war criminals in WWII
while the FBI was spending millions of dollars on his case, and had agents out digging through dumpsters looking for old IBM tapes, you know what year it was? 1999.
you know who else was in the US in 1999? Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
Guess who the FBI wasn't paying attention to while it was going on these wild fucking goose chases, looking for 'Chinese nuclear spies'. China has had nukes since the 60s. There aren't a whole lot of fucking secrets to them. You smash uranium together, you get a big boom. A lot of Wen Ho Lee's simulation code was based on commonly known academic research that had been published in journals. But that didn't stop certain people from throwing millions of dollars down a black toilet hole looking for the 'Chinese Spy'.
You want to find a Chinese Spy? Oh, lets look at every manufacturer that has outsourced production to China. now the military (according to slashdot yesterday) is having problems with massive fake stuff made in china coming into their supply chain .Who moved the supply chain to China? When did they do it? Do you think having every last bit of your economy depend on the production facilities controlled by the Red Army and the Communist Chinese Party is a little bit bigger of a threat to national security than some fucking old man writing shitty fortran routines that are largely academic exercises, and losing some of them in a dumpster?
Mihdhar and Hazmi, in 1999, and 2000, were taking flying lessons. There were, actually, two FBI guys who knew about them, but their bosses decided they shouldn't be able to pass that information along to FBI HQ. There was another FBI guy, maybe you have heard of him, John P O'Neill, who was on the trail of Al Qaeda's agents in the US, when bureaucratic fuckwits with gigantic political sticks up their ass, and an inability to understand reality because of intellectual laziness and stupidity, fired him , and he was working security guard duty at the WTC when it went down.
People like you, who are more interested in your own personal emotions than in reading books and studying reality, are the reason that 9/11 happened.
you stupid, ignorant fuckwad
full of people that you chopped the limbs off of and ate, like in The Road, well, i guess we should put you in prison too.
But hey, whats this 'if' stuff. Here's what we know about cannibals in modern society.
1. most of them are white
2. most of them are male
3. alot of them visit sites similar to slashdot
4. you have a basement
5. you are not a vegetarian
holy shit ! call the fucking FBI
the fact is that you can build a nuclear bomb with 1940s technology. know what else was state of the art in the 1940s? nylon. tube amplifiers. black and white television. color movies.
the 'gun type weapon' is so simple a child could build it. half the shit on mythbusters is more complicated than a gun-type uranium weapon. refining the uranium is a pain in the ass, but again, it just takes a lot of fucking money, there isn't any secret formula. there is no mystery. its not going back in the bottle. its like saying that we can stop people from building guns or airplanes with missiles on them. it doesnt work that way.
Your ignorance is astonishing. If a gun type weapon is so simple to build, then please define for me the effects of insertion rate.
Thank God the Government is also going to protect the intertubes now.
Function, as they have society at large.
That said, IMHO the environment there was pretty horrible since the mid 1980's.
Quite a few decent scientists were still there (but many were leaving); but there were just as many guys who's main job was the politics and empire building (who can manage the largest budgets, just for the sake of managing the largest budget) rather than doing science.
do it to slow you get a less-powerful, incredibly dangerous radioactive criticality event
do it fast enough, you get a big boom
it was so simple, they didnt even need to test one before they dropped it on hiroshima.
the 'gadget' test at trinity was only of the plutonium implosion system, and that was only because they were a little short on uranium.
the problem has never been design. the problem has been scraping together enough enriched uranium.
I feel for these guys, I really do. But this article makes it sound like LA is entirely devoted to nuclear weapons research, I suppose so that it could have a sexier tag clod. LA is actually under the Department of Energy, as the article says, and conducts varied research in many more areas than just nuclear science. I'd hardly say nuclear weapons research is a profitable venture for a national lab in any case: we already have bombs big enough to blow up the entire planet, anything after that is just decoration. It certainly sounds like a mismanaged lab, but we should be upset because science is being impeded, not because baddies may or may not be threatening ohttp://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/10/0329206/the-political-assault-on-los-alamos-national-laboratory?utm_source=feedburnerGoogle+Reader&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#ur favorite olde tyme nucleare wyponnes shoppe's ability to do irrelevant shit.