Parallel Paths

by CKR

Oak Ridge and Los Alamos seem to be traveling parallel paths in the space-time continuum these days, with respect to two variables: contamination and secrecy. Perhaps the home-town newspapers that cover what’s going on in those nuclear installations are also traveling parallel tracks.

Jeffrey Lewis notes the secrecy at Oak Ridge. Apparently a manager there dared to speak of the Libyan centrifuges that they’ve been checking out and got his clearances pulled. That’s the equivalent of “you won’t work in this town any more.” Or Los Alamos or Hanford or Savannah River or any of those places. Frank Munger at the Knoxville News Sentinel is on the story.

Let’s switch to the parallel track in space-time. Ralph Damiani of the Los Alamos Monitor is not pleased with secrecy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I’m going to reproduce his editorial.

A couple of weeks ago, Rep. Steve Pearce came to Los Alamos to talk to local residents and address LANL employees.

This week, Rep. Tom Udall was here to do the same. In both cases, the press was flatly denied access and just shut out, with the lab making claims that “confidential” information would be discussed.

Well, that is simply disingenuous and misleading.

There was no legitimate reason to keep the media away from these talks – save for the simple fact that lab officials could and their growing arrogance pushed them to it.

It used to be that accommodations were made for such events and the press was allowed to cover them. Even under the dark days of Pete Nanos, the press was allowed in.
Not any more.

More and more a bigger and bigger wall is going up around Los Alamos National Laboratory. And it is such a shame.

What are they hiding? If you say nothing, then the question is begged: Why all the secrecy?

It is an unacceptable answer to say that proprietary information may be discussed. We are not asking to be included in the boardroom discussions. That we understand.

But when you tell the public – and like it or not, the press represents the public – that they cannot hear what our elected representatives have to say on a facility that we, the taxpayers, pay for, it smacks of such conceit that one can hardly understand the logic of it all.

And in both cases, the representatives came to us after the meetings with the lab, gave us context of their speeches, answered questions on what happened and reported on their visit. They never once said that any “secret” or “confidential” material was covered.

So why the exclusion? As we stated above, the only answer we can see is the simple egotism of “we do it because we can.”

Some people do not seem to care if the press is excluded. But the press only has the rights of each and every citizen. And if government can take away those rights, then each and everyone of us is in danger.

Pearce and Udall are currently US Representatives from New Mexico. Both are running for the Senate seat that Pete Domenici, “St. Pete” of funding to the Laboratory.

Shifting to that other coordinate, Oak Ridge has just had a contamination incident, and so, perhaps, has Los Alamos. My own feeling, arising from my advanced age, is that these incidents are always far out of proportion, sort of like reporting every time a cafeteria worker cuts her hand with a knife. Back in the day, believe me, we trudged through knee-deep cesium-137 in every lab and it was uphill in both directions. Not quite, but there are stories I could tell but won’t, and I am still here to not tell you about them.

But we live in a different world today, so these stories make news. Or don’t. The possible incident in Los Alamos has not yet made the news. Or perhaps is totally a creation of misunderstanding and amplification through the rumor chain. One needs only to read the comments at the LANL blog to doubt the truth of anything that appears there. The contributors seem to share an extreme animus toward their management that allows them to believe almost anything.

As do many of the critics of the Laboratory, although their preferences in rumor tend to slant in a different direction. Back in the day, I can recall when the Laboratory grapevine was absolutely reliable, back when we trudged through…

So the secrecy and contamination coordinates eventually intersect. The secrecy undermines trust, the contamination incidents are blown out of proportion, which undermines trust, which leads to more bad feelings on the part of both employees and the public, which lead to more defensive feelings on the part of the management, which leads to more secrecy.

There are good reasons for secrecy, but its misuse contaminates them too. Weapons design data should be held tightlly, but during the nineties there was a rush to declassification, and some of the declassification guidance stood my hair on end. So information is out there now. It’s subject to decay by rumor; after it passes through many electronic generations, you don’t know what’s reliable unless you’ve bought it from A. Q. Khan. So it still makes sense for those who know the secrets not to comment.

But what’s with this? Protecting weapons secrets, ordinary glitches or incompetence? Without the damage to trust, we probably wouldn’t give it a second thought.

The local newspapers seem to be on parallel tracks: both are becoming more active in ferreting out what is going on in their backyards, which happen to be the backyards of the nation and the world as well. Their reporters may be the best-placed to get the stories we need to hear about what’s going on. But, as we can see from the LANL blog and as I well know from back in the day, the workers have their own sorts of secrecy. It arises out of fear, and it hasn’t served them well.