by CKR
The new seven-story Administration Building at Los Alamos is engulfing the old Ad Building. During my career, that old pile of glass and cinderblock housed some dramatic confrontations, intense meetings, and perfervid scheming. When the Lab’s library was housed in its basement, you could still drive up to the front door. Then they put a prefab badge office and large concrete planters in front.
The parking lot was chewed away. The row of cottonwoods went under the Robert Oppenheimer Study Center, to which the library moved. Now a parking garage will provide two or three times the parking. That may almost be enough to compensate for the parking lot on the other side of the Ad Building, which now holds the NISC (nonproliferation and verification, sorry, I can’t make the acronym fit) and Nicholas Metropolos (computational science) buildings.
And you can’t drive down Pajarito Road any more without a badge—the plutonium and criticality facilities are too close to the road.
For a number of years, the Lab’s requests for new buildings went unheeded by the Department of Energy and Congress. Portable buildings sprang up like boletuses in the ponderosas. Then the Cerro Grande Fire wiped out too many portables.
Another fire has been raging through Los Alamos, with no end in sight. This one has done a lot more harm.
Los Alamos is famous for having developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of its work still revolves around nuclear weapons, but in addition to nuclear weapons design, it includes working with Russia to secure its weapons and materials, keeping the US stockpile usable without nuclear test explosions, and thinking about how to avoid proliferation. The Lab also does a wide variety of research not related to weapons, including AIDS epidemiology.
The troubles began with the Wen Ho Lee accusations. Most recently, the director, George “Pete” Nanos, shut down the Lab because of alleged safety and security violations. Since then, most employees have spent their time in training courses and reading and writing documents that supposedly will keep everyone safe and the classified information secure. The official word is that everyone is back to work, but pronouncements and rumors are not unanimous.
The FBI has confirmed the rumor floating around the Lab since the shutdown: the two supposedly lost computer disks never existed—it was an accounting error. Nanos said early on that he would apologize publicly if he was wrong, but he has not yet done that.
I brought my laptop to the workshop last week and had to fill out a form, to be kept with the laptop at all times, with the laptop’s serial number and a signature from a Lab official. This seems redundant, since the serial number is on the laptop, but the Lab must have a copy of that form in its records so that auditors can see that every personally-owned computer on Lab property is tracked.
This is the approach to safety and security being required by Washington. It emphasizes “accountability,” auditability really, to the exclusion of mindsets that would in fact improve safety and security.
On the safety side, Brad Lee Holian has made a case that the Lab’s safety record is better than at other labs in the DOE complex. Nanos has argued that Holian is wrong. I can’t judge who is right, but the difference is part of the hard feelings between the staff and management.
There have been hard feelings between staff and management at Los Alamos since the beginning. Edward Teller wanted to skip the easy stuff and work on a hydrogen bomb while Oppenheimer was focusing on winning the war. Teller had the political know-how to get his own Laboratory (now Livermore National Laboratory in California) and to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation. Recent staff may have a wide range of dissatisfactions, but they haven’t yet mustered political know-how.
A Los Alamos physicist has begun a blog, as has a youngish staff member. You might expect scientists to adduce evidence and build a case; you would be wrong. Most of the content in both blogs is poorly supported rumor, venting and paranoia. The paranoia is not surprising; there are many stories of retaliation for unacceptable opinions or careers damaged by the need for a scapegoat. The staff have never been able to form a united front, and the blogs continue the tradition.
The inability of the dissatisfied at Los Alamos to form a case beyond hurt feelings dovetailed with a book a friend gave me: John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In both cases, there seems to be a story, but it’s not possible to tell what it is or what might be done about it. I’m sympathetic to the issues, but neither case is made.
Confessions contradicts its own thesis: when Perkins takes up with Claudine, he is being inducted into a secret society, but by the end of the book, no conspiracy is involved, it is just the way corporations operate.
The whole Claudine story is improbable: Perkins is trained in her apartment to be an economic hit man, the entirety of which seems to be that she tells him that his mission is to bring countries under the economic sway of the US. This is shortly after he has joined one of the consulting companies that might be suspected of such things. He hasn’t proved his willingness to go along to get along, which would seem to be a prerequisite for such training. In Confessions, he divulges none of the tradecraft of the ECM (except that Claudine refers to him by that acronym), not even the secret handshake.
I don’t believe there is a specific fact in Confessions that didn’t come out of a news report or better-researched books. Perhaps that Perkins drove Subarus on most of his trips back to South America after he had signed on as an ECM. He cites vague meetings in bars, most of the time to tell us how bad he felt that he was an ECM, even though he was piling up money, women and yachts.
Perhaps it’s just that Perkins can’t write. I know that I began the book willing to believe what he had to say and came away deeply suspicious that the book is a fantasy or a fraud.
If you’re going to do something about financial misdealings by US corporations with other countries or about mismanagement at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, you need a coherent story and evidence. I don’t see either in the book or the blogs.
(More Los Alamos background in the September and October 2004 issues of WordWorth Magazine. Those issues are available as pdf files in the WordWorth archive.)