by CKR
I wrote most of this piece a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t have the finishing touches on it before Todd Kauppila died. Todd was one of the two people fired for “losing” the classified media that later turned out to be an accounting mistake. He was 41 and is reported to have died from a massive heart attack. My sympathies to his family.
His memorial service was last Friday. You can read about it on the Los Alamos blog.
Today Bill Broad published a piece on the Los Alamos National Laboratory and its interim director, Bob Kuckuck. George "Pete" Nanos resigned a week or two ago.
What originally inspired this post was that Sean Paul used Nanos’s resignation as an example of the power of the blog. I tend to believe that it’s not at all in the category of Dan Rather’s or Eason Jordan’s troubles with the blogosphere. Most likely, the Los Alamos blog had very little to do with Pete Nanos’s move to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
I’ve written before about Los Alamos before. If you want background, check out the WordWorth articles linked in that previous WV post.
Los Alamos’s basic problem is that it was formed for a special purpose during World War II and then things just kept happening. They just kept developing bombs and doing lots of other things for the US in the Cold War, and the money kept coming. Then the Soviet Union came apart.
Los Alamos’s primary purpose has always been the design and development of nuclear weapons. So its funding should flow from US policy on nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, that policy is unclear, at least in unclassified form, or perhaps not well coupled to an execution strategy. So Los Alamos has become political, subject to the laws of pork. The laws of pork are complicated by the ever more ideological right, which finds it hard to believe that a university, particularly one from the left coast, should run a weapons lab. Add in a sprinkle of antinuclear activism and overblown whistleblowers, along with the never-ending media quest for conflict, and you have most of the reason the Lab has been so battered over the past several years.
Enter Pete Nanos. Sig Hecker was removed as director because he took the DOE’s admonition to cut costs seriously and downsized the Lab. John Browne presided over the Wen Ho Lee debacle and continuing questions about how money was spent.
George P. Nanos is a retired vice-admiral. He has some qualifications in the nuclear field, and he was the first director from outside the Lab. I’m sure that there were those in Congress, and perhaps the DOE, who felt that he would make those scientists stand up and salute. He tried.
Between the apparent loss of classified computer media and a laser accident that really did damage a student’s eye, Nanos decided to shut down the Lab. We’re not talking about sending people home without paychecks, we’re talking about not allowing scientific work to be done until people had sat in classes and developed standard operating procedures and sat in more classes and signed pieces of paper that said that anything bad that happened, ever, was all their fault.
Nanos also called the Lab’s scientists “buttheads and cowboys.” This was taken badly.
Federal agencies were paying the Lab to do project work, which was not done under the shutdown. Some withdrew their contracts.
The investigations eventually showed that the classified computer media were not lost, but never existed. Nonetheless, Nanos refused to apologize as he had promised he would, and commentators inside and outside the government said that this indicated how badly broken the Lab’s systems were, the same thing they would have said in any case. So the standdown went on until some appropriate amount of paper had been generated.
When the Lab’s official electronic newsletter refused to print letters critical of Nanos, Doug Roberts decided to begin a blog where Lab employees could post their gripes. The blog has been credited with bringing Nanos down, but I find this viewpoint naïve.
Roberts’s blog is dreadful reading for anyone who isn’t closely acquainted with Los Alamos culture. It may even be incomprehensible to outsiders. It’s pretty dreadful reading even for those of us who have some idea of what’s going on.
There is a convention among scientists, enhanced in graduate school, that management is the place for thieves and fools. A sign of belonging to (or of trying out for) the in-group is the loud proclamation of one’s contempt for management accompanied by edicts on how management should be done. Usually the latter consist of demands that the scientists be left free of mundane cares like acquiring funds or writing safety procedures.
Much of the blog has been screeds against Nanos and other disliked members of the management, along with newspaper articles on the competition of the Lab’s contract and reactions to the news, freqently highly emotional.
Practically all the comments are anonymous. Retaliation is a legitimate concern, but the anonymity undermines any possibility of concerted action on the part of the staff. Posts suggesting constructive approaches have been shouted down or dismissed as tools of the management.
Questions have been raised about the number of people contributing to the blog. A recent estimate cited 6000 posts (comments included, I think) and surmised 600 posters providing ten posts each. I’ve participated in discussion boards, and it’s not unusual to see five posts a day from the more prolific posters. The blog began at the end of December, so it has been in existence for maybe twenty weeks. Posting on discussion boards tends to be higher during the week, so let’s say five days a week, for one hundred posting days. At two posts a day per poster, 30 people could have generated the material on the LANL blog.
The Lab’s managers at the University of California can do this calculation.
Nanos lost the confidence of the employees, and it was time for him to leave. That would have been obvious without the blog.
The sad thing about the blog is that larger issues about the direction of the Lab never surfaced. Nor did the idea of political action. I know that some employees are capable of understanding these kinds of things, but they also would have had enough sense to keep quiet.
A new blog has just appeared today, with the purpose of generating some positive direction for the Lab. I wish Eric well. The Lab’s capabilities are far too good to be wasted.
Oppenheimer and the early scientists had the larger issues in the forefront as they drove themselves to build the bomb. They kept those larger issues in mind after the war. The Santa Fe Reporter last week brought out some of those ideas. I’m hoping they'll show up on the new blog.