Nuke Scarecrow Put Out to Pasture

Security at the nation's nuclear weapons complex has been comically awful for years. But despite meth dealers caught with classified info, despite the barely-armed guards patrolling the Livermore Lab, despite the short-cut security drills at Oak Ridge, and despite the faked investigations at Sandia -- not to mention that pesky reporter who waltzed right into Los Alamos -- the guy supposedly in charge of security has somehow been able to keep his job.

Until now. Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, has been asked to step down by Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. Brooks is "to submit his resignation... this month," the AP says.

The nuclear watchdogs over at the Project on Government Oversight are understandably psyched. They've been calling for Brooks' resignation since 2004. "This is an opportunity for the National Nuclear Security Administration to finally live up to its name," said POGO chief Danielle Brian said in a statement.

The NNSA was created back in 2000, after the Wen Ho Lee scandal and other security lapses hit Los Alamos. Maybe the group can finally start doing its job, under a new director. See ya later, Linton. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

(Big ups: Raw Story)

Los Alamos Getting Sloppy (Updated)

Why should we bother putting radiological detectors in the ports when it's easier to get the stuff within the United States? The AP has this article on a drug raid at a New Mexico trailer park, which turned up classified documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Local police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man's records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said.

Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file.

While the FBI won't comment, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has some insights.

According to unconfirmed sources, the information was classified as Secret Restricted Data which means it would involve nuclear weapons data and may have concerned detection of underground nuclear weapons testing. Also unconfirmed, the person in possession of the information worked either in Technical Area 55 where all of the Lab’s plutonium is stored or in the X Division which handles nuclear weapons design data for a maintenance subcontractor of the Lab.

POGO also notes six previous security incidents at LANL since 9/11. No wonder that many of the DHS exercises feature dirty bomb scenarios - they must be worried about domestic terrorists getting too much National Lab material...

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

UPDATED 10:20 AM: It should be noted that this isn't Los Alamos' first drug-related incident. Back in 2004, local authorities evicted a man who had lived for years in a cave on lab property. from a cave on Los Alamos National Laboratory land where they say he apparently lived for years with the comforts of home — a wood-burning stove, solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity and a satellite radio. Ten marijuana plants were found outside the cave, and the fellow inside was charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

UPDATED 4:15 PM: Whatever you do, be sure to check in regularly at the POGO blog, where they've got all kinds of fun rumors floating in. Police docs, too.

UPDATED 10-26: J. here - let me clarify that I believe the combination of classified LANL documents and potential theft of radioactive isotopes from domestic sources (universities, medical labs) is what ought to get people excited about this incident. Obviously we don't know what's in the documents that makes them classified, and I am not suggesting that LANL might be the source of loose plutonium material. But unless LANL tightens up their security procedures and trains/screens its employees and contract support better, its leadership ought to be on notice.

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 4

Welcome to the final post in my series on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program and the future of U.S. nuclear stockpile stewardship. In this post, I'll review where RRW stands today, and touch briefly on some of the political dimensions of the debate over the program.

There's a lot of material on this program – from the government, from outside experts and from policy advocates of all orientations – that I won't be able to cover, so to those interested in reading more, I recommend checking out CDI's guide to government documents on RRW, as well as articles on the program at the Arms Control Association website and over at Arms Control Wonk.

In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-month RRW Feasibility Study, as mandated in the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Act. The study consisted of a design competition between the two labs (both with help from Sandia) to produce plans for the first RRW warhead, a replacement for the W76 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.

The preliminary designs were completed and submitted in March, and underwent peer review in the labs in May. Currently, the teams are back at the drawing boards, incorporating suggestions from the peer reviews and from the Project Officers Group, the representatives of the nuclear stockpile's Department of Defense "customers." By November, NNSA is expected to pick a winning design.

As reported in Defense Tech last week, however, RRW is well on its way to expanding beyond a single warhead design. It has been clear for some time that one RRW design would not be enough to replace all nine warhead models currently in the stockpile. Still, many RRW observers were disappointed and concerned to hear that the Senate is planning to commission a design competition for the next RRW warhead and to allocate $62 million for RRW in 2007 – more than double the department’s $27 million request, and the program’s $25 million budget for 2006 – before the first feasibility study is even completed.

The arguments in favor of RRW have mostly been described in previous posts: redesigning the stockpile to increase performance margins would, if possible, help put to rest concerns about the effect of modified manufacturing practices on warhead performance, and would provide work for the nuclear weapons complex.

The arguments against RRW, meanwhile, take issue with both the program’s desirability and its feasibility.

The first argument against the program is that, according to the program’s opponents, there is no need to change the current warhead designs. In the example of the pit remanufacturing debate discussed in my last post, this means that the program’s opponents believe that the new pits have been proven conclusively to be as reliable as the old pits, and can be incorporated into existing warheads.

(Dr. Jeanloz, by the way, is on the record as an RRW "skeptic," rather than an outright critic, but several other experts have offered views similar to his as arguments against RRW.)

The second main argument against RRW is that a significantly modified warhead design which has not been tested cannot possibly be as reliable as a tested design. Critics who advance this argument point out that independent assessments predating RRW by government advisory bodies such as the JASONs found that "entirely new designs for the nuclear subsystem... would be expected to require nuclear-explosion (underground) testing before being accepted for the enduring stockpile."

This assessment contradicts the NNSA’s assessment that the RRW designs will "be certifiable and producible without nuclear testing" even though the plans call for "redesigning" the warheads' nuclear subsystems. Nuclear testing is almost universally regarded as a very bad thing – the Bush Administration is formally committed to continuing the current testing moratorium, in no small part due to concern that a U.S. test would inevitably lead to Chinese and Russian tests.

Critics who cite this concern point out that even if the nuclear weapons complex ever brought itself to certify a warhead design which had never been tested, U.S. Strategic Command, as the stockpile's "customer," would be unlikely to accept such an unproven product.

It is worth noting, by the way, that there are certain modest modifications which can increase warheads' performance margins to a certain extent without adding uncertainty – these changes are not controversial, and are being considered outside of RRW.

Finally, critics point out that the program's supposed contributions to the goal of "stockpile transformation" are not consistent with each other.

On the one hand, RRW is supposed to lead to long-term cost-savings by producing a stockpile which can be maintained without a complex stockpile stewardship effort. On the other hand, RRW is also supposed to "continuously exercise" the nuclear weapons complex and "enable" the transition to a "responsive infrastructure."

The two goals are clearly incompatible – a good-for-a-century warhead design which met Congress' goal of reducing the cost and complexity of stockpile maintenance would not meet NNSA's goal (and Congress' secondary goal) of keeping the production complex "exercised" for a possible future arms race. (Ryan jokes that to some people, RRW seems to stand for "Reliably Recurring Work.")

As the Congressional Research Service points out, "RRW is a new program with no specific, tangible product yet defined. In deciding how to proceed on RRW, Congress has a number of options available to it." It is possible that a version of the program will emerge which can satisfy the concerns of all sides – of those who worry that the current stockpile stewardship paradigm will lead to a dangerous accumulation of minor changes, and of those who worry that a significant overhaul of warhead designs will destroy, rather than fortify, confidence in the stockpile. Until such a version emerges, though, we can expect to see both confusion and controversy continue to rage.

- Haninah Levine

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 3

In my last post, I discussed the origins of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW). In this post, I'll look at one example of a change which is being made in the manufacturing of an essential nuclear component, and at what this change means for the debate over RRW.

The component in question here is the "pit," the sphere of plutonium which sits at the heart of a thermonuclear warhead's primary stage.

During the Cold War, pits were made at the Rocky Flats site in Colorado. After Rocky Flats was shut down in 1989, the United States was left without the ability to make new pits for its stockpile.

In 1996, under the leadership of then-director of Los Alamos Siegfried Hecker, the Department of Energy started working on a new pit manufacturing line at Los Alamos’ Technical Area 55 (TA-55). A decade later, replacement pits are finally starting to roll off the line at TA-55. But a debate has broken out over whether or not those pits are functionally the same as those made at Rocky Flats. As a result, the new pits are still waiting to receive their certification for stockpile use.

At the heart of the debate lies precisely the sort of improved manufacturing technique which I mentioned in the last post. At Rocky Flats, plutonium was shaped into pits by stamping, folding and welding, in what’s known as a wrought process. Unfortunately, the wrought process is very infrastructure-intensive, making it good for an industrial-scale facility like Rocky Flats, but less so for a smaller facility like TA-55. The wrought process also creates lots of dangerous plutonium sawdust and shavings, and leaves behind a product with an uneven microscopic texture.

So under Dr. Hecker’s enthusiastic leadership, TA-55 developed a new technique for making pits. The new pits are made using a cast process – that is, molten plutonium (alloyed with some other metals for stability) is poured into pit-shaped molds. The cast process, if done properly, produces a much more uniform product, with less complex equipment and less hazard.

Fast forward ten years.

New pits have been cast and have undergone a gauntlet of tests and computer modeling, but, of course, not underground nuclear tests. Some scientists at the labs, and in the greater nuclear policy community, are ready to certify the pits as functionally equivalent to the Rocky Flats pits in every way. One of these scientists is Raymond Jeanloz, a professor of planetary science at UC Berkeley who does not work at Los Alamos, but is one of the country’s foremost scientific advisors on nuclear issues, and has served as lead author on several JASON studies on stockpile stewardship.

But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins – that is, only as part of RRW.

Ironically, one of these scientists is Dr. Hecker – the grandfather of the TA-55 pits. He stands by his decision to switch manufacturing techniques, and he insists that the new pits are of excellent quality, but he denies that the labs have been able to test the pits as exhaustively as Dr. Jeanloz claims.

To make matters worse, Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz disagree just as vehemently on the subject of plutonium aging. Dr. Hecker claims that not enough is known about the different processes which take place as plutonium metal ages to predict safely when aging will begin to affect the dynamics of the pit implosion – and therefore the yield of the warhead primary. He therefore claims that the only responsible thing to do is to replace the current pits after a conservative 50-year shelf-life – and to keep replacing the pits every half-century. This schedule would keep the nuclear labs perpetually busy building, certifying and installing new pits.

Dr. Jeanloz doesn’t buy Dr. Hecker’s claim that plutonium aging is poorly understood. He points out that the nuclear labs have learned so much about plutonium aging just in the last six years that they’re planning on wrapping up a major review of pit lifetimes this coming fall (see page 58 of this report).

Dr. Jeanloz is convinced that the review will give estimates of pit lifetimes "substantially" longer than 60 years. If he's right (and he may not be alone), then there's no need to keep up a high rate of pit production – to say nothing of RRW. Of course, whether the results of that review will be published if the NNSA doesn’t like what it sees is anyone's guess....

Taken as a whole, the dispute between Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz over pit aging and remanufacture offers a useful behind-the-scenes view of the sorts of arguments which are shaping the technical debate over RRW. Of course, plutonium aging is far from being the only concern behind the drive for RRW. Other parts of the nuclear explosives package, such as the high explosives and the secondary, also raise serious technical concerns. And the political and institutional forces driving RRW, which in some cases have little to do with technical issues, are a whole other subject.

But plutonium science has been, historically, a relatively open field, with much of the progress in the field reported regularly in the open literature. The plutonium aging issue therefore allows us a rare glimpse at the type of scientific and technical debates whose outcomes will determine the future of the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure and stockpile.

In my fourth and final post on RRW, I'll discuss where RRW stands today, and examine briefly some of the political issues raised by the program.

- Haninah Levine

Not So Divine After All?

Remember Divine Strake – a.k.a. "strakes on a plain"? Well, forget it. At least for this year.

Palm Springs’ KESQ reports that the planned massive explosion at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) has been put off till 2007, at the earliest.

Divine Strake, recall, was supposed to consist of 700 tons – many, many trucks’ worth – of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil emplaced in a shallow pit. The test did not represent an operationally realistic conventional weapon (700 tons!!! of explosives!). Rather, it was intended to simulate the effect of a very low-yield (under 600 ton) nuclear weapon on underground structures.

It is still unclear what the reasons for the delay are. The report from KESQ hints, though, that the issue may involve disputes over Western Shoshone tribal claims to NTS lands, as well as concerns that the explosion might stir up contaminated soil and send radioactive material downwind.

I guess Samuel Jackson got his way this time....

- Haninah Levine

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 2

In my last post, I talked about the origins of the Stockpile Stewardship and briefly described the three activities which make up stockpile stewardship: stockpile science, stockpile surveillance and warhead life extension. In this post, I’d like to discuss the challenge of life extension in greater detail, and show how this challenge has motivated the debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW).

The goal of the life extension programs (LEP) is to add anywhere from 20 to 30 years onto the (nominal) design lifetimes of the various warhead models in the stockpile (of course, "there is no such thing as a 'design life'"...). The W87 ICBM warhead became the first warhead to complete its LEP in 2004. The B61 bomb warhead and the W76 SLBM warhead – the first warhead slated for replacement under RRW – are currently undergoing LEPs, while the W80 cruise-missile warhead’s LEP was recently canceled by the Nuclear Weapons Council in order to free up funds for RRW.

A life extension program is a sort of 50,000-mile tune-up for a nuclear warhead: limited-lifetime components such as batteries and neutron generators are replaced, along with any other parts – "cables, elastomers, valves, pads, foam supports, telemetries, and miscellaneous parts" – which may have degraded. Most of these replacements take place outside the warhead’s nuclear explosives package, however.

While these tasks sound mundane, manufacturing the replacement components is no mean task. Manufacturing lines still exist for some components, but in other cases, lines have been dismantled, suppliers have canceled product lines or gone out of business, and health, safety and environmental regulations have grown stricter.

In these cases, a dilemma arises: should the nuclear production complex go to extreme lengths to recreate the processes needed to remanufacture these components exactly according to the original specifications? Or should they look for ways to make replacement parts that will work just as well, if not better? Since the part has to be replaced anyway, why not make maintenance easier for future generations already?

For components outside the warheads' nuclear explosives package, modifying the manufacturing specs is an attractive option, since each new component can be tested exhaustively without underground nuclear testing.

If too many of these minor changes pile up, though, a sort of "Grandfather’s axe" effect may kick in: if enough components have been modified and replaced, is the warhead design still the same one that was once tested? For this reason, the guiding philosophy has been "change-control discipline": make the fewest number of changes possible, and only after proving exhaustively that the changes will not affect warhead characteristics.

For nuclear components, the problem is more serious. While there are ways to investigate how a nuclear component will behave when detonated – computer simulations which model the component, dynamic and quasi-static experiments which measure its relevant physical properties, sub-critical experiments which assess its behavior under conditions similar to actual detonation – none of these methods has the same doubt-erasing effect as an underground nuclear test.

Any modification to proven designs for nuclear components is therefore bound to cause anxiety as long as underground nuclear testing is forbidden.

Conceptually, this is where the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) enters the picture.

While some members of the stockpile policy community argue that something like change-control discipline can be applied to nuclear components, too, others believe that if any modification is going to be made to the nuclear explosives package, a broader set of changes has to be made to the warhead design try to offset any possible drop in the performance of those modified components.

In brief, the changes being contemplated by those in the latter camp would increase the performance margins of warhead designs. The performance margin is the difference between the energy which the primary stage is expected to produce and the minimum energy needed to set off the secondary stage – essentially, the warhead's margin of error.

Since increasing the performance margin would require modifications to warhead designs that go well beyond what change-control discipline would allow, it would require an entirely new philosophy of stockpile stewardship. This philosophy is to be put into practice through a program known as Reliable Replacement Warhead.

RRW was introduced into the fiscal year 2005 Department of Energy budget by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Energy and Water Subcommittee. Hobson, a noted budget hawk, believed that the Bush Administration’s latest nuclear weapons program, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) – or "nuclear bunker buster" – would be both costly and unnecessary, not to mention harmful to the nation’s non-proliferation posture. His committee therefore cut all funds for RNEP, and allocated the funds instead to a "program to improve the reliability [and] longevity... of existing weapons and their components" – and RRW was born.

Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that "sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear," and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that "this is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons."

Even today, though, Brooks continues to advertise RRW as an "enabler" for the transition to a "responsive infrastructure" which will one day "provide capabilities, if required, to produce weapons with different or modified military capabilities". And the official DOD website on "Stockpile Transformation" (the generic name for RRW and related plans) boasts of a goal of "develop[ing] warheads for next-generation delivery systems" – seemingly a direct contradiction of Hobson’s injunction.

This ongoing back-and-forth about RRW’s purpose inspired the Congressional Research Service’s comment, quoted in my earlier post, that "many find RRW to be confusing."

In the third post, I will discuss the changes which are being made to the warheads' nuclear components, and examine the debate over whether or not those changes require a wider set of modifications to the warhead designs – and therefore RRW.

- Haninah Levine

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 1

If you've been following the debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) – and if you haven't, you should be – there's a good chance that you're confused over how this program is supposed to go about revolutionizing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. Is RRW a "program to improve the reliability [and] longevity... of existing weapons and their components"? Or is it an "enabler" for a long-term goal of building "new (or replacement) warheads"?

If you're confused, you're not alone. Even the Congressional Research Service dryly observed that "many find RRW to be confusing because it is a new program and descriptions of it have changed." (The CRS study linked here, by the way, is an absolute must-read for anyone who's interested in these issues.)

Just last week, Stephen I. Schwartz wrote here on Defense Tech that even as controversy still swirls over the first RRW warhead program, the labs are developing plans for as many as three other RRW warheads – and that the end-result of RRW will be not a fixed, long-lived warhead design, but rather "steady-state production of warheads for deployment."

In order to understand what RRW is, and what it might evolve into, it’s important to take a step back and look at where the U.S. stockpile is today, and how it got there. Over the next few days, I’m going to do my best to summarize the history of stockpile stewardship in the U.S. and the debates which led to the creation of RRW (which I wrote about in greater detail here). Then we can get to the meat of what RRW is all about.

Below the jump – the Cold War ends, and Stockpile Stewardship is (re)born.

During the Cold War, high turnover was the key to maintaining confidence in the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. New weapons were constantly being designed, built, tested and added to the stockpile, allowing older weapons to be retired, or relegated to reserve status; warheads rarely accumulated more than a couple of decades of shelf life, at most.

Once a production run of warheads had made it into the stockpile, odds were slim that any of the warheads in the run would be tested again. The exception to this rule were the relatively small number of so-called "stockpile confidence tests" which took place during the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and the primary stages which were occasionally taken from stockpile warheads for use in tests of new weapons concepts.

While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as stockpile surveillance, was intended to catch production defects and aging-related deterioration to any of the warhead's 3000 components. Most of these components are located outside of the warhead's nuclear subsystem, so their full range of functions could be tested without a nuclear test.

The knowledge base developed over forty years of stockpile surveillance (beginning with the introduction of sealed-pit designs in the late 1950s) laid the foundations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), which was officially born in 1994.

Three events which took place at the end of the Cold War led to the creation of SSP. In 1989, the Rocky Flats site in Colorado, where all the plutonium "pits," or triggers, in the stockpile had been produced, was shut down after years of egregious health and safety violations. In 1992, shortly before its dissolution, the USSR declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. In response, Congress passed a similar testing moratorium, and the President George H. W. Bush announced an indefinite moratorium on the introduction of new weapon designs into the stockpile. The era of high stockpile turnover was over, and the Stockpile Stewardship Program was born.

The Stockpile Stewardship Program was organized by Congress from the Department of Energy's existing stewardship activities in the 1994 Defense Authorization Act. The program was part of a new policy aimed at keeping the nation's bomb-making skills and facilities in suspended animation in case a new nuclear arms race were to break out.

In keeping with this policy, resources which were cut from bomb-making and nuclear testing activities were channeled to the three activities necessary for stockpile stewardship: improving the nuclear complex's understanding of the science of warhead performance and aging (known as "stockpile science"), keeping an eye out for signs of deterioration as warheads age ("stockpile surveillance") and repairing problems which may arise ("warhead life extension").

You can find more details about these three activities in the paper I mentioned earlier (including some worrying reports about the problems SSP has had coordinating the different activities).

In the next post, I’ll be focusing on warhead life extension, and looking at the debates over how to replace old warhead components as an example of the technical controversies behind the scenes of the RRW debate.

- Haninah Levine

Postal Service's Nuke Deal Off

Triumphs of common sense can be few and far-between, when you're dealing with the management of Los Alamos National Lab. So let's all get out of chairs and do a little victory jig: The U.S. Postal Service has backed out of a plan to help the nuclear weapons mecca fund a 400,000 square-foot "Science Center," off the books.

Postal Service Funding Nuke Labs

$2.1 billion dollars a year ain't enough for the brains in charge of Los Alamos National Lab, apparently. So the world's most important nuclear research center has turned to the U.S. Postal Service, of all places, to fund its new, 400,000 square foot "Science Complex."

No, it's not like the fathers of the atom bomb are now starting some new-fangled effort to zap your mail. Instead, the lab's managers have been on the hunt for "alternative funding (i.e. third-party methods)" to bankroll its construction projects, documents uncovered by Nuclear Watch of New Mexico reveal.

Funds for the new Science Center weren't anywhere to be found in the Energy Department's publicly-available budgets. Nuke Watch had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out that the Energy Department was digging into the U.S. Postal Service's pockets for two new buildings (one classified, the other not) and a parking lot. "As a justification," Nuke Watch notes, the department "cited a vaguely worded federal law that authorizes the USPS to furnish property and services to executive branch agencies and vice versa."

Nuke Watch director Jay Coghlan calls it an "end run around Congress."

About 10% of Los Alamos' total workforce will eventually have their offices in the Science Center. That includes the everyone in the "Strategic Research" directorate, including the folks in the "Nuclear Technology Office." What will they do there? Well, they probably won't be handling big piles of uranium or plutonium. But they will be tackling "basic and applied scientific research" for "Stockpile Stewardship" -- maintenance of the country's nuclear arsenal.

Now, Los Alamos complains that half of its 8.9 million square feet of facilities are over 30 years old, and half are in "fair, poor, or failing condition." So the need for new buildings is understandable. But why do if off-the-books? And why the shenanigans with the Post Office?

(Big ups: TH)

California Keeps Los Alamos Control

For more than sixty years, the University of California has run Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Energy Department's behalf. And, despite a seemingly-ceaseless array of financial, security, and safety scandals at the birthplace of the atom bomb -- the latest came out just yesterday -- the University will hold on to the lab's $2.2 billion per year management contract. Just goes to show, no amount of incompetence can lose you a fat government deal. The Santa Fe New Mexican has the scoop. LANL: The Real Story has employee reacts.

Zero Hour for Los Alamos

Jeez. As if things couldn't get any busier around here. Now the Santa Fe New Mexican is reporting that there's a winner in the monster fight to grab control of Los Alamos National Lab -- and its $2.2 billion per year contract.

"Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is scheduled to announce the winning contractor... at noon Mountain Time," according to the paper's Los Alamos blog.

A whole lot more than money is at stake here. If the Lockheed Martin-led team wins, some scientists worry, the nuclear lab's culture of innovation could be crushed. But if the University of California continues to run Los Alamos -- as it has since the days of the Manhattan Project -- the lab's seemingly-endless series of scandals may never stop. Stay tuned to the New Mexican's site, and to LANL: The Real Story, where lab insiders dish and vent hot.

"Climax" for Los Alamos Fight

Longtime friends of Defense Tech know I'm, uh, mildly interested in what goes on at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And it's been driving me nuts that I've been too busy to dig into the battle for control of the lab -- a battle which is about to reach its "climax," notes the San Francisco Chronicle.

A decision [about] who runs the world's most glamorous and controversial nuclear weapons lab and that also could end the University of California's unchallenged six-decade domination of the U.S. weapons program... could come soon, perhaps even Friday.

The decision will wrap up a six-month competition to run scandal-shaken Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. UC and its industrial partners, including San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc., are competing for the contract against aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp. and its allies -- the huge University of Texas system, several New Mexico universities and various industrial partners...

A Lockheed Martin takeover would be seen as an example of a growing trend toward the "privatization" of the nation's nuclear weapons complex...

UC has run the lab since 1943 without having to compete for its Energy Department contracts. But in 2003, Los Alamos and its management by UC came under fire after a series of security, safety, financial and managerial scandals at the lab, and the Energy Department and Congress ordered that all future contracts be open to outside bidders.

Several lab staff members told The Chronicle this week that they thought the Lockheed-Texas team had the best shot at winning the contract after what some view as a ghastly parade of UC screw-ups.

"The morale here is abysmal," said theoretical physicist Brad Lee Holian. [Check this blog and you'll see what he means -- ed.] "People's lives have been wrenched apart by the political games that have been played. You can't hold people's careers by the heels out over the balcony without them feeling threatened and cheapened."

Police: Whistleblower Story = B.S.

Wow. Climb out on a limb, and watch it get sawn off...

An assault this week on an auditor from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was not related to his status as a whistle-blower and prospective congressional witness, police in Santa Fe said Thursday.

Tommy Hook, who has alleged that millions of dollars were wasted at the lab, was severely beaten in the parking lot of a topless bar early Sunday. Hook said the attack was meant to silence him.

But police said Thursday that it appeared the incident began when Hook hit or bumped into a pedestrian in the parking lot with his car.

"Facts, evidence and information obtained … led investigators to believe that the altercation involving Mr. Hook is an isolated incident and is in no way related to Mr. Hook's whistle-blower status at the Los Alamos National Laboratories," Santa Fe Deputy Police Chief Eric Johnson said in a statement.

THERE'S MORE: "Here's our take on the Tommy Hook story as it stands now," says lab watchdog Project on Government Oversight, whose Peter Stockton is in Santa Fe investigating the assault.

It should be no surprise that the police claim there is no evidence the assault had anything to do with Tommy's whistleblowing. The Santa Fe police were initially sent in to investigate a bar fight, and that’s all they have ever indicated they thought it was.

Yet it seems that the Santa Fe police have not adequately investigated what they have been told. For instance, they didn’t get the phone records that would show whether or not Tommy received a call after 10 pm on Saturday night.

We find it interesting that the FBI is continuing to conduct interviews and obtaining the phone records, despite the police statement that there was no link to issues at Los Alamos.

Our questions remain: Did Tommy receive a call after 10 pm? Isn't it an extraordinary coincidence that the attack happened at the bar where he was told to meet an anonymous source, three days before he was scheduled to meet with Congressional investigators?

Gray Lady Joins Nuke Lab Chorus

The New York Times has picked up on the Los Alamos whistleblower assault story, with a nice summary of what we know so far. And unlike most of the other big media reports of Tommy Hook's beating, the paper of record actually gets into why the whistleblower may have been in jeopardy.

Events at Los Alamos have whipped up a perfect storm for intrigue and retribution. There was the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, who was suspected of espionage but ultimately pleaded guilty in 2000 to a single charge of mishandling classified data. Then computer disks with nuclear weapons secrets disappeared; the laboratory was shut down for several months last year in an effort to find out what went wrong. Last month, the contract to run the laboratory was opened for the first time to multiple bidders.

People who work at Los Alamos are worried. Their way of life is threatened, with Congress breathing down their necks. And whistle-blowers like Mr. Hook say that accounting procedures are in shambles....

Mr. Hook's complaints concern the lab's accounting practices. In 2003, he and a colleague, Chuck Montano, released an internal report that showed millions of dollars in fraudulent billing. For example, many local contractors overcharged. Identical bills were paid more than once. Purdue University was awarded $180,000 in unrestricted gifts, which is not allowable under the laboratory's rules.

In 2004, the two auditors were removed from their duties. Mr. Montano sat idle for nine months, Mr. Hook for five. In March, they sued the University of California, which manages the laboratory, for whistle-blower retaliation.

Both men have been invited to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about how the laboratory has treated them as whistle-blowers.

[Lab spokesman Kevin] Roark said there was a widespread perception of accounting problems at Los Alamos but that further investigations contradicted Mr. Hook and Mr. Montano. "We know we aren't a den of thieves," he said.

Questions Emerge in Assault Story

The folks throwing cold water on Los Alamos whistleblower Tommy Hook's assault story are going to love this.

"A dancer at the topless bar Cheeks said Tuesday afternoon that Tommy Hook had received a lap dance inside the club earlier the night of the beating," today's Albuquerque Journal says.

Hook... told his wife from his Santa Fe hospital bed early Sunday morning that he was lured to Cheeks by a mysterious late-night call from someone who said they had information about fraud at the Los Alamos lab...

When the alleged caller didn't show after more than an hour, Hook made his way to his car parked near the exit at about the time the club closed at 2 a.m., Hook told his wife.

Susan Hook and [attorney Bob] Rothstein said four to six men pulled Hook from his car before he could drive away, told him to keep his mouth shut and beat him to near unconsciousness.

But according to a Cheeks dancer, Hook did more than just wait by the bar. "He did get a lap-dance from the waitress," Jeanette McCalip, a dancer who was working at Cheeks on Saturday night, said of the whistle-blower.

McCalip said she saw Hook when she got off work Sunday lying beat up on the ground outside the club's door, surrounded by customers who were leaving. McCalip said she recognized Hook as the same man who got a lap-dance from a waitress inside the bar, because it is her standard practice to keep an eye on all the customers.

Could be. But it seems like it'd be awfully tough to pair up the busted mug above with any face in a darkened club. Hooks must've looked a whole lot different before his beating than he did after, right? Anyway, we'll see what facts emerge.

Click here for more.

Rothstein said a private investigator got an entirely different story when he interviewed several Cheeks employees.

"We've had a private investigator who interviewed the manager, the bartender and two security guards," he said. "All four of them confirmed that Tommy sat at the bar, he was drinking light beer, didn't have any interactions with the girls who were dancing there..."

Montoya, the club owner, said Tuesday that law enforcement officers instructed him to not speak about the incident, but he did say Hook probably wouldn't have lived if it weren't for a Cheeks security guard who helped disrupt the fight.

"My security employee did save the guy's life," he said.

THERE'S MORE: As Nick notes, the Santa Fe New Mexican has an awfully different account of the awful night.

Whistleblower Beating: Victim Blamed

Blame the victim -- or, at the very least, question his motives. That's the attitude some anonymous trolls on this Los Alamos blog are taking towards Tommy Hook, the lab whistleblower who was brutally assaulted over the weekend.

"Hook was beaten up by common thugs in a random act of violence... he decide[d] to make up a story about being intimidated as a witness... because he is embarrassed about being found in the parking lot of a strip club."

"Sounds very fishy to me. He had two drinks? They always say a couple of drinks. I think this has nothing to do with LANL [Los Alamos National Lab]."

"Something is very, very wrong with this story, and POGO [Project on Government Oversight, a lab watchdog group] needs to be investigated immediately."

The attitude shouldn't come as much of a surprise, really. For years, a core of lab employees has been angry and resentful at what they see as outsiders meddling in their jobs and in their lives.

Congress, POGO, the press, even the Energy Department -- none of them really understand the important work that goes on at the birthplace of the atomic bomb. They're just piling on the lab's scientists to further their own agendas, the logic goes. And they're helping second-rate institutions that don't know a damn thing about research get control of the "crown jewel" in the country's tiara of government-sponsored labs.

Anyone who is seen as helping these outsiders -- guys like ousted lab chief Pete Nanos, who made a questionable call to shut the lab down after security and safety lapses – should be instantly branded as a thief of that prize, or worse.

I got a flood of screaming e-mails from Los Alamos employees after I took an unauthorized stroll through a secret section of the lab back in 2003. Most of them were along the lines of this note:

"I can only assume that you hate the scientists at national laboratories, and you have contempt for the fundamental scientific work being done to protect your lousy ass from biological, chemical, and nuclear attacks."

The comments I got about Glenn Walp and Steve Doran, the ex-cops who were fired for uncovering fraud at the lab, were even worse.

"The stupid thing was to hire them in the first place," one Los Alamos scientist told me.

Another said, "They should be shot."

This isn't to say that all Los Alamos employees are some kind of nuclear Klanners. Not even close. But there is an element that is beyond angry. And that element may have had something to do with the shoe marks across Tommy Hook's face.

THERE'S MORE: Speaking of whistleblower retaliation, Paul points out this case from Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 2000 -- a case that has yet to be closed, five years later.

Frustrated Livermore police detectives are accusing Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of stonewalling an investigation into the slaying of a reclusive designer who uncovered a serious flaw in the lab's troubled $1 billion weapons testing program.

Lee Scott Hall, 54, was discovered beaten and repeatedly stabbed in the bedroom of his Livermore home October 20 by two co-workers. Hall was a lead designer on the $1.2 billion National Ignition Facility, which when completed will monitor the nation's nuclear stockpile without the need for underground testing.

For a year, Hall had been trying to bring attention to a miscalculation in a multimillion-dollar installation of super laser beams that is part of the ignition facility. But only in the weeks leading up to his death had the laboratory acknowledged his findings and begun to deal with them.

Officials are searching for a motive in the crime. "Is it personally related?" asks Livermore Det. Sgt. Scott Robertson. "Family related? Job related? Or just some criminal? That's what we haven't been able to determine."

Los Alamos Heart Break

The Los Alamos whistleblower story has gone national, with the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the AP all picking up the tale of Tommy Hook's assault. All the accounts are painful to read. But the most heart-breaking moment in the coverage comes at the end of this Santa Fe New Mexican piece.

Susan Hook cried as photographs of her disfigured husband were shown to news reporters. She said today is their 30th wedding anniversary. She said she had to cancel a Hawaiian cruise they had planned to take. When a reporter asked whether her husband could be lying, she said he was not the type to go to bars. "We just aren't dancers or bar people," she said. "And he'd been in bed."

He usually accompanied her to Albuquerque, but he was too tired and overwhelmed with the upcoming hearing, she said. He suffers from a heart condition, and he is recovering from a stroke and shoulder surgery. He had been back to work just three weeks. When she talked to him on the phone after 10 p.m. Saturday, he told her he had a last-minute meeting with the auditor at a bar... "I've known Tommy for many years, and this is not in character with him to be going to bars," [Hook's partner Chuck] Montano added. "He's been my boss, and we've never even had a drink together."

Ian Hoffman, the dean of the nuclear lab reporters, has a good round-up, too, noting that the local and federal authorities seem to be taking the case very seriously. "FBI agents are investigating the beating as a civil-rights violation, but impeding a congressional investigation also is a federal felony," he writes.

Whistleblower's Long War with Nuke Lab

Tommy and his partner, Chuck Montano, have been at war with Los Alamos' management for over a decade, ever since Tommy was named the lab's "Whistleblower Officer," and Montano one his investigators.

After Montano backed Hispanic and female lab employees' claims of discrimination at the birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos managers in 1996 "directed all of the internal auditors to sign a 'loyalty pledge' agreeing to do nothing that was contrary to the official position, 'welfare,' or 'interests' of the Laboratory or the University," according to a lawsuit the pair recently filed against the lab.

But by 2003, Tommy seemed to be back in the lab's good graces. Los Alamos' old managers had been forced out, after they fired a pair of whistleblowers. Glenn Walp and Steve Doran were ex-police chiefs who had uncovered a series of shady purchases and lax security at Los Alamos. Their dismissal sparked national headlines and Congressional investigations.

Tommy was appointed as the head of a new unit that was supposed to follow up on Walp and Doran's findings. But when Tommy and Montano presented their report, they were told to get lost. The new unit was "buried" in a bureaucratic reorganization. Tommy was told he needed to be more "'flexible' and allow managers the opportunity to "change facts'" in his subsequent findings, according to his lawsuit. All work was taken away from him, for months. Now, it's clear, that was only the beginning of his troubles.

Whistleblower Beating: Details Emerge

The phone reception was awful on the conference call describing the assault on Los Alamos investigator Tommy Hook. But here's the information I pieced together, based on what I could hear his wife, his lawyer, and his partner say:

Last Friday, Los Alamos auditor-turned- whistleblower Tommy Hook got a phone call at his Albuquerque home. It was late -- past ten-thirty at night, and Tommy was getting ready to go to bed. He had had shoulder surgery recently, and a stroke about a year-and-a-half before that. So he needed his rest.

But Tommy got up, anyway. The man on the other end of the call said he was an auditor, too, at Los Alamos. And he had information that could corroborate Tommy's upcoming testimony before the House Energy Committee on financial shenanigans at Los Alamos. The two were supposed to meet earlier that day, but the auditor couldn't make the appointment. Could Tommy meet him now, he asked?

Tommy made the fifty-minute drive to Santa Fe, to a nudie bar called Cheeks. And there he waited, for over an hour. The auditor never showed. So finally, frustrated, Tommy walked out, got into his car, and started it up.

Suddenly, he was yanked out of the car by four to six men. And "they began to beat him with their feet," Tommy's wife, Susan, said. Afterwards, "there were shoe marks on his face." His jaw was fractured. At the hospital, doctors wired it shut -- and diagnosed him with a herniated disk, too.

The men "didn't take his wallet or our car," Susan added. But they "kept telling him," according to Tommy's lawyer, Bob Rothstein, "'If you know what's good for you, you'll keep your mouth shut."

Now the assailants didn't mention Los Alamos, or the University of California (UC), which runs the lab on behalf of the Energy Department. And Tommy's testimony -- which had been rescheduled several times, because of an impending family cruise -- was not publicly known. Nobody on the conference call accused the lab or UC of ordering some sort of hit on Tommy.

But by battling whistleblowers in court, by retaliating against them on the job, and by stretching their cases out for years on end, UC "encouraged an atmosphere where whistleblowers were perceived as enemies of the University," Rothstein said.

The local police have been called in to investigate the incident. And "the FBI is with Tommy right now," his wife said as the conference call came to a close.

Los Alamos Whistleblower Assaulted

Los Alamos whistleblower "Tommy Hook is still hospitalized today after being brutally assaulted over the weekend," the Project on Government Oversight is saying. "A group of three to four assailants threatened Hook to keep silent, in apparent reference to his upcoming Congressional testimony on fraud at Los Alamos."

Mr. Hook was slated to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this month. Congressional staff from the Committee were already scheduled to arrive Tuesday, June 7th to investigate Tommy Hook's allegations. Also flying out tomorrow is the Project On Government Oversight's Senior Investigator Peter Stockton who investigated the 1974 murder of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood in his previous position as a Congressional investigator.

Mr. Hook had planned at the end of last week to meet an individual who claimed to have corroborating information about fraud at Los Alamos. That individual never attended the meeting. Late Saturday evening, someone who might have been posing as that individual called Mr. Hook and asked to meet with him at a bar in Santa Fe. He went to the bar and waited but that person never showed up. When Mr. Hook got into his car to leave, attackers pulled him out of the car and brutally assaulted him. The assailants threatened Mr. Hook to keep silent. A bouncer at the bar intervened and broke up the attack. Mr. Hook was hospitalized in an Emergency Room with severe trauma to his face and head, including a fractured jaw, and a herniated disk. He is heavily medicated today and unable to speak to the media.

Mr. Hook and whistleblower Chuck Montano appeared on the CBS Evening News earlier this year. Audit reports conducted by Mr. Hook and Mr. Montano in 2002-2004 found a disturbing pattern of financial irregularities in the Los Alamos Lab's procurement division. In compliance with Department of Energy (DOE) requirements, Mr. Hook and Mr. Montano produced a report assessing the Lab's contracting operations. Lab supervisors refused to allow the report to be submitted to DOE, instead submitting a report that glossed over the problems identified by Mr. Hook and Mr. Montano.

Although a lab spokesman once told the Albuquerque Journal's Adam Rankin that "retaliation against whistleblowers is not tolerated," the fact is that Los Alamos officials have been pretty vicious with whistleblowers in years past. But the assaults have always been financial, or political, up until now. I've never heard of anything like this.

There's going to be a conference call with Hook's wife and his partner, Montano, in a few hours. I'll let you know what happens.

THERE'S MORE: The conference call is done. Details are above, here. And background on Hook's long war with Los Alamos management is here.

AND MORE: As John notes, "Interfering with a witness is against the law. Let's hope the GOP Congress does something about this."

SO LONG, PETE

"G. Peter Nanos, a retired Navy admiral who sought to shake up the Los Alamos National Laboratory but alienated many employees with his brusque, top-down management style, is stepping down as director to take a job at the Pentagon, it was disclosed today."

NORTHROP WANTS LOS ALAMOS CASH

A second giant defense contractor is getting into the race to run the world's leading nuclear lab.

In a press release that just landed in my in-box, Northrop Grumman has announced that it will "leverage its expertise in advanced technology and large-scale program management to bid on the contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory."

Two weeks ago, Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, made a similar announcement. But there are key differences between the two firms. Lockheed already has a bunch of experience running this kind of research center. The company has been operating Sandia National Laboratories for years -- and plucked Sandia chief Paul Robinson to head up its Los Alamos bid. Northrop says it is "assembling a world-class team of partners from the academic and business communities who offer particular expertise in areas such as scientific research." But it doesn't have the same track record as Lockheed.

Still, a bid from another defense industry heavyweight can't be good news for the University of California (UC), which has run Los Alamos for the Energy Department since the Oppenheimer era. Not long ago, it looked like UC would be the only bidder on the $2.2 billion per year contract -- despite a decade-long series of scandals at the lab. But the Energy Department upped the Los Alamos management fee by 500 percent. Companies can now turn a nice $73 million profit from running the lab. And after 60 years of having the waters to themselves, UC suddenly finds itself surrounded by sharks.

SANDIA CHIEF LEADING LOS ALAMOS BID

For a while, it looked like no one would challenge the University of California for control of Los Alamos, the world's leading nuclear lab. Not any more.

Lockheed Martin, the country's biggest defense contractor, is prepping for a monster bid for Los Alamos. And the company has tapped the longtime chief of Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos' more buttoned-down sister to the south, to head the effort.

Lockheed already runs Sandia for the Energy Department. And for nearly ten years, the former Los Alamos physicist C. Paul Robinson, has been the company's point man there. It's been a relatively calm period for the Sandia, with only a faint whiff of the corruption and shaky security that has stunk up Los Alamos over the last decade.

But Sandia has also missed the flashes of scary brilliance that the world has come to expect from Los Alamos. Sandia is known more as an engineering center.

Last August, Lockheed dropped out of the running for Los Alamos. The retainer for running the lab was puny. And early drafts of the request for bids seemed heavily slanted in California's favor.

But "Lockheed Martin jumped back into the fray after the DOE proposed changes to the Los Alamos contract, including increasing the manager's fee from 0.6 percent of the lab's $2 billion annual budget to 3 percent," the Contra Costa Times says.

And now, it looks like a second discouraged Los Alamos bidder, the University of Texas, may be coming back to the table, as well. Lockheed and Texas officials are talking about teaming up to run the lab.

In recent years, many Los Alamos scientists have been vocal in their distaste for both Texas and Lockheed. "We've established a reputation as an idea lab, and I think you'd lose that if the management went to a corporation," Los Alamos nonproliferation scientist Bill Priedhorsky told me back in 2003. "I think you'd see the better people flee."

This morning, someone posted to Los Alamos employee blog LANL: The Real Story a Photoshopped memo from Paul Robinson. He's wearing a Hitler moustache in it.

But attitudes may be softening, a bit. "I'm mid-career, and frankly am ready to work for a manager that's competent, deft, astute, respected, efficient, rational, self-disciplined, and understands what we do and how hard it is to do it," writes one LANL: The Real Story poster. "LockMart & C. Paul Robinson sure look like they got a good opportunity to fulfill that potential."

"What a difference a year makes!" another writes. "Can you imagine anyone at LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] saying a year ago, 'Gee, I wish LockMart would take over from that incompetent bunch at UC...' Now, we hear, 'Paul! Save us! Bring in some sanity from Lockheed Martin! You can even change our name to Sandia National Laboratories at Los Alamos! We don't care! Just SAVE us!'

MORE LOS ALAMOS SHENANIGANS

There's only one reporter in the national mainstream press who's had the attention span to stay focused on the ongoing scandals at Los Alamos National Lab. On Friday, CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson had another remarkable story about the almost laughably corrupt business practices at the world's most important nuclear center.

The story centers around Chuck Montano, one of a group of Los Alamos auditors who were supposed to look over the lab's accounts with outside vendors. What he found: "Vendors could charge whatever they wanted." 10,000 purchases out of 56,000 shouldn't have been allowed. Another 38,000 were questionable. "Vendors routinely overbilled and double-billed -- and yet were paid, no questions asked," Attkisson notes. (And you wonder why lab employee tried to buy camping gear and a Mustang with government credit cards.)

But when Montano and his fellow auditors wrote up an account of the fishy deals, the report was buried. Montano was kept idle without work for nine months, he claims.

Obviously, this burying of whistleblowers has become a habit over at Los Alamos. And Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, seems to be getting pretty tired of it. Attkisson asked Barton how could Los Alamos finally be cleaned up. And Barton answered, "One thing we could do is just shut the entire complex down."

LOS ALAMOS: HELP WANTED

It ain't easy, running the world's most important nuclear lab. There are billions of dollars to worry about. Tons of lethally radioactive material. And thousands of scientist employees who think they're smarter than you -- and are probably right. Worst of all, if recent history is any guide, you'll be kicked to the curb before your contract is up, the victim of the latest in a series of seemingly-endless scandals.

So maybe that's why Los Alamos is advertising for top jobs in the Washington Post's classified section. Here's one of the ads, for the Principal Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Programs.

Responsible for the technical and administrative supervision of approximately 2,500 scientific and administrative personnel, and a budget of about $1 Billion.

Manages the Laboratory nuclear weapons technology program, which includes nuclear weapons design... ensure[s] confidence in the safety, security and reliability of the nations nuclear weapons stockpile.

Serves as the Laboratory focal point for all nuclear weapons activities, including the assessment and certification of the performance of the LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] designed enduring nuclear stockpile. Activities include surveillance, maintenance, and stockpile life extension and limited-scale fabrication of a variety of nuclear and non-nuclear components.

Responsible for the pit manufacturing function, which includes the development and implementation of the capability to fabricate plutonium pits [the hearts of thermonuclear weapons] on all types of pits in the enduring nuclear stockpile...

Must have exceptional management skills on large scale programs approaching a 1Billion/year or more.

Desire a nationally recognized expert in the field of nuclear weapons technology, with a strong background in nuclear physics and nuclear weapons design and evaluation.

If that position doesn't quite match up with your expertise, don't worry. There are others available, including the lab's #2 slot, Deputy Director, and associate directorships for science and technology, international security, and engineering and evaluations.

(via LANL: The Real Story)

LOS ALAMOS BLOG GOES NUCLEAR ON MANAGEMENT

The managers I've encountered have been kinda squirrely. The researchers, on the other hand -- the folks down in Los Alamos National Lab's scientific trenches -- have been beautifully blunt, for the most part. A big chunk of their work may be secret. But the men and women of Los Alamos have rarely had a problem coming out into the open and articulating exactly what they thought was wrong with the lab -- and with the reporters who cover it.

Now, Los Alamos simulation specialist Douglas Roberts has given lab employees a chance to vent 24/7, with a new blog, LANL: The Real Story. And what they're saying about Los Alamos director Pete Nanos and his management team is not pretty.

After an intern got zapped in the eye with a laser, and a pair of classified disks supposedly went missing, Nanos shut down the lab, calling scientists who refused to comply with safety and security regulations "buttheads" and "cowboys."

At LANL: The Real Story, employees are blasting back, using all the literary tools at their disposal. Even limericks.

Under LANL's new management plan,
if you try to do science you're canned.
Shall we instill a revolt?
Or just give up and bolt?
Either way, it's "game over," man.

Quoth Nanos, "Disks are missing, oh dear!"
"They're neither here, nor here, nor here!"
"You're all cowboys, I say."
"Now we'll do it MY way!"
Make way for intimidation and fear...

Oh Nanos, why don't you just leave us?
Your actions really do grieve us.
Those missing disks?
Just labels amiss!
If we're butt-heads, then you must be Beavis!

Ian Hoffman has a great backgrounder on Roberts and his blog