By Carl Irving
Los Alamos, New Mexico
During recruiting visits
to Princeton, MIT and CalTech
last fall, students snapped up
freshly printed leaflets describing national
security as the major mission of the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. Prepared at
the urging of staff physicist Bob Benjamin,
the new lures replaced small traditional
posters which had proclaimed hopefully,
“Science Is My Life.”
At Princeton, where the biological
sciences are a noted field of study, a
number of students asked Benjamin about
war-related studies.
“I told them that biological threats were
part of overall research in the bio-sciences
at Los Alamos,” he said. “They kept coming
at me for five hours.” The number of
inquiries about jobs at Los Alamos has increased
significantly after two bad years,
Benjamin said.
The lab faces an immediate need: several
hundred additional scientists, engineers
and technicians. It expects to lose close to
500 employees this year, mostly to retirement,
just as the federal government looks
to it for more help in preventing terrorism.
Los Alamos and a second unit at Livermore,
California, are the nation’s two main
nuclear weapons laboratories, funded by
the federal government and managed by
the University of California. Each is staffed
with about 7,000 UC employees, mostly
scientists and engineers. The two billiondollar
budgets include funding for large
and growing amounts of secret research
labeled “threat reduction.”
The attacks on the United States last
September, a recession which slowed competitive
hiring, and heightened demands
for security all helped raise hopes for the
future among a range of scientists and
engineers interviewed here. Prospects, they
said, looked brighter not only for hiring
promising young talent, but also for keeping
experts and improving morale.
Recruiting and retention had sagged,
along with morale, during two bad years,
beginning in 1999 with the arrest and incarceration
of staff engineer Wen Ho Lee
on charges of spying for China.That in turn
had fanned wider suspicions in Washington
about Los Alamos regarding lax security in
general, and scientists of Chinese ancestry
in particular. Congress responded by
ordering a hiring freeze, just as growing
numbers of employees were qualifying for
retirement.
The following May, a “controlled burn”
by the National Park Service got out of
hand and destroyed 43,000 acres, forcing
evacuation of the nearby town of Los Alamos,
where the majority of UC employees
live. The fire destroyed homes of more
than 400 people, most of them lab employees
and their families.
At one point the fire had threatened
the heart of the lab, and secret files were
moved to protect them from the flames.
Later, scientists could not account for two
computer hard drives containing classified
data about nuclear weapons.That launched
yet another drawn-out investigation, amid
more unproven suspicions of espionage
and carelessness, accompanied by renewed
demands for widespread lie detector tests.
The files later were found intact, stashed
behind a copy machine.
Four months later, an apologetic judge
released Lee from jail, after he had spent
nine months in solitary confinement. The
impact of Lee’s case, along with criticisms
of security measures and unproven
suspicions about other employees, still
reverberates here.
“The Lee case has a legacy, particularly
over trust issues,” said Benjamin, an
honored employee who has devoted most
of his career to nuclear weapons research.
A task force was formed last fall, with
Benjamin as an advisory member, to
support efforts to hire additional technical
staff. “It’s the first time higher-level
management has made allocations for
recruiting, along with planning and
feedback,” he said.The effort now appears
to be showing signs of success.
The most crucial need is for more “postdocs”
—men and women who have
completed their doctoral work in the
sciences and engineering. They have long
been a major source of professional
employees here, but the number of
applicants has dropped by 25 percent over
the past two years.
“We’ve had an awful year, and we’re
not fully out of it, but we’ve dealt with most
of the concerns,” said James L. Holt,
associate director for operations and
weapons.
“We have learned to live with some of
the systems that were put in place, and
work more effectively again,” said Paul C.
White, program manager for Russian
non-proliferation programs. His own
operations, he said, which depend on
working continuously and closely with
Russian scientists to safeguard nuclear
stockpiles and their components from
theft, have been operating smoothly.
White now is subject to polygraph tests,
and says that there is “still some anxiety
among the staff about random testing, and
how they will be treated if incidents occur.
Security is ultimately built on trust. That’s
the best security there is. Not a lie detector
test.”
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John McTague, a University of California vice president, is credited with
improving relations between the UC-run labs and the federal government. |
His hopes for a more secure future
were boosted last September 11: “When I
got to work, I was deluged with e-mail
from our colleagues in Russia expressing
sympathy and pledging more ways to work
together to prevent this kind of thing from
happening again.”
White said the Bush administration,
“which might have been more skeptical,
now sees prospects for short- and longterm
cooperation with the Russians in
preventing nuclear material from falling
into terrorists’ hands.”
There are other signs of better times at
the lab. Last summer, for the first time,
students from Russia were cleared for
work at White’s office. And his support
groups once more are able to hire qualified
people.
White said he was relieved that the ties
to the University of California, which has
managed the lab for all of its 58 years,
remain in place, after growing concerns
that the contract would not be extended.
Last winter, rumors had circulated here,
and at UC headquarters, that under a
hostile Bush administration, government
responsibility would be shifted from the
Department of Energy (DOE) to the Pentagon,
and that management would be
transferred either to a private defense contractor,
such as Lockheed Martin, or the
University of Texas.
None of that happened. The new administration
extended the UC contract for
four more years, after the university had
agreed—following several months of talks
with the Clinton administration—to take a
more active role in managing and securing
the lab.
Los Alamos was created secretly for
scientists from UC Berkeley and elsewhere
to develop nuclear weapons during the
height of the Second World War. And it
always has been a place apart, because of
the secret nature of its research and also
because of its lonely location.Thus, continuing
ties with one of the most prestigious
state university systems is especially important,
employees interviewed here said.
“It helps me, personally and professionally,”
White said. “The university
connection helps us bring in new people.”
His staff, like many others here, shares consultation
and research with UC. “We tap
into what people are thinking about and
there’s interaction, cross-fertilization,” he
said.“We consider ourselves university employees.
We think it’s a good relationship.”
“I can tell you the one resonating
thread for all people my age is that if the
UC contract goes, we’re leaving,” said
Michelle Espy, a young nuclear physicist
who became a permanent staff member
last year. “The academic atmosphere UC
provides is crucial,” she said.
Most of the highly trained scientists and
engineers—almost entirely from other
states and nations—live near the lab, partly
because Santa Fe, the nearest city, is an
hour away.
Beyond the lab’s uninviting barriers and
the mix of old, decrepit buildings and grim
new gray concrete structures—one of
which soon will contain the world’s most
powerful high-speed computer—there is
only a small commercial area and employees’
housing tracts. Vast uninhabited
hills and valleys stretch in all directions.
Women who work here have mixed
feelings about the setting and the large
number of highly trained, frequently single
male scientists and engineers, most of
whom seem wedded to their projects.
There’s a commonly shared joke among
women, who are outnumbered two to one
at the lab: “the odds are good, but the
goods are odd.”
In an effort to become less forbidding
to the rest of New Mexico, one of the nation’s
poorest states, with severe education
problems, the lab recently appointed Rae
Lee Siporin, formerly undergraduate admissions
director at UCLA, to help more
New Mexico students prepare for college.
Siporin will try to “build connections”
between the lab and UC campuses and
New Mexico school administrators and
teachers, kindergarten through college,UC
announced.
Last spring, to make good on its new
deal with the DOE, the university for the
first time appointed a vice president for
laboratory relations—John McTague—to
be solely responsible for lab management.
The 62-year-old McTague’s credentials
were ideal for the new national political
configuration. After receiving his Ph.D. at
Brown University,McTague had begun his
career as chemistry professor at UCLA.
He later was a vice president for Ford
Motor Company and a science adviser to
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush.
To fulfill the new agreement, UC
appointed panels of outside experts to
advise on lab security and management.
Steven E. Koonin, vice president and
provost at CalTech, is chair of the security
panel. Members include former CIA and
FBI officials.
McTague spent his first six months in
office last year traveling constantly between
Los Alamos and the other weapons
lab managed by UC at Livermore,
California, and Washington, D.C. The
DOE, he said, has agreed to curtail what
had been a “proliferation of directives on
how to do things, as opposed to what to
do,” such as “how to screw in a light bulb in
a plutonium facility.There was a document
literally on how to screw in a light bulb.
This is not something conducive to
productivity.” The directive has been
rescinded.
The goal, McTague said, is to “get back
to integrated safety management, where
individuals are accountable for their actual
safety results, as opposed to conforming to
a procedure arrived at by somebody in
Washington,D.C.”The DOE’s security unit
supported this, he said, by ordering that the
number of its directives be reduced by
50 percent.
“Everything’s much better because of
the new vice president,” said associate
director Holt. “We’ve never had someone
at this level with the ability to meet with
the president of UC or the head of security
at the DOE or even somebody in President
Bush’s office if necessary.” Before
McTague’s appointment, administrative
ties with UC often had been restricted to
“a lot of lip service at the high level,”Holt
said.“What changed is that all of a sudden
they take real positions, taking stronger
roles than before.”
Threat reduction research has gained a
great deal of attention at Los Alamos
recently. Last fall, Don Cobb, associate
director for threat reduction, formed a “9-
11 Response Team,” to spur production of
useful tests and products and more effectively
respond to urgent federal requests
for help.
To expand such studies, the labs “don’t
have to reinvent themselves,” McTague
said.“They’ve been getting ready for a situation
the rest of us haven’t been thinking
much about.”
Threat reduction research involves
about 1,000 staff members supported by a
$300 million annual federal budget. The
staff includes 160 physicists, 220 engineers,
44 computer scientists and 30 chemists.
For many years, scientists like Paul
White have helped train inspectors from
the International Atomic Energy Agency
to detect and measure technology, and to
give advice on protecting the growing
number of nuclear plants around the
world.
One of the few public descriptions
about such research here seeks to illustrate
the need: Eight kilograms of plutonium,
about the size of a grapefruit, can create an
explosion comparable to the blast that
destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
Los Alamos helped develop hand-held
monitors to detect such hidden materials at
airport and customs checkpoints.
Biothreat reduction research has been
going on for many years here. In 1979, federal
agents used a DNA test developed at
Los Alamos to help detect a lethal form of
anthrax, which had leaked from a secret
Soviet plant and killed many nearby
residents.
More recently, working with researchers
at Livermore and Northern Arizona
University, Los Alamos helped develop
tools to analyze DNA to identify anthrax,
plague and other potentially lethal
diseases. That helped to provide quicker
analyses of anthrax cases discovered in the
United States last fall.
Los Alamos researchers developed
remote sensing techniques which can be
applied to search “the remotest corners of
the universe or caves or tunnels in Afghanistan,”
said Galen R. Gisler, an astrophysicist
who has been here for 20 years.
“Some members of our team have been
thinking about the latter since September
11,” he said.
“A lot of people, myself included, now
feel some patriotic obligation to stay,” Michelle
Espy said. Some of her research involves
threat reduction. Last year, she and
her husband, also a staff physicist, had
hunted for other jobs, and got offers for
academic positions outside the lab. They
decided to stay, because they felt that morale
was improving.
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| Theoretical physicist Shao-Ping Chen, shown holding a model of a silicon
molecule, doubts that his friend Wen Ho Lee was involved in espionage. |
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“I’ve bumped into a lot of people who
said the same:‘Yeah, I looked around, I got
an offer, and I decided to stay,’” Espy said.
“The message I get is, ‘If things continue to
improve, we stay; if one more thing goes
wrong, we leave.’
“After Wen Ho Lee and the fire, people
were pretty messed up, felt pretty kicked
around and unclear about the
future…They do what they do because
they really love it and believe in it. And
when they believe they’re not being supported,
I think it’s a real let down. I think
they take it personally. I know I do.And so,
a lot of people felt pretty depressed.”
But, like White and others who have
been here longer, Espy agrees that in the
post-Lee environment, “everyone is more
careful about security.” She added, “I think
the overshoot on security stuff has started
to settle into something that is reasonable.
It made a difference. People started to feel
things were getting back to normal.”
But that normalcy may not include
scientists and engineers of Asian descent or
birth.
Post-docs in those categories
dropped from about 25 percent of
the total hired in the early 1990s to
less than 17 percent last year,
according to the National Science
Foundation. That worries management,
because the largest fraction of
foreign post-docs with scientific and
engineering backgrounds in the U.S.
now come from China, followed by
India and Russia.
With shrinking numbers of Americans
earning advanced science
degrees, Los Alamos, in competition
with other labs and many campuses,
has increasingly depended on postdocs
from abroad to make up the
difference. Last year, 56 percent of
the post-docs at Los Alamos were
foreign citizens. Lab records do not
distinguish between domestic and
foreign-born U.S. citizens.
“We see more and more people
from Asia doing the real technical, the real
hard stuff,” said Gisler, who strongly
supports hiring more scientists with foreign
training. “You need an influx of ideas and
talent,” he said. “It’s almost like this has
become the new menial labor we leave to
immigrants…[It] reminds me of the later
years of the Roman empire, when all the
engineers were Visigoths.”
Efforts to change the downward trend
in attracting post-docs of Asian descent are
under way. The number offered jobs last
year nearly doubled; offers to post-docs
from China increased from 28 in 2000 to 48
last year.
In an interview with Asian Week last
year, Los Alamos Director John Browne
blamed “the implication” that the lab tolerated
racial profiling on espionage investigations
by federal agencies. He said he
was “outraged” by wild rumors at the time,
such as one claiming that there were many
Chinese restaurants in town because there
was a spy ring at the lab.
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Galen R. Gisler, an astrophysicist who has
worked at Los Alamos for 20 years, thinks the lab should hire more foreign-trained scientists. |
Browne, lab director since 1997, has said
repeatedly that he did not fire Lee in 1999
because of his race, but for security
reasons—for removing thousands of pages
of secret files about nuclear weapons from
the lab system and later being unable to
account for some of them—and not because
of his race.
In September 2000, Lee was released
on a year’s probation, after the judge said
that his treatment had “embarrassed this
entire nation.” Prosecutors dropped 58
charges, and Lee pleaded guilty to a single
felony count of mishandling nuclear secrets.
A year-old Justice Department report
on the case, made public last summer,
blamed the FBI and the DOE for a “slapdash”
investigation. Lee’s version of events
has just been published.
“I would not imagine him involved in
espionage,” said Shao-Ping Chen, a theoretical
physicist on the Los Alamos staff for
16 years. Like his friend Lee, Chen is a
native of Taiwan, and a naturalized American
citizen.
“He likes to fish and listen to classical
music, and do gardening. He leads a very
simple life,” Chen said. “Apparently he
didn’t follow all the rules; my guess is he
should be disciplined. But whether he
deserved to be treated that way, I don’t
think so.”
Chen took part in a campaign last year
to question the lab’s fairness in salaries and
promotions for those of Asian backgrounds.
Browne appointed him to the
newly formed Los Alamos Asian-Pacific
Islander Career Enhancement task force,
and Chen himself was promoted to manager
for computational sciences and software,
with a staff of 120 people.
Chen conceded that the situation “may
be slightly better,” since last year, when he
was subjected to three interviews by the
FBI about his friendship with Lee and
contacts with his relatives on Taiwan. He
believes his personal background held up
processing for 19 months, until last summer,
before he received permission to have
access to classified material.
He has mixed feelings about an informal
employment boycott against the lab
organized by a number of Asian American
scientists and scholars, headed by Ling-chi
L.Wang, associate professor of ethnic studies
at UC Berkeley. “It brought attention
to the problem,” Chen admitted. But he
does not favor a “long-term” boycott.
The task force chair, Maurenda K.
Dubey, an atmospheric chemist and native
of India, said he believed that the lab has
improved the situation. “Things are stabilizing,”
he said, citing more promotions and
hirings of Asians. But, he added, “there are
still worried professors who tell their
students ‘don’t go there,’ and the boycott is
still hurting us,” he said.Wang’s group has
not formally retracted the boycott.
An independent firm, hired to investigate
questions of salary disparities
between Asians and others, concluded last
May that there were no significant differences.
An investigation by the DOE’s inspector
general found that scientists of
Asian descent seeking security clearances
were not subject to racial profiling during
the Lee case. The Justice Department has
concluded that there was no evidence of
racial bias in the handling of Lee’s case.
But Browne said that Dubey’s task
force revealed “barriers that we were not
aware of.They were subtle things. It wasn’t
bias.A lot of our Asian scientists and engineers
are really good…[but] the culture
doesn’t push them to say, ‘Consider me for
management.’ And they told me this.They
said, ‘Look, we were raised differently; we
don’t sometimes push ourselves.”
Management training programs have
been started for Asians at the lab, and a
career scientist, Ping Lee, has been named
Browne’s special assistant to concentrate
on hiring and promotion issues involving
staff members of Asian backgrounds. Lisa
Gutierrez, head of a new Diversity Office
here, said that “from the managerial perspective,
more leaders at the lab are engaged
on the issue.”
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| Atmospheric chemist Maurenda K.
Dubey chairs a task force examining salary and promotion policies at the Los Alamos lab. |
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Such efforts have been bolstered by the
fact that the string of events that once led
people here to foresee nothing but dire
prospects has faded away,McTague said.
Employee surveys mostly support that
conclusion. Last year, for example,
employees responded that they generally
were proud to be with the lab and were
satisfied with their work. The results, from
47 percent of the UC employees here,
showed more positive attitudes compared
with the last survey in 1999. But there was
one exception: In 1999, 53 percent
responded that productivity had increased;
last year, that percentage fell to 46 percent.
A similar drop was registered at Livermore
last year.
McTague called that a troubling perception,
but said he believed that the
improved ties to Washington should help
restore optimism at the labs. Besides, he
added, “Times have changed. There’ve
been no incidents in the past year. Under
the circumstances, it is less likely to get
people breathing down your neck.”
