Senator Jeff Bingaman will speak about the future of science and national security at Los Alamos in the NSSB Auditorium, at 10:15 am, Monday 2 April. Some grist for the Q&A mill from some earlier posts:

__________

FROM: Brad Lee Holian
SUBJECT: Reliable Replacement Warhead decision
DATE: 5 March 2007
TO: Senator Jeff Bingaman
United States Senate
Washington, DC

Dear Senator Bingaman:

It is with considerable urgency that I write to you about the recent decision regarding the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) that was handed down on March 2, 2007, by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy. In that decision, the design put forward by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was chosen over the one from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Paramount among the myriad problems that privatization has caused LANL is this matter of the RRW and its impact upon the nation’s nuclear security; so let me focus on that issue alone.

I believe that there are several significant concerns about weaknesses in the Livermore design that ought to be addressed in Senate hearings. In order to help you sort out some of these issues, I believe that your committee would be well advised to subpoena two witnesses from Los Alamos to testify: Joe Martz, the RRW team leader, and John Pedicini, the principal designer. (By subpoenaing them, you can protect them from potential reprisals.)

The issues that these two LANL gentlemen can address before your committee are as follows:

(1) Contrary to misstatements by NNSA’s chief, Tom D’Agostino, the Livermore design is not more “conservative” than Los Alamos’s. In order that the RRW satisfy the security and safety requirements of the Navy, both designs that were submitted were equally far from any Cold War nuclear warhead that was tested before the moratorium imposed by the first President Bush in 1992.

(2) Unlike the LANL design, the LLNL design does not meet the Navy’s security and safety requirements, that is, safety from accidental detonation (including from a nearby explosion), whether deliberate or accidental, under all imaginable transportation, terrorist, or wartime scenarios.

(3) The process by which the RRW design was chosen was deeply flawed, since the members of the committee (five from the military and two from NNSA) that performed hours of in-depth technical reviews over 18 months, voted overwhelmingly for the LANL design. Since the RRW is intended for placement aboard submarines, which carry by far the largest number of nuclear weapons in the arsenal, the Navy’s wishes ought to have been paramount, but they were overruled by NNSA’s political, rather than technical considerations.

(4) LANL’s new design, while not tested in its entirety in an underground explosion at the Nevada Test Site, is far from being “untested.” In fact, a number of experiments were performed on various facets of the design, including a non-nuclear implosion, diagnosed by radiography. Both the LANL and LLNL teams carried out independent computer simulations of each other’s RRW designs. Los Alamos’s computer simulations correctly predicted the marginal behavior of the Livermore design, and the successful behavior of their own; Livermore’s simulations erroneously predicted the “failure” of the Los Alamos design. On the other hand, the LANL team’s calculation of the implosion experiment, carried out prior to the actual experiment, correctly predicted the results, while the LLNL team’s calculation did not. This calls into question not only the capabilities of the Livermore designers, but the computational tools they use.

As a result of this troubling set of observations about the RRW competition between Los Alamos and Livermore, it would be appropriate and wise to receive sworn testimony from Joe Martz and John Pedicini. It would also be useful to subpoena the members of the Project Officers’ Group (POG), the only decision-making body that oversaw all technical aspects of the RRW competition, to ascertain under oath how they voted.

The ultimate goal of reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals cannot be accomplished without a reliable deterrent—both physical and intellectual—and I believe that the Los Alamos design (and the team that created it) is the only way to achieve that highly desirable end.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter of utmost importance to national security.

Sincerely,

—Brad Lee Holian
Santa Fe, NM
Email: blhksh@comcast.net

[Disclaimer: I am an employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory, but I speak to you as a concerned American citizen. The opinions I’ve expressed in this letter do not reflect those of the management of LANL (LANS, LLC), nor of NNSA or DOE.]
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The response from Bingaman (dated March 16, 2007):

__________

Dear Mr. Holian :

Thank you for contacting me regarding the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) recent selection of a design by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

Following the award announcement, my staff traveled to NNSA headquarters for a detailed briefing on the Livermore design and why it was selected. While classification issues prevent me from commenting on the specifics of the selected proposal, it is my understanding that the Livermore design was believed to offer scientists a greater degree of certainty without additional testing. With this said, I have forwarded your letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee with the request that they consider the issues you've raised during their oversight hearing with the NNSA. Additionally, I plan to meet with members of the Armed Services Committee following that hearing to ensure that they are comfortable with the overall selection process. Please be assured that I have followed the development of the RRW project very carefully; I will do what I can to ensure that the recent award to LLNL does not negatively impact the morale or quality of science at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Again, thank you for writing. Please continue to keep me informed regarding matters of importance to you and your community.


Sincerely,

JEFF BINGAMAN
United States Senator

__________

Based on the NM Congressional Delegation's response to Holian's letter, let me make the following prognostications:

* The weapons program at LANL will go into a steep decline (funding and morale), followed in due course by a decline in other, more basic research efforts at LANL. The LANL Pit Factory (Rocky Flats South) will remain, but only for a couple of years, before it, too, will slowly wither away.
* LLNL will be the "intellectual" center of the DOE weapons complex for the future, but not for long: that "future" will also begin to decline, since LLNL is behind LANL by two years in the inexorable (irreversible) mad rush to privatization.
* The RRW will never be built, but it will be funded -- for only about two more years.

The Cold War has ended; the Manhattan Project has faded from memory.
The handwriting is on the wall; you see it before you.

--Pat, the Dog

-John Arnold (Staff Writer, ABQ Journal, Santa Fe Edition, Saturday, March 31, 2007)


A powerful congressional committee has rejected a request from New Mexico lawmakers to delay a government inquiry into Los Alamos National Laboratory security problems. House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., last month asked the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the feasibility of moving classified activities to other national laboratories "where there is a better track record with respect to security."

Earlier this month, Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., wrote to committee leaders, asking that the GAO hold off on the investigation for six months to allow lab managers time to implement new operating and security procedures. Dingell and ranking member Joe Barton, R-Texas, rejected the request this week, saying that the GAO study "will not interfere with any steps (LANL managers) may be taking to improve security."

"The national security failures at Los Alamos are a matter of the utmost urgency," Dingell and Barton wrote in a letter dated March 27. Dingell has asked GAO to evaluate how LANL can reduce and consolidate the volume of classified material and the "security footprint" of the lab. His request followed January's congressional hearing in which lawmakers grilled LANL and Department of Energy officials over the lab's most recent security breach— the discovery of hundreds of classified documents in the home of a former lab contractor.

Domenici said in a news release issued Friday that he is disappointed with Dingell's decision to move forward with the investigation. "However, if this GAO investigation goes forward, I believe it should focus on evaluating cost-effective security solutions at the lab, as opposed to solely focusing on punitive and unproductive assessments that would only lend themselves to breaking up the lab," Domenici said.

Boom in Tech Contracts Sparks Complex Debate; A Mecca in Virginia

By BERNARD WYSOCKI JR., Wall Street Journal Online, March 30, 2007; Page A1

TYSONS CORNER, Va. -- The moment visitors arrive in the lobby of the campuslike headquarters of Mitre Corp., they're asked: Do you have a national-security clearance?

If the answer is yes, Mitre's receptionists tap a few computer keys to verify. If it's no, the visitor gets a special badge and a constant escort. It's the sort of scrutiny one might expect at the Defense Department or a U.S. intelligence agency.

Mitre is one step from that: a private company with one major client, the U.S. government. Mitre does high-tech engineering and other computer work for the Pentagon, various intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security -- and business is booming.
OUTSOURCING BONANZA

"There is no doubt that post-9/11 there is more growth than we have experienced historically," says Chief Executive Alfred Grasso. In 2006, Mitre, a nonprofit that runs three federally funded research-and-development groups, says revenues topped $1 billion for the first time.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the federal government's demand for complex technology has soared. But Washington often doesn't have the expertise to take on new high-tech projects, or the staff to oversee them. As a result, officials are increasingly turning to contractors, in particular the hundreds of companies in Tysons Corner and the surrounding Fairfax County that operate some of the government's most sensitive and important undertakings.

The risk of this approach, in the words of Warren Suss, a Jenkintown, Pa., consultant and expert on federal computer outsourcing, is that the government could wind up "outsourcing its brain." The number of private federal contractors has soared to 7.5 million, four times bigger than the federal civilian work force itself, according to Paul Light of New York University. Congress, meanwhile, is learning how hard it is to keep tabs on these activities.

As a Mecca for this sort of work, Tysons Corner has emerged as outsourcing central. Once known mostly for its shopping malls, it's now a land of glass towers, manicured office parks and Tiffany boutiques, where private-sector budget analysts, project managers and highly paid executives do the work that clock-punching civil servants in downtown D.C., 10 miles to the west, can't do.

The government still buys pencils and office furniture, but now relies on others for sophisticated technology work, especially what's known as "systems integration" -- pulling together complex information networks for the military, homeland-security personnel and others.

"Our ignorance is their gain," says Richard Skinner, inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. Projects currently under way range from the design of next-generation military computer networks to the oversight of a $30 billion electronic "fence" being built along the Mexican border.

Teaming Up

Outsourcing originally sprang from concerns about overspending and mismanagement by the government itself. Starting in the 1980s, agencies realized it was cheaper to buy certain services directly from companies. In the 1990s, teaming up with the private sector became a popular idea, in part as a way to reduce the number of federal employees on the books.

Today, the potential pitfalls are legion. Big contracts are notorious for cost overruns and designs that don't work, much of which takes place under loose or ineffective government scrutiny. Underlying this tension is the fundamental question of whether one system is better than the other.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has castigated the Department of Homeland Security for lax oversight of the Coast Guard's $24 billion fleet modernization, which is being run by two defense giants. He has also faulted its management of the "fence" project, formally called the Secure Border Initiative, complaining that 60 of the 98 people overseeing the border project are contractors.

Outsourcing details to private contractors "can be a prescription for enormous fraud, waste and abuse," Rep. Waxman said during a February hearing on the issue.

Mr. Skinner, the Homeland Security inspector general, says his investigation into the Coast Guard project, known as Integrated Deepwater System, found inadequate management and oversight, resulting in delays, cost increases and design flaws.

Deepwater, awarded in 2002, is a 25-year program aimed at upgrading the Coast Guard's boats, aircraft and communications systems. The contract was awarded to a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. Unlike standard contractors, they were given a bigger role overseeing the project's many different strands.

Mr. Skinner says his office found that the top decision makers were contractors, not civil servants. The Coast Guard was relegated to the role of "adviser" on technical matters, and was essentially shut out of decisions on subcontracts. Partly as a result, he says, the cost of the first two large armed boats, called cutters, is expected to be well beyond the $775 million original estimate.

During congressional hearings on the matter, a Lockheed Martin executive defended the program. The performance "has been closely supervised by the Coast Guard" with additional oversight by Homeland Security, Congress and the Government Accountability Office, he said.

The Coast Guard recently stripped some management work from the Northrop-Lockheed venture, saying it could acquire 12 smaller cutters faster and at lower cost.

Mr. Skinner says Homeland Security is also trying to exert more oversight over its "fence" project. One problem is that the department, with 900 procurement officers, constantly battles turnover. He says the department is lucky if it can keep procurement personnel for three years before they bolt -- to places such as Tysons Corner.

Once a sleepy crossroads, the area has boomed in part because of its location halfway between downtown Washington and Dulles International Airport, straddling the Beltway that rings the capital.

The Tysons area and surrounding Fairfax County have enjoyed the boom in federal procurement in the post-9/11 era, with $18 billion of work performed in the area in 2006, up from about $10 billion in 2000. To economists such as Stephen Fuller of nearby George Mason University, Tysons is a natural anchor for outsourcing, close to the "honey," of the federal government, and attractive to young engineers and entrepreneurs.

One flashpoint today is whether contractors hire other contractors without enough controls or competition. In March, Rep. Waxman introduced a bill that would put limits on contracts awarded without competitive bidding. It passed the House by a wide margin and is raising fears among contractors that it could dent their growth. Federal procurement is already expected to slow because of budget constraints and the slowing of the post-9/11 spending boom.

Rep. Waxman's staff, in a Feb. 8 memo, said that "at least one contractor hired to engage in contract oversight on the border project, Booz Allen Hamilton, may have a conflict of interest with Boeing Co.," the prime contractor. Booz Allen has done consulting work for Boeing and has been a member of the Boeing team on other contracts.

Ralph Shrader, chief executive at Booz Allen, flatly denies the charge. "I take the greatest exception to the idea of conflict of interest," Dr. Shrader says, adding that Booz Allen is doing "support" and "coordination" work on behalf of the government, and doesn't "oversee" Boeing. He adds that Booz Allen has for decades taken pains to avoid conflicts of interest, and has a rigorous process to avoid such conflicts. (Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has hired Booz Allen to help the company with its news strategy.)

Booz Allen epitomizes the successful, well-connected Tysons consultant-contractor on a giant scale. Once mostly a management consultant to corporations based in New York City, Booz Allen's government business now accounts for more than 50% of its $4 billion in revenue. In 1992, it moved its headquarters to Tysons Corner.

The firm's past three CEOs have come from the government side of the firm. Dr. Shrader, with a Ph.D. in engineering and CEO since 1999, had experience on the commercial side early in his career. Since 2000, Booz Allen's revenue has doubled in size. It plans to hire 4,000 people in 2007 alone, adding to an existing work force of 18,000 people.

Booz Allen has extensive government contracts -- totaling more than $2 billion a year -- with the Pentagon, intelligence services and various civilian agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

It employs numerous retired military officers and former intelligence-agency chiefs. Retired Navy Admiral J. Michael McConnell, former head of the National Security Agency, was a $2 million-a-year Booz Allen executive until President Bush named him director of national intelligence in late 2006. James Woolsey, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, is another rainmaker.

Booz Allen does so much business with the Department of Defense that it conducts brown-bag lunches for young civilian recruits dubbed "DOD 101," where it explains, among other things, the difference between the insignia of a captain and a general. Ex-military types attend a "forum" to learn the commercial ropes, as well as ways of working in less hierarchical environments.

The company argues that it can mobilize staff more quickly and cheaply than the government. As one example, Booz Allen cites its work on the Pentagon's communications network, which was damaged in the 9/11 attack. Booz Allen says it put together a special "surge" team to design what it calls "survivable telecom system." It turned the plans over to the Pentagon in just six weeks.

Grand Database

Among its more controversial projects was Total Information Awareness, a Defense Department plan for a grand database to thwart terrorists. It was conceived shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and soon came under criticism from members of Congress and others as a privacy invasion, before being scrapped. "I really have no problems with the decisions we have made," says Dr. Shrader, who adds, without being specific, that "there are things we have chosen not to do."

Booz Allen has filled up its headquarters, which is technically located in McLean, Va. County zoning rules won't let the company add more people beyond its current 6,500, so Booz Allen has set up another campus near Dulles airport, which housed 1,700 people as of February.

Fueling the growth at Booz Allen and other big firms is a move toward giant, complex projects, awarded by Uncle Sam but pulled together by what's called a "lead systems integrator." Big contractors have become even more powerful in the post-9/11 era, some say, because the government has turned conservative, preferring to award contracts on critical national-security projects to proven players, especially as knowledgeable civil servants retire.

The U.S. government "is losing their system engineering, program management, acquisition expertise," said Kenneth Dahlberg, CEO of Science Applications International Corp., of San Diego, at a recent Wall Street investor conference. He vowed that his company, one of the biggest federal contractors with 44,000 employees, would be there to fill the void. SAIC recently formed a special team to go after big government contracts valued at $100 million or larger.

Portraits at the Palm

The contracting industry has consolidated recently, with big guys buying up many midsize firms. That's apparent from the walls of the tony Palm restaurant in Tysons Corner. Unlike its downtown Washington, D.C., counterpart, which displays caricatures of people from the political world, the portraits at the Tysons Palm run toward local technology entrepreneurs and founders of federal contracting companies, many of whom have made fortunes selling to big contractors. One is of Ed Bersoff. He founded BTG Inc., a government-contracting company, and sold it for $174 million in 2002 to another contractor, which has itself since been acquired.

In this small neighborhood, big contractors have started bumping into each other. A few years ago, Booz Allen tangled with next-door neighbor SAIC after the road near the two companies' office towers was named "SAIC Drive." After some back and forth, that part of the road was given a new name: Solutions Drive.

Fairfax County is now home to 358 foreign-owned firms, some of which have been lured by the county's Economic Development Authority, which has five overseas offices. Recently, Camero Inc., a unit of a Tel Aviv company, set up shop in Tysons Corner so it can better promote a radar system that can see through brick or concrete walls.

Robert Judd, the president, says he considered Arlington, Va., but the atmosphere seemed very Pentagon-centric. The office parks near Dulles seemed too commercial in nature. So he settled on Tysons, halfway between them, and a blend of the two.

The one drawback is the traffic. "We work 7 a.m. until 4 to avoid the worst of it," says Mr. Judd.

Write to Bernard Wysocki Jr. at bernie.wysocki@wsj.com 1



Outsourcing Bonanza
A sampling of large federal contracts
Company Value Covers Relevant agency
Electronic Data Systems Corp. $3.26 billion Data processing and telecommunications Defense Department/Navy
$1.66 billion Electronic identification systems Multiple agencies
$295.9 million Defense enterprise services Defense
Northrop Grumman Corp. $10.14 billion Sustaining B-2 bomber Defense/Air Force
$3.93 billion Aircraft carriers Defense/Navy
$3.9 billion Amphibious assault ships Defense/ Navy
Computer Sciences Corp. $2.2 billion Engineering services Defense/Air Force
$1.41 billion Prime integration services Treasury/Internal Revenue Service
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. $1.29 billion Information system design Multiple agencies
$595.4 million Management, organization improvement multiple agencies
Science Applications International Corp. $1.95 billion Computer aided design Health and Human Services/
National Institutes of Health
$1.92 billion Automated data-processing software multiple agencies

Source: Eagle Eye Publishers, based on public federal data

Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) mailto:bernie.wysocki@wsj.com
Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Can you please post a new thread on "Do you know a good labor lawyer?" before you retire?
Thanks,
-Anonymous

Post away, folks. Time is running out.
-Pat

by Jay Davis and Bill Nebo (San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, March 30, 2007)

Having the sense that the national discussion about the new generation of nuclear weapons will go on for some time, we decided as old friends with very different perspectives to see if we could join our knowledge and opinions and come to a common conclusion about the weapon and the program to build it, the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

We hoped that success in this matter would provide a useful guide for others as the dialogue and debate go forward. Programs dealing with weapons that can cause mass casualties and environmental change create moral and political concerns that must be addressed each time we renew them. We contend that our nation should be intentionally and responsibly led into visiting these political and moral concerns at the front end of efforts to renew our nuclear arsenal.

First: What is a reliable replacement warhead?

It is the first weapon to go into the nuclear stockpile in more than 20 years. It is designed to replace existing weapons carried on U.S. ballistic missile submarines and to be safer and more secure, with a much longer service lifetime. It is not a new weapon, in the sense of its military capabilities or of the targets to which it would be assigned. As such, it represents no change in use doctrine or threat. Our current weapons were not designed to last as long as they already have. While the plutonium cores continue to be viable, the non-nuclear components that live for decades in the low-radiation level of the cores weren't designed to last this long. In the past, were these parts to be replaced with modern ones, as one would logically do in rebuilding a car, a nuclear test would have been called for to validate the weapon's performance. Such a test is not possible under the moratorium. The military reaction to questions of reliability is to want large numbers of weapons in reserve, and to have multiple types of weapons, impeding further efforts to reduce the remaining large American and Russian nuclear stockpiles.

Second: Why build a reliable replacement warhead?

Having a more reliable weapon will allow the United States to reduce the size of its arsenal as fewer weapons will be needed to achieve a credible deterrent. The weapon offers the possibility of reducing the size and cost of the nuclear weapons-production complex, while making it more responsive to possible future threats -- that is, after a substantial investment.

On the other hand, the case against reliable replacement warheads is similarly stated: That it would encourage proliferation and, being a new weapon, would somehow lead to new threats of use or a lower threshold to use.

The first is easy to dismiss: Proliferation directed against us is stimulated almost exclusively by our conventional military superiority and by our policies and actions, such as the assertion of the unilateral right to declare pre-emptive war to repel or deter an attack, and to cause regime change in other nations at our whim.

Nuclear proliferation among regional neighbors (e.g., Egypt and Saudi Arabia versus Iran, Japan or Taiwan versus China, South Korea versus North Korea) is little affected by our weapons policies, unless we fail to make guarantees to allies under our nuclear umbrella both clear and credible.

As for the second, the reliable replacement warhead is not a new weapon and has no new utility, something that in fact the military may not like.

We believe that before this program goes forward, the reliable replacement warhead issue requires our nation to have a full and clear discussion of what our nuclear doctrine is. During the Cold War, Americans knew precisely whom our nuclear stockpile was intended to deter. We had a clear vision of the circumstances under which the stockpile was likely to be used and the consequences of such use.

Today, we lack that clear vision. Establishing that vision seems essential to achieving a political consensus that will support a reliable replacement warhead program. In replacing Cold War weapons with new ones, even if their military characteristics are the same, it is very important for us to be clear about their intended use. What are our present threats these weapons would deter and what future threat might they deter?

Additionally, the international dialogue needs to be free of bullying, posturing and threats because such behavior does not lead to the understanding and trust required for verifiable arms control agreements. We need to offer a return to treaty regimes (e.g., the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) that are conducive to mutual trust.

At the end of the day, nuclear weapons are presidential weapons reserved for dealing with existential threats to the nation, either by deterrence, or in case of the failure of deterrence, by use. Casual discussion of their use by those not holding these sobering responsibilities is not useful in creating the clarity and understanding that this subject demands.

Jay Davis is a retired nuclear physicist who spent more than 30 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was the first director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, having operational responsibility for U.S. arms control inspections. Bill Nebo retired last year after 30 years as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Livermore. They have had a 20-year long discussion on these issues.

By John Arnold, ABQ Journal, Santa Fe Edition, Friday, March 30, 2007

A federal judge has overruled a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee's objections to a $12 million class action lawsuit settlement. The ruling, handed down this week by District Judge William Johnson, could clear the way for final approval of the settlement, which was negotiated after several women sued the lab alleging years of racial and gender discrimination. A final approval hearing was originally scheduled for last October, but legal objections delayed it.

Johnson is waiting on a panel of arbitrators to determine what attorneys' fees will be before rescheduling the hearing, lawyers in the case said Thursday. Checks could be mailed out "by late summer or early fall, if all goes smoothly," said John Bienvenu, a lawyer representing workers in the case. More than 7,700 current and former employees may be eligible for payouts, which would range from $200 to $9,200 for class members. Five women who initiated the suit would receive $122,000 each under terms of the agreement.

LANL worker Laurie Quon formally objected to the settlement, arguing that the women who initiated the lawsuit would receive excessive payouts. She also contends that the agreement, which releases the lab from future discrimination claims, is too broad and that proposed attorneys fees are excessive. Johnson overruled those objections, noting that employees who aren't satisfied with the settlement can opt out and pursue their own cases. Quon's attorney, George Geran, said Thursday that he may appeal Johnson's ruling to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Settlement payouts could be delayed "indefinitely," pending the outcome of an appeal, Bienvenu said. Six female LANL employees (one of whom has since opted out of the settlement) filed separate discrimination lawsuits against former lab manager the University of California in 2003 and 2004. The suits, which allege pay and promotions disparities stemming from years of gender and racial discrimination, were merged into a single class-action case, and the parties announced a settlement agreement last May. So far, 3,100 employees have filed claims, while 129 have opted out of the settlement, Bienvenu said.

Accident info must be shared
Suppressing details of reactor mishaps imperils workers, facilities

by Kyoichi Sasazawa, Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer (Mar. 30, 2007)

Following the revelation of a criticality accident at Hokuriku Electric Power Co.'s Shika nuclear power station in Shikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, it was brought to light recently that a criticality accident likely occurred at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in November 1978.

The accident at the TEPCO plant occurred when control rods became dislodged, but the accident did not have any effect outside the plant, as was the case with similar control rod problems at other nuclear power plants.

Japan is the only country where two criticality accidents have been reported since the 1970s, when nuclear power generation was put into commercial use. Why were these extraordinary accidents covered up for such a long time?

...

In addition to the two accidents in Japan that recently came to light, 60 criticality accidents have occurred here and in eight other countries, killing 21 people, according to a report by Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. These 21 victims include two who were killed in the criticality accident at JCO Co.'s nuclear fuel plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, in September 1999.

...

In one case, a criticality accident lasted for 37 hours. Why did a criticality accident last for so long at a light water reactor that was supposed to be very safe?

...

Past criticality accidents include many that happened at nuclear development facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, both in the United States, where secrecy is paramount. Even these organizations have disclosed details of accidents to prevent recurrence, ensure safety for workers and share information with others, according to a report from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

At a news conference last Thursday, TEPCO stressed its response to the accident was appropriate. "There was no institutional obligation to report such an accident at that time," an official said. But there remains a problem from the perspective of engineering ethics on sharing information on accidents with others.

According to a report by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, accidents and problems at Japan's nuclear power plants, which are supposed to be reported to the government, total about 30 a year. As many as 200 minor accidents that are not required to be reported occur each year--about 10 percent of the figure recorded in the United States.

"Regulation was different than it is today," said Prof. Kazuo Furuta of Tokyo University's graduate school, an expert in system quantum engineering. "They thought they were performing their jobs without problem, but actually they might have made a mistake inadvertently. We must consider the issue by stepping into the mind-set of engineers in those days."

Hello Pat- Could you make this a top level post? This DOE 'request' could spell out the premature END of LANLs pension plans... Maybe a nip can spur the sheep into action...

Request for Public Comment on Department of Energy Contractor Employee Pension and Medical Benefits Challenge

[Click on title for link.]

Summary:

The Department of Energy (DOE) is seeking public comments and/or recommendations on how to address the challenge it faces due to increasing costs and liabilities associated with contractor employee pension and medical benefits. Under the Department’s unique Management and Operating (M&O) and other site management contracts, DOE reimburses its contractors for allowable costs incurred in providing employee pension and medical benefits to current employees and retirees who are eligible to participate in the contractors’ pension and medical benefit plans.

How to Submit Comments:

Please submit your comments via e-mail to contractorpensions@hq.doe.gov.

Comments due by COB, Friday, May 11, 2007.

Pat, a little update on Nanos...
-Anonymous contributor
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Livermore has largest share of dubious costs
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER, Inside Bay Area, 03/29/2007

A scientist from Lawrence Livermore Lab went to work in a French research facility, as a U.S. liaison. That was back in 1998, yet the scientist is still collecting salary and "dislocation allowances" of about $300,000 a year for housing, furniture rental, private school for his daughter and, in the past, foreign language lessons for his wife. So far the total bill is more than $2.7 million, according to an audit released Wednesday by the Energy Department's inspector general.

Winning an off-site assignment from the nation's nuclear weapons labs can be a career plum, a brief but valuable chance to work inside the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA.

But one of the secrets inside the labs is that reassignments elsewhere also can offer a handy way of finessing senior management problems, such as an incompetent manager or one angered at being passed over for a promotion.

Either way, the practice of reassignments is largely unregulated inside the Department of Energy, and while auditors found it hasn't resulted in dubious or wasteful spending at basic science labs such as Lawrence Berkeley Lab, they found millions of dollars in questionable expenses for reassignments from the nation's three nuclear weapons labs.

Overall, in 2004 and 2005 the inspector general found $11.3 million in weapons lab reassignments that "were either too long, resulted in excess costs, or were not appropriately cost-shared with host entities."

At Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, the University of California in years past has provided lab-salaried scientists as staff to Sen. Pete Domenici, the top Republican on a key appropriations committee holding purse strings on nuclear weapons work. More recently, the university has resolved problems with unpopular lab managers by finding them jobs at the Defense Department while still paying them Los Alamos salaries and entitlement to UC's richly funded pension plan.

That was the case with retired Vice Adm. G. Pete Nanos, who left Los Alamos after a tumultuous period as director in which he derided staff as "buttheads." The university secured a job for Nanos planning strategy for scientific research at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and paid him a Los Alamos salary of $289,000. When an internal audit questioned the payment, the university itself took over Nanos' salary, now at $235,000.

"He has knowledge of Los Alamos and knowledge of (the Defense Department) and he's been able to apply that at DTRA," university spokesman Chris Harrington said. "Being able at times to present the perspective of the laboratory, having a liaison at times, is valuable for the laboratory."

Of the three bomb labs, Livermore Lab had the largest share of questionable expenses noted by the inspector general — more than $5 million for 2004 and 2005.

Auditors found the lab's payment of 100 percent of the $3.7 million costs for four employee reassignments "especially troubling" because the reasons for the assignments were not documented and because lab officials acknowledged other agencies were getting some benefit and should have been charged.

"We use these because we really feel there are benefits to the laboratory and the agency that the employee is being transferred to," lab spokeswoman Lynda Seaver said. "We agree we can improve our documentation."

Auditors also found that in several cases Livermore employees were kept on assignment for the more than the maximum of four years and that the lab had no plans on file to take the employees back.

In one case auditors found a Livermore scientist took a six-month assignment and still hasn't come back after 15 years and $1.2 million in lab expenses.

(Click image to enlarge)

http://www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-070304-lanl.html

	March 22, 2007 “New” LANL Management Can’t Get a Grip on Cyber-Security Issues

For Immediate Release Contact: Jennifer Porter Gore jgore@pogo.org or Peter Stockton (202) 347-1122 WASHINGTON —The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has received copies of an internal assessment of the Los Alamos National Laboratory showing that six months into its tenure the lab’s new management had no cyber security protection plan. The new management is a consortium led by University of California and Bechtel. The University alone managed the lab for 60 years—until a series of cyber-security lapses and breaches forced a re-bid of the original management contract. However, the internal assessment of the lab’s Cyber Security Program conducted in November 2006 reveals crucial management problems. These problems include lack of a clear cyber-security policy and a program plan that still hadn’t been finalized. Two sections of the lab’s draft master cyber-security plan titled “Bull in a China Shop” and “Flatheaded” are cited as “derogatory statements regarding the new LANS [Los Alamos National Security] management structure and its likely impacts on cyber security at LANL.” These sections were drafted by the lab’s Information System Security Officers. In addition to not having a site-wide plan, the lab is reported to lack “rudimentary components” of a cyber security program including standardized periodic training, a site-wide cyber security manual, and an overarching policy for the lab’s cyber-security, noting “limited procedural documentation was available.” The assessment involved representatives from several nuclear weapons facilities and was conducted in mid-November—weeks after a major cyber-security breach that led to more than 1,000 pages of highly classified documents from the lab being discovered in a trailer during a methamphetamine lab drug bust. POGO’s investigations have found seven cyber-security breaches at LANL since 2002 (see http://pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-061003-lanl.html ). These breaches include a 2004 report of the loss of computer disks containing classified information and the mishandling of classified emails. Those events prompted LANL Director Pete Nanos to suspend all work activities for the Lab in July 2004 for several months, at a cost of at least $370 million. “LANL seems to have the same never-ending problems,” said POGO’s Executive Director Danielle Brian. “Time after time the lab has promised to strengthen its cyber-security program, including finding better ways to secure classified removable media, but little gets done. I hope it doesn’t take another security breach to spur lab officials to real action, but I’m afraid it will.” Founded in 1981, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government. # # #

Dear Pat,

From my reputation, you probably know that you and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet we share many of the same goals. I, for one, appreciate the effort that you have put into the blog, even though I do not agree with some of your posts. This is exactly what freedom of speech is about. I was sorry to see the announcement of the closing on April 1, but can understand your reasons. Again my thanks for your efforts. If my request to hold the blog open until at least September would make a difference, please consider this a request. You may quote the request with my name attached. By that time, we should know whether the decision to remain at LANL should be on the grounds of personal issues or the chance to make a difference for the nation. You may quote this paragraph in its entirety and attribute it to me.

Thanks,

John M. Pedicini

-----

Dear John:

The closing date of April 1st is firm, but there are others who have signaled the desire to carry on. Doug and I will discuss -- offline, for the first time, probably by land line, maybe even over a beer (he'll probably be surprised to learn my identity) -- just how to do this in the smoothest way possible, with candidates who come forward with a credible level of commitment. As to the two future posts you mention, "on the goings on in RRW and my future plans," I can guarantee you that they will appear, either on this very blog before April 1st, or on whatever follow-on that materializes after April 1st. That will be part of the "commitment" bargain with the new blogmeister.

As to our political differences, I doubt they are as far apart as you claim. A dedication to the long-term survival of the finest characteristics of humanity is the essence of conservatism, and I am that kind of conservative. So are you. Living well and letting others do so, as long as they don't impinge upon my living well, is the essence of liberalism (or at least libertarianism, if you prefer that word), and I am that kind of liberal (or libertarian). So, I believe, are you.

Thanks to you for your contributions to the nation's security and to the people at LANL through the medium of this blog.

--Pat, the Dog

P.S. As a scientist, as well as a conservationist, let me add one more comment on the definition of "conservative": When Thomas Jefferson wrote the words in the Declaration of Independence over 230 years ago, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness", no one, not even a scientifically educated man like Jefferson, had an inkling of the subsequent discovery of the laws of natural selection, general relativity, or quantum mechanics. He and the intellectuals of his Enlightened day had only the barest notions about the vastness of the beautiful, terrifying, and strange Cosmos we find ourselves in, nor of the even stranger tiny quantum universe of atoms, nor of the complex richness of the chemistry inside a living cell -- a universe in itself. So it is no wonder that when Jefferson spoke of "Life," it was human life that he had in mind. But now we know that "life" on our Blue Planet Earth is a complex, interconnected web of plants, animals, and bacteria, from which the lives of human beings cannot be separated, and which we may be seriously perturbing by our human activities. Life is a rare thing in our Universe -- our Blue Planet is a lonely speck, and we may never, as a species make contact with any other life forms -- and that makes the preservation of life on our planet a moral imperative. Science has brought our understanding of life to an unprecedented height, and at the same time, brought all life, including us, closer to extinction, especially with the invention of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer's last unfinished hope was that nuclear weapons would never, ever be used again on the face of this planet. The RRW, properly realized, could facilitate the elimination of nuclear weapons, and this, along with the struggle to contain the lethality of human-caused global warming, constitute the moral imperative of saving all life on this Earth. Those who dedicate their lives to saving the biosphere are, in my mind, the Ultimate Conservatives.

By Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 26 March 2007

On March 2, the Energy Department made the announcement that the nuclear weapons labs have long anticipated and arms control advocates have long dreaded: It selected a design for the first new nuclear warhead in two decades--a so-called reliable replacement warhead (RRW). Although Congress has not yet approved production of the warhead, Energy's announcement takes the RRW past a significant hurdle, into the final step of the design process (if Congress appropriates the $119 million necessary for this), and in the direction of production and deployment.

In 2006, Congress authorized the two nuclear weapons labs (Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) to develop competing designs for an RRW that might replace the most common warhead in the current stockpile--the W76. This is the warhead that sits atop most U.S. submarine-based missiles. Congress stipulated that the RRW design should be safer and more reliable than the existing W76 design, that it should not confer new military capabilities, and that it should not require nuclear testing in order to be certified.

The existing stockpile, of Cold War vintage, was designed to squeeze the most explosive yield possible out of the smallest amount of plutonium. These warheads, instead of being built to last, were designed right up against the edge of viability on the assumption that they would be retired after a few years and replaced with newer designs. Congressional advocates of the RRW, such as Ohio Republican Rep. David Hobson, have seen it as a program to replace temperamental nuclear Porsches with reliable Honda Civics in the hope that future administrations would be bolder in cutting the stockpile if they had more confidence in each warhead's reliability.

Energy announced that it selected the Livermore design for the RRW because it had "a very robust test pedigree," according to Tom D'Agostino, the acting head of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. While the Los Alamos design was more adventurous, the Livermore design involved tweaking a warhead (never deployed) that Livermore tested in 1980. Of the two designs, it best satisfied the Congressional requirement that the RRW not require nuclear testing. The RRW will also incorporate new protective features that make it, if Gen. James Cartwright of STRATCOM is to be believed, as useless "as a paperweight" if it falls into terrorist hands.

It would be easy to assume that the weapons labs and the navy are united in wanting the new warhead, but the truth is more complicated. Many older weapons designers have been lukewarm about the RRW, which has been more strongly supported by a younger generation of weapons designers who were just hitting their stride when the testing moratorium of the 1990s slammed the door in their faces. The media have quoted Bruce Tarter, the former director of Livermore, and the legendary retired designer Seymour Sack (whose design is the basis for the RRW) as being skeptical about the need for a new warhead.

The warhead has also been opposed by two of the three newspapers in the Livermore Valley. And the navy, which has had a legendary blood feud with Livermore for at least two decades, was always ambivalent about spending the money a new warhead will cost. Now that Livermore has won the design contest, the navy's limited enthusiasm for this project can be expected to ebb still further. Also, judging by comments on the entertaining Los Alamos blog, there are Los Alamos scientists determined that the Livermore RRW will die at birth.

An interesting political struggle looms on the horizon as Congress moves toward hearings on the RRW. In this struggle, New Mexico and California politicians, who pay close attention to the weapons labs, are on both sides of the issue--though all claim to speak in the name of arms reductions. California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, New Mexico Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman, and New Mexico Democratic Rep. Tom Udall have criticized the RRW, while New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and the representative from Livermore's district, Democrat Ellen Tauscher, have lined up behind it (the latter suggesting a bargain whereby the United States builds the RRW while, finally, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty).

In the debate on the RRW, such as it has been, opponents have mainly focused on two issues: the reliability of the existing stockpile and the danger that an RRW will stimulate nuclear proliferation. Many RRW opponents in nongovernmental organizations have cited a 2006 report by the JASON committee of experts, which concluded that the plutonium cores of existing warheads will be reliable for at least 85 years. If it ain't broke, they say, don't fix it--especially if the fix might provoke other countries. Thus, the New York Times has editorialized that the RRW is "a public relations disaster in the making overseas," while Feinstein has said the mass production of a new warhead, at a time when the United States is trying to isolate North Korea and Iran for their nuclear initiatives, would appear hypocritical and "could serve to encourage the very proliferation we are trying to prevent."

These are good arguments, but still something important has been missing from the debate. It is my own feeling that, if given the choice of waving a wand and changing all the current W76s into RRWs, one would do so because the RRW is a safer warhead whose design is less likely to trigger neurotic doubts about reliability among the men and women in white lab coats who can bring the test ban regime crashing down if they tell the president that they have lost confidence in the reliability of the stockpile. But changing the W76s into RRWs cannot be done by the swish and flick of a wand. Given that the United States currently has the capability to produce about a dozen new pits each year and that we are talking about replacing all the W76s--and eventually, the entire nuclear stockpile, after future RRW design exercises--it can only be done by expanding the U.S. plutonium pit production capability and, presumably, by building the new Consolidated Plutonium Facility Energy seeks as part of its $150 billion Complex 2030 initiative.

We need, then, to debate Complex 2030 and the RRW as two sides of the same coin and to ask whether we want to go back to being a country that mass produces nuclear weapons with all the political, environmental, and health costs that entails. Ten years after the test ban treaty was signed, at a time when the U.S. and Russian stockpiles are shrinking, at a moment when the U.S. budget deficit arcs deeper into the red each year, in a year when the Iraq War is adding $100 billion to the $450 billion defense budget, we need to ask whether we want to restore the relevance of nuclear weapons by devoting this much of our treasure to their refurbishment.

The real question is not so much what the RRW might mean to others, but what nuclear weapons mean to us now.

From land, water, and other resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectra, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources have been undergoing a powerful shift toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation and civic life.

What's to be done?

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

Again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

And again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

-Bill Moyers, an address to students at Occidental College, entitled "A Time for Anger, a Call to Action."

-----

Does this strike home to those of you who are NOT part of LANL's new "Power Elite"?

Think, before you answer.

--Pat, the Dog

PS: A herd does not qualify as "organized people"...

Is new H-bomb design better?
Debate rages over bathtub shape

--Ian Hoffman, Staff Writer, Inside Bay Area, 03/25/2007

For Gen. James Cartwright, the military commander over U.S. nuclear forces, the first hydrogen bomb to come out of an American nuclear design lab in 20 years doesn't look very new.

The warhead is launched by the same submarines on the same missiles at the same targets and produces the same blast as the warhead it replaces.

"This is far from being a new warhead because it still has the same form, fit and function as the existing warhead," agrees Steve Henry, deputy assistant defense secretary for nuclear affairs.

But Sen. Dianne Feinstein figures by putting more sophisticated warheads on the same missile "you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon."

Weapons experts themselves are sharply divided.

In designing a hardier replacement for the warhead atop the Navy's Trident missiles, Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists poured more muscle and a few added features into an early 1980s-vintage warhead.

The new/not-new distinction is more than semantic: A truly new bomb probably would need explosive testing, something U.S. presidents have forsworn since 1992, partly to block other nations from testing new designs.

What everyone can agree on is that Livermore's latest bomb — the first in a planned series of "reliable, replacement warheads," or RRWs — never has been manufactured. That means it is vulnerable to the kinds of flaws and breakdowns that afflict every complex object, from trains to automobiles to computers and even living things. The same is true for newly made nuclear bombs, with thousands of parts.

"What you know from bringing in these bright, new, shining systems is they can bring in all these new defects," said Raymond Jeanloz, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who sits on several advisory committees on nuclear weapons matters. "The nature of the glitches have always been very small, detailed things. These are very sophisticated systems, and it's just really hard to be sure that every detail has been shaken down. That doesn't necessarily mean it will have to be the same in the future, but in the past, really diligent people were part of the design and development cycles, and there were glitches."

Scientists, engineers, factory workers and nature itself build unforeseen flaws into the things they make. That's why products are recalled, women miscarry and consumers repair a larger universe of unacknowledged mistakes in the things they buy. It's why Windows users still are downloading security fixes and "updates" after the nth service pack.

On the other side of the equation from these "birth defects" is aging. In time, more and more critical parts break down in any organism or product until it reaches the end of its service life or dies.

Engineers depict these facts of birth, life and death as a curve that looks like a bathtub. After a number of early design- and manufacturing-related failures, the surviving units stumble through a smaller, constant number of random defects and then begin to fail in larger and larger numbers as age takes its toll.

It is tempting to think the most horrendously lethal weapons ever devised by humanity are immune to these facts of engineering and manufacture. They're not.

Numerous studies have found the weapons to be remarkably defect-free, especially as scientists learned to seal moisture out of the most sensitive components. But flaws have been found — and when deemed necessary, fixed — in every kind of bomb and warhead in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, according to a 1995 study by scientists at all three U.S. nuclear weapons design labs.

That study suggested the wholesale failure of one or more bombs or warheads could come somewhere around the 28th year after a weapon is manufactured.

The deadly right-hand side of the bathtub curve, in other words, was imminent.

Yet subsequent studies showed that conclusion was statistically infirm, based on too small of a sample of examined weapons. Twelve years later, with many weapons aging past that mark and an average arsenal age of about 23 years, weapons scientists acknowledge there is no evidence yet for an age-related meltdown. It is partly fear of such a meltdown that has driven a plan by the weapons labs and the Bush administration to design replacements for every U.S. nuclear explosive.

"What is true is I think there has not been an upturn in the frequency of age-related findings that would create a sense of dramatic urgency in the sense we need to do something in the next year or two years or three years," said former Lawrence Livermore director Bruce Tarter, chairman of a committee studying the replacement warhead program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

U.S. nuclear bombs and warheads then rest somewhere in the stable bottom of the bathtub, past most of their birth defects and adolescence.

"I don't know where the right side of the bathtub shows up, but it is measured in hundreds of years," said Bob Peurifoy, a retired Sandia National Laboratories weapons executive.

A newly manufactured bomb such as Livermore's latest will slip into the bathtub at the left side, before possible defects in design and manufacture are discovered. The lab's RRW-1 is based heavily on a well-tested warhead from the early 1980s but will never be tested in its final manufactured state, and the probability of defects is unclear.

Livermore designers say they learn from mistakes, just as any automaker does.

"Just like Toyota, you have many fewer birth defects today than on a Toyota that you bought in 1985," said designer Bruce Goodwin, head of the lab's weapons program. "But at the end of the day a lot of the lessons learned from the last 25 years come down to simplicity of design. If you could look at RRW, you'd see many fewer parts, you'll see things that come together simply and come apart simply."

If the lab's designers make mistakes that, as in the current arsenal, don't show up for a decade or two, the RRW-1 is designed so that its first explosive stage produces at least four times the energy necessary to drive the rest of the bomb.

"You do have a very, very large margin in the system and so you can absorb defects, you can absorb insults or things that make it work less well," Goodwin said.

Without the proof of a nuclear test, skeptics such as Peurifoy aren't convinced.

"When you do something new, it's the left side of the bathtub, and if you look at automobiles, flashlight batteries, I don't care, you'll find that statistically, you make mistakes that you only discover after you put something into inventory," he said. "I go with the tried and true. I go with the stockpile that has been surveilled and maintained and, when necessary, fixed, and that's what we have today."

By Donald J. Dudziak

Santa Fe New Mexican, Opinions, Sunday 25 March 2007

If the Bush administration and Congress want to focus energy policies more sen­sibly, New Mexico is the place to begin.

Thirty years ago, President Jimmy Carter put a halt to the recycling of spent fuel from nuclear power plants, on grounds that plutonium removed during the process might get into the hands of irresponsible gov­ernments or terrorists and lead to production of a nuclear weapon. Although President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban on recycling, and other countries like France and Great Britain never stopped using the process, it was not resurrected in this country because recycling was considered too costly.

Now that could change, given the growing importance of nuclear power in the battle against global climate change. In the United States, 17 utilities are preparing to build as many as 33 nuclear power plants. And here in New Mexico, a new uranium enrichment facility is under construction, and one or more nuclear power plants might be built.

Worldwide, the number of nuclear plants is expected to double, with at least 1,000 oper­ating by midcentury, but the likelihood exists there might not be enough uranium.

If the spent reactor fuel now stored at nuclear power plants in the U.S. — some 50,000 tons — were recycled instead of dis­posed of as nuclear “waste,” it could be con­verted into new reactor fuel and used again to provide clean electricity. This would help conserve the world’s uranium resources.

Another benefit from recycling is that it significantly reduces the volume, heat and toxicity of nuclear “waste,” in effect more than doubling the capacity of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. It means that Congress would not have to decide on a second or a third site for addi­tional repositories after the first one is built.

The Department of Energy plans to spend $250 million to demonstrate and deploy tech­nologies for recycling, along with advanced “fast” reactors that can burn the recycled spent fuel. DOE’s goal is to stimulate the use of nuclear power around the world, by assur­ing an ample supply of nuclear fuel, while limiting the risk of weapons proliferation.

Known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the DOE plan is to build and operate three facilities in the United States: One for recycling spent fuel and fabricating a mixed-oxide fuel for use in nuclear power plants to produce more electricity. Another facility would be an advanced fast reactor, which would destroy long-lived radioactive elements, while producing power. And a research facility would be used to develop new recycling processes and other advanced nuclear technologies.

So far, 11 sites around the country — including Hobbs and Roswell in New Mexico — have received DOE grants to con­duct studies in order to determine whether they’d be suitable as locations for either the nuclear recycling center or the advanced reactor. Over the long term, the facilities are expected to require a capital investment of at least $16 billion and bring in 8,000 jobs.

The cost of developing new recycling technology would be stretched out over many years, so it will require an assurance of long-term, predictable funding for research, development and demonstration, involving universities and national laboratories.

No question about it, the idea of recy­cling is ambitious. It will entail perfecting a new technology for recycling, one that reduces the risk of weapons proliferation and is affordable. Also, a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors will need to be built. As we’ve learned well over the past 30 years, the absence of recycling and the unnecessary delays in opening the Yucca Mountain repository have placed nuclear power plants in the position of storing more spent fuel than expected, for longer than originally intended.

We need to move forward with GNEP now. Otherwise, we could seriously limit the ability of nuclear power to provide the essen­tially emission-free energy that the world urgently needs.

Donald J. Dudziak, Ph.D., P.E., is a fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a department head and professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University.

Congratulations, Pat!

>100K, 1 week before Shutdown!

Good boy! ... er, girl?

-Anonymous (#100,043)

This just in:

***********************

Pat,

In response to your question of "Where are the bright young people at LANL?" I submit that they have already left, or are in the process of doing so. You seem to be laboring under the misconception that DOE wishes for LANL to be a science laboratory. To assist you in understanding what DOE's real intentions are for LANL, I suggest that you read the following comment left on the "Nuke Lab Workers' SOS to Congress": post. It describes LANL's future quite clearly.

-Anon

_________________________________________

Mallory has already said that TA-55 is to be manufacturing. TA-16 HE work will go to Pantex. SRS is here, at McQuinn's request, to do an assessment on WETF Tritium work. And I jut read that SRS is gearing up their Tritium facilities. Maybe Tritium will go to SRS and their assessment is just a scoping trip. SNL is getting more and more LANL applications.

With all this there may not be enough left for LASO to mismanage. Between LASO mismanagement, LANS mismanagement, LASO arrogance, LANS arrogance we make quite the team.

Outsourcing is coming. RIFs are coming. You'll have to be 60+ to get your TCP1. Time clocks. Pee bottles. Keystroke counts. A new world is a brewin'. We'll be back down to a 6000 person lab before we know it.

Heim's specialty was outsourcing at SRS. It'll happen here. Give computer support out. Get rid of travel. Give benefits to Hewitt. Give small science to universities. HE work to Pantex. Tritium to SRS. Don't need weapons engineers soon. Give engineers to Bechtel. Do a corporate reachback if we need them and it looks like a management function so there will be a management fee coming in.

Job classification restructure. Salary realignments. Formality of Ops. New world a blowin' in.

Nuke Lab Workers' SOS to Congress

And here's the 'quality' of the 'story' by the 'reporter':

"The drug dealer was a former employee of KSL, a subcontractor with a
Los Alamos contract. How he could walk out of one of the world's most
secure nuclear weapons laboratories with highly secret information on
USB memory sticks is near unbelievable."

A. The person who worked for KSL was a woman.
B. She wasn't accused of being a drug dealer.
C. The drug dealer was her renter (maybe not even a boyfriend).

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has received a letter addressed to Congress from “current and former DOE employees” (pdf) calling for an investigation into persistent mismanagement at the NNSA’s Los Alamos Site Office (LASO). Their concerns include understaffing, cronyism, constant and haphazard reorganizations, and inadequate training of employees. The letter draws from a wealth of knowledge and experience, and the issues raised deserve to be taken seriously:

The "we" who have authored this letter constitute a group of current and former employees of the Los Alamos Site Office (LASO) and the New Mexico DOE Complex. As a group our personnel have a sum of more that 100 years of experience. We can say with confidence that we have never in our careers, either in public service or the private sector witnessed such gross mismanagement as seen at the Los Alamos Site Office.

Last year, the University of California won, along with Bechtel, a questionable competition to continue their mismanagement of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with the stated purpose of correcting the problems that they, in part, created. The NNSA initiated a “pilot program” shortly thereafter that handed over contract oversight responsibility to the contractor itself. This program rendered the Site Office virtually powerless to correct problems and it’s at the root of many of the issues discussed in the letter to Congress.

The "pilot program" makes little sense considering the track records of the contractors. The University of California already had a proven history of mismanagement at Los Alamos before the DOE decided to open their contract to competitive bidding. Bechtel, UC’s current partner, not only has its own checkered contract history, but has often used its political clout to actively dodge accountability.

Thus it's no surprise that safety and security debacles continue unabated: the partial blinding of an employee with a laser, incidents of losing classified information (e.g., CREM DE METH), americium contamination in four states that cost the governement $1 million in clean-up costs, and a nine-month shutdown of the lab due to lax security and safety that cost taxpayers roughly $500 million.

The employee letter states:

Given past problems, one must question why the LASO was thought to be the appropriate site for implementation of a pilot of reduced contractor oversight as a way of doing business. Why select a site that is-known to have had a history of serious management problems and serious problems with business systems. Audits and review of other documentation will verify the lack of a viable business system at LANL.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman last fall, POGO also addressed the Site Office’s “pilot program.”

The problem is clear: the lack of qualified safety basis experts in the Site Offices; the fact that DOE does not verify whether the safety directions created by the federal DOE overseers have been implemented by the contractor; and the decision-makers at DOE Headquarters do not support their people in the field when there is a conflict between the contractor and DOE. For instance, Headquarters assured the Los Alamos site office that it would get additional staff to work on safety verification. However, that additional staff was never provided. Furthermore, former Los Alamos safety director Chris Steele was transferred because of complaints from the contractor, who said he was being too tough on them. The solution is not self-policing by the contractor: it is to have a sufficient number of adequately-qualified safety experts, and the support for those experts from DOE Headquarters. Oversight of contractors is an inherently governmental function.

On January 30 of this year, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian testified before a House subcommittee once again reiterating that the situation has yet to improve. She stated, “In fact, I fear things may actually be getting worse. Not only has NNSA has failed to correct security issues, but the agency has determined that it wants even less oversight of Los Alamos and has implemented a new pilot program in which oversight has been handed over to the contractor itself.”

Many of the DOE employees’ concerns are widely known and pre-date the “pilot program.” Retired Admiral Henry Chiles, presiding over a Security Workforce Panel, released a report in 2004 (pdf) that documented personnel problems within NNSA, particularly those related to understaffing. The following year, retired Admiral Richard Mies led an independent review of NNSA security operations at the national laboratories. His subsequent report (pdf) also detailed an extensive lack of proper training, oversight, and accountability.

Yet while paying lip-service to these and other reports’ recommendations, the DOE and NNSA have failed to correct the underlying problems. At the same hearing where POGO’s Brian noted that the situations may be getting worse, NNSA Acting Administrator Thomas D’Agostino persisted in the belief (pdf) that improvements were already underway. His conclusion:

We have received a number of reports from the Government Accountability Office, the DOE Inspector General, and the DOE Office of Independent Oversight. Like the Chiles and Mies studies, we have addressed the recommendations in these reports and have made major improvements.

The recent letter from “current and former DOE employees” proves D’Agostino’s conclusion to be false. POGO supports their request for a congressional investigation into the matter. The “pilot program” has been a disaster and should be terminated immediately. The entire senior management staff should also be held accountable for LANL and LASO's failures.

-- John Pruett

Various individuals in Congress are assessing the necessity of the RRW program. There are multiple reasons why I believe the entire RRW program (RRW-1 and RRW-2) should be stopped immediately and they are outlined below.

The original goal of the RRW program was to make advances in nuclear safety and security, improve manufacturability, and increase robustness. However, according to NNSA, it is now certifiability by an arbitrary date. The easiest weapons to certify are the ones in the stockpile so the life extension program (LEP) approach is the most logical path forward. There is no need for RRW-1 or RRW-2, just do more LEP’s. NNSA, by there own admission, has successfully destroyed every reason for the RRW program.

Secondly, who defines which RRW designs are the easiest to certify? The LANL team believes their design is easer to certify than their competitors; likewise, LLNL sides with their design. In fact, Marty Schoenbauer, a top NNSA official, acknowledged that both designs are equally certifiable. The truth is, no RRW design will be easy to certify without nuclear testing; as a result, RRW only makes sense if we make revolutionary advances in nuclear safety and security, improve manufacturability, and increase robustness.

Likewise, should we spend tens of billions of dollars to generate a nuclear weapon that is more difficult to certify than the current stockpile, and requires an expensive nuclear weapons infrastructure? The original vision for the RRW program was to use science as the nuclear deterrent in combination with a small and agile infrastructure where nuclear weapons could be built in a rapid manner if they are needed. Unfortunately, the path that NNSA is taking is opposite of the RRW objective. Sadly, NNSA is heading down a costly path that will require an expensive infrastructure that will not be able to respond in a manner consistent with RRW vision sold to congress.

Unfortunately, the most atrocious problem with the RRW program is the disregard of science. The LANS management on many occasions ordered the RRW team to not refute statements made by LLNL, even though LANL had experimental data that proved LLNL statements were wrong. I am very fearful that LANS will continue the gag order on LANL scientists. The entire RRW program (RRW-1 and RRW-2) is destined for failure if we suppress the senior weapon designers who have designed and detonated nuclear weapons at Nevada.

Congress, please do not be fooled by all the marketing tactics. LLNL has a long history of grandiose promises, and never delivering on what they promised. Two recent examples of LLNL failures are NIF and the second axis of DARHT. The NIF facility is billions of dollars over budget and many scientists at LANL do not believe it will ever achieve ignition. Likewise, the second axis of DARHT, which LLNL designed, still does not work correctly, and it may not be operational for some time to come. We should learn from history so that we do not repeat the same mistakes.

Finally, I would highly encourage the members of Congress to look deeper into the RRW program and the competition process. Plus, it would be very beneficial for the Q-cleared members of Congress to hear the peer-review presentation from the LANL RRW team prior to proceeding with the RRW program. I think that these members of Congress will be shocked at what they discover!

Sincerely,
--A nuclear weapons scientist

Dear Pat, The Dog,

I agree with your assessment of the state of LANL, its management, its sponsors, and its staff. I applaud you for the efforts you spent in trying help LANL help itself, but the collective wherewithal at LANL just doesn't seem capable of rising to the occasion.

I believe the term for what we have observed in this latest LANL-focussed web interaction is called "Darwinism," evolution in action, survival of the fittest, etc.

There will soon be RIFs. LANL's science mission will continue to erode. In a few years those of us who once worked there will not recognize the place, nor will we want to.

Thanks again for trying to help undo some of the damage that the ill-conceived corporatization process has done to LANL, but it is now clearly time for those who wish to participate in a healthy, productive work environment to move on.

-Anon

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Dear Anon:

You have the true Force with you. You can make it in other, more productive environments -- even "campus-like" environments -- of that I am sure. May you, your new colleagues, and your students prosper. Urge them to think for themselves and stand up for what is right. It'll be a refreshing thing for us somewhat older people to watch as a new day dawns. (As for me, don't worry: I plan to move on beyond all this LANL misery in only a few more months. Things are progressing nicely to a new, more friendly place for your canine pal. And you don't even have to go very far from here ...)

--Pat, the forward-looking Dog

Regents approve $1.2 B pension deals

ROGER SNODGRASS, Los Alamos Monitor Assistant Editor

The University of California Board of Regents unanimously authorized completing an agreement with the Department of Energy on Thursday to meet ongoing obligations for UC retirees and inactive former employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The recommendation from President Robert C. Dynes included a plan to transfer $1.279 billion of pension assets to Los Alamos National Security, the new contract manager. The remainder of $3.17 billion will be retained by the UC Retirement Program to manage and fund liabilities of the LANL employees who retired or became vested inactive members of the program before the contract changed hands.

UC spokesman Chris Harrington confirmed the approval on Friday. He said the university had delivered on its promise to protect the interests of the UC retirees at LANL.

Charles Mansfield, president of the LANL Retiree Group, said the deal looked good except for one thing.

"We haven't heard DOE say that," he said

A call to the contract officer at the local National Nuclear Security Office that supervises the laboratory contract for DOE was not returned on Friday afternoon.

A fact sheet prepared by UC to explain the transactions represents two fully mature and negotiated agreements ready for formal completion.

The transfer of UC assets and liabilities "is planned to occur on or about April 2, 2007," according to the information.

Earlier in the week, UC alerted laboratory employees and retirees that the closeout agreements would be considered during the regents' meeting this week in Los Angeles.

It has been a roller-coaster couple of years for retirees who found themselves alternately reassured and powerless in the process.

Their concerns emerged when the request for proposal was issued to compete the lab contract, without guaranteeing that their pension assets would be retained by UCRP. That raised the possibility that they would be removed from the highly effective UCRP fund and transferred to a smaller and unproven new pension program to be established by a new, stand-alone, limited liability company.

Efforts by the Los Alamos Committee on LANL Excellence, including a forum hosted by Joe Ladish and a panel of community leaders, in June 2005, elicited additional assurances on behalf of retirees from Tyler Przybylek, the chair of the Source Evaluation Board that evaluated proposals for managing the laboratory contract. Language about compensation in the request for proposal was changed from "comparable" to "substantially equivalent."

But then full alarms went off in early January 2006, when the UC regents did not entirely reject a plan to separate out the assets of the LANL retirees. Nothing had been settled with DOE by the time the contract was transferred to LANS on June 1, 2006. Concerns were compounded for some retirees by a lack of communication from UC that relegated them to a second-class status and shut them out of the negotiations.

A measure of assurance was regained on the eve of the contract transfer by Judy Ackerhalt, UC's executive director of human resources and benefits from the Office of the President. In a public meeting at Duane Smith Auditorium, she reaffirmed a commitment made by President Robert C. Dynes that employees would receive the defined benefits they had earned and had been promised.

"The University of California remains committed to honoring your pensions and benefits," she said at the time. "You are UC retirees and you will always be UC retirees."

Mansfield, whose retiree group has been most prominent in protecting retiree interests, attributed the outcome to political intervention.

"I got our congressional delegation really coming down hard on UC and DOE, saying do not separate these people out into a separate plan of some sort," he said.

The UC audit found that as of May 31, 2006, the last day of the UC contract with DOE/NNSA, the total market value of UCRP assets accrued for LANL-related members was $4.449 billion. The figure was calculated by the regents' actuary, the Segal Company and accepted by DOE/NNSA.

UC also said that DOE/NNSA has agreed to 100-percent funding of what they now call the "Retained LANL segment" within the overall UCRP.

DOE/NNSA will maintain that segment at 100 percent, if necessary, with additional payments over a seven-year period, the UC fact sheet stated.

On the Internet: http://atyourservice.ucop.edu/news/retirement/ucrp_asset_transfer.html

By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, March 18, 2007

A prestigious scientific committee made up of retired nuclear weapons lab directors and former Defense and Energy department officials is recommending that, before the United States moves ahead on the development of new nuclear warheads, the Bush administration should develop a bipartisan policy regarding the size of the future stockpile, testing and nonproliferation.

The committee's report, which is due out next month, comes at a time when the Bush administration is asking Congress to approve $88 million for cost and engineering plans that could lead to a decision next year for production of a new Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) for the nation's current submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile.

The panel will recommend that "any decision to proceed with RRW must be coupled with a transparent administration policy on nuclear weapons, including comments concerning stockpile size, nuclear testing and nonproliferation," according to an interim progress report from the committee chaired by C. Bruce Tarter, the former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The panel was formed under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The panel includes John S. Foster Jr., another former Livermore director; Siegfried S. Hecker, who ran Los Alamos National Laboratory; Richard L. Wagner Jr., a Los Alamos veteran and a member of the Defense Science Board; and Charles B. Curtis, former deputy secretary of energy and currently president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

In presenting the interim report to an AAAS meeting last month, Tarter said the panel found there has been no Bush administration statements dealing with nuclear weapons since the Nuclear Posture Review in December 2001. In addition, he said, "There have been no public policy statements that articulate the role of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War and post-9/11 world and lay out the stockpile needs for the future."

Based on open and classified briefings from current officials at the Pentagon, the weapons labs and National Nuclear Security Administration, the panel believes that the RRW program should not move ahead without getting bipartisan agreement on the Complex 2030 plan, the costly modernization of the nation's nuclear weapons complex, and the future of the program now underway to refurbish the currently deployed nuclear weapons stockpile.

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, has in the past sought funds to carry out the comprehensive nuclear policy study that the AAAS panel has recommended. "We have pieces and programs, calls for designs and weapons that don't track back to a policy that everyone understands," she said in a recent interview.

"There are a growing number of voices that have credibility that are saying we have a disjointed set of programs that don't lead to a cogent nuclear policy for the 21st century," she said, pointing to an article last January by Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, former secretaries of State; former defense secretary William J. Perry and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).

In it they called on the Bush administration to take the lead in reversing reliance on nuclear weapons through various measures, including ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; taking nuclear weapons off alert; further reducing the number of the weapons themselves; and halting production of fissile materials.

Rumor has it that, even though DC is "awash" in scandal and debate on the war, etc., there is some back-door maneuvering in the halls of Congress on the issues of RRW and LANL management problems. Keep your eyes posted on the blog; if anything important happens on these fronts, we'll report it.

--Pat

P.S. Behind the scenes, unknown to the audience, the faint rustling in the curtains was caused when the stagehands almost simultaneously performed a faith-based face-plant.

And from an anonymous contributor from earlier on this blog:

Thank goodness for this blog. Without it the Lab workforce would be more zombe-like than it already is...nodding agreement to everything management spews without even hearing, much less understanding. Just so long as we keep our benefits, our highly compensated jobs, and our heads attached we hardly notice the rest of the world. This blog is an intrusion into our mere existence, which means it wakes us up once in awhile to reality. And perhaps that's the crux of the issue; we don't like dealing with reality.

--30 years and barely hanging on to sanity

And yet another earlier comment of relevance:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (shit; maybe a whole f*cking Galaxy away), there was a hero of the Livermore scientific staff by the name of Hugh Dewitt. He took on Hazel O'Leary; he took on Crazy Eddie Teller; he took on a number of faceless LLNL Directors; he managed to get his security clearance re-instated; he belonged to Livermore's Union; moreover, he was a REAL scientist. What happened to guys like him, who had two functioning balls? At Los Alamos, they appear to be dead -- an extinct species. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I bet you either can't, or you won't.

-Son of Oppy

Friday is Freedom of Information Day, celebrated nationally each year on March 16, the anniversary of the birth of James Madison, chief author of the Bill of Rights and fourth president of the United States. The day focuses public attention on the importance of citizenry's right to government information in a democratic society.

-From an X-Division memo

-----

Do your part! Write your Congressman or Senator. Call up a reporter. Don't just sit there whimpering.

--Pat, the Dog

How many times have we told you "No horsing around in TA-55!"

AS we here at LLNL (about 10 miles from Scott Adams place) sit around waiting for our turn in the barrel, the news from TA-55 has filled us with some trepidation.

For almost a year ominous rumors have been circulating among high-level LLNL leaders that the LANS LLC had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a DILBERT device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret comedic project to the perpetually cloud-shrouded wastes of TA-55. What you were building or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place no one could say.

I realize that there were some of you who fought against it, but in the end you could not keep up with the expense involved in the RRW competition, the security infractions, and the contract change. At the same time your people grumbled for more salary and retirement benefits. The deciding factor was when you learned that LLNL had DILBERT and you were afraid of a DILBERT gap.

DILBERTization is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous comedic plot you will ever have to face. Do you realize that in addition to DILBERTing TA-55, why, there are studies underway to DILBERT Y12, the Kansas City Plant, Pantex ..NNSA headquarters. NNSA Headquarters – DOE’s NNSA Headquarters!

Do you know when DILBERTization began? Nineteen ninety-six. How does that coincide with your post-testing Comic conspiracy? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it. A foreign cartoon is introduced into your precious organizations without the knowledge of management. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Comic works.

Fortunately management was able to see that you were some kind of deviated comics -----found out about your DILBERTS, found out about some kind of mutiny of comics. You perhaps recall what Clemenceau once said about cartoons. He said that cartooning was too important to be left to the managers. When he said that 80 years ago, he may have been right. But today, DILBERT is too important to be left to comics. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic comedic thought. Management can no longer sit back and allow Comic infiltration, Comic indoctrination, Comic subversion, and the international Comic conspiracy to sap and impurify TA-55.

Well boys, I reckon it boils down to this: Comic combat toe to toe with DILBERT. Now look, I ain’t much of a hand at writing letters, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is going on down there. And I got a fair idea of the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinking. Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelings about Comic combat. I want you to remember one thing –the folks at TA-55 is a-countin on you, and by golly you shouldn’t let them down. I’ll tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I’d say that you’re in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this things over. That goes for every last one of you regardless of your race, color, or your creed.

So hang in there. God willing you shall prevail, in Peace and Freedom from fear; through the purity and essence of your natural fluids.

-Thomas Thomson

Blair faces party rebellion on nuclear arms renewal

The British Parliament votes today on whether to renew the country's nuclear arsenal, and Prime Minister Tony Blair faces one of the biggest party rebellions of his leadership. As many as a hundred of his Labour party members could vote against the plan to spend almost 30 billion euros replacing its out-dated Trident missile system.

But the vote should still pass as Blair can rely on the support of the opposition conservatives. Britain is dwarfed by the other permanent UN Security Council members when it comes to its nuclear fleet. It's thought to be the bare minimum needed to act as a deterrent to potential enemies.

Blair says a decision must be made now if the system is to be replaced in time. He insists that the international situation in the next half century is so uncertain that it would be too risky to drop nuclear weapons. But critics say there is no need for an atomic arsenal now the Cold War is over and that to develop it would encourage potential nuclear threats to follow suit.

Editorial - New York Times - March 14, 2007

Politics, Pure and Cynical

We wish we’d been surprised to learn that the White House was deeply involved in the politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, but the news had the unmistakable whiff of inevitability. This disaster is just part of the Bush administration’s sordid history of waving the bloody bullhorn of 9/11 for the basest of motives: the perpetuation of power for power’s sake.

Time and again, President Bush and his team have assured Americans that they needed new powers to prevent another attack by an implacable enemy. Time and again, Americans have discovered that these powers were not being used to make them safer, but in the service of Vice President Dick Cheney’s vision of a presidency so powerful that Congress and the courts are irrelevant, or Karl Rove’s fantasy of a permanent Republican majority.

In firing the prosecutors and replacing them without Senate approval, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took advantage of a little-noticed provision that the administration and its Republican enablers in Congress had slipped into the 2006 expansion of the Patriot Act. The ostensible purpose was to allow the swift interim replacement of a United States attorney who was, for instance, killed by terrorism.

But these firings had nothing to do with national security or officials’ claims that the attorneys were fired for poor performance. This looks like a political purge, pure and simple, and President Bush and his White House are in the thick of it.

Earlier, the White House insisted that it had approved the list of fired United States attorneys after it was compiled. Now it admits that White House officials helped prepare it. Harriet Miers, the White House counsel whom Mr. Bush tried to elevate to the Supreme Court, originally wanted to replace all 93 attorneys with Republican appointees.

The White House still says Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings, but newly released documents show that he personally fielded a senator’s political complaint about David Iglesias, who was fired as United States attorney in New Mexico. The papers suggest that the United States attorney in Arkansas was fired just to put a Rove protégé in his place, and a plan was mapped out by administration officials to “run out the clock” if lawmakers objected.

Among the documents is e-mail sent to Ms. Miers by Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, ranking United States attorneys on factors like “exhibited loyalty.” Small wonder, then that United States Attorney Carol Lam of San Diego was fired. She had put one Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, in jail and had opened an inquiry that put others at risk, along with party donors.

More disturbing details have come out about Mr. Iglesias’s firing. We knew he was ousted six weeks after Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, made a wildly inappropriate phone call in which he asked if Mr. Iglesias intended to indict Democrats before last November’s election in a high-profile corruption scandal. We now know that Mr. Domenici took his complaints to Mr. Bush.

After Mr. Iglesias was fired, the deputy White House counsel, William Kelley, wrote in an e-mail note that Mr. Domenici’s chief of staff was “happy as a clam.” Another e-mail note, from Mr. Sampson, said Mr. Domenici was “not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool” before getting his list of preferred replacements to the White House.

Given what’s in those documents, it was astonishing to hear Mr. Gonzales continue to insist yesterday that he had no personal knowledge of discussions involving the individual attorneys. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, was right on the mark when he said that if Mr. Gonzales didn’t know what Mr. Sampson was doing, “he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on” at his department. Fortunately, last year’s election left Democrats like Mr. Schumer in the majority, with subpoena power. Otherwise, this and so many other scandals might never have come to light.

Mr. Gonzales, who has shown why he was such an awful choice for this job in the first place, should be called under oath to resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies in his story. Mr. Gonzales is willing to peddle almost any nonsense to the public (witness his astonishingly maladroit use of the Nixonian “mistakes were made” dodge yesterday). But lying to Congress under oath is another matter.

The Justice Department has been saying that it is committed to putting Senate-confirmed United States attorneys in every jurisdiction. But the newly released documents make it clear that the department was making an end run around the Senate for baldly political reasons. Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure or kept on because they did.

There was, for example, the decision by United States Attorney Chris Christie of New Jersey to open an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez just before his hotly contested re-election last November. Republicans, who would have held the Senate if Mr. Menendez had lost, used the news for attack ads. Then there was the career United States attorney in Guam who was removed by Mr. Bush in 2002 after he started investigating the superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor was replaced. The investigation was dropped.

In mid-December 2006, Mr. Gonzales’s aide, Mr. Sampson, wrote to a White House counterpart that using the Patriot Act to fire the Arkansas prosecutor and replace him with Mr. Rove’s man was risky Congress could revoke the authority. But, he wrote, “if we don’t ever exercise it, then what’s the point of having it?”

If that sounds cynical, it is. It is also an accurate summary of the governing philosophy of this administration: What’s the point of having power if you don’t use it to get more power?

-----

As I said earlier, some who wander onto this blog can't seem to see the connections of national disasters to their local catastrophes. One can hope that they will calm down, begin using spell-checkers, and gradually start the painful process of thinking critically for themselves. Patience, dear Readers. There will come a time of enlightenment for many of these wanderers.

--Pat, the Dog who can sniff out the connections between the dots

Union aims to organize before lab privatization

The 800-plus Tracy residents who work for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will begin working for a military contractor when the lab's management contract is privatized in October.

The only nonprofit-led bidder for the contract has given up on its long-shot proposal to run the weapons laboratory as a civilian science and renewable energy research center.

One of the two remaining bids is led by military contractor Northrop Grumman, while the other team is led by military contractor Bechtel and the University of California.

Lab physicist Jeff Colvin said Monday that the privatization of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had led to reduced benefits and job security for employees there.

Colvin is an organizer for the Society of Professionals, Scientists and Engineers, a union working to convince the roughly 8,000 lab employees to allow it to collectively negotiate their contracts before the lab is privatized.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Barbara Stearrett told Marylia Kelley in an 11-page fax that the Livermore Lab Green Renewable Energy and Environmental Nexus' protest of the rejection of its proposal failed in part because "the proposal submitted by your firm was found deficient beyond what was challenged in your protest."

Kelley, who works for lab watchdog Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, described the rejection as unfortunate but said no more appeals are planned.

University of California currently manages the Livermore lab, and it managed Los Alamos until it was privatized in June. Los Alamos is now run by a team led by Bechtel and University of California.

From the Hays Daily News [the view from the amber waves of grain in Kansas]:

On occasion, we’re offered stark reminders that Joseph Heller’s classic satire “Catch- 22” wasn’t all that satirical.

Take the news out of Washington, D.C. The Bush administration — with guidance and agreement from the military and the Department of Energy — announced it had selected the design for a new line of atomic warheads.

Almost 20 years after the Cold War ended, we’re designing a new line of nukes. And not just any nuclear weapons, no sir.

These warheads will not require nuclear testing. Testing wasn’t even in the Request for Proposal for either the Los Alamos National Laboratory or the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Lawrence Nevermore

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, Posted 3/12/2007

National Security: The researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who developed the weapons that won the Cold War are being asked to build the next generation of nukes. Not if California's senior senator gets her way.

The National Nuclear Security Administration selected the prestigious lab's design over one submitted by New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory because it would not require underground testing. Designed for installation on Trident submarines, it's clean and almost certainly would boost the Northern California economy.

You might think Sen. Dianne Feinstein, once the mayor of San Francisco, would hail the promising economic news. You might even expect the centrist Democrat who helped steer the Patriot Act to passage to be snared by no fantasies of a nuclear-free world, especially when leaders of terrorist states from Pyongyang to Tehran bristle with nuke-lobbing threats.

But no. Feinstein's most solid constituencies remain inhabitants of San Francisco and Berkeley, both designated by their voters as nuclear-free zones. The senator already has come under fire from California's Democratic left for what looks to them like hawkishness. They're the same activists who'd prefer that Livermore padlock its lab and turn its rolling hills over to growing chardonnay grapes.

So Feinstein instantly declared she was "100% opposed." "What worries me," said the senator, "is that the minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And it's just a matter of time before other nations do the same thing."

You do wonder about the origins of such thinking, now so prevalent among the Democrats' congressional leadership.

Did the strategic non sequitur insinuate itself in to their thinking when, the Reagan and first Bush administrations having won the Cold War, Washington and Moscow agreed to dismantle their nuclear stockpiles?

Was the "peace dividend," as it was called in those years, an intellectual green light to nourish the fantasy that global hostilities were forever gone?

Does the new diplomacy reduce to a kind of perpetual potlatching, in which one state offers a gesture of peaceful intentions to be followed by a round of similar gestures from other formally hostile states?

9/11 was supposed to have disposed of such naivete. Yet, it lingers. How else to explain the expectation that a timed troop withdrawal will usher in a new era of Iraqi peace? How did the notion attain credibility that we could send such specific signals to our sworn enemies?

Such thinking likewise informs the touching belief that foregoing next-generation nukes will civilize Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But it's not "a matter of time," Sen. Feinstein, before terrorist states advance their nuclear technology.

They don't stop because we stop.

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[Chardonnay grapes growing on the glowing grounds of the former LLNL ... Much as I like Concannon and Wente wines, this is a scenario so remote that I must smile. --Pat]

Gonzales: Prosecutors Firings Mishandled

LARA JAKES JORDAN | AP | March 13, 2007 02:11 PM EST

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that mistakes were made and accepted responsibility Tuesday for the way eight federal prosecutors were fired.

At a Justice Department news conference, Gonzales said he would find out why Congress was not told sooner that the White House was involved in discussions of who would be fired and when. He did not back away, however, from his stance that the dismissals that did take place were appropriate.

"I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision," Gonzales said.

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[No, never mind; D'Agostino will just say about RRW, "I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision." (As Bush would say, "I accept responsibility for the ___ decision, but none of the blame.")

--Pat]

What distinguishes [George] McGovern from most other political elders, however, is his refusal to mince words about the current occupants of the White House.

"I think this is the most lawless administration we've ever had," he says of the Bush-Cheney team. That's a strong statement coming from a man who tangled in 1972 with Nixon, and then saw Nixon's presidency destroyed by the Watergate scandals. But McGovern says there is no comparison.

"I'd far rather have Nixon in the White House than these two fellows that we've got now," said the former three-term senator from South Dakota. "Nixon did some horrible things, which led to the effort to impeach him. But he simply was not as bad as Bush. On just about every level I can think of, Bush's actions are more impeachable than were those of Nixon."

-----

This bunch of crooks affects us all, even in Los Alamos County. Even some of us life-long Republicans can see the truth in what ol' George says. And here's what Marty Kaplan says:

Impeachment is off the table -- I keep forgetting. Lying about a blowjob is a high crime, but lying about Iraq's nukes is merely high Kissinger. The daily actions of Bush, Cheney, Gonzales et al are the very dictionary definition of "impeachable," but because thirty percent of fundamentalists, and a hundred percent of Fox, would scream bloody murder, we will have to wait for this endless Administration to end, wait until after the pardons are inevitably issued, after the Freedom of Information requests are finally honored, after the manacles on the presidential archives are finally broken, after the press finally suffers stenographer's remorse, after the historians at last connect the dots, to learn how really bad it has been, how close we have danced to the brink of a de facto coup.

-Martin Kaplan
Research professor and associate dean, USC Annenberg School for Communication.

And here's what Robert Scheer says:

If the occupation had gone well, of course, Cheney wouldn't be under fire. But as it heads into its fifth year, the only winners in this war are the aforementioned radical Shiites, Iran, mercenaries, al-Qaida, oil companies and military contractors such as Halliburton, which has scooped up $27 billion in contracts paid with our taxes. Now Halliburton is making its home in an undemocratic oil-garchy so distasteful to Americans that we wouldn't let a company from there manage our ports.

Perhaps Cheney, in disgrace, can build his retirement cave there.

-Robert Scheer, editor of TruthDig

"It's one thing to have all the components working, and another to have them all working together.
To me, that's the key technical issue that has yet to be resolved."

-Raymond Jeanloz
University of California, Berkeley (on untested replacement nuclear warheads, in The New York Times, January 7. 2007)

"But now that the Turd Blossom has hit the fan, it's the White House that is starting to reek."
-Arianna Huffington

Presidential adviser Karl Rove speaks during a University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service lecture series Thursday, March 8, 2007, in Little Rock, Ark. Rove defended the Bush administration's firing of several U.S. attorneys, stressing the positions serve at the pleasure of the president. (AP Photo/Mike Wintroath)





Democrats Seek Rove in Attorney Firings

LARA JAKES JORDAN | AP | March 12, 2007 04:52 PM EST

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats on Monday singled out presidential adviser Karl Rove for questioning about the firings of eight federal prosecutors and whether the dismissals were politically motivated. The demands to question Rove signaled anew Democrats' shifting focus beyond the Justice Department and toward the White House, in the inquiry. Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said he would seek to interview former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and deputy counsel William Kelly for insight on their roles, if any, in the firings.

Rove emerged as the Democrats' newest target after weekend news reports said the New Mexico Republican Party's chairman urged Rove to fire David Iglesias, then the state's U.S. attorney. In a statement Monday, Conyers said stories about Rove's alleged link to Iglesias' dismissal "raise even more alarm bells for us."

"As a result, we would want to ensure that Karl Rove was one of the White House staff that we interview in connection with our investigation," said Conyers. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who is leading his chamber's probe into the firings, said he also wants to question Rove. White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said the demands would be considered after lawmakers send letters requesting an interview. "If we receive such a request, we would consider it in the ordinary course and respond appropriately," Lawrimore said.

In an interview this weekend with The Associated Press, New Mexico GOP chairman Allen Weh said Iglesias' "termination had already occurred" by the time he spoke with Rove at a holiday party last December. But Weh made no secret of his dissatisfaction with Iglesias, in part from the prosecutor's failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation. The White House has said Rove wasn't involved in the firings, but did alert Miers to complaints about Iglesias. It was not immediately clear whether Rove also told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the complaints.

Justice Department officials have said the decision to fire the eight prosecutors began in the office of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, not in the White House. Last week, Rove called the two-month controversy "a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it." Schumer called it "almost unheard of" for a federal prosecutor with favorable reviews to be fired after a top presidential adviser like Rove received complaints about his performance.

"The more we learn, the more it seems that people at high levels in the White House have been involved in the U.S. attorney purge," Schumer said Monday.

Rove was asked to fire U.S. attorney

By Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

...

Justice Department officials have revealed that Domenici repeatedly contacted officials within the department requesting Iglesias' removal. But when asked Friday whether he contacted Rove about the issue, Domenici said he could not remember.

* "Another day, another scandal."
* "...the Bush administration is unraveling amid declining public support and trust."
* "Get somebody new."

Attorney General Gonzales' new problems add to Bush's continuing ones

-RON FOURNIER | AP | March 9, 2007 07:21 PM EST

WASHINGTON — Another day, another scandal. The Justice Department's improper and illegal use of the USA Patriot Act has Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in trouble, an all-too-familiar circumstance for President George W. Bush's inner circle.

The last thing a troubled president needs is another friend in trouble.

"This strikes me as another blow for the administration," said Republican consultant Joe Gaylord.

He was not the only Republican fretting about the Republican president's White House after a Justice Department audit criticized the FBI's use of extraordinary powers, granted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, to obtain personal information secretly.

"This is, regrettably, part of an ongoing process where the federal authorities are not really sensitive to privacy and go far beyond what we have authorized," said Sen. Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lawmakers already were seething at the Justice Department for the firing of eight federal prosecutors and Gonzales' dismissive response to critics.

"One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later," Specter said Thursday.

It is too soon to tell whether Gonzales, a close Texas friend of Bush, might be forced to leave. Even his ouster, however, would do little to change a perception that the Bush administration is unraveling amid declining public support and trust. Some big names already have had to leave.

Donald H. Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats seized control of Congress in fall elections that were a repudiation of Bush's policies on Iraq.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a powerful adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, left the White House to face perjury charges in the investigation of the exposure of a CIA official. He was convicted Tuesday in a trial that also revealed that top Bush aide Karl Rove and a State Department official played roles in the CIA leak, part of a White House strategy to undermine a critic of the Iraq war.

Jim Nicholson, secretary of Veterans Affairs and former Republican Party chairman, is clinging to his job amid revelations of shoddy treatment for wounded troops from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The latest events are more heavy baggage for a president who already is close to his limit. Re-elected by a comfortable margin in 2004, Bush watched his job approval rating plummet in 2005 with the rise of violence in Iraq and the government's weak response and follow-up after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to huge swaths of the country's southern coastline.

With a rating of just 35 percent, Bush's standing is the weakest of any second-term president at this point in 56 years.

"Gonzales' problems here feed into and build on all of the competence issues that have been dogging the administration since Katrina," said Charles Franklin, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gonzales, architect of Bush's controversial approach to detaining and interrogating terror suspects, drew the wrath of lawmakers when he dismissed the hubbub over fired prosecutors as an "overblown personnel matter." Critics say the U.S. attorneys were dismissed for refusing to do the administration's political bidding.

Under fire, Gonzales beat an abrupt retreat and agreed to accommodate Democratic-led investigations.

On the wrongdoing regarding the Patriot Act, a spokesman for Gonzales said he was incensed by the allegations.

If nothing else, perhaps Gonzales is displaying a scintilla of accountability, a trait the administration only reluctantly embraced after Katrina and throughout the Iraq war.

Still, some say it may be time for Gonzales to go.

"The president is dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan and a new Congress, and the last thing in the world he needs is this," said Joseph diGenova, who served as U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia in President Ronald Reagan's administration. "At some point, he throws up his hands and says `Get somebody new.' I don't know when that is."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ron Fournier has covered politics for The Associated Press for nearly 20 years.

"Fortunately, Mr. Rove's smear-and-fear tactics fell short last November. I say fortunately, because without Democrats in control of Congress, able to hold hearings and issue subpoenas, the prosecutor purge would probably have become yet another suppressed Bush-era scandal - a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news."
-Paul Krugman

And, from the New York Times Editorial, March 11, 2007:

On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution.

And from the Los Angeles Times, this just in:

Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York — citing recent disclosures about the FBI's improper use of administrative subpoenas to obtain private records and the controversy over the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys in December — told CBS' "Face the Nation" that Gonzales, who previously served as White House counsel, "is no longer just the president's lawyer, but has a higher obligation to the rule of law and the Constitution."

Schumer, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, charged that under Gonzales, the Justice Department has become even more politicized than it was under President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft.

"And so," Schumer said, "I think for the sake of the nation, Atty. Gen. Gonzales should step down."

"Former Los Alamos director Harold Agnew was taken aback. 'We competed with Livermore, and we wiped them out, but you didn't hear them crying,' Agnew said. 'Once in a while they did win something, and we didn't cry about it. There was never any cry-babying on either side.' "

That was way back then; this is now. And Harold's words apply to the current RRW case, too, even if he doesn't fully realize it: We competed with Livermore, and we wiped them out, at least as far as the Navy is concerned, but NNSA had their minds made up ahead of time to give the RRW to Livermore. That's why there's more than just "bitter words" this time -- there's national security at stake. Congressional and Senatorial staff: Pay attention; it's time to investigate!

--Pat

Livermore lab's selection to build new H-bomb spurs torrent of bitter words from some at sister lab Los Alamos
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 03/08/2007 07:57:37 PM PST

Inside the top-secret passages of the nation's nuclear weapons labs, scientists talk of a renaissance, a glorious return to inventing hydrogen bombs after a 20-year hiatus. But at one lab -- Los Alamos, the place most linked in history with nuclear bomb design -- such talk is less a celebration than a snarl.

For more than a year, leading bomb scientists at Los Alamos tried ignoring tumult at the lab over security problems and new, corporate management, and instead poured themselves into designing a paradoxical bomb -- one so reliably destructive that the nation would need fewer of them.

For inspiration, Los Alamos' weaponeers invoked the Manhattan Project and devised what could have been the world's first wholly new, multistage warhead without resort to nuclear explosive testing. Some suggested this new "reliable, replacement warhead" or RRW could be the lab's future, its salvation from years of troubles.

But in the week since the Bush administration tapped competing scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to design the first nuclear warhead in a replacement arsenal, scientists at Los Alamos have recoiled angrily and flung accusations in anonymous Internet postings that the warhead design competition was tainted by politics and doomed to failure.

Over at the latest incarnation of a public lab blog, "LANL: The Corporate Story," Los Alamos director Michael Anastasio -- a former Livermore bomb designer -- is pilloried as a traitor to Los Alamos and its weaponeers. He is cast as an instrument of a long-running conspiracy to shut down the famed birthplace of the bomb.

Elsewhere, Los Alamos staff wishes openly for Livermore's failure in developing the new warhead for the Navy's submarine-launched missiles.

"Well, as an embarrassed LANL RRW team member, I believe our task should become to do all that we can to kill this program we (far more than LLNL) created," wrote one commenter who claimed to have worked on the Los Alamos design. "The sooner the Navy scuttles this, the better."

Another scientist added: "LANL don't lose hope yet! Even though RRW officially went to LLNL, LLNL has a long history of proposing and winning programs only for LANL to pick up the program and complete the job. My opinion is that LANL should sit back and watch as LLNL falls on their face technically once again."

Such rivalries and jealousies are a hallmark of nuclear bomb design, American style. Years ago, a Livermore designer put it this way: "The Russians are the competition, but Los Alamos is the enemy."

But even veterans of the Cold War, when Los Alamos and Livermore bomb physicists fought bitterly for the right to design the latest nuclear explosive for the military, don't remember reading or hearing such naked venom.

"To be sure the people who worked hard in the competition would be disappointed," said Phillip Coyle, a former Livermore associate director and weapons testing chief. "I don't recall ever seeing this kind of correspondence."

Former Los Alamos director Harold Agnew was taken aback.

"We competed with Livermore, and we wiped them out, but you didn't hear them crying," Agnew said. "Once in a while they did win something, and we didn't cry about it. There was never any cry-babying on either side."

The big difference, of course, is that Cold War designers often addressed their counterparts in starchy telegrams and memos. There was no e-mail, much less the anonymous wilds of the blogosphere.

Paul White, a former weapons designer who is chief of national security planning and policy at Los Alamos, said, "The most disgruntled find a way of venting in that kind of venue."

And there was a lot to vent because Los Alamos has been under extreme scrutiny from Congress and transition to new management.

"So in that atmosphere with everybody sort of hypersensitized, news of the RRW competition strikes a little harder," White said.

In the Cold War, there also was plenty of work to go around. Not so today. The first of the new warheads, designated RRW-1, is intended as replacement for the most numerous nuclear explosive in the U.S. arsenal, a Los Alamos design called the W76. Other RRWs are proposed for every bomb and warhead in the U.S. arsenal but the next design competition is more than a year away and highly dependent on the success of RRW-1.

That's one reason why Livermore scientists dropped their usual inclination toward novel, feature-packed bombs and turned to a well-tested warhead from 20 years ago as the basis for their design.

When federal weapons officials at the Defense and Energy departments reviewed the two designs, Los Alamos won higher marks for innovation, ingenuity and another goal of the replacement warhead -- exercising a full range of scientific and production skills.

But Livermore's design was judged more likely to be finished by 2012, meeting the target date for manufacturing the first warheads, according to Marty Schoenbauer, acting head of weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

"The Livermore design had a shorter distance to go," he said.

ABQ Journal, Santa Fe Edition, Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Martin Salazar, Journal Staff Writer

A former Los Alamos National Laboratory purchasing officer caught stealing more than $55,000 from the lab in 2005 pleaded guilty in federal court Friday.

Dolores Mae Arreola, a 26-year lab veteran fired in July 2005 after the embezzlement scheme was uncovered, faces up to 20 years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands in fines.

The U.S. Attorney's Office, however, has agreed to recommend that Arreola be sentenced at the lowest end of the sentencing guideline range.

Arreola pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements or entries, one count of theft or embezzlement of public money and one count of making a false, fictitious or fraudulent claim.

As part of her plea, Arreola has also agreed to forfeit a 2000 Ford Mustang, a 2000 Toyota Tacoma truck and $20,000 she acquired through the scam.

A sentencing hearing has yet to be scheduled in the case.

"I recognize and accept responsibility for my criminal conduct," says the plea agreement signed by Arreola.

Arreola also admitted a detailed set of facts about how she pulled off the scheme and what she did with the money.

According to the plea agreement:
Arreola worked as a buyer for the lab and was responsible for processing purchase requests for materials and services needed by lab personnel to carry out their duties.

As a buyer for the lab, she was allowed to make purchases for goods and services costing up to $100,000 without supervisory approval.

At the same time that she was executing her scheme, Arreola was president of the Santo Domingo de Cundiyo Heirs' Association, a land grant heirs group. The organization reportedly seeks recognition of land grant rights in the Cundiyo area, about 20 miles north of Santa Fe.

As president of the group, Arreola had signatory authority on the organization's Del Norte Credit Union account.

On Feb. 22, 2005, she entered false data into the lab's computerized vendor system to make it appear as if the Santo Domingo de Cundiyo Heirs' Association were one of the lab's legitimate vendors.

The same day she activated the organization as a vendor, she submitted a fictitious purchase order for the organization to construct and supply the lab with various fictitious items for a purchase price of $19,845. Arreola authorized advance payment on the order and asked the accounts payable department to notify her when the check was ready so she could pick it up. She picked up the check on Feb. 24, 2005, and deposited it into the organization's bank account. She then withdrew the money.

On May 9, 2005, Arreola prepared a second fictitious purchase order. The following day she picked up the $15,644 check made out to her organization. She deposited it into the organization's account and then withdrew the money.

Arreola used part of the proceeds from those two checks to buy the Mustang and the Tacoma truck.

On June 7, 2005, Arreola processed another fraudulent purchase order for $20,000. She picked up the check from the accounts payable department on June 8, 2005, and deposited it into her organization's account.

Before Arreola could pull the $20,000 out of the account, lab officials discovered what had been occurring, and the bank froze the account.

Arreola isn't the first lab employee to plead guilty to a procurement scam.

Peter Bussolini and Scott Alexander were accused of illegally buying more than $399,000 worth of hunting equipment, outdoor gear and television sets on a LANL account. The scandal, which occurred five years ago, landed the two men behind bars and drew the ire of Congress.

[FBI misuse of PATRIOT Act may shove LANL/LLNL/RRW/morale/.../ issues off of Congress' table.]

FBI Misused Patriot Act On U.S. Citizens, Internal Probe Finds

Several of the probes requested were for non-U.S. residents although their files stated that the targets were believed to be legally residing in the United States.

By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek
March 9, 2007

The FBI abused the USA Patriot Act to illegally obtain personal information about U.S. citizens and request information from telecom and financial businesses, according to a government report released Friday.

An audit by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General found agents improperly used national security letters to gain telephone subscriber information from specific institutions, including telecom carriers, banks, and credit card companies. Some of the letters were signed by people who were not authorized to sign them, according to the report. The probe also said the FBI had sought subpoenas for phone billing records when it had not and collected personal information not associated with any investigation.

In addition to overstepping its authority, the FBI misreported its use of the letters while improperly documenting justification and frequency of use, according to the 199-page report titled A Review Of The Federal Bureau Of Investigation's Use Of National Security Letters.

Speaking before the International Association of Privacy Professionals Privacy Summit in Washington on Friday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales commented that he was deeply concerned about what has been revealed in the inspector general's report.

"Failure to adequately protect information privacy is a failure to do our jobs," Gonzales said. "And although I believe the kinds of errors we saw here were due to questionable judgment or lack or attention, not intentional wrongdoing, I want to be very clear: There is no excuse for the mistakes that have been made, and we are going to make things right as quickly as possible."

Members of Congress immediately announced plans to hold hearings, as well as plans to introduce legislation that would rein in federal investigators' powers.

...

The number of letters focusing on people inside the United States increased from about 39% of all letters in 2003 to about 53% in 2005. However, inspectors said they found 17% more letters and 22% more requests for letters in FBI files than had been recorded in the databases they reviewed.

The FBI databases had also indicated in several cases that the targets of investigator's probes were non-U.S. residents, although the files stated that the targets were believed to be legally residing in the United States.

The public report redacted percentages that focused on telephone billing records, subscriber information, and e-mail information but stated that the majority of requests related to phone and e-mail activities and records.

Roughly three-quarters of the letters sprang from instances of suspected terrorism, and about one-quarter targeted instances of suspected espionage. The FBI does not have to meet traditional thresholds for providing evidence to justify gathering personal information through national security letters, but it is required to comply with federal laws relating to privacy as well as its own internal policies. It is also required to record and report on its overall use of the letters.

...

The report received an immediate reaction from both political parties in Congress. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., joined Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to call for a thorough investigation.

"National security letters are a powerful tool, and when they are misused they can do great harm to innocent people," Leahy said. "The government expects Americans to follow the law, but the American people also have a right to expect that the government follows the law."

Leahy said that reporting requirements Congress added to the Patriot Act should prevent the violations from continuing, but he will hold hearings to find out more about past violations.

This was just sent in by a reader:

____________________________________

We got an email from our division leader today, that all travel now needs justification to, and approval by an AD! So now we know why LANS tripled the number of managers. They must be totally nuts to require three levels in the chain of approval - they don't trust group leaders, they don't trust division leaders, so why not eliminate them and move all functions to the AD office, saving a bundle in the process.

Of all the unnecessary waste, fraud and abuse, this is the worst, because it is initiated from the top!

[There is not just a bit of "unevenness" in morale, Terry. There's a cliff in morale between the delirious joy of the manager class with their big bonuses and the deep depression of the workers, who haven't even had a decent raise in over six years, who are dreading a RIF, and whose house values will plunge over a cliff if there is a RIF. -Pat.]

Newer and fewer

Mar 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition

But Congress may still have doubts about modernising America's bombs

WHEN George Bush first took office, he said he wanted to reduce the size of America's stockpile of nuclear warheads to the lowest number consistent with America's security and that of its allies. But since then Mr Bush has attracted controversy, rather than committed arms-controllers, to his cause. On March 2nd the National Nuclear Security Administration, the bit of the Energy Department that looks after America's bombs, announced the winner of a competition between weapons laboratories to design a “reliable replacement warhead” (RRW). If Congress gives the nod and the money, development could get under way next year. But why build more bombs if you want fewer of them? And what will all this mean for America's vast weapons complex?

It was Congress that first nudged the administration to explore the RRW idea. It had earlier scotched plans to develop a nuclear bunker-buster, fearing that the weapon would require testing and prove all too tempting to use. The aim of the RRW, by contrast, is not to develop a new nuclear weapon. All along, Congress has laid down the clear condition that it must avoid the need for testing too.

The design chosen was put forward by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. It is based on a weapon that has already been tested but was never added to the stockpile. Some of its insides—not the explosive core—will be adapted to make it cheaper and easier to build, using less toxic materials (the old cold-war imperative to get the biggest bang for the smallest weight, so that multiple warheads could be mounted on each missile, drove scientists to push materials to the limit). Meanwhile the Livermore design, it has been decided, will also make use of elements of a rival bid by Los Alamos in New Mexico. These include mechanisms to reduce the likelihood that a stolen weapon could ever be put to terrorist use.

The administration's RRW-boosters argue that making nuclear warheads safer, cheaper and easier to build will also allow the “hedge” of thousands of nuclear warheads now held in reserve and for spares to be chopped drastically. But that also depends, in part, on a second element of the administration's plans: the consolidation of weapons-making facilities into a more modern, streamlined and responsive “complex 2030”, including new facilities to churn out “pits”—plutonium cores for bombs—at a faster clip, should they be needed to meet some unforeseen threat. Although building simpler and safer warheads may be done more cheaply, the saving will be far outweighed by the investment needed for such a reorganisation.

A big question also hangs over the future of Los Alamos, the loser in the RRW competition. It has long been argued that having two rival labs keeps the weaponeers on their toes—witness the somewhat hybrid result of the RRW competition. But scientists are no longer quite so sure about that. Los Alamos has had persistent problems of management and internal security that have lowered morale and led to something of a brain drain. Meanwhile a significant number of its nuclear scientists are heading for retirement.

Even though Congress helped kick-start the RRW effort, it may have other reservations. A recent report discovered that the plutonium triggers of weapons deteriorate more slowly than had been feared, reducing the urgency of modernisation. And the labs have other ways to extend the life of existing weapons.

Keen to avoid the impression that their modernisation plans could spark a new arms race, administration officials point out that Russia, China, Britain and France all have their own modernisation efforts planned or under way. Meanwhile the dismantling of old warheads, as part of a treaty commitment with Russia to reduce each side's stockpile to no more than 1,700-2,200 deployed strategic weapons by 2012, is being speeded up. But Congress will not let itself be rushed.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. ----- [The Pond here is the BIG pond, not Ashley Pond Pond. --Pat.]

[Yeah, that's the ticket: Let's give LANS another 6 months to cover up their culpability with respect to LANL's current security, safety, and ethical "issues". Who still thinks Bingaman, Udall, and 'St. Pete' are our friends?

Or, as one comment puts it: "I guess it is ethical to slow down an investigation but not to speed one up. "

-Pat, The Dog

PS: I meant to put the quotes around the saint part -- "St." Pete. Sorry.]

________________________________________________

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 7, 2007

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - New Mexico's two U.S. senators and the congressman whose district includes Los Alamos National Laboratory have asked the Government Accountability Office to delay for six months its probe into security problems at the lab.

Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., argued that the delay would give the lab's new manager, Los Alamos National Security, more time to implement operational and security reforms.

Reps. John Dingell, D-Mich., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, asked the GAO for the investigation last month _ including whether any lab operations could be moved elsewhere.

"We believe a six-month delay will provide a better baseline on which we can judge the progress that has actually been made in improving the operation of the laboratory," the New Mexico delegation, joined by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., wrote Dingell and Barton on Tuesday. "Like you, we are interested in seeing significant and verifiable improvements in the area of safety and security."

The letter said the new management team, which took over in June, is working to increase security and reduce the potential for theft of classified material. However, they said, the reforms will take time.

[Click on title to see in-depth article about Domenici's protege, Heather Wilson, who was "on the ropes" against a weak Democratic candidate last November. "St." Pete laid a glove on US Atty. Iglesias, and Heather squeaked by her opponent, who was a "Patsy." --Pat]


Domenici hires lawyer on ethics charge
Last Update: 03/07/2007 5:25:20 PM
By: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. Senator Pete Domenici has hired a well-known Washington defense lawyer to represent him in a preliminary ethics investigation.

The investigation is looking into allegations that the New Mexico Republican pressured U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to rush indictments against Democrats before the 2006 election.

Iglesias has since been fired.

Domenici hired Lee Blalack on Feb. 28, the same day Iglesias went public with his accusations.

Iglesias said last week he believes he was forced out of his job for political reasons after refusing pressure from Domenici and Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson.

In testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Iglesias said he “felt leaned on” and “felt pressured” by Domenici and Wilson.

-----

[Anyone still think that "St." Pete has been good for LANL? -Ever since 1999, when he invented NNSA? Anyone at LANL still think that NNSA has been good for the country? Anyone NOT in management above Group Leader think that privatization was a 'nifty' idea? -Another 'great' thing that "St." Pete's NNSA brought to LANL.]

Letters to the Editor, Los Alamos Monitor, Wednesday, March 7, 2007

LANL unfair to longtime employee

Dear Editor,

Recently, a 23-year veteran employee at LANL was terminated for an absurdly minor security infraction. The employee had an impeccable performance record. "George" was only two years from retirement.

The majority of LANL employees and residents of Los Alamos take security matters seriously, and are dismayed at the recent security breaches. However, it seems that LANS is concerned only with appearances.

"The lab is getting rid of the low-hanging fruit," said a low-level manager recently. LANS does not want to do the difficult job of ferreting out the real security problems; they just care about their bottom line.

A younger, less experienced and cheaper subcontractor, trained by "George," has replaced him. Mid-level management did not fight for this employee, apparently because it, too, is afraid of being caught up in the witch-hunt. The phrase "there but for the grace of God goes I" comes to mind.

On the bright side, "George" can now sell his over-priced Los Alamos home for an obscene profit before the real estate market is flooded as a mass exodus out of Los Alamos begins.

J. Jacobson

Los Alamos

Date: March 6, 2007
Contact: Claudia Luther ( cluther@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-8258

‘Nuclear Weapons in a New Century’ Conference Continues Wednesday, March 7, at UCLA

Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry said that North Korea "overplayed its hand" when it tested a nuclear weapon, leading to a stronger U.S. position in forcing Pyongyang to negotiate on its nuclear weapons program. Perry's comments came Tuesday at the opening session of "Nuclear Weapons in a New Century: Facing the Emerging Challenges," a two-day conference co-hosted by Gen. Wesley K. Clark (Ret.), senior fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations, and Kal Raustiala, the center's director.

The conference continues at 7:45 a.m., Wednesday, March 7, with a full roster of nationally renowned speakers on nuclear weapons and proliferation, as well panels and breakout sessions on a variety of issues, including nuclear terrorism, the status of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and regional threats centering on North Korea, Iran, and India and Pakistan.

Among the speakers will be Robert Joseph, former U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; Thomas C. Schelling, the 2005 Nobel laureate in economics; Brian Jenkins, a nuclear terrorism expert with the Rand Corp.; Michael R. Anastasio, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory; and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter. A full conference schedule is available at http://www.international.ucla.edu/bcir/challenges.

The program concludes with a panel discussion moderated by Gen. Clark on the nuclear challenges facing the next presidential administration, followed by a 5:15 p.m. reception for conference participants on the Covel Commons terrace. Conference sponsors are the Burkle Center, the UCLA International Institute and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

-UCLA-

[This post by John Pedicini is in response to a "rather" ignorant earlier comment on this blog, which claimed that the LANL design was 15 years old. In fact, the LLNL RRW is, more or less, a 20-year-old design, but LANL's is truly brand new. --Pat]

Pat,

Please post this in response to the 03/06/2007 6:18 post stating the the LANL RRW design was in my safe for 15 years.

The LANL RRW design was not sitting in my safe for 15 years. I have proposed what became RRW for more than 15 years, but refused to design it until there was a chance for training new designers. At age 49, I am the youngest of the seriously experienced NTS tested designers and the last chance for generational transfer of knowledge and art form.

I have used the RRW to teach new designers the art of design from the most basic physics principles. LANL did not start the design of what is a fundamentally nonlinear object, from an existing design, but began with only the basic physics. Notably, this will lead to a design closer to tested configurations than piecewise linear steps from an existing design, Mr. D'Agostino's comments notwithstanding. The new designers were present for every step and derivation of the actual design. The only work done prior to the detailed design was the theoretical work supporting certification without testing and some basic materials research. These were necessary before proposing the project now known as RRW.

This type of design process focusses heavily upon physics understanding of non-linear relationships and less upon brute force computational power. We used less than 1% of the computing power of the lab to design the RRW weapon. This low computer usage infuriated NNSA who personally berated me for placing understanding ahead of computer usage.

The LANL team also placed heavy emphasis upon the old fashioned scientific method and conducted many experiments to test the theoretical and computational findings. The team is proud to say that all experiments were 95% or better confirmation of the underlying hypotheses and all experiments were 95% or better refutation of the peer review. All of the experiments were delegated to and led by the new designers to further reinforce the need to constantly test one's understanding. The performance of the LANL experimental teams was exemplary. This, also, was not popular with NNSA, who are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the scientific method. Much of this data was suppressed.

The post-9/11 and post-Cold War worlds required something different than a Cold War design. The safety and security requirements of the Navy, prior to NNSA redefinition of the threat, could not be met with a Cold War design, and RRW provided the perfect opportunity to train new designers to think about the problem and the physics and not just the name or computer.

The generational transfer was about 50% completed prior to the recent RRW decision. This training process was terminated per NNSA requirements when the Navy POG [Project Officers Group] was overruled.

--John M. Pedicini

(As always, the views are my own and the posting has been ADC reviewed.)

Pat,
Being new to posting on a blog I ask that this be posted anonymously. I've been a practicing chemist for 30 years, and have never found music at work to be a distraction, quite the opposite, it helped me stay focused and kept from from thinking about the sometimes depressing job conditions. But I like to call your attention to this little gem that came out this week from Mike Mallory (see below). I call attention to the first two "improvements" in the list. These are subjects that Scott Adams has addressed in a number of Dilbert cartoons. It's sad to see that our management has sunk that low, or could be that clueless. Though I have to admit I've run across co-workers who thought listening to music at work was somehow unprofessional, but I tend to side with Nietzsche on this, who said "Without music, life would be a mistake." But I guess in the grand scene of things this is just a drop in the bucket.

























-----
It looks like adults aren't welcome at LANL.

--Pat

Of the twelve people pictured here (one recently invited to LANL, two live in Santa Fe):
Q. How many should be impeached? (Hint: See far left, far right panels)
A. Two (No, not Rove!)



"Now Pete, here, is no crook. You 'n I know a crook when we see one. Scooter's a crook, but Dick isn't. He 'n Pete are my trusted friends. At least, Dick is. I hope Pete gets his life straightened out, an' becomes born-again, like I did."





[The following article is not so far-fetched, since we see that privatization by CheneyBush has led to corruption at LANL (managed by LANS, LLC), and it has spread to our very own patron "Saint," Pete.]

Why the Libby Verdict Is So Damning
by Arianna Huffington

Before the GOP spin machine kicks into high gear, shouting from the mountain tops that the Libby verdict is just about making false statements to the FBI, and that no one was ever charged with the underlying crime of outing Valerie Plame, let's make it clear that Libby was found guilty not just of perjury but of obstructing justice -- obstructing justice in order to encumber the investigation and keep secret the dark, ugly truth about how the White House sought to cover up its lies about Iraq and its efforts to intimidate and silence critics of the administration. But the cover ups are unraveling. And they are unraveling at a speed and in a quantity that guarantee Bush's legacy will both be marked by the tragedy of the Iraq war, and soiled by corruption, indictments, and convictions.

So on the same day that the Libby jury returned its guilty verdict, we have the second day of searing and sickening testimony about the way we've been treating our wounded troops at Walter Reed, and Congressional hearings investigating the sudden firing of eight U.S. attorneys for allegedly being too zealous in their prosecution of GOP corruption. And with Democrats back in control of Congress we can expect more of the same over the next 22 months.

Following the verdict, one of the Libby jurors asked reporters, "Where's Rove? Where are these other guys?" The answer: waiting for a whole flock of chickens to come home to roost.

Submitted by Anonymous. (Check out the earlier blog post on LANL's political "relationship" to the environment by clicking on the title of this post. Do you suppose that there's a deeper bureaucratic "relationship" between these two posts?)



To/MS: LANL-ALL
From/MS: Michael R. Anastasio, A100
Phone/Fax: 7-5101/5-2679
Symbol: DIR-07-079
Date: March 6, 2007



SUBJECT: Personnel Announcement

Yesterday, I reluctantly accepted a request from Andy Phelps,
Associate Director for Environmental Programs, to be reassigned
to other duties, effective immediately. Although Los Alamos
National Laboratory has made tremendous strides in most technical
aspects of remediation, clean up, and closure, the Laboratory has
been unable in the last nine months to cement effective
relationships with the Laboratory’s regulators and stakeholders.
Because such relationships are integral to the continuing success
of our institution, Andy felt it was best to step down, effective
today.

Andy was quick to acknowledge that the staff of Environmental
Programs is talented and extremely hardworking. They have been a
key factor in the numerous accomplishments that have occurred
during the past nine months, including meeting nearly 100
deliverables specified under the Consent Order with the New
Mexico Environment Department and making progress toward
decommissioning unnecessary facilities.

The Laboratory will use its extensive resources, including parent
company expertise, to facilitate continuing progress in the
environmental arena. The Laboratory remains steadfast in its
commitment to the NMED Consent Order and the clean up of legacy
sites. We will continue to protect the environment, the public
and our workers and continue to develop innovative methods to
conserve natural resources and minimize our environmental
impacts.

Carolyn Mangeng will serve as Acting Associate Director for
Environmental Programs pending the selection of a replacement.

I wish to thank Andy for his hard work and dedication to the
Laboratory. I also want acknowledge that his leadership played a
critical role in allowing the Laboratory to accomplish so much
during the past nine months. Please join me in wishing Andy well
in his new endeavors.

[Kinda like them po' white trash livin' up th' crick in the single-wide trailer, with mean dogs tied to th' porch, and tires holdin' down th' roof.]

Cleanup Tied to Lab Funds

By John Arnold, ABQ Journal Staff Writer, Tuesday, March 6, 2007

An "untenable budget situation" is delaying environmental cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a cleanup agreement between the federal and state governments may need to be changed to reflect those federal budget restraints, according to U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

He said in a news release issued Monday that LANL is "stuck between a rock and a hard place."

"It must make more progress (on cleanup), but its hands have been tied with insufficient funding and now a steady stream of fines imposed by the state," he said.

But state Environment Secretary Ron Curry said poor environmental management at LANL, not lack of funding, is the root of cleanup delays and state fines.

Curry said the state does not intend to renegotiate the so-called consent order, a legally binding agreement that requires the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate and clean up decades worth of contamination across the lab's 40-square-mile property by 2015.

Signed in 2005, the order lays out cleanup milestones and requires the federal government to pay fines if LANL fails to meet them. The state has so far fined LANL $240,000 for consent order violations, according to the Environment Department.

"Those penalties have arisen because of a lack of proper environmental management and a lack of embracing the order by the people in charge of environmental cleanup for (LANL contractor Los Alamos National Security)," Curry said.

Lab spokesman James Rickman declined to comment on funding issues or the root causes of the cleanup delays, but he said that LANL remains committed to the consent order.

"We will continue to try our best to meet all future consent order requirements and milestones," he said.

The Bush administration is requesting $140 million in its fiscal year 2008 budget for LANL cleanup. Domenici called that amount, similar to 2007 funding levels, insufficient.

Domenici said that he met with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to discuss LANL's cleanup situation and funding. Bodman acknowledged the problem and said he would instruct DOE officials to meet with state officials "to try to set new clean-up responsibilities that are consistent with realistic budget requests," according to Domenici.

Reached by phone late Monday, DOE spokeswoman Megan Barnett could not confirm Domenici's characterization of his discussions with Bodman, but she said that LANL's cleanup program "has faced technical and efficiency challenges and contractor performance issues."

"We are committed to working with state regulators to get cleanup progress back on track," she said.

Domenici plans to address LANL cleanup during a congressional budget hearing on Wednesday.

Experienced hand guides latest U.S. nuclear weapons project
The Salt Lake Tribune wire services, Article Last Updated:03/05/2007 11:19:12 AM MST
By Ralph Vartabedian Los Angeles Times

A 77-year-old retiree, known as an eccentric genius but in declining health, played an unexpected role over the last year in designing the United States' new hydrogen bomb. Seymour Sack, a legend among nuclear weapons designers, was called in from his home in the hills above Berkeley, Calif., into his old offices in a high-security zone of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sack's role illustrates the predicament facing the U.S. nuclear weapons complex in an era without nuclear testing: Its newest hydrogen bomb springs from a 25-year-old design whose architect ventures out of his house as seldom as he can. "I do as little as possible these days," Sack said. "I'm not feeling too well."

If the new bomb enters production and is deployed atop missiles on nuclear alert, as the Energy Department hopes, it will have to navigate a careful path through serious technical issues and political attacks. The Navy will have to be convinced that the bomb will blow up reliably without a new test to prove it. And Congress will have to be persuaded that thousands of existing bombs will become obsolete. And arms control advocates who fiercely oppose the program will have to be outmaneuvered. But the bomb, known as the reliable replacement warhead, has progressed much further and faster than any new nuclear weapons program since the end of the Cold War.

On Friday, the Livermore lab was selected over Los Alamos National Laboratory to design the weapon and begin a 12-month effort to assess its cost, schedule and scope. If all goes well, the new weapon could be mounted on missiles aboard the Navy's Trident submarines by 2012. Livermore won the competition with a warhead design based on something Sack developed in the 1980s. At the time, most nuclear bombs were designed to be as small and light as possible, and that made them less reliable. Defense and Energy department officials now say those aging weapons might not work at some point and should be substituted with the reliable replacement warhead. But without a new test -- the U.S. swore off nuclear testing in 1992 -- the new weapon would have to go on alert status.

Sack contends the design, tested in the 1980s, is still reliable. "You will end up with a very reliable weapon," he said in an interview Friday. "It doesn't matter that the tests were done 25 years ago."

When Sack was given the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award in 2003, his low-profile role in the world of nuclear arms was finally recognized. "He is more responsible than any other individual for the fundamental design and intrinsic safety of the modern U.S. deterrent," said Livermore nuclear weapons chief Bruce Goodwin.

Sack was known at the labs as a salty guy who was methodical and conservative. "His eccentricity, if that is the word, is not how some people would think," said Philip Coyle, former associate director at the lab. "He did not behave oddly. His eccentricity was that he didn't suffer fools gladly."

Asked how he felt about his nuclear bomb design being resurrected for the 21st century, Sack replied sharply, "It is not like it was resurrected from a garbage bin." He said he did some kibitzing with younger scientists when he was shown their derivation of his design. "Some of my detailed recommendations were ignored," said Sack, a native of New York City.

Sack said Defense and Energy officials had offered numerous justifications for the new bomb but still hadn't made the purpose clear. Indeed, Energy and Defense officials have cited more than half a dozen reasons to build the bomb, saying it will improve reliability, safety and security, and allow for reductions in the number of reserve weapons. It is also supposed to help train a new generation of nuclear scientists.

But some key members of Congress and many nuclear arms groups have dismissed the laundry list of arguments for the entire program, saying it is unnecessary and could trigger a new arms race. Coyle said the use of the Sack design illustrates an intrinsic problem facing nuclear weapons labs. "How do they keep nuclear design skills current when the best thing they have is from this guy in his 70s in declining health? The people who know how to do this are old."

-----

[Wow. There's some scary sh*t in this article ... Somebody better investigate soon ...]

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/nb.story/story_id/9844

A comment on an earlier post:

Regarding the poppy seed story, check this out:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp

On a related note, the Otowi cafeteria is now serving poppyseed muffins on their breakfast menu -- 2 for 1 special pricing from now until June 1!

It's all part of the LANL SRP (Staff Reduction Program)

-Pat

<-- Note NM version of Mickey Mouse watch (5 minutes to midnight?). "St." Pete is demonstrating for LANL staff how to drink the Kool Aid.




http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17468898/

Attorney General Gonzales upholding ... his hand. Meanwhile, St. Pete is upholding his ... stonewall.

This was just sent in by a reader:

-Pat

______________________________

Mike will speak to LANL again. There will be an All Employee Meeting tomorrow on "the future of the Principal Associate Director for Science, Technology, and Engineering Organization as well as the future of science at the Laboratory". Maybe I should start to learn how to spell P-I-T (or dream about science somewhere else).

March 5, 2007
New substance abuse policy begins today
Provisions in place to safeguard for 'false positives'

Laboratory employees provided more than 300 comments on the new substance abuse policy, which goes into effect today. The comments were reviewed and revisions were made to the policy, which applies to all Laboratory employees and subcontract personnel.

Many of the comments focused on protections to employees from "false positive" tests. “The new policy has safeguards for addressing false positives,” said Doris Heim, associate director for business services (ADBS). “If, for example, there is a medical explanation such as, ingestion of a prescription medication, and the employee can provide documentation (medical or pharmacy records), the drug test will be reported as negative. However, if there is no medical explanation for a positive test, the specimen is reported to Personnel Security (SEC-PSS6) as a confirmed positive.”

According to the policy, Personnel Security will notify employees selected for random testing. Workers who are on approved leave from the Laboratory will not be required to appear for a test on that day. A worker who fails to appear for a drug test will be treated in the same manner as if (s)he had tested positive for an illegal drug. It is understood that being called for a random test may be inconvenient, however, this element of unpredictability is required in order to guard the integrity of the testing process. A positive drug test will result in disciplinary action up to and including termination.

At an all-employee meeting last December, Laboratory Director Michael Anastasio announced that an enhanced substance abuse policy would be implemented. The enhanced policy, which incorporates employee comments and suggestions, includes

--Pre-employment drug testing for all LANL employees (excluding guests/affiliates) and subcontractors;

--Random drug testing for all LANL employees (excluding guests/affiliates) and subcontractors;

--Drug and/or alcohol testing on the basis of reasonable suspicion that the policy has been violated; and

--Drug and/or alcohol testing following an incident or accident that results in or has the potential to result in serious injury.

As suggested by employees, metrics and an assessment schedule are being developed to ensure effective implementation of the policy.

"The new substance abuse policy reflects today's environment and the need to take greater precautions to ensure a workplace that is safe, secure and demonstrates that we are worthy of our nation's trust," Anastasio said in an all-employee message.

The new policy -- IPP 732 -- can be found on the Policy Center Web page and replaces the previous substance abuse policy (AM110).

A set of frequently asked questions on the new policy also is available at http://int.lanl.gov/orgs/adbs/substanceabusepolicy.shtml online.

For more information, see the all-employee memo from Anastasio or contact Employee Relations at 7-8730 (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).

Domenici and Wilson Involved in Attorney Purge?
by Paul Blumenthal, 03.04.2007

Back at the beginning of the year the Justice Department announced that it was replacing seven U.S. Attorneys in an unprecedented move. The Attorney 'purge' was able to take place due to a provision allowing the Justice Department to unilaterally replace U.S. Attorneys for any reason that was snuck into the PATRIOT Act reauthorization by Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA).

McClatchy Newspapers reports today that one of those Attorneys, David Iglesias, U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, was pressured by Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) and Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) to bring down indictments on local Democratic officials prior to the 2006 midterm election. Iglesias refused and has since been purged by the Justice Department. If Wilson and Domenici did attempt to pressure a sitting U.S. Attorney for the political benefit of the oft-endangered Wilson it would be a serious ethical violation.

Wilson's history with Domenici is integral to this story. Wilson was one of the top Democratic targets in the 2006 election and faced her toughest competition in years from New Mexico Attorney General Patsy Madrid. She barely eked out a victory after a late gaffe by Madrid during a debate. Wilson's continuing victories are essential to the aging Domenici as he views the Albuquerque Republican as his heir. Domenici is an institution in New Mexico. He has served since the 1970s and represents a more moderate strain of Republicanism than those elected in the 1980s or 90s. Wilson was brought up through the system by Domenici and clearly the heir apparent to his Senate seat, much to the chagrin of the more conservative Southern New Mexico Republican Congressman Stevan Pearce. This explains why Domenici, the second of the two to pressure Iglesias, was "more persistent than Wilson ... When Iglesias said an indictment wouldn't be handed down until at least December, the line went dead." Meanwhile the White House is choosing between four potential replacements for Iglesias, all of whom were hand picked by Domenici. Domenici is up for reelection in 2008.

Playing with justice for political reasons is a serious violation of the public's trust. That two Members of Congress may have done this to further their careers or legacies is abominable. The Ethics Committees in both Houses of Congress have just been handed a chance to prove if they work or not. If Members wish to insist that they do not need an Independent Oversight Board to investigate wrong doing they must begin with the cases of Wilson and Domenici to prove that they can and will police their own. On the grander scale, the Justice Department has serious questions it must answer in what may be an attempt to stifle or distort justice for purely political reasons.

[See if you can find LANL on this Must-Do List. (Maybe on a future list? So much to do: energy, nuclear disarmament, global warming, ...) This unprecedented editorial is just the tip of the iceberg: The real Powers-that-Be behind the scenes, whose voice is that of the usually compliant New York Times, must really be angry at the Neoconservatives in the White House and Congress this time.]


The Must-Do List

The Bush administration’s assault on some of the founding principles of American democracy marches onward despite the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections. The new Democratic majorities in Congress can block the sort of noxious measures that the Republican majority rubber-stamped. But preventing new assaults on civil liberties is not nearly enough.

Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.

It will require forceful steps by this Congress to undo the damage. A few lawmakers are offering bills intended to do just that, but they are only a start. Taking on this task is a moral imperative that will show the world the United States can be tough on terrorism without sacrificing its humanity and the rule of law.

Today we’re offering a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Many will require a rewrite of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an atrocious measure pushed through Congress with the help of three Republican senators, Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham and John McCain; Senator McCain lent his moral authority to improving one part of the bill and thus obscured its many other problems.

Our list starts with three fundamental tasks:

Restore Habeas Corpus

One of the new act’s most indecent provisions denies anyone Mr. Bush labels an “illegal enemy combatant” the ancient right to challenge his imprisonment in court. The arguments for doing this were specious. Habeas corpus is nothing remotely like a get-out-of-jail-free card for terrorists, as supporters would have you believe. It is a way to sort out those justly detained from those unjustly detained. It will not “clog the courts,” as Senator Graham claims. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has a worthy bill that would restore habeas corpus. It is essential to bringing integrity to the detention system and reviving the United States’ credibility.

Stop Illegal Spying

Mr. Bush’s program of intercepting Americans’ international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant has not ceased. The agreement announced recently — under which a secret court supposedly gave its blessing to the program — did nothing to restore judicial process or ensure that Americans’ rights are preserved. Congress needs to pass a measure, like one proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, to force Mr. Bush to obey the law that requires warrants for electronic surveillance.

Ban Torture, Really

The provisions in the Military Commissions Act that Senator McCain trumpeted as a ban on torture are hardly that. It is still largely up to the president to decide what constitutes torture and abuse for the purpose of prosecuting anyone who breaks the rules. This amounts to rewriting the Geneva Conventions and puts every American soldier at far greater risk if captured. It allows the president to decide in secret what kinds of treatment he will permit at the Central Intelligence Agency’s prisons. The law absolves American intelligence agents and their bosses of any acts of torture and abuse they have already committed.

Many of the tasks facing Congress involve the way the United States takes prisoners, and how it treats them. There are two sets of prisons in the war on terror. The military runs one set in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. The other is even more shadowy, run by the C.I.A. at secret places.

Close the C.I.A. Prisons

When the Military Commissions Act passed, Mr. Bush triumphantly announced that he now had the power to keep the secret prisons open. He cast this as a great victory for national security. It was a defeat for America’s image around the world. The prisons should be closed.

Account for ‘Ghost Prisoners’

The United States has to come clean on all of the “ghost prisoners” it has in the secret camps. Holding prisoners without any accounting violates human rights norms. Human Rights Watch says it has identified nearly 40 men and women who have disappeared into secret American-run prisons.

Ban Extraordinary Rendition

This is the odious practice of abducting foreign citizens and secretly flying them to countries where everyone knows they will be tortured. It is already illegal to send a prisoner to a country if there is reason to believe he will be tortured. The administration’s claim that it got “diplomatic assurances” that prisoners would not be abused is laughable.

A bill by Representative Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, would require the executive branch to list countries known to abuse and torture prisoners. No prisoner could be sent to any of them unless the secretary of state certified that the country’s government no longer abused its prisoners or offered a way to verify that a prisoner will not be mistreated. It says “diplomatic assurances” are not sufficient.

Congress needs to completely overhaul the military prisons for terrorist suspects, starting with the way prisoners are classified. Shortly after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared all members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to be “illegal enemy combatants” not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions or American justice. Over time, the designation was applied to anyone the administration chose, including some United States citizens and the entire detainee population of Gitmo.

To address this mess, the government must:

Tighten the Definition of Combatant

“Illegal enemy combatant” is assigned a dangerously broad definition in the Military Commissions Act. It allows Mr. Bush — or for that matter anyone he chooses to designate to do the job — to apply this label to virtually any foreigner anywhere, including those living legally in the United States.

Screen Prisoners Fairly and Effectively

When the administration began taking prisoners in Afghanistan, it did not much bother to screen them. Hundreds of innocent men were sent to Gitmo, where far too many remain to this day. The vast majority will never even be brought before tribunals and still face indefinite detention without charges.

Under legal pressure, Mr. Bush created “combatant status review tribunals,” but they are a mockery of any civilized legal proceeding. They take place thousands of miles from the point of capture, and often years later. Evidence obtained by coercion and torture is permitted. The inmates do not get to challenge this evidence. They usually do not see it.

The Bush administration uses the hoary “fog of war” dodge to justify the failure to screen prisoners, saying it is not practical to do that on the battlefield. That’s nonsense. It did not happen in Afghanistan, and often in Iraq, because Mr. Bush decided just to ship the prisoners off to Gitmo.

Prisoners designated as illegal combatants are subject to trial rules out of the Red Queen’s playbook. The administration refuses to allow lawyers access to 14 terrorism suspects transferred in September from C.I.A. prisons to Guantánamo. It says that if they had a lawyer, they might say that they were tortured or abused at the C.I.A. prisons, and anything that happened at those prisons is secret.

At first, Mr. Bush provided no system of trial at the Guantánamo camp. Then he invented his own military tribunals, which were rightly overturned by the Supreme Court. Congress then passed the Military Commissions Act, which did not fix the problem. Some tasks now for Congress:

Ban Tainted Evidence

The Military Commissions Act and the regulations drawn up by the Pentagon to put it into action, are far too permissive on evidence obtained through physical abuse or coercion. This evidence is unreliable. The method of obtaining it is an affront.

Ban Secret Evidence

Under the Pentagon’s new rules for military tribunals, judges are allowed to keep evidence secret from a prisoner’s lawyer if the government persuades the judge it is classified. The information that may be withheld can include interrogation methods, which would make it hard, if not impossible, to prove torture or abuse.

Better Define ‘Classified’ Evidence

The military commission rules define this sort of secret evidence as “any information or material that has been determined by the United States government pursuant to statute, executive order or regulation to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national security.” This is too broad, even if a president can be trusted to exercise the power fairly and carefully. Mr. Bush has shown he cannot be trusted to do that.

Respect the Right to Counsel

Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration allowed the government to listen to conversations and intercept mail between some prisoners and their lawyers. This had the effect of suspending their right to effective legal representation. Since then, the administration has been unceasingly hostile to any lawyers who defend detainees. The right to legal counsel does not exist to coddle serial terrorists or snarl legal proceedings. It exists to protect innocent people from illegal imprisonment.

Beyond all these huge tasks, Congress should halt the federal government’s race to classify documents to avoid public scrutiny — 15.6 million in 2005, nearly double the 2001 number. It should also reverse the grievous harm this administration has done to the Freedom of Information Act by encouraging agencies to reject requests for documents whenever possible. Congress should curtail F.B.I. spying on nonviolent antiwar groups and revisit parts of the Patriot Act that allow this practice.

The United States should apologize to a Canadian citizen and a German citizen, both innocent, who were kidnapped and tortured by American agents.

Oh yes, and it is time to close the Guantánamo camp. It is a despicable symbol of the abuses committed by this administration (with Congress’s complicity) in the name of fighting terrorism.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
-----

Extraordinary times, these. Unprecedented since the American Revolution, or for sure, in my lifetime. Some of you might not like to see this List of Must-Do items on this blog. (To them I say, in words that Bush himself might use, "If you are offended by what I said, I accept full responsibility and none of the blame.") But sometimes, our little problems are overshadowed by the bigger ones we all face as American citizens. Moreover, we at Los Alamos have not been immune from these radical-right people and their perfidy for over a half a dozen years.

--Pat

[Question: Will NNSA's choice for RRW (the California bomb) do the trick?]

Bomb gurus ponder non-nuclear future
New U.S. weapons could make arsenal a relic of Cold War

by James Sterngold, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, March 4, 2007

Nuclear weapons policy discussions in this country tend to feel obscure, cerebral and, more often than not, gentlemanly.

The subject may involve degrees of annihilation more vast than anything ever experienced, but, a new thrust of the debate is being launched, even as the Bush administration announced on Friday that it had accepted the design of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for a new generation of nuclear weapons, known as "reliable replacement warheads."

During a discussion in San Francisco recently on the future of the United States nuclear arsenal -- which in other times might have involved little more than a dry excursion into this dense topic -- specialists provided an extraordinarily tough critique of the Bush administration's nuclear weapons programs and added fuel to the growing efforts to drastically reduce, or eliminate, the stockpile.

C. Bruce Tarter, the former director of the Lawrence Livermore and now head of a group evaluating proposals for a new generation of warheads, complained during the panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science two weeks ago that it was almost impossible to make judgments about future weapons needs because the White House had failed to articulate "a clear, transparent" statement on its nuclear strategy and there was no consensus in Congress.

Further, he said, the Bush administration's proposal to resuscitate the weapons production complex "means nothing" because the White House has not provided either a firm timetable or a budget for the program. "You damn well better have bipartisan support" for the new weapons program before moving ahead, he warned.

Another speaker, Gen. James Cartwright, head of the Pentagon's Strategic Command, which manages nuclear war planning, was also blunt. He said that while Stratcom, as the command is known, has developed an array of new tools and strategies for defending the country, including space and cyber defenses, nuclear policy was largely stuck in a Cold War mode.

He endorsed, at least in principle, steps toward eliminating the stockpile, in part because the United States has so many new weapons to defend itself that it is far less reliant on nuclear warheads than in the past. "We ought to grade our homework by the path we're taking in that direction," meaning the direction of nuclear disarmament, Cartwright said.

The exercise is far from academic. At one time, Congress more or less accepted what the administration said the country needed in weapons systems and provided the funding. But now, many in Congress on both sides of the aisle are skeptical about the Bush administration's efforts to start manufacturing new generations of replacement nuclear bombs.

"There is at present no clear, coherent weapons policy supporting RRW," or Reliable Replacement Warhead, said Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that controls nuclear weapons spending. "Without a comprehensive strategy that includes the mission, the threat, and the specific U.S. nuclear stockpile necessary to achieve the strategic goals, it is impossible for Congress to appropriate funding for RRW in a responsible and efficient manner."

Visclosky also sought to put disarmament on the agenda.

Given the need to halt weapons programs in countries such as Iran and North Korea, he said, "the lack of attention the administration has given to developing a policy that explains the role of RRW in our broader national nuclear weapons strategy may result in Congress eliminating funding for the program."

None of the senior officials involved in the debate proposes quick elimination of the nuclear stockpile. What they are encouraging is the first thorough debate in years on whether the country even needs nuclear weapons, and, if so, what kind. Disarmament is being discussed not just by arms-control zealots but by the people who build and manage the nuclear strike force.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek [whose district includes LLNL], now chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Forces Committee, says she plans to push for ratification of the long-stalled Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. President Clinton signed the treaty in 1996, but the Republican-controlled Senate rejected it and the Bush administration has said it has no intention of seeking ratification.

Tauscher says she believes the United States still needs a nuclear deterrent for the time being, even if it is far smaller than the current arsenal of some 5,000 warheads, but she says the new political climate means the country can finally have a real debate about the long-term need to replace nuclear warheads with precision conventional weapons, special forces teams and the like.

"We have a chance to not only get the size of our stockpile to a significantly reduced level but to move toward elimination," she said. "We have a chance to regain the high ground on nonproliferation and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction."

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

-----

See the SF Chronicle article on LANL's Joe Martz posted earlier on this blog, where he articulates forward-thinking ideas about how RRW fits into nuclear-weapons policy, namely, deterrence and disarmament. As usual, LANL is way ahead of LLNL in both nuclear-weapons design and policy, though curiously, in the above article, the only voice we hear is that of former LLNL Director Bruce Tarter. NNSA and the rest of the Bush Administration is, as usual, way behind the curve on all scores.

--Pat

LANL takes warhead consolation prize

ROGER SNODGRASS Los Alamos Monitor Assistant Editor

The National Nuclear Security Administration named the winning design team for the Reliable Replacement Warhead Friday morning and it was not Los Alamos.

Acting NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino told reporters that the "very robust test pedigree" of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory blueprint provided the winning margin.

The competition was to find a better substitute for the W-76 warhead used on submarinelaunched ballistic missiles.

NNSA acknowledged that both designs met all the requirements, but D'Agostino emphasized that there was a higher degree of confidence that the Livermore design could be certified without underground testing, and that gave them the edge. He called it "the most conservative approach."

D'Agostino said some of the highly innovative features developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory will continue to be developed in parallel with the effort at Livermore and may even be introduced into the RRW design as it progresses.

Glenn Mara, the head of the weapons program at LANL, greeted the news with some relief.

"There is excitement that we are moving forward in this next phase," he said in a post-announcement press conference. "The deliberations have taken longer than anyone expected."

He said LANL would continue to play a key role, not only in developing some of its innovative designs, but also because of its exclusive capacity to make the plutonium pits that any replacement warhead will need as the primary trigger.

The runner-up will also be among the first to provide peer reviews for the California plan as it develops.

Mara said about 200 people at LANL had been involved in one way or another with the two-year effort, but he saw no major shifts or changes at LANL.

"There always are minor shifts that are easily accommodated within the program," he said.

In hindsight, some might speculate that LANL's attempt to take a more innovative approach in the contest could have been a handicap.

When questioned by a congressional analyst last September, the LLNL team responded that "all components in their design" or components "very similar" to their design "have been nuclear tested."

They continued, "For example, the primary uses a tested design with a modest and very well understood modification of the pit to provide added margin. Thus there is direct nuclear test proof that the (California RRW) design will perform properly."

They said the California design drew on over 100 other nuclear tests to assure confidence in materials, components and features.

Further, they told Jonathan Medalia, who was preparing the first of two Congressional Research Service reports, that LLNL "made basic design choices that ease certification without testing."

In subtle but revealing contrast, LANL said they "began with an exhaustive evaluation and statistical analysis of nuclear test data that led to design choices made to improve the margin ... for performance parameters dramatically while avoiding known failure modes."

While the LANL design may be more "reliable," Livermore clearly succeeded in establishing that its design was better "tested."

Sen. Jeff Bingaman expressed additional consolation for the runners-up.

"Notwithstanding this decision, LANL clearly is home to some of the best scientists in the world and will continue to play a major role in ensuring we have a safe, reliable and secure stockpile, and in advancing basic science and technology R&D," he said in announcement Friday.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. saw it as round one of a longer contest, as the nuclear weapons complex enters a period of change.

"This is not the end of our RRW effort. One system is not equivalent to a transformation and we need to move on a second design competition, one that should give priority consideration to pit reuse," he said in a prepared statement.

Now that a decision has been made, attention is expected to turn next to independent reviews, congressional hearings and public debate.

-----

[The following post from an anonymous contributor sorta sums it all up ...]

"Now that a decision has been made, attention is expected to turn next to independent reviews, congressional hearings and public debate."

I can hardly wait. If the hearings are of the type where the "experts" in congress are not happy with a decision because it is was not THEIR view of the "facts," then heaven help us.

But since LANL is the whipping boy, I would not expect any serious investigations by Congress. After all the whipping boy is already on the bottom of the heap, so why belabor the point.

Perhaps this RRW decision will result in LLNL being the new screw in "screw"-tinize.

Let's take inventory:
LANL is #2 in nuclear design expertise (read last)
LANL is not the nuclear energy center (Oak Ridge, Idaho or Savannah River is better suited).
LANL is not the Bio center.
LANL may not be the Homeland Security center (e.g., Nonproliferation).

But, hey, we do have more contamination than most other places, so we ARE the #1 successor to Rocky Flats.

We also have the only fully operational plutonium facility in the US.

We have a pretty good hydrodynamics test facility (a place to test high explosives in weapons configurations) in DARHT.

We have an obsolete and under-powered proton accelerator (LANSCE), but we CAN do experiments on special nuclear materials there.

WE also have (really) a world-class bunch of scientists on staff that, given proper motivation, could likely solve almost any problem (including energy sufficiency and global warning). But, the key may be the proper motivation.

Setting all this aside, the one thing LANL excels at more than anywhere else is the number of support staff whose main job is to keep the doors open. These include safety, security, quality, financial, administrative and janitorial staff just to name a few categories. Why, I dare say we have more of these folks that you can shake a stick at.

Therefore, even without RRW (and therefore no forward looking mission), we will be able to spend every cent the Federal government send to LANL. And that, folks, is the real mission of the lab: Spend the money and don't get caught (at least not today...)

[This is from an anonymous contributor. You'll notice that there are two #1's on the list. I decided to leave it that way, since maybe our contributor meant it as a not-so-subtle signal of the depth of the hole LANL finds itself in. My only reservation with regard to his/her suggestion is that I know people who've sent thoughtful e-mails to Mikey on this general topic and they've never heard word #1 back from him. Maybe he was just too busy working the RRW. --Pat]

LANL can survive if …

As a practical matter, LANL can survive and even prosper in the future, but not if it keeps depending on UC or the DoE for its direction. Neither of these bureaucracies have the incentive, the foresight, or the ability to fix the problems at LANL. LANL’s two key problems are:

1. It no longer has a mission that Congress and the nation recognizes as critically important. Stockpile stewardship isn’t such a mission, nor frankly was RRW. There is no shortage of critical national problems the lab could take on – global warming problems, developing better energy sources, pandemic control, infrastructure protection, etc. etc. But to survive, LANL has to take on one or two of these issues full bore – not spread itself around in lots of lightly-funded and thinly staffed boutique operations as it does now – and become recognized worldwide as THE place at the forefront of solving the issue. That will mean some painful triage choices, and some people will lose their turf, but LANL’s survival depends on getting focused, and being SEEN to be focused, on one or two problems the nation recognizes as critically important.

1. LANL has no idea how to market itself, and good marketing to Congress and the public is key both to maintaining the lab’s funding and to attracting the bright young talent that is its future lifeblood. Lockheed Martin would not have been a perfect partner, but at least they understand marketing and are good at it, as Sandia can attest. Since LANL didn’t get Lockheed Martin as a partner, it’s going to have to learn how to market itself on its own. But that is not impossible. LANL is full of smart people who can surely, with the help of books, the internet and consultants, teach themselves how to market their efforts effectively. They just have to decide it is important, which it is.

Some will grumble that these changes are impossible with the present LANL management. Well, if you think it is impossible, then by definition it is. On the other hand, lots of other organizations have been revitalized from the bottom up by the workers taking matters into their own hands. Management doesn’t want failure any more than the workers do, so if offered some good, practical ideas – if sold some good practical ideas (marketing again) – they will probably be receptive.

But more than anything else, LANL’s survival depends upon LANL staff deciding to take charge and change things, rather than just whining that UC/DoE aren’t doing it for them.

-Anon.

P.S. (added later) As for your observation about others sending thoughtful notes to management - persistence and marketing matter. In my experience, senior managers are usually up to their armpits in alligators, and like an Army mule, you have to get their attention first. Personal visits do better then emails, deputations and groups do better than a single person walking in, and practical ideas get a better hearing than just a suggestion that we ought to do something about this.... In general, someone has to drive the log, and in this case I suspect you can't depend on senior management to do that, so it has to be one or more worker bees, looking for allies, generating practical ideas of what the lab could do and how to get it funded and who to sell it to, and then doing the selling.

[Anonymous LANL RRW team member unloads. For another West Coast view of this story, click on the title of this post. --Pat]

Well, as an embarrassed LANL RRW team member, I believe our task should become to do all that we can to kill this program we (far more than LLNL) created. Joe Martz and John Pedicini took the high road throughout and sold this program. Turns out, the United States of America now values lies and dishonesty over truth and ideas. What a shame. The Nation loses on all accounts with this decision. The sooner the Navy scuttles this, the better. The Navy needs nothing that LLNL proposed! The Navy despises the snake-oil salesman from the mistake by the bay. Why oh why Mr. D’Agostino would you shove something up the ___ of the customer that they do not need or want? Perhaps the only good that can now come out of RRW is the death of NNSA. That assumes that Congress has anymore integrity than NNSA. America, you will be wasting your tax dollars with the RRW proposed by LLNL. They cannot do it, they do not know how to work with the Navy, and their design is nothing more than a relic of the past. The Nation needs Safety and Security in its arsenal. That is what LANL offered.

For some more one sided reading, check out:

http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/localnews/ci_5344369

Here are a few tidbits:

"I'm personally humbled by this. It's a huge responsibility," said Goodwin. "I look forward to serving the Navy and getting their weapon out for them."

Nobody should trust Bruce Goodwin and I guarantee you the Navy does not and never will.

“But weapons lab executives and federal officials say replicating the bombs' Cold War parts is expensive and that at least one component of the bombs is aging faster than anyone can replace -- the designers themselves. The RRWs are intended to help train a new generation of weapons scientists and engineers. “

No kidding, especially at LANL.

"What I really expect is some young Los Alamos scientists and engineers will be involved in the development work with Livermore directly, whether they are assigned to Livermore directly or will be flying there will be something the three lab directors will be working on," said Thomas D'Agostino, acting chief of the national Nuclear Security Administration. "

Don’t count on it. I think you have rubbed enough salt in the wound. Now you want us to go help the deceitful and incapable clowns from Brand X. What business school teaches this idea?

“During the Cold War, Livermore lab's designers were known for bleeding-edge bomb designs packed so full of bombs and whistles that the uniformed military more often went shopping with more conservative Los Alamos. But for the RRW, Livermore's designers dug up a bomb from the early 1980s that possessed every available safety feature of the time and through a series of nuclear explosions was proven to be highly robust. The bomb never was built because its weapons system was canceled.
Unlike Los Alamos' RRW design, which was a compendium of new-fangled features that had been tested but not together, Livermore's bomb was hardly new at all, but recycled from the Cold War.”

This writing is of the same caliber as the LLNL design.

Signing off once and for all

Anon :(

-----

But then, here's another insider's view from LANL:

Teller Hasn’t Won Yet

LANL don’t lose hope yet! Even though RRW officially went to LLNL, LLNL has a long history of proposing and winning programs only for LANL to pick up the program and complete the job. For that reason the Navy despises LLNL. I’ve been at LANL for quite awhile and seen these kinds of decisions time and time again, although not necessarily on the scale of the RRW decision. My opinion is that LANL should sit back and watch as LLNL falls on their face technically once again.

However, I personally think that this decision is, in part, a reflection of the current dysfunctional nature of X-4. People who have been here for awhile made the same observation, lack of integral test data for the X-4 LANL design. Charlie MacMillan and Mike Anastasio should look at this as an opportunity to make changes in X-4, at least if Mike and Charlie are on our side, which I doubt.

It is still hard for me to believe the customer, the Navy, would stand for this decision. There must have been a lot of backroom negotiations. This decision is a political one and we just have to wait and see what the real implications are. LLNL may end up just being a program manager with minimal technical input.

-Anonymous

-----

P.S. (from original Anonymous LANL RRW team member):

As the writer of the original post, I am embarrassed. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed the United States Government when it said RRW was a competition to be judged on technical merit. There were many independent reviews (5 according to my count) that all placed us equal or above the LLNL effort. We gave more than you can imagine of our personal lives and energy to win. And, we did. That wasn't the allowed outcome however, because it doesn't work for the no-lab-left-behind strategy.

You bet I'm angry and if you bought that RRW-2 is our consolation prize you are as foolish as I was.

I am a hard core believer in the nuclear stockpile and the purpose it serves. I believe that our nation is playing a dangerous game of politics by banking our future on LLNL. May sound bitter, but their proposal does not meet the needs of the customer. The stockpile is no longer there to protect us, it is now a make work program.

There is no weapons future at LANL. Hate to say it, but reality just knocked a few of my teeth out.

[For the view from San Francisco, click on the title of this post.]





Blast off.
A new class of nuclear weapons is being designed to replace the W-88 warhead, which is fired from submarines.

Credit: LLNL






New Design for Warhead Is Awarded to Livermore
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times, March 3, 2007

The Bush administration announced yesterday the winner of a competition to design the nation’s first new nuclear weapon in nearly two decades and immediately set out to reassure Russia and China that the weapon, if built, would pose no new threat to either nation.

If President Bush decides to authorize production and Congress agrees, the research could lead to a long, expensive process to replace all American nuclear warheads in the next few decades with new designs.

The first to be replaced with the new Reliable Replacement Weapon would be the W-76, a warhead for missiles deployed on submarines.

Officials said the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California would design the replacement warhead based on previously tested components, allowing the administration to argue that no new underground tests would be necessary before deploying the new weapon.

Officials said, however, the Livermore design might eventually draw on technical contributions from a more novel approach on the drawing boards at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, Livermore’s longtime rival.

The surprise choice of a single laboratory reversed a tentative decision, reported in January, to combine elements of the Livermore and Los Alamos designs. In a behind-the-scenes debate over the last two months, nuclear experts inside and outside the government faulted the hybrid approach as unusual and technically risky, with some calling it a “Frankenbomb.”

Administration officials said the Livermore design had won primarily because its main elements were detonated beneath the Nevada desert decades ago, making it a better candidate under the nuclear test ban treaty, which the United States has signed but not ratified.

Thomas P. D’Agostino, acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Energy Department, told reporters that the Livermore design was “the most conservative approach.”

Administration officials said the hybrid had been rejected after senior members of the Navy, which will manage the W-76 replacement, worried that members of Congress would perceive it as more likely to require explosive testing.

The announcement of the research path had been expected in early January but was delayed, officials said, because of last-minute Navy concerns over control of financing and dividing the scientific labor.

The potentially expensive initiative faces an uncertain future and has generated much criticism from skeptics who argue that a new design for the nuclear arsenal is unneeded and is a potential stimulus to a global nuclear arms race.

“This is a solution in search of a problem,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a group in Washington. “There is an urgent need to reduce these weapons, not expand them. This will keep the Chinese, the Russians and others on guard to improve their own stockpiles.”

Among lawmakers who declared their opposition was Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

“What worries me,” Mrs. Feinstein said, “is that the minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And it’s just a matter of time before other nations do the same thing.”

Critics had ridiculed the hybrid approach as a compromise dictated by the politics of survival for the nuclear laboratories, rather than technical merit. In an unusual move, even senior arms designers spoke out publicly against what they called serious risks of merging differing designs from different laboratories.

“A hybrid design by inexperienced personnel, managed by committee, is not the best approach,” John Pedicini, technical head of the design team at Los Alamos, said last month in a public blog entry.

Mr. Pedicini conceded that the Livermore design had features “that are an advance over ours, and if we get the assignment, I would incorporate them in our design.”

“If this is what is meant by hybrid,” he said, “then the outcome would be good.”

The goal is to replace the arsenal of aging warheads with a generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft.

The replacements will have the same explosive yields and other military characteristics of the current weapons, officials said, a point that senior administration officials have made to Russia in arguing that the new weapons do not represent an expansion of the American arsenal.

Mrs. Feinstein cited a report in December saying plutonium pits have a lifespan of at least 85 years, leading critics to question whether the new weapons are necessary.

(David E. Sanger contributed reporting.)

-----
[Thanks for the plug on the blog, Bill! --Pat]

This was just sent in by a reader.

-Pat

--------------------------------------------------------------

Today's announcement that the RRW program has been awarded to LLNL was one more coffin nail in the LANL casket. It has now been clearly demonstrated that the one unique, indispensable, irreplacable talent claimed by LANL supporters, i.e. nuclear weapons design expertise, is no longer needed by the sponsor. It has been dispensed with, replaced.

What's left for LANL to do? Pit production? Probably not: the DAF (Device Assembly Area) at the Neveda Test Site is just sitting there, empty, all 300,000 square feet of it. The middle of the NTS is a more logical place to house plutonium foundry operations than LANL.

Reprocessing spent reactor fuel rods? There are no train tracks going up the hill. There are train tracks leading into Savannah River and Oak Ridge. In case you missed the implication: spent reactor cores are shipped by train.

Doing really cool simulations? Of what? Who is going to pay more than $400,000 per staff member to develop code when there are dozens of organizations out there that can do it better, faster, and cheaper?

The way I see it, the shutdown of LANL is on, or even a bit ahead of schedule. June 1st will mark the next phase in the LANL SRP (Staff Reduction Program). That date marks the first year anniversary of LANS at LANL, as well the official start of LANL employee at-will status, which also coincides nicely with a largish budget shortfall.

Does anybody want to predict the schedule for completion of the LANL shutdown? My bet is that within 7 years the only workers at (the former) Los Alamos National Laboratory will be the cleanup crews.

[Read it and weep, LANL. Read it and weep, America?]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 2, 2007
NR-07-03-02

Joint statement on the Reliable Replacement Warhead Announcement

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) today issued the following statement:

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced an acquisition and development strategy for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW.) The design by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories was selected as the initial baseline. Livermore and Sandia will provide the design leadership for this development project. All three laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex, will work together as an integrated NNSA Project Team.

Development of the integrated weapons system is under the overall leadership of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Program.

Today’s announcement is an important first step in the RRW program that will enable a sustainable nuclear deterrent for our nation. The laboratories have been engaged in a feasibility study for the last two years to determine an initial RRW design based on NNSA and the U.S. Department of Defense criteria. We support this acquisition strategy and stand ready to participate in the transformation of the weapons complex.

Michael R. Anastasio, Director, LANL

George H. Miller, Director, LLNL

Thomas O. Hunter, Director, Sandia

-----

And now, from the Santa Fe New Mexican's Andy Lenderman:

LANL Will Have Supporting Role in Livermore Weapon
By Andy Lenderman | The New Mexican, March 2, 2007

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has defeated Los Alamos National Laboratory in a competition to design a new nuclear bomb called the reliable replacement warhead.

Livermore will pair with the Navy to make production plans and budgets for the new warhead, which was picked in part because there's a higher confidence it can be certified without underground nuclear testing. Congress must approve the project before it's actually built.

"The design was based on making sure that we start off the RRW strategy... in a way that is deeply rooted and firmly embedded in test history," agency Administrator Tom D'Agostino said.

Scientists at Los Alamos will be able to provide peer review of the Livermore project, receive training from the Livermore team and could see some of their more innovative features from their proposal developed, officials said.

The Navy will lead the overall effort to develop the plan for the weapon, which will be deployed at sea, according to the agency.

The Los Alamos team had an excellent design, D'Agostino said, and had some "transformational" features.

But one design was more directly related to past underground nuclear test information, he said.

"In essence this was about starting off with what I would call the most conservative approach," D'Agostino said.

Livermore will work on the nuclear part of the weapon. Sandia National Laboratories will cover the non-nuclear parts, and will make sure it's compatible with the Trident submarine-based missile system, the agency reports.

The reliable replacement warhead is basically the cornerstone to modernize the country's nuclear arsenal and the factories and labs that support it.

It also enables scientists from the Cold War to pass on their knowledge to a new generation of designers, engineers and production workers.

On Nov. 20, 2006, the Nuclear Weapons Council endorsed the warhead as a long-term strategy.

It's unclear how much the total cost of the program would be. The president asked for $88.8 million in the 2008 fiscal year budget request to Congress. The total weapons budget request is $6.5 billion, and includes other programs like life-extension programs and stockpile work to maintain and certify weapons, the budget request shows.

Proponents of the program say it's a way to make weapons that are more reliable, more secure from unauthorized use, and easier and less costly to maintain than weapons from the Cold War era. No nuclear explosion tests are planned with the RRW program.

Critics say it's a way to keep the nuclear weapons complex busy, a poor use of tax dollars, and could undercut this country's effort to keep other nations from building nuclear bombs by setting a bad example.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group said the decision will likely "further cement" Los Alamos' role to become a plutonium pit production center, despite safety concerns repeatedly cited by federal officials.

U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., is a supporter of the program and last year suggested blending the best features from each lab to improve the weapon.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has questioned the need for the program in light of a recent study which said that pits, the plutonium triggers of nuclear weapons, last at least 85 years, which is decades longer than previously believed.

Contact Andy Lenderman at 995-3827 or alenderman@sfnewmexican.com.

-----

[At last! LANL's RRW team will get some valuable training from LLNL: on what? how to wink the hoods?

Kudos all around:

Thanks, Pete. You've really helped out a lot on this one. Some "wag" (not this "pit bull") has called you Senator "Pit" Dementia (R-NM). You're the "pits," all right!

And "Cement LANL" is the new LASG motto, isn't it?

Finally, is this really what the Navy wanted? We hear by the grapevine that the POG vote on the two designs was 4-2, Los Alamos. But I guess we'll never get NNSA to tell the truth, will we?

--Pat, the Dog

P.S. Have a great weekend, my Livermore "pals." Go for it, Sandia! At least you won't need training: security or otherwise, right?]

[Looks like NNSA does it again. Will this be their last f*ckup? Stay tuned.]

First, from the KOB (Albuquerque) web site:

http://www.kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer&id=30789&cat=HOME

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Bush administration has selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory�s design for a revamped nuclear warhead.

That news is according to two federal officials familiar with the decision.

The officials spoke Friday to The Associated press on condition of anonymity because the decision hasn�t been formally announced yet.

The decision comes a year after the administration ordered a competition between Lawrence Livermore near San Francisco and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Officials say the administration has decided that the design submitted by Lawrence Livermore, with engineering assistance from Sandia National Laboratories, can be built safely without underground testing.

Many of the warheads in the nation�s stockpile were designed and built 40 years ago.

----

Then this from
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/16818549.htm

U.S. to develop new hydrogen bomb
Lawrence Livermore may take the lead in an effort by three national labs. Aging warheads would be replaced.

By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, March 2, 2007

The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.

The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.

Teams of scientists in California and New Mexico have been working since last year to develop the new bomb, using the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The weapon is known as the reliable replacement warhead and is intended to replace aging warheads now deployed on missiles aboard Trident submarines.

The contract decision was made by the Nuclear Weapons Council, which consists of officials from the Defense Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Energy Department. Plans were underway Thursday to announce the award this afternoon.

The nuclear administration will issue the contract and run the program.

The cost of the development is secret, though outside experts said it would cost billions of dollars — perhaps tens of billions — to develop the bomb, build factories to restart high-volume weapons production and then assemble the weapons.

If Livermore does become the lead laboratory, confidence in the facility is likely to be bolstered, and political suggestions that its role in weapons development is unnecessary could be quelled.

A lead role by Los Alamos would help extract that facility from deep political problems growing out of security breaches.

The program is not expected to create a surge in employment at any of the labs.

The program marks the first time the military has fielded a nuclear weapon design without an underground test. The last time scientists set off a hydrogen bomb was in 1991 under the Nevada desert.

President Clinton ordered a testing moratorium, and it has been continued by President Bush.

Since the reason for building the new bomb is to maintain confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent, experts say, the Nuclear Weapons Council will want the most conservative design, which gives Livermore the upper hand.

The design details are secret, but Livermore's version utilizes major components that had been tested — though not produced — for a Navy bomb about two decades ago.

By contrast, Los Alamos selected a design that involved an atomic trigger and a thermonuclear component that had been tested individually.

However, the two elements were never tested together, said Philip Coyle, who serves on scientific advisory committees and formerly was deputy director at Livermore.

The Los Alamos design is said to contain highly attractive features, including innovative mechanisms that would prevent terrorists from detonating the bomb should they gain access to it, experts said. Those use controls were cited by military officials as a key factor in developing the weapon.

Proponents of the effort say that the nation's existing nuclear stockpile is getting old and that doubts will eventually grow about weapons reliability. They say the new bomb will not have a greater nuclear yield and could not perform any new military missions beyond those of existing weapons.

So far, those arguments have attracted bipartisan support, including from Democrats who have long played a leading role in nuclear arms issues.

Critics say the existing stockpile is perfectly reliable and can be maintained for decades. The new bomb will undermine U.S. efforts to stop nuclear proliferation, they say. In addition, a recent study showed that plutonium components in existing weapons were aging much more slowly than expected.

ralph.vartabedian @latimes.com

----

[From AP ->]


New U.S. nuclear warhead design chosen
Updated 3/2/2007 2:18 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration selected a design Friday for a new generation of atomic warheads, taking a major step toward building the first new nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War nearly two decades ago.

The military and the Energy Department selected a design developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over a competing design by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The decision to move ahead with the warhead, which eventually would replace the existing arsenal of weapons, has been criticized as sending the wrong signal to the world at a time when the United States is assailing attempts at nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran and striving to contain them.

But military and Energy Department officials said the new U.S. warhead will not add to the nuclear arsenal, but replace existing warheads with ones that are safer and more reliable.

"This is not about starting a new arms race," said Thomas P. D'Agostino, acting head of the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear weapons programs.

D'Agostino said that both the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore designs were contingent on not requiring nuclear testing. If tests were required in a design, "We were not going to go forward," he said.

D'Agostino said that engineers over the next year will focus on developing cost estimates and defining the scope of the program and a schedule for its development. After that, decisions will be made on actually building the warhead.

The warhead has been the focus of an intense competition between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, the government's two premier nuclear weapons labs.

The two facilities submitted separate designs nearly a year ago. Lawrence Livermore's design is based on a warhead actually tested in an underground detonation in the 1980s. Los Alamos had a design based on a fresh approach that has not undergone testing.

One of the assurances given by defense officials to Congress is that the new warhead will not have to undergo actual testing. Once developed, it would be used in the Trident missiles on submarines and eventually would replace warheads on the Air Force's missile arsenal, officials said.

Administration officials, including the military, have argued that today's aging warheads are harder to maintain and as they age it will become more difficult to ensure their reliability.

The new design is advertised as being more robust with additional features to safeguard them against possible theft or misuse.

Of overriding concern to members of Congress has been that the warhead be developed without the need for underground tests. The administration has sought to assure Congress that the design would not require such testing.

The administration also argues that a phasing out of current warheads with the more modern design will allow additional reductions in the number of warheads that will be needed.

The decision Friday establishes a clear blueprint for designing the new warhead, officials said. A final go ahead is expected to be made by the president within two years, with the first warheads to be completed by 2012.

It has not been determined how much the program will cost. The administration asked Congress for $119 million for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 to push ahead with further design work.

Advocates for the warhead say it would give military commanders greater assurance of reliability and could speed the reduction of the deployed number of nuclear warheads from 6,000 to fewer than 2,000 by 2012.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

This was sent in by a reader:

Hi Pat,

Information Assets Management, the LANL subcontractor that employed Jessica Quintana of CREM de METH fame, and whose contract with LANL was terminated according to Michael Anastasio's Congressional testimony, has filed a $1.6 million lawsuit against LANL (or, more likely, LANS).

I have no details, but Information Assets is probably claiming that their contract was wrongfull[y] terminated insofar as the FBI has allegedly cleared them of any wrongdoing in the security breach.

N the No

PS: Pat, The Dog would like to know what else the FBI findings will reveal, specifically re: John Mitchell.

[Click on the title for the link.]
Looks like all three national labs are experiencing dark days. If there's a Livermore blog that is thriving, somebody please send me the link.

--Pat, the Dog

-----

And here's something from an anonymous tipster from down south (March 6, 2007):

--

Pat:

Here's an interesting development (if factual) that popped up on "sandiathedownwardspiral" today:

A message in a bottle from behind the gates... I learned today that Sandia has retained a team of heavy-hitters at the mega-firm of Baker Botts LLP to handle their appeal of the Carpenter case. Here's a bit of reading for those readers who have never heard of Baker Botts: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041011/bryce

If the partners at Baker Botts can't put lipstick on this pig for Sandia, nobody can! No worries, though, it's not their money they are spending on all these ridiculously expensive attorneys - it's yours. If you'd like to send a contribution to help Sandia (err... the taxpayers) defray the absurd amounts of money required to retain two swanky law firms, you can send your donations to:

Decapitators for National Security Fund
c/o Sandia National Laboratories
P.O. Box 5800 MS0001
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0001

This afternoon, Sandia President Tom Hunter sent the email below to all Sandia employees concerning the Shawn Carpenter trial. It is the second such email that has been sent out concerning the Carpenter trial.

----------------

From: Hunter, Tom

Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 5:43 PM

To: SNL-ALL-SITES

Subject: Recent Media Attention

Dear Sandians,

As many of you are aware, a New Mexico state court jury awarded former Sandian Shawn Carpenter more than $4 million on February 13, 2007. The outcome of the trial was a great disappointment to me personally, but I am most concerned about any perception that the laboratory may not have acted in the best interest of the nation.

It is essential in all cases that Sandians adhere to the principle of putting the nation first. I firmly believe Sandia must always conduct its work lawfully, with appropriate authorizations, and when people step beyond clear boundaries we must act responsibly. In fact, living and acting upon our values are of the utmost importance to our continuing to have the opportunity to provide exceptional service to the nation. I and the management team are committed to these values in all we do and every decision we make.

In my career at Sandia, I have come to know Sandia as a place of exemplary character and values, earned through the exceptional conduct of its employees and the significant contributions you have all made to national security. Our values are not new. For more than 60 years, service to the nation, excellence in our conduct and work, respect for each other, integrity, and teamwork have shaped our decisions at Sandia.

In closing, I ask that each of you take a moment and reflect on the exceptional service that you render in the national interest. I have a deep respect for our employees and this organization, the values we stand for, and the commitment we all have to our mission. Our contributions, both individually and collectively, are critically important to our nation’s security.

Sincerely,

-Tom Hunter

----------------

The Albuquerque Journal provided extensive (daily) stories of the trial proceedings, and these internal emails fail to acknowledge even an iota of failings of Sandia management in this case. As a longtime Sandia employee, I find the disparity between the Albuquerque Journal reporting and what is being communicated to employees extremely disconcerting. In fact, I would go as far as describing this most recent email as corporate propaganda that insults the intelligence of the hard working, patriotic and dedicated employees I work with every day.

The most recent Sandia Lab News, an internal publication, did not contain one line of print about the Carpenter case. Staff in my office were both amazed and suspicious that management did not make an effort to address this. Platitudes about "we are disappointed with the verdict" and "putting the nation first" do nothing whatsoever to reassure employees that they will not be subjected to treatment similar to that apparently received by this former employee.

If a senior Sandia manager used terms such as "decapitate" and "bloody" in an interview with an employee, it is unconscionable that he is not held to the same standards that are preached in these emails. From my perspective, it is obvious that Sandia handled the termination of this employee unfairly. It seems ludicrous that Carpenter would currently hold a top secret security clearance at the State Dept. and be the lawbreaking criminal that management keeps implying in these communications to employees. Sandia employees are not ignorant, and do read publications other than those produced within Sandia.

It is apparent that the Sandia leadership did not learn anything from the events several years ago that led to the Bay Report. Despite the fact that Sandia has a huge influence on the local community, a jury of local citizens found Sandia liable, and doubled the punitive damages in their verdict to send a message. These very public situations are tough for current employees to deal with. To be frank, it is embarrassing when the topic comes up in conversations with non-Sandians.

Good leaders take responsibility for their shortcomings, acknowledge them, and then move forward to implement solutions to improve the organization. Sandia leadership continues to erode employee confidence with their meaningless emails and state of denial. Dr. Hunter needs to step up to the plate to regain his credibility within the Sandia community - preferably before employee confidence is totally gone.

-Anonymous

---

[There are two things that the human race should never again witness: fascism and nuclear war. These are the twin reasons for a viable Reliable Replacement Warhead: deterrence and disarmament, hand-in-hand. Notice that I said "viable," not "hybrid."
--Pat]

Present at the Devastation
A new eyewitness to history, circa August 1945.

BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, Thursday, March 1, 2007 12:01 a.m.

The atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945. On Sept. 6, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, fresh from covering the formal surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, arrived in the city. He got there by impersonating an American colonel and forcing his way onto Japanese trains. He was the first Westerner to enter Nagasaki after the bomb.

By heading for Nagasaki, Weller was following his nose for news but also defying a ban imposed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who had declared Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki is located, off-limits to journalists. Weller reasoned that the war was over, the U.S. military's authority over journalists was now moot, and he ought to be free to travel wherever his story took him.

But MacArthur had the last word. Weller's dispatches, filed through U.S. censors in Tokyo, never reached Chicago. Weller always assumed that they landed in the general's circular file. It wasn't until after the reporter's death, in 2002, that his son, Anthony, discovered the carbon copies of his father's never-published stories, buried in a box of files that had followed the peripatetic correspondent around the globe. The result is "First Into Nagasaki," compiled by the younger Mr. Weller and edited by him into a powerful set of historical documents. His intelligent concluding essay provides the framework for his father's raw copy.


The most striking aspect of the Weller dispatches is their immediacy. "Walk in Nagasaki's streets and you walk in ruins" is how his first report begins, as he describes the sights and smells of the devastated city, where pyres are still burning with the remains of humans killed in the attack. Yet "Nagasaki cannot be described as a city of the dead. . . . Though the smashed streets are as barren of production or commerce as Pompeii's, yet a living stream of humanity pours along them, looking with alert, shoe-button eyes for today's main chance."

It is a month after the bomb, and Weller, hearing rumors about what we now know to be radiation sickness, heads to two local hospitals to see what he can find out. He interviews doctors perplexed by how to treat "Disease X," which is killing people who appeared to have survived the blast unhurt. He reports the conditions of the patients he sees there in a spare, descriptive style. "Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals," he writes on Sept. 8, "some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. . . . The doctors [say] . . . the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes."

The aftereffects of the atomic bomb aren't the only story that Weller finds in Nagasaki. After a few days in the city, he heads to the nearby prisoner-of-war camps, where he has what can only be called the incredible experience of informing his fellow Americans, who did not know the war had ended, of the two atomic bombs, the Japanese surrender and the impending arrival of American occupation troops.

He writes a series of harrowing reports based on interviews with hundreds of American, British, Dutch and Australian soldiers interned there under appalling conditions. The younger Mr. Weller calls historians' lack of attention to the Japanese POW camps "one of the great omissions in World War II memory." After reading his father's shocking dispatches, one finds it hard not to agree. A third of Allied prisoners died in Japan's POW camps, the younger Mr. Weller says, compared with 4% in Germany's.

George Weller also writes about the "Death Cruise," one of the 200 or so "hellship voyages" that transported POWs from Southeast Asia to Japan between 1942 and 1945. Weller pieced together the lengthy account included here from stories told to him by the POWs he interviewed in Kyushu. A sanitized version was published in the Chicago Daily News, minus horrific details regarding Japanese brutalities and the cannibalism and vampirism that some prisoners resorted to in order to survive. Anthony Weller reports that of the roughly 50,000 prisoners who traveled by hellship during the war, some 21,000 died.


"First Into Nagasaki" is no "Hiroshima," John Hersey's famous 1946 account of atomic-bomb survivors that has been taken up by antinuclear activists. Weller doesn't flinch from describing the suffering of the Japanese victims of the bomb, but it is clear where his sympathies lie. In a 1967 essay for an anthology of reporters' memoirs, he relates his experiences in Nagasaki. "I felt pity," he writes, "but no remorse. The Japanese military had cured me of that."

--
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

[Note earlier article on this blog from Los Alamos Monitor, which claimed that reprocessing plant might be sited at Los Alamos.]

Research proposal gets public airing
Energy program also involves nuclear recycling and an advanced reactor

By Andy Lenderman, The New Mexican

Los Alamos is among six potential places where new research on advanced nuclear power might be located. A public meeting is scheduled for this evening in Los Alamos to discuss and take public comment on the proposal, known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

That program involves three new facili­ties — a research center, a nuclear fuel recycling center and an advanced nuclear reactor that would burn old nuclear fuel that’s been reprocessed into something usable.

Los Alamos is on the list for potential research sites only. The recycling center and reactor would be located at one of 11 places, including Hobbs, a report in the federal register shows.

Proponents say it would take care of lots of partially consumed nuclear fuel that would otherwise need to be buried and generate lots of electricity in an energy­driven economy. Critics say the program is a waste of money and could make wherever it’s located a nuclear waste dump.

“Our society has a great need for nuclear power — a safe, emissions-free, and afford­able source of energy — and GNEP puts us on that path,” Assistant Secretary Dennis Spurgeon of the Department of Energy said in a news release.

“It will encourage expansion of domes­tic and foreign nuclear energy production while reducing the risk of nuclear prolifera­tion.”

A flier released by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety this week encourages people to speak against the project.

“Communities living near GNEP would not greatly benefit economically from the program, and would be forced to deal with the program’s hazardous effects on human and environmental health,” the flier reads.

Today, roughly 20 percent of the coun­try’s electricity comes from nuclear power plants.

Tonight’s meeting is part of the environ­mental impact statement required by the project.

Contact Andy Lenderman at 995-3827 or alenderman@sfnewmexican.com.

IF YOU GO
What: Meeting to discuss the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
When: 6 to 9 p.m. today Where: Hilltop House Best Western, 400 Trinity Drive, Los Alamos

[Imagine this happening at Los Alamos; imagine the Congressional uproar!]

Sandia Says Guard Covered Up Shooting

By John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer, Thursday, March 1, 2007

A Sandia National Laboratories guard accidentally shot a hole in an observation post door last year, then covered up the incident, a Sandia investigation has found.

The investigation also found someone had periodically disabled the alarm on the door in question, allowing them to go in and out without setting off the alarm.

Sandia, headquartered at Kirtland Air Force Base, designs and maintains U.S. nuclear weapons. Sandia has a paramilitary force of approximately 120 guards protecting its classified information and nuclear materials.

The investigation failed to finger the culprit, but in the process Sandia management found problems in its guard force operations and made some changes, said Sandia spokesman Rod Geer.

Guards no longer work 12-hour shifts by themselves at remote Sandia sites such as the one where the incident happened, Geer said.

The shooting happened in an office building adjacent to Sandia's heavily guarded nuclear reactor complex, the primary Sandia site where nuclear materials are stored. The door was on an upstairs room used by guards as an observation post. It opened onto an exterior roof area, according to Geer.

A guard found the bullet hole the afternoon of Oct. 24, according to a National Nuclear Security Administration report on the incident.

The hole had gone undetected for some time because the holes had been covered— with a magnetized sign affixed to the inside of the metal door and a magnetized coat hook on the outside, according to Geer.

The incident was discovered when a guard on routine rounds thought the coat hook seemed out of place on an exterior building door, Geer said.

The investigation concluded the hole was made by a .40-caliber handgun— the type carried by Sandia guards. Investigators searched but were unable to find the bullet, Geer said.

The room gives guards a view of the adjacent nuclear reactor area, according to Geer.

The building, Sandia Building 6585, contains office space used by a variety of Sandia research groups. Classified work is not normally done there, but one floor of the building is cleared for classified work, Geer said.

In addition to investigating the shooting, the incident "prompted a review of the entire security system," Geer said.

The investigation found that an alarm on the door in question had routinely been set in what Geer called "access mode," allowing the door to be opened without setting off an alarm.

Among changes that resulted from the review of Sandia security, according to Geer, is an increase in the number of managers so each has a smaller area of responsibility on which to focus. Also, more formal written reports are required at the beginning and end of shifts.