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2008-06-04 05:37:38
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press WriterTue Jun 3, 8:43 PM ET
The nation's top nuclear weapons design lab has laid off hundreds of workers,
raising concerns about a brain drain and stirring fears that some of these
highly specialized scientists will sell their expertise to foreign governments,
perhaps hostile ones.
Because of budget cuts and higher costs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
laid off 440 employees May 22 and 23. Over the past 2 1/2 years, attrition and
layoffs have reduced the work force of 8,000 by about 1,800 altogether.
According to a list obtained by The Associated Press, about 60 of the recently
laid-off workers were engineers, around 30 were physicists and about 15 were
chemists. Some, but not all, were involved in nuclear weapons work or
nonproliferation efforts, and all had put in at least 20 years at the lab.
Some lawmakers and others said they fear the loss of important institutional
knowledge about designing warheads and detecting whether other countries are
going nuclear.
Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said job reductions at Lawrence
Livermore and two other big U.S. weapons labs represent "a national security
danger point." These unemployed experts might take their skills overseas,
Feinstein said.
"The fact is, these are all people who are human they have homes, they have
families, they have educations to pay for," she said. "And I very much worry
where they go for their next job."
The possibility is also on the mind of the nation's top nuclear weapons
official, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D'Agostino.
"Always in a situation where people leave under less-than-ideal circumstances,
we worry about that, and it's something I assure you we're looking at closely,"
D'Agostino said. "I'm always concerned about the counterintelligence part of
our mission, and we have an active program to go make sure we understand where
we're vulnerable and where we're not."
Asked to elaborate, NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency is "always on
guard for foreign entities approaching our employees, active or retired, but
it's their responsibility to alert us to those circumstances."
The NNSA is aware of no instance in which a U.S. nuclear weapons scientist had
gone to work overseas, he said.
He said the agency regards the possibility of a hostile government picking up
laid-off workers as "highly unlikely," in part because these are American
citizens who have responsibly held high-level clearances for many years, and
because federal law provide stiff penalties which range as high as life in
prison for divulging nuclear secrets.
In an e-mail message, Wilkes said the very notion that these scientists would
sell their country out is "an insult to their personal integrity and their
patriotism."
Ken Sale, a physicist laid off from Lawrence Livermore on May 23, said that
taking his knowledge of nuclear weapons overseas would be unthinkable, and that
he knows of no laid-off colleague who would even consider it.
But "the recent history of spying has all been money-based," Sale said. "Being
concerned about expertise you wouldn't want rattling around in the whole world,
and workers being desperate for a job, is a reasonable concern."
Sale worked on nuclear weapons testing, nonproliferation and nuclear-detection
projects.
"The specific experience you get doing that stuff doesn't have applications
outside that narrow world," he said. "It's not obvious that I will be able to
be fully employed."
Sale, 51, will receive one week's pay for each of his 23 years at the lab,
which is in Livermore, about 50 miles from San Francisco.
For security reasons, laid-off workers like Sale immediately lost their access
badges, their top-secret "Q" clearances were suspended, and they were promptly
escorted off the grounds. Some, including Sale, may stay on for a few months
doing unclassified work via telecommuting.
Lawmakers and others have expressed concern that wave after wave of work force
reductions will diminish the lab's expertise. D'Agostino said he could not
guarantee that national security would not be harmed.
With a self-imposed nuclear test ban in place since 1992, maintenance of the
warhead stockpile Lawrence Livermore's top responsibility is performed on
supercomputers. So is the task of designing a new generation of warhead, which
Lawrence Livermore won the right to do last year.
The layoffs have reduced the lab's roster of experts with invaluable experience
they had gleaned from taking part in actual nuclear tests, Sale and others
said. "Designing, building and seeing a device go off is very different from
designing a device and handing it to a computer jockey," Sale said.
Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, whose district includes part of the lab, said
the stakes are especially high as the United States tries to divine through
science what other countries are doing inside their weapons programs.
"We need to be able to understand what the clues are about other countries such
as Iran and North Korea and other countries that are potential nuclear weapons
developers," he said. "Without those scientists that have been involved in that
field for years, for decades, it's going to be a lot more difficult to know
what's going on elsewhere in the world."
Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory that built the atom bomb during World War
II, cut its work force last year by about 550 through retirements and
attrition, and Sandia, also largely in New Mexico, plans to shed dozens of
workers.
Congress cut $100 million from Lawrence Livermore's budget in the fiscal 2008
budget, and the lab has been hit with an additional $180 million in unexpected
costs from its transfer last year to a new management company, lab spokeswoman
Susan Houghton said.