The impact of nuclear zero on the nuclear weapons laboratories has been a neglected issue. But it should not be ignored: for decades nuclear weapons provided the rationale for the growth and continued support for national weapons laboratories in the nuclear weapons states (NWS). In addition to their work to develop successive generations of nuclear weapons, the laboratories have also made major contributions to nonproliferation policy—for example, through the development of verification technologies and participation in on-site inspections—and to the national science and technology base. Under the ongoing moratorium on nuclear testing, they are tasked with monitoring the stockpile of nuclear weapons, as well as supervising the disassembly of nuclear weapons that have been removed from national inventories. Presumably this technical work on verification and disassembly will be even more important during the transition to nuclear zero, even as the support for new nuclear weapons disappears.
The role of the laboratories has not been wholly benign, however. In the past the U.S. national laboratories have contributed to undermining support for arms control measures whenever the laboratory leadership judged those measures might lead to a lowered support for their institutions. For example, during the 1999 Senate debate on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the lab directors testified that they could not guarantee the long-term safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile under a CTBT, although they had earlier said that, if fully funded for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), they could.1 In January 2010 the directors wrote letters to the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic forces in which they asserted—contrary to a JASON report—that the SSP was not enough to guarantee the reliability of the nuclear weapons in their charge in future years.2 Given the prestige traditionally accorded to the national laboratories in Washington, their position poses a real risk to the goal of nuclear zero.
The major nuclear weapons states all maintain laboratories dedicated to nuclear weapons, with varying degrees of civilian control, commercial involvement, and political engagement.3 In every case, the early development of a nuclear weapon was the product of a high-priority secret program, working in most cases under considerable time pressure. With the passing of the years— particularly since the end of the Cold War—the urgency has faded, and the weapons complexes have become “normal” bureaucracies. Beyond these generalizations, however, they are diverse: the national laboratories have been shaped by their specific political cultures and positions in the international arena and their profiles differ in interesting ways.
In the United States, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a “semiautonomous” agency within the Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for the development and production of nuclear weapons, while the Department of Defense provides the delivery systems. The nuclear weapons laboratories are Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), which together had approximately 22,000 employees at the end of 2009.4 There are an additional five manufacturing, assembly and disassembly, and testing facilities in the DOE nuclear weapons complex which will also be affected by going to zero, but they do not play a major role in research and development (R&D) activities.
Over the years the three major laboratories have diversified their research programs to include work on conventional weapons, alternative energy technologies, biomedical projects, and climate modeling, and—in recent years— homeland security. Nuclear weapons activities, however, still account for 85 to 90 percent of the total NNSA budgets for the three laboratories.5 Other sources of income for the laboratories fall in the category of “Work for Others” (WFO), which covers contracts with non-NNSA parts of the Department of Energy, with other federal agencies such as the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and with private companies. Sandia has been the most successful of the three laboratories in shifting away from a reliance on NNSA funding; as of 2009 approximately 50 percent of its budget came from other funders; Los Alamos, by contrast, reports only 15 percent WFO.6
In 1946, the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission established the principle that, in the United States, atomic energy, including both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, would be under civilian control. This principle has been maintained ever since, through several bureaucratic reorganizations that led in 1977 to the creation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and in 1999 to the creation of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Throughout the whole period, the weapons laboratories have been managed as government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) entities. For sixty years the contractor for LANL and LLNL was the University of California, but following a number of security incidents and other concerns, the DOE opened the contracts to outside bids in 2005–6. The current management teams at the LANL and LLNL are consortia of private corporations led by Bechtel Corporation and the University of California, with additional members from the private sector. SNL, which originated as the engineering arm of Los Alamos, was spun off in 1949 as a separate laboratory. It was managed by Sandia Corporation, which was a subsidiary of Western Electric (itself a subsidiary of AT&T) from 1949 until 1993, when the contract went to Martin Marietta (now Lockheed-Martin Corporation).
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built up a vast scientific and industrial network for the design and manufacture of nuclear weapons. Much—but not all—of the work was carried out in closed “nuclear cities,” whose very existence was for many years an official secret. The two major weapons laboratories, approximate counterparts to LANL and LLNL, were the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (Arzamas-16) at Sarov, and the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics (Chelyabinsk-70) at Snezhinsk.7 The cities were literally sealed off from the rest of society through barbed wire and strict limitations on movement of residents and visitors. The nuclear weapons complex was under nominal civilian control in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (1953–86) and then in the Ministry of Atomic Power and Industry. Like other parts of the national security sector, residents of the nuclear cities enjoyed higher pay and special benefits, such as better health care.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the organization of the nuclear weapons complex underwent several changes. Responsibility for the complex was moved to a new Ministry for Atomic Energy (Minatom), which also had responsibility for nuclear energy. The main nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk was lost in 1991 when Kazakhstan became independent; the remaining site is Novaya Zemlya. In 2004 Minatom became Rosatom, and in 2007 the civilian nuclear activities were spun off to a joint-stock company.8
The closed nuclear cities suffered greatly during the hard times of the 1990s and lost substantial numbers of their professional staff. In recent years some of the closed cities have been opened up and been encouraged to diversify into civilian research, while others have simply been shut down.9 The United States and Britain have each promoted collaborative projects between their nuclear scientists and their Russian counterparts, with the aim of promoting conversion to civilian work and preventing defections to clandestine nuclear programs in other countries, but the projects have faced bureaucratic hurdles and relatively few new jobs have been created. The restrictions under which the scientists live inhibit recruitment of new staff even though the remaining closed cities continue to enjoy special guarantees for government funding.10
The nuclear weapons complex in the United Kingdom consists of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), with sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield. Originally nuclear energy and nuclear weapons were both part of the remit of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but since 1973 the weapons establishment has been under the Ministry of Defence (MoD). In 1993, as part of the general move toward privatization in the Thatcher era, the management of AWE was converted to contractor operation, while ownership of the site remained with MoD. In late 2008 the government’s one-third stake in the management consortium was sold to Jacobs, an American engineering group, so the consortium is now 100 percent American owned. The British government, however, maintains a golden share that allows it to intervene “if necessary.”11
AWE faces problems of an aging infrastructure and the need to maintain a highly qualified work force in a period in which the number of technical graduates in the UK has been declining.12 Besides a campaign to recruit a new generation of scientists, considerable investment in new facilities has been undertaken at Aldermaston, with more planned for the next ten years. This additional investment has been called into question, however, by the 2010 Defence & Security Cooperation Treaty between the UK and France, which assigns many of the stockpile stewardship activities planned for Aldermaston to a new joint laboratory in France.13 In both countries the impetus for this new arrangement appears to have been the need to save money in a period of declining budgets.
A special characteristic of the UK nuclear weapons complex is its close ties to the U.S. program. Before the moratorium on testing, the UK performed most of its nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site, and it relied heavily on the U.S. Polaris and Trident programs in building its submarine-based nuclear weapons system. According to news reports, AWE continues to cooperate with the U.S. national laboratories on certain weapons-based research projects.14
Unlike the other major nuclear states, France does not separate civilian nuclear uses from military uses at the highest level of government. From its inception, the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has handled both civil and military nuclear programs in the same bureaucracy, and it currently employs about the same number of people (4,500) in each program.15
Overall, there is strong popular support for the nuclear sector. Nuclear energy plays a major role in France’s energy sector, accounting for 78 percent of electricity production, and there has been substantial cross-subsidization between the military and civilian sectors. For example, in the past, civilian nuclear reactors produced weapons-grade plutonium for warheads; this ceased in the 1990s, when France halted all production of fissile material for weapons use.16
The Ministry of Defense funds research and development for nuclear weapons, but management of the program resides in the Military Applications Division of the CEA. There are a number of laboratories and production facilities in the complex, with the Centre d’Etudes de Limeil-Valenton near Paris serving as the central weapons design laboratory. Since signing the CTBT in 1996, France has relied on a simulation program for maintaining stewardship of its nuclear weapons and for designing replacement warheads in anticipation of the end of the service life of the current weapons.17
Because of the unitary administrative structure in France, a reduction in nuclear weapons work does not carry the same threat to organizational interests as it does in the United States and United Kingdom. Indeed, France has reduced the size of its nuclear arsenal and closed its nuclear weapons testing site without any noticeable domestic political or bureaucratic opposition, perhaps because the nuclear weapons establishment had secured what it needed during the last round of tests in 1995–96. The cuts in numbers and types of weapons do not, however, mean that France is likely to favor a move to nuclear zero unless there are major—and unlikely in the near term—changes in the international situation.18 The investment in the design of new nuclear warheads suggests instead that, despite its rhetorical support for nuclear zero, the French government is operating on the assumption of a continued requirement for a nuclear deterrent force.
The nuclear weapons laboratories of China are part of a large, geographically dispersed nuclear weapons complex, with major concentrations in Mianyang (Sichuan Province), Subei (Gansu Province), and Haiyan County (Quinghai Province). The Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) and its many institutes in Mianyang constitute the leading laboratory, analogous to Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia laboratories. According to the Congressional Research Service, the complex “appears” to be under military control;19 other sources make it clear that there are numerous formal and informal links to the civilian sector, at least in the area of research and development.
In the early years of Chinese nuclear weapons development, the laboratories were granted an unusual degree of independence from normal bureaucratic control, and they developed fruitful relations across industries that normally would have been isolated from each other. The system that emerged was the leading sector of Chinese research and development, flourishing while R&D for conventional weapons and in the civilian sector fell behind. In the 1980s, the Chinese government adopted this R&D model more widely to spur innovation in a limited number of critical technologies, hoping to promote civilian technologies that would also benefit the military.20
This brief summary of the nuclear weapons research laboratories in the major nuclear powers suggests that broad similarity in the technologies under development has not been accompanied by institutional convergence. Instead, the relations between the labs and the rest of the defense establishment and between the labs and the civilian nuclear sector have evolved to reflect social and political cultures unique to each state. The rest of this chapter will focus on the U.S. case, but there is room to ask whether the same opportunities and constraints are operating in the other NWS and what the likely responses will be. For example, during the transition to zero all the NWS will want to be assured of the reliability and safety of their remaining nuclear weapons; they will require robust verification technologies to detect any defections from the nonproliferation regime; and they will face the challenge of retaining experienced personnel in a declining field.
The path to nuclear weapons began with basic scientific discoveries in the 1930s made by academic scientists in a number of countries. The development in the United States of weapons based on those discoveries was, however, a massive industrial effort, involving thousands of workers in mines, power plants, separation facilities, university physics laboratories, testing facilities, and, of course, Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was designed and built. In a few short years, an entire complex of laboratories and production facilities was created, along with a knowledge base that went far beyond the basic physics of nuclear fission.
The U.S. nuclear weapons complex experienced fairly steady growth until the end of the Cold War, when the sea change in the international situation brought about by the breakup of the Soviet Union called into question the whole raison d’être of the nuclear enterprise. Outlays for research and development for “atomic energy defense” declined in real terms by over 25 percent through 1995 before recovering gradually to the level of the late 1980s; since 2006 the funds have fluctuated around a slightly lower level.21 The laboratories, especially SNL, have diversified into other areas, but the nuclear weapons activities continue to dominate at LANL and LLNL.
Following the 1992 test moratorium and in anticipation of a permanent comprehensive test ban treaty, the laboratories’ role was redefined as one of stockpile stewardship. Stewardship is an elastic concept, but it typically includes maintaining the safety and reliability of a smaller stockpile of nuclear weapons into a distant future; dismantling excess warheads and disposing of nuclear materials; and in some versions, retaining a “rebuild” capability.22 In January 1996 the DOE formally established the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program (later the Stockpile Stewardship Program). Under the program every year the Department of Defense (DOD) and DOE jointly certify the arsenal as safe, secure, and reliable. The FY 2010 budget for this part of the SSP is $1.5 billion; an additional $1.6 billion is authorized for the science and engineering “campaigns” supporting the stewardship function.23
The laboratories rely on computer simulations and physical tests of nonnuclear components to support their judgments about the reliability of the weapons in the stockpile, and they maintain a capacity to refurbish and remanufacture components as needed. They also maintain a test readiness program as a hedge in case nuclear testing is ever again deemed necessary. In addition, in a move that was widely interpreted at the time as a quid pro quo for the support of the laboratories for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, SSP included increased funds for science at the laboratories and the construction of expensive new facilities such as the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, and the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility. It is worth noting that these science facilities have yet to contribute to the directed stockpile work at the laboratories; that is, they have not been necessary for the annual certification of the stockpile.24
Nuclear weapons have often been touted as a cheap security guarantee (“more bang for the buck”), compared to the cost of a force posture based solely on conventional forces, but the sums are still staggering. Estimates of the cumulative resources devoted by the United States to the development and production of nuclear weapons between 1940 and 2005 run as high as $7.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), or around $115 billion a year; Stephen Schwartz has estimated that nuclear weapons accounted for 29 percent of total defense spending between 1940 and 1996.25 Most of this spending was in the DOD budget and went to develop and produce delivery systems, command and control systems, and defensive systems, including air defense and the various iterations of ballistic missile defense systems. The budget for the nuclear components of the weapons, which falls under the DOE, was only 7 percent of the total costs through 1996.26 An update of these estimates for FY 2008 suggests a higher share for DOE in recent years: the total appropriations for nuclear forces and operational support were $29 billion, of which $22.5 billion was in the DOD budget and $6.6 billion in DOE. The grand total for 2008, including missile defense and deferred environmental and health costs, was $52.4 billion.27
The assets and activities of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex are not distributed evenly across the national economy. New Mexico is the geographical core of the complex; it also has the distinction of being the most research intensive state in the country, as measured by the share of R&D spending in state domestic product, with 95 percent of its total R&D spending—public and private—coming from the federal government, and 75 percent of the total attributable to LANL and SNL.28 In fiscal year 2008, the DOE spent $182.7 million directly on basic science research programs at LANL, LLNL, and SNL in addition to the funds appropriated for weapons activities.29
This pattern of spending has created specific constituencies based in the nuclear weapons complex and defense industry which will be negatively affected by a transition to a zero nuclear world. The defense industry can expect that its products will still be in demand: many, if not all, of the nuclear-capable systems, such as aircraft and missiles, are also produced in non-nuclear versions, and the satellites, communication systems, and radars will find a place in the conventional forces. The more specialized nuclear facilities, however, will be redundant. For example, the nuclear test facilities at the Nevada Test Site—now held in a state of suspended animation, ready to be reconstituted if nuclear testing were to resume—would lose any claim for DOE support, although the site would probably continue to be used for other activities. Depending on the decisions made for the transition period, other elements of the stockpile stewardship program would presumably be phased out over time, a future that would entail a downward trajectory in support for weapons activities at the national laboratories and possibly their elimination. It is likely that the laboratories will resist this possible future, as they have in the past.30
The weapons laboratories are a special kind of workplace. They are distinguished by their remote locations (no longer so remote for Lawrence Livermore and Sandia); the compartmentalization in the name of secrecy; the moral dilemma present in work on weapons of mass destruction; and the cultivated sense, especially in the early years, of being part of an elite group working for national security.31 The same conditions that foster a strong sense of a special community make it difficult for scientists to leave the laboratories for other jobs; in particular, the secrecy requirements mean that many of their accomplishments are not recognized in the open literature.
A number of ethnographic studies of the national laboratories have delineated laboratory culture at the micro level.32 These accounts make it clear that there is an internal politics in the laboratories along functional lines—weapons designers vs. production engineers, or experimentalists vs. theorists and computational experts—and also along the generational lines separating the older scientists from the younger generation, which has never participated in a nuclear test. The shift from the nuclear testing regime to reliance on computer simulations as the basis for credible deterrence was difficult for many of the scientists and engineers to accept; one consequence of it has been a rise in status of the computer modelers relative to experimental scientists.33
The laboratories’ ability to fulfill their mandated security role depends strongly on success in recruiting and retaining talented scientists and technical workers. Even before President Obama affirmed the U.S. commitment to eventual nuclear disarmament, the problems of managing a declining enterprise were evident. Downsizing at LANL and LLNL has largely been accomplished through retirements without offsetting replacement, leading to an increase in the average age of the scientific workforce, even as the collective experience of the cold war scientists disappears. And more than creative scientists are needed: the tasks of dismantling surplus nuclear weapons during downsizing and re-manufacturing uranium pits as part of the lifetime extension program require a workforce of trained engineers and technical workers. An additional problem is that these jobs are, in general, open only to U.S. citizens, while the pool of science and engineering graduates in the United States is 40–60 percent foreign born.34
The internal politics of the laboratories as sketched above have not been closely linked to the “external” politics of formulating national policy with respect to nuclear arms control and disarmament, or even to a calculation of fluctuations in congressional support for the labs. Instead, the intralaboratory struggles have been about competing claims for credibility within the nuclear weapons community and—in another area of contention—about resistance to the micromanagement, as it is perceived, by NNSA. There is also frequent criticism from below of the changes made after the laboratory management contracts at LANL and LLNL were switched to for-profit corporations, changes that included shedding hundreds of jobs to offset the costs of the increase in the annual management fees and the loss of tax-exempt status.35
As with other institutions that rely on federal government funding, the top management of the laboratories engages directly with the Washington policy community. Policy positions are developed in consultation with DOE and DOD, and the laboratories also maintain their own representatives in the capital who serve as a source of information on issues affecting the labs. Laboratory leaders testify at congressional hearings, meet with agency and congressional staff, maintain contacts with advisory groups such as the Defense Science Board and JASON, and sponsor special events, like the fall 2009 Workshop on Nuclear Forces and Nonproliferation organized by LANL at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In these meetings they are able to make the case for the role played by the laboratories in guaranteeing the nuclear deterrent and, implicitly and explicitly, to argue for continued reliance on nuclear deterrence as the centerpiece of U.S. security policy. They deploy their prestige and expertise to promote particular policies—for example, in their support for the Reliable Replacement Warhead—and have a record of success in maintaining support for the labs’ primary mission.36
Since the end of the Cold War, numerous commissions and task forces have considered the future of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and issued their recommendations.37 The issues at stake include the appropriate size for the complex, whether to maintain redundant weapons design capabilities in LANL and LLNL, replacement of aging infrastructure, and security and management issues. At a more fundamental level, however, the modernization questions are inseparable from the question of U.S. policy on nuclear weapons. They depend on the decisions about the size of the stockpile, whether new warheads should be developed to replace the current versions being maintained under the SSP, and the projected path to nuclear zero.
In December 2007, NNSA administrator Thomas D’Agostino announced a plan for “Complex Transformation.” As adopted, the plan reduces the “footprint” of the nuclear weapons establishment by shutting down some redundant activities, while simultaneously investing in modernization of other facilities. This is the so-called modernization in place option; it avoids the near-term disruption of moving weapons activities to a central site, at the cost of maintaining all the existing sites for the foreseeable future. Under this plan, employment at the three weapons laboratories is projected to shrink by 20 to 30 percent beyond the cuts already taken in 2007–8. The laboratories will maintain their core functions, and competition between LANL and LLNL will continue.38 NNSA explicitly rejected a “curatorship” alternative that would have implied the end of capabilities to design and develop replacement nuclear components and weapons.39
The Obama administration signed on to the Complex Transformation plan to the extent of increasing the NNSA budget for infrastructure in the FY 2011 budget to over $2.3 billion, and during the protracted negotiations in the Senate over ratification of the New START treaty, the administration pledged substantial additional funds for modernization of the weapon complex.40 The Nuclear Posture Review of March 2010 explicitly states that the NNSA needs to recapitalize the aging infrastructure at the laboratories and to renew human capital.41 Whether that decision is consistent with the path to nuclear zero depends, of course, on how long the transition is expected to take. There is no doubt that the current facilities at the labs pose safety and security risks that require attention, but much of the new money will be directed toward the controversial expansion of production capacity for plutonium pits.
Thus, the U.S. weapons complex in general, and the three national laboratories in particular, are on a path that will maintain an active program of research on nuclear weapons and a down-sized, but still considerable, capability to produce new nuclear weapons. The arguments for such a capability are rooted in a doctrine of continued dependence on nuclear weapons as a core element in national security; if that premise is granted, the decision to modernize old, inefficient facilities seems reasonable. The NNSA has acknowledged that a reduction in the size of the nuclear stockpile below 1,000 warheads “could result in a need to reassess the transformation options for the Complex,” but it has chosen a plan that assumes no reductions beyond the figure of 1,700–2,200 deployed warheads which was agreed to in the Moscow Treaty of 2002.42 By contrast, a commitment to nuclear zero would require a different set of decisions, both in the near term and, especially, in the longer term. The laboratories might be retained for reasons discussed in the next section, but the planned investment in new weapons production facilities would be dropped.
The weapons laboratories occupy a special position in the U.S. science and technology base: they are the largest recipients of federal funds for research and development, and they perform research in a number of scientific areas in addition to their primary focus on nuclear weapons research. Through its impact on the national laboratories, a move to nuclear zero will affect the national technology base; how great an effect is open to discussion. There are at least two perspectives that deserve attention:
1. The need for technical expertise in nuclear weapons during the transition to zero. Such expertise is necessary for maintaining the functionality of a diminishing stockpile of weapons, dealing with the dismantlement and disposal of the weapons taken out of service, and providing a robust verification regime. Maintaining large and modernized weapons laboratories, however, carries a proliferation risk. For example, dispersed sites for special nuclear materials and expertise arguably provide more opportunities for illegal diversion to other countries or nonstate actors.
2. The preservation of the physical and intellectual capital accumulated in the national weapons laboratories, which in this framing represents a national treasure that should be protected and made available for the national good. As noted above, the laboratories have a long history of supporting fundamental scientific research, and the facilities at the laboratories for computing, for example, are perhaps not available anywhere else.
The transition to nuclear zero will require continued technical capabilities similar to those currently provided by the weapons laboratories; the obvious issue is how to guarantee that the necessary competence will remain available, while preparing for a world in which it will become irrelevant. The laboratories faced a similar situation at the end of the Cold War, with the same concerns about the threat of declining budgets, loss of scientific personnel to retirement or lay-offs, and lowered morale of the remaining work force.43
In the 1990s the labs were “saved” by the Stockpile Stewardship Program. The science component of the program and the promise of new infrastructure to support it were an important element in enrolling support in the labs for the CTBT because they served as a warrant that the laboratories would remain interesting places to do science.44 Significantly, the charge for the SSP included a requirement to “[m]aintain the science and engineering institutions needed to support the nation’s nuclear deterrent, now and in the future.”45 Note the unquestioned presumption of a permanent nuclear capability, a presumption that will not be an appropriate basis for policy-making during the transition to zero. While some have argued in favor of maintaining a “virtual” capability as a hedge, such a policy would undercut the possibility of gaining universal adherence to nuclear zero because other states would claim the same privilege.
SSP provided political cover for a substantial reduction in the number of U.S. nuclear warheads by offering reassurance that the remaining weapons in the stockpile were fully functional. As numbers decline to a few hundreds and then a few tens of warheads, however, the overall stewardship responsibilities will presumably shrink as well, albeit not uniformly. Verification technology will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future—indeed, its importance will increase during the potentially unstable transition to zero—and the need will persist after zero, however “zero” is defined. A robust nuclear forensic capability would also be useful as a deterrent to clandestine developments.
It is not clear, however, that new technology is needed to provide these interim and long-term capabilities. Strengthened diplomatic and intelligence efforts and new confidence-building measures might well be more effective in managing the transition than investment in new technology. If further R&D at the weapons laboratories is deemed essential, then the political problems created by simultaneously promoting nuclear developments while preaching disarmament cannot be avoided.
There is a related problem that needs to be faced. So long as the laboratories are a repository of nuclear weapons knowledge, they represent a proliferation risk, the risk that the spread of technical knowledge about how to make nuclear weapons will lead to additional states acquiring them. Strenuous efforts to keep the secret of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project were nullified by the work of a few Soviet spies, and subsequent proliferators have all received help, either directly or through espionage, from existing nuclear weapons states.46 The most recent example is the A. Q. Khan network, which transmitted technology for uranium enrichment to Iran, Libya, and North Korea before it was shut down in 2003.
With the publication of the Smyth Report in 1945, which made public the general principles of atomic weapons, it could truly be said that there was no longer any “atomic secret.” Indeed, knowledgeable scientists understood what had been involved in constructing the bomb as soon as they heard of the attack on Hiroshima. How then to understand the high level of security classification maintained on all nuclear weapons knowledge, and the difficulty that would-be proliferators have had in acquiring the ability to build nuclear weapons? The answer to this apparent paradox lies in the considerable success that states have had in controlling access to fissile materials, along with the importance of specific technical knowledge, especially tacit forms of that knowledge. It is one thing to understand the principles of atomic fission, and another to master the technically difficult task of constructing a bomb.
Current proliferation threats from North Korea and Iran bear out the basic argument that it is difficult to produce a nuclear weapon, even when blueprints and contraband materials and components are available, but they also show that a determined regime can persevere and achieve a nuclear weapons capability.
Ironically, the effort that the national laboratories have made to counter the disappearance of tacit knowledge in the wave of retirements of senior scientists, by creating a more complete record of the historical tests and providing formal training programs to new hires, has served to maintain continuity of knowledge and make it available to more scientists, thus, implicitly, maintaining the paths open to proliferators.47
The major nuclear weapons states all have well-established national laboratories to provide the technical base for maintaining the weapons, a mission that, I have argued, will disappear in a nuclear weapons–free world. Many of the laboratories, however, also engage in research oriented toward the civilian sector, a mission that could be enhanced to justify maintaining the laboratories indefinitely, albeit with a revised mandate. The British nuclear complex, for example, has long-standing programs—not all of them successful—to transfer technology to the commercial sector.48 Following the end of the Cold War, Russian and U.S. nuclear laboratories collaborated on civilian projects under a DOE program to support conversion to peacetime employment for Russian nuclear scientists. These programs and others like them are based on the proposition that military technologies can be “spun off” to benefit the civilian technology base, and they have a particular appeal during periods of declining funding for the nuclear mission.
Thus, today, the U.S. laboratories and their supporters emphasize the broad capabilities of the laboratories and argue that they deserve to be maintained with new rules that would allow them to interact more easily with other patrons besides DOE. This is the position taken in a recent report by the Stimson Center, Leveraging Science for Security.49 A similar argument was put forward in 1993 by Hans Bethe, who argued that the nation should “redirect the nation’s huge investment in the nuclear weapons laboratories towards research aimed at serious problems that we are sure to face as a society and in the global market place, but that universities and private industry do not have the resources to address.”50
Historically, the labs’ support for research with broad applicability to military and civilian goals was defended as a recruiting tool to attract top-level scientists to the laboratories. The general science programs are otherwise hard to justify in a mission-oriented agency because of their speculative nature: there is no guarantee of technical success in fundamental research and—even if successful—no guarantee that it will be relevant to the nuclear mission in the near term. If the nuclear mission disappears, the laboratories will lack the “fly wheel” (their phrase) which has provided the budgetary slack to cover the costs of their general science programs.
The laboratories have found it difficult to attract resources for projects that are not connected to the security mission. For example, the program for Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with industry, which in the 1990s was promoted as a way to sustain the laboratories, has failed to live up to the early hype.51 A major problem was the loss of congressional support after the Republicans took control of the House in 1995 and struck down any program that could be tarred with the label of industrial policy; another problem was the complex set of rules and rights that govern laboratory-industry interactions.52 The “crown jewels” argument for continued support for the laboratories cannot be sustained if the jewels remain inside the laboratory walls.
In the current situation, the emphasis has been on reinventing the laboratories as national security laboratories with expertise in all kinds of weapons research. The Stimson Center’s 2009 report makes the case for such a mission, supported through cooperative agreements with other agencies in the security sector—the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA—and Sandia’s success in reducing its dependence on NNSA funding shows that there is potential to increase sharply the role of Work for Others at the laboratories. It remains to be seen, however, whether the “Others” will be willing to include the long-term costs of laboratory infrastructure in their contracts. WFO has been typically in the form of short-term contracts, leading to a fragmentation of effort and difficult working conditions for scientists and engineers, who are forced to divide their time among numerous contracts.
The case for long-term support of the laboratories in a period of declining importance for the nuclear mission has, moreover, a serious weakness: the management problems that have plagued the laboratories for years. The recent history of safety incidents and security scandals do not—to put it mildly—inspire confidence. The insular laboratory workplace culture described above is at odds with the persistent tendency for DOE to manage (“micromanage,” in the view of its critics) the laboratories from Washington.53 Others point to the so-called cowboy culture of the laboratories as the reason why the DOE has added more and more layers of oversight.54 The underlying tension between the two sides has been exacerbated by the series of security scandals involving lost or misplaced classified data and sloppy accounting practices.
The case of Wen Ho Lee, a physicist at Los Alamos who was charged with transferring nuclear secrets to China, only to have the case collapse after he had spent nine months in jail, is the most notorious. The furor over the mishandling of this case led a federal judge to apologize to Dr. Lee, and Congress to create the NNSA. Other scandals at LANL included the loss of two computer disks holding classified data in 2004 (eventually it was determined that the disks never existed, an outcome that drew further attention to the sloppy practices at the laboratory),55 and a string of other security breaches involving mishandling of classified information.56 These incidents precipitated the firing of one laboratory director, a stand-down in 2004 of several months at Los Alamos, and the opening of the management contracts at LANL and LLNL to corporate teams, a step that has proved deeply unpopular at the labs. Given this record, any argument to preserve the laboratories for their value to the national S&T base would need first to establish that the resources could not be better used elsewhere to accomplish the same mission.
A serious move to nuclear zero will have major implications for the U.S. weapons laboratories, as well as their counterparts in other nuclear weapons states. To the extent that the laboratories depend on their role in maintaining nuclear deterrence through stockpile stewardship programs or work on modernization programs, survival in their present form is unlikely in an era of nuclear disarmament. In the near term, the laboratories will be needed to provide guarantees for the reliability of the stockpile, to oversee the dismantlement of nuclear warheads, and to support verification technologies. The first two functions will, however, decline and eventually disappear during the drawdown to zero. The verification function will last longer, but in a zero nuclear world, when the problem will be detection of possible cheating, an international verification effort lodged in the IAEA or a successor agency would be a preferred solution because it would be more trusted than a capability based in a single state.
A roadmap could guide the transition to zero. How long is the long run? Is there a need to recruit and train another generation of laboratory scientists, or will the current cohort be sufficient? Is new knowledge needed to perform verification, or is current technology adequate? Related to these questions are the challenges of maintaining morale in organizations that are losing their main mission and of sustaining political support for the cost of running the laboratories during the transition period.
Are there alternative missions that would justify maintaining the weapons laboratories following abolition of nuclear weapons? In the UK, interest is strong in converting AWE into a laboratory for disarmament. The model is the conversion of Porton Down, the British chemical and biological weapons laboratory, to work only on defensive measures and support for international conventions, following the 1956 cabinet decision to stop development of offensive chemical and biological weapons.57 In the ongoing debate over the future of the Trident, the government statement in summer 2009 that it would postpone signing the design contract for the new generation of submarines was accompanied by announcements of a new “centre of excellence” devoted to civil nuclear technology and of new funds for AWE’s program of nuclear forensics.58 These initiatives are consistent with a medium-term future for AWE as a laboratory supporting nuclear disarmament measures, but they do not answer the question for the long term when nuclear weapons have been abolished.
The U.S. laboratories might hope to expand their activities in the area of nuclear energy and nuclear forensics, but these would be unlikely to be funded at a level that would replace their weapons program funding. They face a daunting task if they seek to reinvent themselves as general purpose laboratories whose claim on the national budget would derive from their contributions to the civilian sector. The large sunk investment in scientific infrastructure is an argument in their favor, but there are many barriers to converting the laboratories to effective partners in commercial endeavors or even to expanding their participation in civilian-oriented government programs. The best prospect for the laboratories at present seems to expand WFO in the area of national security, accepting that such a change implies considerable changes in working conditions.
A serious commitment to nuclear zero would require laboratory leadership to prepare a long-term plan for phasing out nuclear weapons–related activities, with milestones to match political and technological developments, such as the entry of the CTBT into force, or the dismantlement of the last nuclear war head. These milestones should be viewed as irreversible, and thus there would be no need for further modernization of the weapons complex. To argue that interim nuclear activities require continued modernization is to postpone the time when nuclear disarmament becomes an inevitable outcome, not just an aspiration.
A version of this chapter first appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
1. Oliver Meier, “Verifying the CTBT: Responses to Republican Criticisms,” Disarmament Diplomacy 40 (September–October 1999), at http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/ dd40/40verif.htm. See also Barb Mulkin, “The View from San Diego: Harold Agnew Speaks Out,” Los Alamos Science 152 (Summer/Fall 1981): 154, at http://www.fas.org/sgp/ othergov/doe/lanl/00326234.pdf.
2. William J. Broad, “Nuclear Labs Raise Doubts over Viability of Arsenals,” New York Times, 27 March 2010.
3. This chapter describes the nuclear complexes of the Perm 5: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China.
4. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Chief Financial Officer, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Request, vol. 1, Washington, DC (May 2009), pp. 535, 543, 559, at http://nnsa. energy.gov/management/documents/NNSA_Budget.pdf. Including contractors, students, and resident visitors would increase the total by approximately 5,000 employees.
5. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Chief Financial Officer, “FY 2010 Congressional Budget Request, Laboratory Tables Preliminary” (2009), pp. 40–41; 44–46; 93–94, at http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/10budget/Content/Labandstate/FY2010lab.pdf.
6. Sandia National Laboratories, “Facts and Figures,” at http://www.sandia.gov/ about/faq; Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Fact Sheets,” at http://www.lanl.gov.news. releases/index.html.
7. Sharon Weiner, “Preventing Nuclear Entrepreneurship in Russia’s Nuclear Cities,” International Security 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002), Table 1, pp. 130–31.
8. Jonathan Medalia, Shirley A. Kan, Paul K. Kerr, Carol Migdalovitz, Derek E. Mix, Mary Beth Nitikin, and Larry A. Niksch, “Nuclear Weapons R&D Organizations in Nine Nations,” R40439 (Washington DC, Congressional Research Service, 2009), at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R40439.pdf.
9. Dimitry Nikonov and Igor Khripunov, “The Rebirth of Russia’s Closed Cities,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (web edition), 16 October 2008, at http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-rebirth-of-russias-closed-cities.
10. Ibid.
11. Ben Russell, “Secret Nuclear Sell-off Storm.” The Independent, 20 December 2008.
12. Stuart Parkinson, “The Costs of Replacing Trident,” Physics World (March 2007); Henrietta Wilson, “Renewing Trident: Can the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment Cope?” Disarmament Diplomacy 88 (Summer 2008).
13. “UK–France Summit 2010 Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation,” 2 November 2010, at http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/statements-and-articles/2010/11/ uk–france-summit-2010-declaration-on-defence-and-security-co-operation-5651.
14. Matthew Taylor and Richard Norton-Taylor, “US Using British Atomic Weapons Factory for Its Nuclear Programme,” The Guardian, 9 February 2009.
15. Mycle Schneider, “Nuclear Power in France: Beyond the Myth,” Report Commissioned by the Greens-EFA Group in the European Parliament (Brussels, December 2008), p. 8, at http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/258/258614.mythbuster@ en.pdf.
16. See Venance Journé, Chapter 7, this volume.
17. Ibid.
18. Bruno Tertrais, “French Perspectives on Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Disarmament,” in France and the United Kingdom, ed. Barry Blechman (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009), pp. 1–22.
19. Medalia et al., “Nuclear Weapons R&D,” p. 3.
20. Evan Feigenbaum, “Who’s behind China’s High-Technology ‘Revolution’?” International Security 24 (Summer 1999): 95–126; Tai Ming Cheung, Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
21. U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget for Fiscal Year 2009, Historical Tables (Washington, DC: Office of Management and Budget, 2008), Tables 9.8 and 10.1, at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/.
22. See Judith Reppy and Joseph Pilat, eds., Defense Conversion and the Future of the National Nuclear Weapons Laboratories, Cornell University Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper #18 (Ithaca, NY: Peace Studies Program, 1994), Panel I, “What Is the Nuclear Mission?”
23. 111th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010,” Conference Report to accompany H.R. 2647, Report 111–288, 7 October 2009, pp. 1137–39.
24. A. Fitzpatrick and I. Oelrich, “The Stockpile Stewardship Program: Fifteen Years On,” Federation of American Scientists (April 2007), pp. 23–24, at http://www.fas. org/2007/nuke/Stockpile_Stewardship_Paper.pdf. The DOE reportedly called this “the anchor store approach,” as in “Every shopping mall needs an anchor store.” Stephen M. Younger, The Bomb (New York, HarperCollins, 2009), p. 183.
25. Stephen Schwartz, “The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” Issue Brief (Monterey, CA: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, 2008); Joseph Cirincione, “Lessons Lost,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 61 (November/December, 2005): 43–53.
26. Schwartz, “The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons.”
27. Stephen Schwartz, with Deepti Choubey,Nuclear Security Spending Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009).
28. National Science Foundation, National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 (NSB 08-01; NSB 08-01A), Arlington, VA, 2008, Appendix Tables 4–23; 4–24, at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf_v2.htm#ch4.
29. U.S. Department of Energy, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Request.
30. Benjamin Sims and Christopher Henke, “Maintenance and Transformation in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 27, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 32–38.
31. Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System 1947–1974 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
32. Gusterson, Nuclear Rites; Laura McNamara, “Ways of Knowing about Weapons: The Cold War’s End at the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, May 2001; Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 3 (2004): 348–73; Sims and Henke, “Maintenance and Transformation.”
33. This description applies mostly to LANL and LLNL. SNL were established as engineering centers and have been managed by the private sector from the beginning. By all reports, the laboratory culture at SNL is more open to industry collaboration than that of LANL and LLNL (Andrew Ross, private communication).
34. National Research Council, Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), p. 80.
35. See, for example, the comments on 31 August 2009 on the blog “LANL: The Rest of the Story,” at http://lanl-the-rest-of-the-story.blogspot.com/2009/08/ltrs-lansees-employee-engagement.html. Similar comments can be found on “LLNL-The True Story,” at http://llnlthetruestory.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html.
36. Sims and Henke, “Maintenance and Transformation.”
37. These include the Galvin Report (1995); the Chiles Commission’s Report of the Commission on Maintaining United States Nuclear Weapons Expertise (1999); the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Report of the Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force (2005); the Defense Science Board Task Force on Nuclear Capabilities (2006); and the Stimson Center report, Leveraging Science for Security (2009).
38. James Brosnan, “Nuclear Labs Face Workforce Cutbacks within 10 Years,” ABQTrib.com (19 December 2007), at http://abqtrib.com/news/2007/dec/19/nuclear-labsface-workforce-cutbacks-within-10-yea/.
39. U.S. Department of Energy, “Record of Decision for the Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement,” Federal Register, 19 December 2008, 77651.
40. Mary Beth Sheridan and Walter Pincus, “Sen. Kyl Dampens Administration Hopes for Ratification of Arms Treaty,”Washington Post, 16 November 2010.
41. “Administrator Highlights NNSA Role in Implementing Nuclear Posture Review in Congressional Hearing,” NNSA News, 14 April 2010, at http://www.nnsa.energy. gov/2900.htm. Not surprisingly, that stance has been welcomed by the lab directors.
42. U.S. Department of Energy, NNSA, Final Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement Summary, DOE/EIS-0236-S4, October 2008, S-56–56; 3–72–3–75, at http://www.gc.energy.gov/NEPA/1017.htm. In fact, the new START treaty sets the number of deployed warheads for Russia and the United States at 1550 each.
43. Reppy and Pilat, eds., Defense Conversion, p. 18.
44. Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (New York: Viking, 2006), pp. 187–88.
45. U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, “Stockpile Stewardship Program” (Las Vegas, NV: DOE/NV, 2004), at http://www.nv.doe.gov/nationalsecurity/stewardship. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 raises preservation of the core intellectual and technical competencies in nuclear weapons to be the number one objective; 111th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, “National Defense Authorization,” Sec. 3111 (b).
46. Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 1 (July 1995): 44–99.
47. McNamara, “Ways of Knowing about Weapons,” pp. 267–74. A 2006 security case at LANL, in which classified documents from the nuclear weapons archiving project were found in an employee’s home in the course of a drug bust, suggests that the danger is not merely theoretical. See Ralph Vartabedian, “Los Alamos Confirms Data Breach,” Los Angeles Times, 26 October 2006, at http://articles.latimes.com/2006/oct/26/nation/ na-lab26.
48. Graham Spinardi, “Aldermaston and British Nuclear Weapons Development: Testing the ‘Zuckerman Thesis,’” Social Studies of Science 27, no. 4 (1997): 547–82.
49. Elizabeth Turpen, Leveraging Science for Security: A Strategy for the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories in the 21st Century, Henry L. Stimson Center, Report no. 71 (Washington, DC, March 2009). By contrast, the National Research Council, Rising, is skeptical of assigning the laboratories an S&T role beyond their core mission.
50. Reppy and Pilat, eds., Defense Conversion, Appendix A.
51. Andrew Lawler, “DOE to Industry: So Long, Partner,” Science 274, no. 5284 (4 October 1996): 24–26; Rose Marie Ham and David C. Mowery, “Improving the Effectiveness of Public-private R&D Collaboration: Case Studies at a US Weapons Laboratory,” Research Policy 26 (February 1998): 661–75.
52. Turpen, Leveraging Science for Security, Appendix III. In addition, the simple mechanics of cooperation are difficult because of the secrecy barriers. The proposed multi-million dollar “open campus” outside the fence at LLNL, intended to facilitate face-to-face collaboration with private business, is evidence of the problem. See Benjamin Pimentel, “Livermore Opens Its Doors to Outsiders, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2010.
53. U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Defense Science Board Task Force on Nuclear Capabilities, Report Summary (Washington, DC, 2006). See also Turpen, Leveraging Science for Security, 22–25.
54. Ralph Vartabedian and Christine Henley, “Toxic Culture Brewing at Los Alamos Lab,” Los Angeles Times, 26 July 2004. For a rebuttal, see Brad Lee Holian, “Is There Really a Cowboy Culture of Arrogance at Los Alamos?” Physics Today 57, no. 12 (2004): 60–61.
55. David Malakoff, “Security Safety Probe Shuts Down Los Alamos National Lab,” Science 305, no. 5683 (23 July 2004): 462.
56. LANL: The Rest of the Story, “Another Security Breach at Los Alamos,” 6 August 2007, at http://lanl-the-rest-of-the-story.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. For a summary of problems at LLNL, see U.S. General Accountability Office, “Nuclear Security: Better Oversight Needed to Ensure That Security Improvements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Are Fully Implemented and Sustained,” GAO-09-321 (Washington, DC, March 2009).
57. T. Milne, H. Beach, J. L. Finney, R. S. Pease, and J. Rotblat, An End to UK Nuclear Weapons (London: British Pugwash Group, 2002), at http://www.pugwash.org/uk/documents/end-to-uk-nuclear-weapons.pdf.
58. Richard Norton-Taylor, “Trident Submarine Deal Delayed,” The Guardian, 17 July 2009.