UC to Lose Lab Security Oversight After Lapses

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department announced Friday that it plans to strip security and several other responsibilities from the University of California, which manages the nation’s two largest nuclear weapon labs, because of a recent series of security scandals.

“The University of California’s performance in managing security at our weapons laboratories is unacceptable and must be immediately addressed,” said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. “Safeguarding security at our nation’s weapons laboratories warrants nothing less.”

Richardson said he had informed university officials that he intends to renegotiate the current management contract for the Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore national laboratories “to make much needed improvements” to security, engineering and industrial work at the labs.

The move is a sharp symbolic blow to the university, which has managed virtually every aspect of the nation’s nuclear weapon research, development and testing programs since university scientists helped build the first atomic bomb during World War II.

In a telephone interview, Richardson said that he intends to allow the university to continue to manage basic research and other critical science at the labs for the foreseeable future. The current contract expires in 2002.

“We are prepared to extend existing arrangements” with the university, Richardson said. “But we need to beef up the existing assets, which are science and national security, and discard their liabilities. Clearly we need to improve security. That is not their strength.”

Richardson said he envisions subcontracting security in a “partnership with other entities.” Gen. John Gordon, director of the department’s fledgling National Nuclear Security Administration, is to report by Sept. 5 on how best to prevent leaks and losses from the labs.

Another senior Energy Department official was more blunt. “Basically, we’re firing UC from doing security,” the official said. “We’ll leave what they’re good at, the basic science.”

UC President Richard C. Atkinson took a more generous view in a statement issued from his office in Oakland.

“The U.S. Department of Energy has advised us that it will explore ways in which additional expertise might help address security issues that are important to DOE, the defense laboratories and the nation,” he said. “The university welcomes the opportunity to work with DOE in this effort and to create a path forward that meets all security needs.”

UC Has Strong Ties to Los Alamos

Among the other functions the department will subcontract, Energy officials said, are the production of plutonium “pits,” which form the heart of modern thermonuclear weapons.

The University of California has managed Los Alamos since 1943, when physicist Robert Oppenheimer led a star-studded parade of UC scientists and engineers to build the first atomic bomb in the high desert of New Mexico. The Livermore lab opened outside San Francisco shortly after the war.

The current Energy Department contracts with the university are awarded without competitive bidding and provide $2.75 billion a year in salaries, operating costs and bonuses. Energy Department officials said they could not yet determine the value of the security and other functions that will be stripped from the contract.

The Los Alamos and Livermore labs run a variety of research programs, from global warming to computer science, but their main mission is to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

The Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, which is managed by Lockheed Martin Corp., was unaffected by Friday’s announcement. Nor was a separate UC contract to manage unclassified work at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, an energy research center near the UC Berkeley campus.

Management of the weapon labs has come under fierce congressional scrutiny and criticism during the last 18 months as the Los Alamos facility was rocked by two successive scandals involving potential losses of highly classified nuclear weapon data.

In the first case, a former weapon designer, Wen Ho Lee, was fired from Los Alamos in March 1999 amid a massive FBI investigation into alleged espionage. Lee was arrested and charged last December on 59 unrelated counts for allegedly misappropriating a virtual computer library of weapon designs and other secret data. His trial is scheduled for November.

The Los Alamos lab came under withering fire again early last month following the disclosure that two computer hard drives, loaded with highly classified nuclear weapon data, had disappeared from the highly secured vault in the lab’s X Division.

The missing hard drives later were recovered behind a photocopy machine near the vault, but the FBI and a grand jury are investigating to determine who was responsible and why senior officials were not notified for at least three weeks after the loss was first noticed.

“They’re continuing to focus on a few individuals who they think hold all the information,” said an official who has been briefed on the FBI investigation.

Management at Livermore also has come under attack. A former scientist recently filed a lawsuit alleging that the lab covered up problems in the handling of highly radioactive plutonium. And the lab unexpectedly admitted last September that it was several years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget in construction of the National Ignition Facility, which will use dozens of high powered lasers to create nuclear fusion.

Over the years, several studies by university faculty and student groups, as well as outside watchdog groups, have sharply criticized the University of California’s ties to the weapon labs and cited the inevitable clash between the academic world, which values sharing of knowledge, and the military culture, which requires secrecy.

The most recent broadside came in a report this week to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Paul Redmond, former director of counterintelligence at the CIA, specifically criticized the University of California for failing to enforce security at the labs, as required by the contract.

Report Takes UC to Task

According to the report, “in some instances the University of California was not consciously aware of the fact that it was contractually responsible for certain security provisions, even though these were explicitly stated in the contract.”

In other cases, the report said, security orders were marked on official evaluations as “implemented” when they were issued, even though some were never carried out.

Overall, the report said, attempts to improve counterintelligence awareness at the labs have “failed dismally,” and efforts to ensure weapon scientists submit to regular polygraph tests were “poorly thought out and inconsistent. . . . As a result, laboratory personnel have a very negative attitude toward the polygraph.”

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Pleasanton), the ranking Democrat on the special House panel overseeing the development of the new National Nuclear Security Administration, welcomed efforts to tighten security at the labs. But she added that the announcement regarding the university’s contract “does not mitigate the fact that the recent security breaches at Los Alamos happened because DOE did not have the right security policies in place.”