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Abstract

Three US national laboratories, which were established at the dawn of the Cold War, have long outlived their original mission of engaging in coordinated nuclear weapons research to combat the Soviet threat. But as the nature of the threats has changed, institutional ownership and investments in national security science and technology have failed to keep pace. This overarching misalignment between priorities and investments undercuts the relevance of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories in the 21st century. Born in the days of the nuclear arms race, these national labs and the governmental infrastructure above them have clung too tightly to their original nuclear weapons mandate and have failed to reconstitute their efforts to reflect the more diffuse challenges, nuclear and otherwise, facing the country today. Though blame for this lapse could be placed at the feet of policy makers, bureaucrats, and program managers alike, the author writes, the prescription for ameliorating the problem is straightforward: devise and fund a more nimble science, technology, and engineering enterprise that builds upon the unique capabilities at these national labs while outfitting the facilities for, and charging them with, meeting the security and technology challenges of today.

Keywords

Cold War deterrent Lawrence Livermore Los Alamos national laboratories national security Sandia nuclear weapons

In 2008, officials at the Homeland Security Department determined that an additional research center was necessary to keep the country safe. Although it already sponsored the Homeland Security Institute to thwart and respond to terrorist attacks and the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center to research and develop technologies that could be used against biological threats, the department deemed a third center—the Systems Engineering and Development Institute—essential. The new institute would be managed under Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate but would provide the whole department with technical expertise and systems engineering support for its large-scale acquisition programs focused on, for example, border security, emergency preparedness, and intelligence sharing. In its formal request for proposals, Homeland Security expressed a clear desire for a prime contractor to form and oversee a team of highly capable subcontractors to deliver the diverse array of technical and engineering support needed.

Sandia National Laboratories, the largest engineering-focused, federally funded research and development center in the country, proposed becoming a team member in the new bid—with MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that specializes in managing such federal research centers, acting as the prime contractor. The proposed team involved several other federal research centers, including some sponsored by the Defense Department. Providing systems engineering expertise and technical support to this embryonic federal agency was clearly within the core capabilities Sandia had derived from its historic role servicing the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The opportunity also represented much-needed long-term strategic advantages to Sandia and ultimately to the taxpayer, and the initial one-year duration of the contract meant minimal risk. Program leadership at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees Sandia as well as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, supported Sandia’s involvement, and the administration’s lawyers identified no barriers to the proposed subcontracting role. But the administration’s contracts office decided that this unique subcontracting approach—with several federally funded centers operating under a corporate prime contractor to support another such facility—was too risky, and the request was denied (Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009).

MITRE nonetheless succeeded in its bid and now leads support efforts ranging from assessing antiterrorist sensors and detecting industrial releases of chemicals to cybersecurity planning and response coordination among government, industry, and academia. But the taxpayer, in terms of both money and safety, likely lost out. The talented personnel, relevant technologies, and years’ worth of expertise housed at Sandia were kept out of the deal due to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s red tape regarding approvals of non-weapons work at the labs and its severe aversion to engaging in projects that were anything but zero-risk.

Such institutional inertia, risk aversion, and micromanagement of the laboratories are symptomatic of issues wider than one particular agency’s culture or wiring diagram. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States still has no consensus on the role of the nation’s nuclear deterrent and no urgency regarding the mission of nuclear deterrence. Meanwhile, the highest priority at three unique, diverse national laboratories remains the maintenance of an aging nuclear stockpile. In light of today’s budget realities, great risk resides in not fully leveraging, in the most cost-effective manner possible, the science and technology assets that are available to address the full array of national security challenges.

Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories—originally designed as cornerstones to the country’s effort to research, develop, and produce nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet threat—now operate in an institutional straitjacket. As threats to US national security have evolved since the end of the Cold War and, more dramatically, since September 11, 2001, these three national resources and the governmental infrastructure and investments that support them have failed to adapt accordingly. Though the laboratories are currently ill-situated to address 21st-century challenges, there is a way forward: Repurposing these facilities and efficiently tapping the accumulated expertise and skill they contain could make them more relevant in today’s landscape. A dramatic reorganization of governance structures, investment strategies, and priority setting for these storied labs could help them regain prominence in a world that has shifted beneath their foundations.

Changing structure, changing strategy

A rapidly changing post–Cold War security environment has prompted a reanalysis of the mission to maintain a nuclear stockpile designed to deter would-be attackers. The resulting uncertainty has rendered the institutional structures that once supported that clear mission incapable of adequately prioritizing and investing in what might constitute the contemporary analog to the nuclear deterrent. As the United States struggles to adapt its national security architecture in order to offer agile and effective responses to a more diffuse array of threats—through intelligence reform, the creation of the Homeland Security Department, and the establishment of interagency working groups to provide more coherent and cost-effective approaches—nascent change has yet to translate into coherent prioritization and investment in the federal science and technology base. As the story of Sandia’s failure to bid its way into a more continuous supporting role at the Homeland Security Department suggests, the trend has been to establish new research and development centers that remain siloed under and sponsored by a particular agency rather than to revamp existing institutional structures and governance mechanisms to effectively leverage capabilities that already exist. Diffuse threats require crosscutting solutions, but science and technology governance remains controlled and funded by narrow and vertical federal stovepipes (Jones and Kusnezov, 2012).

For more than 40 years, the United States relied on national nuclear weapons laboratories to provide solutions to grievous security threats facing the country. Significant investments made in science, technology, computation, and test facilities were required so that Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore could fulfill their Cold War mission. But the legacy of these three national labs is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, their involvement in the genesis of the US nuclear weapons program endowed them with a broad array of scientific capabilities that is unparalleled elsewhere in the US federal science and technology infrastructure. But, on the other hand, a history of shifting national security goals combined with fluctuating support and the administrative system above the labs has left them with a tangled and inefficient governance structure that fails to maximize the potential scientific benefit the facilities could generate.

In earlier decades, the robust nuclear weapons budget allowed a healthy amount of high-risk, long-term research in materials science, physics, chemistry, and engineering at the laboratories. Much of that research, though it diverged from the core mission of producing the nation’s nuclear deterrent, was spawned by weapons-related programs and goals. For example, earlier work on plutonium research within Lawrence Livermore’s highly secure “superblock” was applicable to weapons stewardship but also to researching new methods for safe disposal of materials from dismantled weapons (Sefcik, 2001).¹ More importantly, these diverse capabilities allowed other national security agencies to periodically tap the resident scientific expertise on an as-needed basis, without necessitating any long-term investments in sustaining the entire enterprise. The nuclear weapons budget created multidisciplinary scientific reservoirs that could be leveraged on the cheap. But this model is no longer viable, nor does it offer the most advantageous outcomes for the nation’s security.

Because the labs are sponsored only by the National Nuclear Security Administration, their core mission remains trained on the nuclear deterrent. Their work for other agencies, including the Energy Department, only survives through the incremental, ad hoc funding provided by those agencies. Furthermore, should another federal agency’s needs conflict with stockpile support, it simply has to wait. For example, the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center uses the supercomputing power, modeling expertise, and multi-disciplinary teams resident at Sandia and Los Alamos to predict the transportation, energy, water, cyber, and economic infrastructure disruptions following natural disasters or terrorist attacks. In fact, these labs helped accurately model the effects of Hurricane Katrina before the storm devastated the Gulf Coast (White House, 2006). Yet the application of this capability has been limited to short-term, tactical tasks funded by the Homeland Security Department.

The institutional structure required in today’s security environment includes several agencies, a decision making structure to prioritize across a spectrum of challenges, and shared investments that align with these decisions. To achieve these objectives, the departments of Energy, Defense, and Homeland Security, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, should act as a governing board that appropriately shapes research and development priorities for the coming decades, allocates investments according to those priorities, and allows the national labs to compete for these investments, according to their strengths and core capabilities, and the cost of the services or technical solutions they provide.

Such a structure would accomplish what the current system—stovepiped and nuclear weapons-focused as it is—cannot. It would streamline federal investments in US national security needs, eliminate unnecessary redundancies in investments, and force a clear-eyed reanalysis of the importance of nuclear weapons stewardship vis-a-vis competing priorities. At the same time, it would encourage investments at the nexus of stockpile stewardship and synergistic projects across a broader mission space. Lastly, and most importantly, it would maximize the taxpayers’ return on new and historic investments in addressing 21st-century needs.

Taking these actions could extend the viability and enhance the responsiveness of the national labs in perpetuity. Recruiting and retaining top scientific talent is difficult for the weapons stewardship mission (National Research Council, 2012); young researchers want to contribute their talents to more exciting and pertinent challenges in the national security arena, such as developing radiation-hardened microsystems for use in intelligence missions and addressing the threat of improvised explosive devices for troops fighting overseas, among other immediate and future threats.

The challenge is not new, but the solutions to address it are. A recurring theme in recent studies of this problem is that, at a minimum, four agencies—Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—heavily rely on the science, technology, and engineering capabilities at the national laboratories, and they need to be part of an investment strategy to ensure the laboratories’ continued health. The crux of the present disconnect is whether the new institutional setting should be a stand-alone agency for science, technology, and engineering efforts (Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009) or an autonomous entity that reports through an existing Cabinet-level secretary (Defense Science Board, 2006; Strategic Posture Commission, 2009).² And understanding the political and scientific climates in which these labs were born can provide valuable insight into strategies that have, and haven’t, accomplished these goals in the past.

The making of facilities

The mid-20th century was a boom time for nuclear weapons and those who researched them. The Soviet Union’s conventional military advantage spurred swift governmental action and a seemingly bottomless war chest to devise a superior nuclear deterrent. The fear of Soviet expansion far outweighed the safety or security risks of that mission.

These decades exemplified the Cold War paradigm of rapid design, testing, and deployment. For the United States, no other policy objective or production priority ranked higher than the nuclear deterrent. The rapid increase in the scale and variety of weapons production illustrates the atmospherics of this time and the core mission of the labs. In June 1946, the United States possessed a total of nine nuclear weapons similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima. By 1967, the US nuclear weapons arsenal numbered more than 31,000 and included a slew of cutting-edge weapons, including nuclear artillery shells, nuclear land mines, and nuclear torpedoes (Loeber, 2002; Strategic Posture Commission, 2009).

Also during this time, Congress established institutional structures to oversee the dual uses of fission: the Atomic Energy Commission and the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. These bodies opened their doors in 1946 to marshal the nation’s research efforts in the fields of military and peaceful nuclear science (Buck, 1983), but their power, authority, and conflicts of interest also ultimately led to their demise (Cooke, 2009).³ This institutional support, however, provided unity of purpose and a sense of partnership among the fragmented and evolving array of laboratories, production sites, and associated facilities that would quickly become a vast Cold War enterprise. At the nodes of this enterprise sat three design facilities: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia. By the end of 1979, these design laboratories were designated as national laboratories, a change that acknowledged their role beyond the weapons program and the expectation of their engagement in broad, multi-program research (Loeber, 2002).

Congress dismantled both the Atomic Energy Commission and the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the 1970s, clearing the way for a Cabinet-level Energy Department, an agency designed to handle many “energy-related enterprises, and spark their scientific progress through closer contacts and centralized management” (PFIAB, 1999: 1). Unfortunately, this organizational solution gave rise to a new problem: the divided attention of the secretary of energy, who addresses issues ranging from oil and gas permits to nuclear weapons research, development, and production. The end of the Cold War exacerbated this challenge, and the changing nature of national security threats after September 11, 2001 further fractured the once single-minded focus of the US nuclear weapons labs.

Threats and missions shift

In the early 1990s, the nuclear weapons enterprise underwent two rapid changes: the end of the Cold War and the passage through Congress of a nuclear test moratorium. When the centrifugal forces unleashed by glasnost and perestroika led to the Soviet Empire’s unraveling, US security concerns shifted from the Soviet deterrent to the collapse of command and control of over 30,000 Soviet nuclear weapons spread over what would rapidly become several independent nations (Nunn, 1997). With these unanticipated and dramatic events, the early post-Cold War years required rapid adaptation within the complex.

The test moratorium spurred an immediate need to delineate a path forward to ensuring the safety and reliability of the existing arsenal and to shore up critical scientific competencies over an indefinite period of time. The 1994 Defense Authorization Act, establishing the Stockpile Stewardship Program as a large and multifaceted scientific investigation into the inner workings of nuclear explosions, sought to address this need. The laboratories were to conduct tests on the full range of weapons components to ensure reliability without full-scale nuclear testing and commence life extension programs to refurbish warhead components. At the same time, the Energy Department had added new emphasis to non-deterrence missions that included energy security, fissile material disposition, environmental remediation, and nonproliferation (US Government Accountability Office, 1997).

What used to be robust development, design, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons systems was supplanted by an effort to achieve milestones within several scientific “campaigns,” such as improving supercomputing power for three-dimensional modeling and simulation of nuclear explosions. Additionally, accountability became fragmented under the stewardship mission. During the Cold War, one program manager bore responsibility for the eventual success or failure of a given system, but accountability for the success of life extension programs is more diffuse.

The last two decades have seen the national laboratories attempt to repurpose themselves with varying degrees of success and within the institutional confines of the day. For example, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia’s California facilities have established “open campuses” with industry and academia to spur collaboration on science and engineering challenges in bioscience, cybersecurity, detection technologies, and hydrogen applications. More significantly, more than half of Sandia’s annual budget over the past several years has been comprised of work outside the nuclear weapons enterprise.

By the late 1990s, stockpile stewardship was proving its merit, but several panels and commissions criticized the Energy Department’s ability to manage the complex effectively. Some pointed to the unclear lines of authority, lack of accountability, and a culture of risk aversion that had permeated the complex (Commission on Maintaining United States Nuclear Weapons Expertise, 1999). Mounting concerns over the continued health of the weapons enterprise reached a tipping point in 1999—with the Wen Ho Lee scandal in the headlines (Newsweek, 2009),⁴ the Cox Committee report on Chinese espionage, and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board’s report entitled Science at Its Best, Security at Its Worst. Congress established the National Nuclear Security Administration as a semi-autonomous agency within the Energy Department. The objective was to get the weapons complex out from under Energy’s bureaucracy and cultural proclivities and clarify lines of authority for those functions specific to nuclear weapons (US Government Accountability Office, 2012).

One decade into the National Nuclear Security Administration’s existence, a similar spate of reports by independent panels and commissions is circulating on the longstanding issues of administering the complex. These reports echo themes from a decade ago on dysfunctional management and a culture of risk aversion (Defense Science Board, 2006; National Research Council, 2012; Strategic Posture Commission, 2009). These most recent reports, as well as recent actions taken by Congress, suggest that the United States is reaching another tipping point in the politics surrounding the weapons complex.⁵ The fates of the three national laboratories, the quality of science and technology they could be producing, and the safety of the citizenry they were designed to protect are thrown into doubt by such mismanagement and misaligned investment.

Conclusion

The National Nuclear Security Administration experiment has failed. This failure largely has been couched as a product of the administration’s lack of autonomy from the Energy Department’s institutional culture. It is easy to pin failures on implementation or leadership (US Government Accountability Office, 2012). But though mission malaise, loss of urgency, and nuclear weapons’ fading prominence in the national consciousness and national security posture are less tangible, they are, nonetheless, quite critical factors.

At a minimum, policy makers have failed the national laboratories from a political standpoint by being insufficiently creative in adapting the laboratories’ governance mechanisms to address evolving science, technology, and engineering needs. Meanwhile, the laboratories have remained tethered to their core weapons mission as the key to their survival.

A sensible path exists between the focus on a Cold War nuclear deterrent and a more expansive and responsive infrastructure for technology, engineering, and national security science, but navigating this path will require adroit and nontraditional behavior on the part of the agencies, their leadership, and administrators. Essentially, the choice to be made is between extracting maximum value from Cold War investments in order to address an entirely different security environment or continuing to sink money into an antiquated paradigm.

The path of least resistance is no longer viable. The US government must either transform its mechanisms to repurpose, leverage, and recapitalize the infrastructure in place, or, as a result of benign neglect, it will be necessary, at some point, to make excessive investments over several years to reconstitute what already exists. Repurposing will prove more cost-effective than starting from scratch.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Libby Turpen is currently an independent consultant. She was most recently a lead associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she provided policy and technical expertise to the nonproliferation programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and National Nuclear Security Administration. From 2001 to 2009, as senior associate at the Stimson Center, she directed the Task Force and was the primary author of the report Leveraging Science for Security: A Strategy for the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories in the 21st Century. Prior to joining the center, she served in the Office of Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici as a legislative assistant responsible for defense, nonproliferation, and foreign affairs. She has taught at Georgetown University and at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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