Since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have faced an unanticipated threat to their work, from politicians and administrators whose reforms and management policies—enacted in the name of national security and efficiency—have substantially undermined the lab’s ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile. Morale and productivity have suffered at Los Alamos—and at the nation’s other weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore. The institutional decline of Los Alamos has occurred in three distinct phases: beginning with an overreaction to the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee’s downloading of secret computer codes, exacerbated by the heavy-handed leadership of Admiral Pete Nanos, and continuing under new management by a for-profit company that focuses more on personal bonuses than on scientific achievement. The author writes that security lapses at Los Alamos are not, as media and government officials have portrayed them, the result of a culture of arrogance and carelessness. More likely, they are symptoms of structural flaws in the workplace, but it is easier to stereotype and scapegoat scientists than to address these structural problems.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, established by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the remote high desert of New Mexico during World War II, is one of two nuclear weapons design laboratories in the United States. The other, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, sits on the edge of California’s wine country. Famous for developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Los Alamos is now a $2 billion-a-year enterprise that sprawls across 43 square miles of piñon-covered desert mesas. I have been studying the tiny, esoteric cadre of American nuclear weapons scientists since 1987, when a very tolerant group of faculty in my graduate anthropology program agreed to let me see whether I could do for nuclear weapons scientists what older generations of anthropologists had done for headhunters, cannibals, and polygamists. Call me the Margaret Mead of the weapons labs, if you like.

When I first made contact with America’s nuclear weapons scientists in the waning years of the Reagan administration, they were reeling from the Nuclear Freeze movement’s energetic attempts to put them out of business. In 1982 and 1983, about 2,300 people, chanting that Livermore and Los Alamos were US Auschwitzes, were arrested for civil disobedience at the Livermore Laboratory. Having survived the antinuclear protests of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War a few years later, American nuclear weapons scientists are now finding that the main threat to their craft comes from an unexpected source: politicians and administrators who are supposed to be on their side. As so often seems to be the case, well-meaning attempts to make the country more secure are having the opposite effect.

Nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos now say that morale there is the worst it has ever been in the lab’s seven-decade history, and that Los Alamos’s ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile has been substantially undermined. This institutional havoc has been wrought not by the left but by congressmen and government officials claiming to act in the name of national security and efficiency. They framed Los Alamos as an institution in need of reform and, by “improving” management practices, reduced the laboratory’s effectiveness. Their counterproductive actions were often justified by an assumption, largely erroneous, that Los Alamos had an organizational culture characterized by arrogance and carelessness.

Act 1: The Wen Ho Lee affair The institutional decline of Los Alamos began on March 6, 1999, when the New York Times published a front-page story (Risen and Gerth, 1999) titled “China stole nuclear secrets for bombs, US aides say.” The article said that “a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American” had stolen nuclear weapons design secrets on behalf of the Chinese. Within days, after Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson leaked his name to journalists off the record (Stober and Hoffman, 2001), Wen Ho Lee was publicly identified as the spy on TV broadcasts and in newspaper stories around the country. For months, until Lee was finally arrested and charged on 59 counts of mishandling national security information, cable TV news crews camped outside his modest Los Alamos home, hoping for a glimpse of the quiet man accused of being the new Julius Rosenberg. Convoys of FBI agents trailed Lee and his wife whenever they went to the store for milk. On December 10, 1999, Lee was arrested. Described as an extreme danger to US national security, he was held in solitary confinement for 278 days awaiting his day in court. When he was finally brought to trial, the case against him rapidly fell apart; 58 of the 59 counts against him were dropped, and he was released with time served for one count of mishandling classified information. “I believe you were terribly wronged,” said Judge James Parker, a Ronald Reagan appointee, from the bench. “I am truly sorry that I was led by our executive branch of government to order your detention last December” (Lee, 2001: 2). While Lee was clearly a victim of racial profiling and media-enabled hysteria about Chinese espionage, this is not to say that he had done nothing wrong. He had, in fact, removed from the lab computer copies of top-secret nuclear weapons simulation codes, a serious offense for which he surely deserved to lose his clearance and his job. There is no evidence, however, that he ever gave the codes to a foreign country or that others at the lab had engaged in similar misdeeds. Indeed, many of Lee’s colleagues were horrified to hear of what he had done. When asked whether other scientists illicitly copied or took home secret documents, one Los Alamos weapons designer told me, “What Wen Ho did was like driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone.” Nevertheless, media accounts reinforced the perception that Lee was not an aberration but rather a symptom of a culture of laxness at Los Alamos. For example, FBI Director Louis Freeh responded to the Lee case by saying that “the culture [at Los Alamos] has not been security-conscious” (Deseret News, 1999); he demanded tighter rules for the handling of the lab’s secrets. During the following summer, the notion that Lee represented something more pervasive hardened when an audit found that two disks containing sensitive nuclear weapons design information were missing from the vault where they were normally stored (Santa Fe New Mexican, 2000). Coming before the charges against Lee were dismissed, this discovery amplified perceptions of what USA Today (2000: 26a) called “a culture of security sloppiness” at Los Alamos. Senators, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were accusing the labs of “being encased in a culture of indifference and arrogance” (Guthrie, 2000). One senator, Richard Bryan of Nevada, was said by the Las Vegas Review-Journal to be deeply concerned about “a culture of seeming unconcern about security” at not just Los Alamos but other nuclear weapons facilities as well (Tetreault, 2000). The Albuquerque Journal (2000) editorialized: “[D]ue for some attitude adjustment is the scientist-king culture in the national laboratories, which has resisted past attempts to bring greater security and accountability into the workplace.” The missing disks showed up behind a copy machine at the lab within a few days of being reported missing. It was generally believed that a scientist had taken them to his or her office without returning them in a timely fashion. If so, they would have been kept in a safe in the scientist’s office, and the disks’ contents would not have been compromised. In other words, they were assumed to be the classified equivalent of overdue library books. Nevertheless, an onslaught of investigation and reform ensued. FBI agents descended on Los Alamos, administering polygraphs to weapons scientists, commandeering their offices, and, in some cases, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night and driving them two hours to Albuquerque for interrogations. A new federal agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, was created to superintend the weapons labs and a general, Eugene Habiger, was put in charge of overseeing security at Los Alamos and Livermore. Meanwhile, weapons scientists were taken away from their weapons work for retraining, and new security procedures were adopted—whether necessary or not. One of the country’s most senior nuclear warhead designers was dejected that summer when I visited Los Alamos and found him going through all of the secret papers in his locked file cabinets, complying with a new management directive to stamp “secret” on the second-to-bottom page of each report in case the bottom page, already stamped “secret,” fell off. This is what he was doing instead of ensuring that the warhead assigned to him was in good working order. One legacy of the Lee and missing-disk incidents was a widespread narrative in the media and among political officials that the scientists of Los Alamos had developed a culture of arrogance and noncompliance, and that US national security was endangered by it. This increasingly powerful perception was, to a considerable degree, grounded in processes of collective misrecognition. While Lee had made illicit copies of weapons simulation codes, all but one of the criminal charges against him were found baseless, and the weakness he had exploited in the lab’s security system was immediately closed through the removal of floppy disk drives from lab computers. Nobody else would ever be able to make copies of weapons codes as Lee had. As for the missing disks, their brief sojourn away from the vault was surely a product not so much of a dysfunctional culture at Los Alamos but of the difficulties posed by its built environment. Los Alamos’s sister lab in Livermore did not have problems with missing disks, partly because it had moved to a diskless system, accessible by secure cable, for much of its classified data and partly because it did not insist on a central repository for all removable disks at the lab. With Los Alamos’s requirement that disks be stored in a central repository, although they were used by scientists spread across several mesas within a vast territory, the lab had a situation almost guaranteed to generate missing disks. Still, it is easier to blame nuclear weapons scientists for a “culture of arrogance” that fits populist sloganeering about overeducated elites than to investigate structural factors and material practices that may be causing problems.

Act 2: The admiral butts heads with scientists In 2003, the director of Los Alamos stepped down. John Browne, a physicist who had worked his way up through the ranks, was weakened by the Wen Ho Lee affair and the case of the missing disks, as well as by a subsequent scandal involving lax oversight of procurement at the lab (Walp, 2010). Browne’s successor was Pete Nanos, an admiral who, George W. Bush hoped, would bring the discipline of the nuclear Navy to the longhairs of the lab. Shortly after he was appointed Nanos announced that he planned to “drain the swamp” at Los Alamos (Hoffman, 2003). Nanos got his chance in July 2004 when, during the same week, two more secret disks apparently went missing at Los Alamos and a student working at the lab was hit in the eye by a laser beam. Nanos’s reaction was swift and extreme. He made an address to all lab employees in which he referred to “cowboys and buttheads” who thought they were above the rules. Nanos also issued a memo to all employees, in which he wrote (Nanos, 2004: 2): “I don’t care how many people I have to fire to make it stop. If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble.” And at a news conference, Nanos referred to “a culture of arrogance” and “suicidal denial” among lab scientists (Blakeslee, 2004). He suspended 19 lab employees and, in an extraordinary measure, suspended most operations at the lab for two to seven months while forcing its employees to embark on protracted retraining and reflection on security practices. Quite aside from its consequences to the US nuclear stockpile, the shutdown is estimated by the National Nuclear Security Administration to have cost about $370 million (GAO, 2005). The news of the missing disks drew remarks from others that verged on the hysterical. “It would sadden us greatly not to continue this work,” said Gerald Parsky, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, which at that time managed the two nuclear weapons labs on behalf of the US government. “On the other hand, we need to be sure the culture has changed” (Rankin, 2004). The University of California’s vice president for lab management, Robert Foley, added: “I don’t like the culture at Los Alamos. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t like the culture” (Hoffman, 2004a). “There is something about the Los Alamos culture that we have not yet beaten into submission,” said Spencer Abraham, the energy secretary (Hoffman, 2004b). Like Paul Bremer, the man President Bush put in charge of occupied Iraq at exactly the same time, Nanos sought to subdue the native scientists of his laboratory with an authoritarian intransigence that mimicked the tin-eared stubbornness of the US provisional administration in Iraq. He was encouraged by some of the same figures in Washington who egged on the hapless endeavor in Iraq—though it has to be said that the neocons of Baghdad created a catastrophe by denying the importance of cultural differences between Americans and Iraqis, while Pete Nanos ran his lab into the ground by insisting on the existence of a distinctive culture that was largely an artifact of his own imagination. The result of Nanos’s ham-handed attempt at cultural engineering was a profound breach with the employees he was supposed to lead and represent. Some of them set up a blog where lab employees could anonymously post tirades against their director. The deluge of complaints included this doggerel gem (LANL: The Real Story, 2005): Director Pete Nanos has said, if you do science you are a butt-head. So he stopped all work, that moronic jerk! Now science at LANL is dead. Hoping Nanos would take the hint, employees planted “for sale” signs on his lawn in the middle of the night. He once came out of church to find an obscene bumper sticker had been affixed to his car while he was praying. Things eventually got so bad that Nanos had a safe room installed in his home. In May 2005, faced with an unmanageable situation, Nanos abruptly resigned. “The corks they are a-poppin’ tonight,” reacted one poster on the blog. But it was too late to reverse some of the damage inflicted on a facility said for years by America’s leaders to be essential to US national security. In 2005, retirements were projected to be 50 percent higher than during the prior year and 60 percent more than in 2003 (Dupuy, 2005). And what of the cause of this brouhaha, the second case of the missing disks? Upon investigation, it turned out that the disks had not gone missing at all. They never existed. An employee putting identification codes on 10 new disks had thrown away the unneeded eleventh and twelfth labels in the series, and this had generated the illusion that there were two more disks. Thanks to the irresistibly powerful frames of collective arrogance and wrongdoing that politicians and the media had placed around the lab, a simple mistake in inventory management had been misidentified as the misconduct of butt-headed scientists and a set of extreme and destructive acts of cultural reengineering had been instituted at great cost to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and, presumably, to national security.

Act 3: Under new management The skewed public perception of an ingrained problem in the organizational culture of the nuclear weapons labs, and the inflammatory responses of some Washington politicians, finally broke the triangular relationship between the Department of Energy, the weapons labs, and the University of California, which had always managed Los Alamos and the other national weapons lab in Livermore. For the first time, instead of simply renewing the University of California’s management contract, the federal government put the contract out to bid. In the last days of 2005, the Bush administration announced that Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a consortium headed by the Bechtel Corporation with the University of California as a junior partner, had won the contract. A year later, the same consortium won the contract to run the lab at Livermore. The new management arrangement extended the process of institutional destruction that began with the Wen Ho Lee affair and inflicted great damage on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as on Los Alamos. The University of California had run the labs as a public service, plowing much of the $8 million-per-lab management fee back into the labs themselves. Bechtel was in it for the money, and the shift to management by a for-profit entity was accompanied by a tenfold increase in the management fee (Broad, 2005) and, in a development deeply resented by rank-and-file scientists, personal bonuses for senior LANS officials if they met contract targets. Meanwhile, since the labs were no longer run by a nonprofit entity, they had to start paying taxes. Benefit costs also increased, because the labs could no longer take advantage of the University of California’s large negotiating pool. Since the overall budget for the labs was not increased, this situation could only be managed with layoffs. Livermore was hit particularly hard, forced to lay off more than 2,000 out of 8,000 employees. These layoffs, in a sharp break with traditional cultural practice at the lab, were handled in strict corporate style: Employees arrived at their offices, not knowing they were to be fired, to find a corporate supervisor at their door. They were watched as they packed their belongings, surrendered their badges, and were escorted to their cars. It would be hard to exaggerate the sense of violation this produced among employees, including those not laid off. Under the management of LANS, scientists at both Livermore and Los Alamos now describe a substantially different organizational culture. In the old days, scientists were managed by other scientists who had risen through the ranks and whom they saw as kin. Now they are largely managed by a phalanx of outsiders brought in under the new management contract. Unlike older lab managers, many of these new managers rotate quickly to other Bechtel sites before they can develop rapport with the scientists they oversee, and they tend to live in Santa Fe rather than in Los Alamos or in the upscale suburbs of the Bay Area rather than Livermore. They are seen by many lab employees as remote, overpaid interlopers who are obsessed with collecting personal bonuses by ensuring that the labs have no safety or security lapses, but have little interest in the labs’ scientific mission. Indeed, since Livermore went under new management, the number of peer-reviewed articles published by its scientists fell from 1,400 in 2005 to about 800 in 2010 (Upton, 2011). The contract between LANS and the Department of Energy specifies a number of yardsticks by which managerial effectiveness—and hence bonuses—will be judged, but, astonishingly, none of these yardsticks involve metrics of scientific productivity. According to the contract, the number and quality of articles published, papers given, and experiments conducted by lab scientists are irrelevant to the government’s evaluation of managerial effectiveness. LANS manages by the book, the book being the enormous contract—thicker than any telephone directory—that regulates the consortium’s bonus on its management fee. Rather than making sure good science is done, scientists complained to me this past summer, Los Alamos managers are more interested in being sure they can check the box in the compliance paperwork that says fluorescent vests were worn during the experiment. A former senior manager in one of the labs told me with sadness that he rarely sees lights on at night in the lab anymore. It has become a nine-to-five operation where there is little incentive to work late. In the words of one scientist I spoke to, “Science is hard to do without being able to set up and modify new experiments quickly. The new safety rules mean you cannot start an experiment rapidly, since it takes months to get all the paperwork approved. By the time you do it, someone else has done it if you are in a trendy science field.” Employees of the weapons laboratories report that they are discouraged from raising any of these issues in public lest any public criticism endanger the managers’ bonuses. Jeff Colvin, a computational scientist and union representative at Livermore, told the New York Times, “Scientists raising any issues that would put the performance bonus at risk is strongly frowned upon.” Meanwhile, the new managers, asked to account for the declining performance of the laboratories, invoke the culture they are supposed to be reforming as their alibi. “Making changes to these large, complex laboratories with firmly entrenched cultures was expected to be difficult,” said Jason Bohne, a Bechtel spokesman (Upton, 2011).

Conclusion Organizations can develop pathological cultures. Enron, for example, had an organizational culture that encouraged lawlessness and extreme risk-taking, and, as is usually the case when rule-breaking is widespread within an organization, that culture was sanctioned by Enron’s top managers (Gibney, 2005; McLean and Elkind, 2003). But Los Alamos is not, and never has been, Enron. The misattribution of Los Alamos’s problems to a pathological organizational culture involved at least two misreadings of the situation. First, when Lee’s illicit copying of computer codes became public knowledge, the actions of a rogue individual were confused with the informal norms of an entire organization. But there has never been any evidence that other scientists at Los Alamos engaged in this kind of extreme rule-breaking with classified information. It is as if, following recent revelations of Sen. John Ensign’s scandalous behavior, we jumped to the conclusion that all senators are having affairs with their staffers’ wives. Second, the organizational dysfunction at Los Alamos has been misdiagnosed as a problem of culture; it is more likely a problem of structure. Lacking the compact campus of its sister laboratory at Livermore, and having a more archaic system for information distribution, it was inevitable that Los Alamos would have problems managing classified information. Attributing these problems solely to the culture of the lab’s employees is a form of “blaming the victim.” Although the context is very different, the perception that Los Alamos has a “culture of arrogance” brings to mind debates about a “culture of poverty” that supposedly condemns the American poor, especially African Americans, to lives of low achievement. Just as this alleged culture of poverty became a means for pundits and politicians to attribute poverty to the deficiencies of the poor rather than to the environment of bad schools, low-paying jobs, and discrimination in which they lived, so the fictional culture of impunity at Los Alamos enables politicians and journalists to fire off cheap sound bites about spoiled scientists and to attribute security lapses to obstinate employees rather than to structural flaws in their workplace. But at least the notion of a “culture of poverty” has been accompanied by elaborate description and theorizing. Recent condemnations of Los Alamos have been based on remarkably thin, cartoonish descriptions of its culture. Critics have offered only a flat, unelaborated sense that weapons scientists, with their lifetime sinecures, have a sense of privilege that, in the words of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman (US House of Representatives, 2008), makes them “think they are above it all.” Such phraseology is bizarre when applied to men and women who work very long hours and accept government surveillance of their lives that most of us would not tolerate. (They are not allowed to travel abroad without government permission; government agents can question their friends about their finances, drinking, and sex habits; and they can be tested for alcohol in their blood at a moment’s notice at work.) However, once the stereotype of the arrogant scientist took root, the work of cultural reformation was seen as urgent. It was first to be achieved through the brute authoritarian force of Pete Nanos and now through the capillary micromanagement of LANS. This process of reform has turned out to be another case of destroying the village in order to save it, and, ironically, it has been pushed hardest by those claiming to act in the name of national security.

Funding This research was partly funded by National Science Foundation grant number 0135622.

References