Should the University of California Run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories?
Transcript of Debate on April 5, 2004 12:00-1:00 PM
University of California, Berkeley

Urs Cipolat: Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, dear students, good afternoon and welcome. My name is Urs Cipolat. I am a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Field at the College of Letters and Sciences here at UC-Berkeley. I am also the organizer of today’s debate on whether the University of California should or should not run the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. As you may know, the University of California manages these two labs on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Both labs are engaged in classified research related in part to maintaining the nation’s arsenal of twenty to thirty thousand nuclear warheads (Correction: The US nuclear arsenal comprises between ten to fifteen thousand nuclear warheads). The two labs are the primary sites of the United States’ nuclear weapons research and design programs. On the other hand, the labs have also engaged in nonproliferation projects such as the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union.

University officials continue to underscore that the University of California has managed the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos labs “as a public service” for over sixty years. The contracts between UC and the federal government to manage the labs are set to expire in 2005 and for the first time in the history of these labs, the federal government has decided to put the contracts out for competitive bidding. To this date, the decision on whether or not the University should compete for new contracts has not yet been made by the UC Regents who prefer to wait until they know more about the terms of the competition, possibly sometime this fall or even later. In the meantime, however, the Regents have encouraged the entire UC community system-wide to engage in discussions and debates and to participate in surveys on the issue of UC involvement in the national nuclear labs.

As indicated on the back side of the debate’s handout, UC faculty and students will have a number of opportunities to inform themselves about the issue at hand, to clarify their own positions and take part—though mainly informally—in the decision-making process. In addition to today’s debate, a panel discussion moderated by radio host Michael Krasny is scheduled to take place on April 21st. On April 29th, the Berkeley division of the Academic Senate will discuss the lab issue in its spring meeting, which will be open to the public. All through April and May, UC-Berkeley undergrads are invited to take part in an informal survey on the lab issue. Another informal survey for all UC Senate faculty will be launched in early May. Finally, the system-wide Academic Senate has prepared a number of White Papers on the issue which can be accessed via the World-Wide Web.

Before I give the word to the debate’s moderator, please allow me to briefly introduce the two debate participants and the moderator. Dr. David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara. He holds numerous board positions in other civil society organizations, among them, the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility. Dr. Krieger has lectured widely throughout Europe, the U.S. and Asia advocating the global elimination of nuclear weapons. Dr. Per Peterson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests focus on thermohydraulics, heat and mass transfer, fluid dynamics and phase change. The moderator, Dr. Robert Powell, is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include international relations, formal theory and methods. Bob, the floor is yours.

Robert Powell: Thank you Urs. We begin this afternoon with each speaker making a ten-minute opening speech. The order has been determined by a coin toss with Professor Peterson going first. After both debaters have made an opening speech they will also have five minutes for rebuttal and a brief closing argument. We are then going to use the balance of the time—and we can go until 1:00—to engage in a question and answer and discussion period. There are cards and pencils being passed out so please write your question on the card and pass them up. If the question is for a specific speaker, please put that speaker’s name on top of the card. If it’s a question for both speakers, just leave it blank and I will ask them. The question for today’s debate is, “should the University of California bid to renew its contract to run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.” Arguing in the affirmative is Professor Peterson. Per?

Per Peterson: Thanks Bob. I have prepared a few notes and I’m here to speak informally. Let me first introduce myself briefly. I am the chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and work on a variety of topics that relate to nuclear science and technology. I hold a security clearance at the national labs and I am familiar with a fairly wide breadth of activities that go on there. so I’d be happy during question and answer session to discuss questions about things such as how difficult is it to do work in a classified environment and still maintain standards of academic freedom?

Let me begin by taking us back some time in history to December of 1938 when Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn were wandering on a horse path, I believe it was in Denmark, discussing the results of experiments where they had been irradiating uranium with neutrons trying to generate heavier elements and then to discover the characteristics of those elements. They were getting anomalous results from this because they were finding chemical species that seemed strange in terms of what one would expect from neutron capture and that was when they discussed the possibility that perhaps what was occurring was fission being induced by these neutrons. Within the space of about ten minutes they had done in their heads the calculations that indicated based on binding energy that the energy released from such a fission reaction might be on the order of about two hundred million electron volts which, compared to chemical reactions which are on the order of ten electron volts, would get an enormous amount of energy release.

The implications of this were immediately obvious to them. Within a few months additional experiments had been done that confirmed that not only did fission occur but that these reactions generated on average more than one neutron coming out of the reaction which created the possibility of a chain reaction. This information propagated to Leo Szilard who made the famous visit to Albert Einstein discussing these observations and the fact that this could imply that there may be the potential for weapons of enormous destructive power and Albert Einstein wrote the famous letter to President Delano Roosevelt which started the Manhattan Project and soon afterwards, UC became engaged. The discovery of plutonium occurred here on this campus. The laboratories were started, particularly the laboratory at Los Alamos, and work was done to develop the first atomic explosion which was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico.

Subsequently, UC has been continuously involved in matters related to nuclear weapons, nuclear security and nonproliferation through its management of the laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. The service that UC has done has been tremendous in this regard. It’s also been a tremendously stressful half-decade with an enormous amount of controversy about these activities. The main thing that we should recognize is that the need to manage nuclear risks is now a permanent one. It’s not going to disappear in the future and we need to think about how humans are going to do this. We don’t have institutions or at least we have very few institutions which have a good track record of managing things over century-type time scales. In fact, governments don’t have that sort of track record but churches and universities do and you can take your pick as to which you would like having in the position of providing leadership and scientific and technical advice.

So let me take you to February of 1992 and this was an interesting time because the Soviet Union had just collapsed, there was a state of something approximating chaos. The U.S. government was having a very difficult time interacting with the Russian government and representatives from the national lab at Los Alamos, led by the then-director Sig (Siegfried) Hecker were among the very first people to actually make it into Russia and visit the nuclear weapons office. Arguably, it was that visit and not other activities that resulted in the creation of what became called the Cooperative Threat Reduction—the transfer of material control and accounting capabilities to Russia which secured materials there and support for the removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to Russia. Quite arguably, of all the things that happened in the latter half of the twentieth century, the successful management of what was going on in the Soviet Union was probably the most important thing for global security. It’s interesting that much of the cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union actually was through Sandia in the area of pulse power and it’s also interesting that it was not Sandia but rather Los Alamos that actually created these connections.

I would suggest that we should be very cautious about thinking about changing the way we provide stewardship over the science and technology aspects of newer technologies in the military applications given the fact that if we had not had the current structure one can readily argue that we’d be in a far more dangerous world now than we are. This is not to suggest that we don’t face major ----- from threats and challenges. I think each of those who benefit from the same type of relatively unbiased and high-quality scientific and technical advice as we have seen coming out of the labs. These things include the need to provide an annual certification of the U.S. stockpile to avoid the need for additional testing, a wide variety of activities in the area of homeland security, including developing technologies for detecting and responding to biological weapons attacks, radiological devices and nuclear weapons, continuing to staff with excellent personnel the Nuclear Emergency Search Team and improving our ability to, after a nuclear explosion occurs, diagnose rapidly and with some confidence what type of device was used and where it likely came from because if, God forbid, we do have a terrorist explosion occur any place in the world and particularly in the United States, the subsequent attribution process will be extraordinarily important in terms of determining the dynamics. If you think about September 11th and then extrapolate that, probably we want to have reliable, trustworthy people doing that work and UC has done perhaps the best possible job at that. It would be a bad idea to switch. Thank you.

(Applause)

David Krieger: Thank you very much and I’m very happy to be here today and to have the opportunity to speak to this issue. I think that it is one of the most critical subjects that we could possibly address on this campus and I am hoping that you will agree with me in my assessment that the University of California should dissociate itself from the making of weapons of mass destruction. I consider nuclear weapons to be the greatest challenge of our time. It places our cities, our civilizations and most of life in jeopardy of annihilation. They are, in fact, our challenge and our choice and the question is, will we continue to live with them or will we take the necessary actions to assure that our government provides leadership toward a nuclear weapons-free world? I believe that what UC does contributes to the ongoing nuclear arms race—it may be a nuclear arms race in which only the United States is actually engaging—but the work done in secret at the nuclear weapons labs is work that contributes toward making new and more usable nuclear weapons, among other projects (and when I say new and more usable nuclear weapons I refer to both “bunker buster” nuclear weapons and to “mini-nukes,” smaller nuclear weapons that would certainly be more usable.).

I think there are three basic reasons why the University of California should not bid to continue to manage the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories. First, it is just simply the wrong thing to do. A great university should not be involved in designing, researching, developing and improving weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, a great university should not be involved in secretive research. It should be open and it should be open to all critics and that’s what makes science thrive and anytime you put research behind closed doors I think it shuts it down and it makes it much more likely that a small group is going to have control not only of the outcome of the research but of the science itself. As I understand it, the motto of this University is “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light”). I think it’s hardly the kind of light—the light of secretiveness that goes on in the nuclear weapons research—that the University wants to support. I also think that a great university like the University of California should set a better example for the young people that it educates. What kind of example is it to say that our culture is so deeply embedded in its relationship to nuclear weapons that the University of California is going to be engaged in actually making weapons capable of destroying cities and civilizations and even the human species?

Secondly, I want to talk about the illegality of nuclear weapons. This is very important. When the Nonproliferation Treaty entered into force in 1970, that treaty called for a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and good faith negotiations for complete nuclear disarmament and strict and effective international control. Some years later, in 1996, when the International Court of Justice considered the issue of illegality, they said that any threat or use of a weapon that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal under international law. So essentially they were saying that a nuclear weapon which could not meet the criteria internationally to humanitarian law in the sense that it cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants; a nuclear weapon will definitely cause unnecessary suffering to both combatants and civilians. So any use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly violate international humanitarian law and therefore be illegal. In that light, I want to share with you a quote by Sir Joseph Rotblat, one of the Manhattan Project scientists, who left the project when he found out that the bomb was not going to be a deterrent against German use of the bomb. Sir Joseph Rotblat said, “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such a weapon also be illegal and should not scientists also be culpable? And if there is doubt even about the legal side, should not the ethical aspect become more compelling?” That’s what he had to say about the legality and ethical issue.

Finally, my third point is that research, development and improving nuclear weapons is deeply immoral. It’s making weapons that kill indiscriminately as I talked about before. Combatants, non-combatants, the young, the old, children, there’s no discrimination. These are weapons of mass murder. To make weapons whose effect cannot be limited by time and space is also highly immoral. And to make weapons that will adversely affect future generations, I think, fits the category of immorality. I’d like to share with you along these lines a quotation by General George Lee Butler who was the head of the United States Strategic Command until he retired in 1994. He was in charge of all nuclear weapons and he said, “What is at stake here is our capacity to move ever higher the bar of civilized behavior. As long as we sanctify nuclear weapons as the ultimate arbiter of conflict we will have forever capped our capacity to live on this planet according to a set of ideals that value human life and eschew a solution that continues to hold acceptable the shearing away of entire societies. That simply is wrong. It is morally wrong and ultimately will be the death of humanity.” This coming from a United States Air Force General.

So, to summarize, the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business because a great university should set a better example for its students and for society as a whole. The UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business because it is illegal and it is immoral. I want to conclude with a poem about Hibakusha. Hibakusha are the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have told very sorrowful stories of what happened to them as a result of being victims of the atomic bombings. They walked around in a daze. They saw charred corpses. They saw people with their skin falling off, their eyeballs melting, crying out in thirst and in pain. And so, hibakusha are the result of what will happen if nuclear weapons are used again. There will be more hibakusha and this poem is called “Hibakusha Do Not Just Happen.”

For every hibakusha there is a pilot.
For every hibakusha there is a planner.
For every hibakusha there is a bombardier.
For every hibakusha there is a bomb designer.
For every hibakusha there is a missile maker.
For every hibakusha there is a missilier.
For every hibakusha there is a targeter.
For every hibakusha there is a commander.
For every hibakusha there is a button pusher.
For every hibakusha many must contribute.
For every hibakusha many must obey.
For every hibakusha many must be silent.

And I’m here today to ask you, to plead with you to break the silence. A great university must not become complicit any longer, must cease its complicity with making nuclear weapons, with making weapons of mass destruction. This is something I am asking you not only to consider intellectually but to consider from your hearts. These scientists who work behind closed doors at the nuclear weapons laboratories are contributing to the possibility that nuclear weapons will be again used in the future. They are not just maintaining the stockpile; they are doing far more than that and it’s time for our institutions—our major institutions, and the University of California is one. It’s time to say no to any more complicity in the making of weapons of mass destruction and to push instead for United States leadership for a world free of nuclear weapons. Thank you.

(Applause)

Per Peterson: The National Labs do a variety of tasks. Scientists and engineers and technical staff who work at the labs believe that most of what they contribute is to reducing the possibility that nuclear weapons will ever be used and indeed, this is the principle question: how do we reduce the possibility that in the future nuclear weapons will be used either for terrible acts of coercion, which they have an enormous potential to do and also by their very existence, the possibility of accidental, unauthorized or unintentional use, all of which are risks posed by the existence of the technology.

Now, there have been debates about how we can eliminate the risks posed by nuclear weapons. In the 1980s we had the idea of a perfect ballistic missile defense shield which, I think, many people agree is technologically impossible to achieve. We’ve also had thoughts about creating a nuclear-free weapons-free world. Unfortunately, this path also has technical dimensions which make it pretty much comparable to the difficulty of providing a perfect ballistic missile defense shield.

Now the main reason why we don’t get into a lot of technical details about why it’s impossible or very difficult to eliminate nuclear weapons is because we have such a long ways to go before we get to that question that reducing them substantially is something we should be working on and certainly something that the national labs can provide the technical and scientific basis to support. In going to the question of the types of things that we should be doing in the national labs given the fact that the national labs of necessity must work in secrecy, let me give just a couple of specific examples of technical questions which have been addressed in the environment of classification.

One of the more recent ones is the potential utility of reactor-grade plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. And this is a technical question. It involves working through classification guidelines if one wants to say anything about it. Within the classified world there are journals, there is peer review and there is discussion about these types of questions. And then there is the issue of what you bring out into the open. And in this case, of course, world commerce with separated reactor- grade plutonium is something that is underway. Alerting the world to the fact that reactor-grade plutonium can be used to make nuclear explosives is therefore very important because there has been a misperception that reactor-grade plutonium would be difficult or impossible to use for this purpose. The question is: how does one, in the process of letting the world know that this is the case, not also simultaneously announce to the world that this is an opportunity as well for terrorists? And this is the type of tradeoff that is made on a regular basis. The people who make these sorts of decisions need to be the people with the highest level of integrity and they need to work in an environment that preserves academic freedom and that would be the national labs.

Again, if our primary goal is to minimize the risks posed by nuclear weapons, we should be very careful in thinking about how to achieve that goal. Thank you.

(Applause)

David Krieger: I’m sure that the labs do some valuable work in non-nuclear weapons areas. I think we could have a science and we could have labs that work in an open, free way on many problems that confront humanity. Issues of sustainability, issues of verification, issues of how we move from the present world of some twenty to thirty thousand nuclear weapons to a world of zero nuclear weapons—these are reasonable problems to approach and these are things that a university engage in. What I’m objecting to here—I want to make very clear—is the involvement of the University of California in a process of providing research, development, design and improvement to nuclear weapons. This drives the nuclear arms race; it doesn’t reduce it. What’s going on in secret at the nuclear weapons labs is pushing other countries to try to develop nuclear weapons and it’s sending a message to the world that the United States remains committed for the indefinite future to having weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, in its arsenal as something that is useful to it, something it is willing to threaten other nations with and perhaps, under certain circumstances, to use.

I want to mention an atomic scientist named Leo Szilard. He was one of the key people in coming up with the idea of a chain reaction that could create nuclear weapons and experimentally proving the chain reaction was possible, and at the end trying in every way possible to see that the weapons that were created in the Manhattan Project were not dropped on Japanese cities. He tried to reach President Roosevelt, he tried to reach President Truman (President Roosevelt died; President Truman diverted him), he organized a petition among scientists working at the University of Chicago on a nuclear weapons project, the Manhattan Project, and all of it came to naught because in the end, the scientists did not have control of their product. And the same thing is true today. The scientist in good faith, perhaps—I’m sure Dr. Peterson acts in good faith—but the scientists in good faith have no end responsibility for what happens with their products. And so, that being the case, I submit to you that nuclear weapons are simply far too dangerous to continue to develop and improve and make a serious part of our arsenal. It adds to the insecurity rather than the security of the United States and while there are useful things that these scientists could be doing—developing energy sources that would be sustainable, so many things that would be useful for humanity. I hate to see them giving their knowledge, their talents, their abilities to making weapons of mass destruction. And more than that, it is a great sadness for me to see this issue of developing nuclear weapons so deeply
embedded in our society that the University of California would lend the fig leaf of respectability to such obscene behavior.

So I want to call to your attention a quote by Hans Bethe, who was one of the senior scientists in the Manhattan Project making nuclear weapons. In 1995, after the end of the Cold War, this is what Hans Bethe sent out to his fellow scientists. “I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

I assure you that if the University of California says no to bidding on the contract to continue its involvement with making weapons of mass destruction, that will not only be sending a great message to the students and other members of the UC community, they will also be sending a great message to our society at large. It will be saying “enough is enough. We’re out of the nuclear weapons business, we’re not going to give you our talents, our capabilities any longer. We’re done with this.” And it will cause our entire society to rethink what we’re continuing to do to keep nuclear weapons as part of our arsenal and not to provide leadership for a nuclear weapons free world in the aftermath of the Cold War. So what you do here on UC campuses can make a difference not only for our country, not only for the world that exists today, but for humanity far into the future. And I encourage you to say no to continuing this involvement with the labs. Thank you.

(Applause)

Robert Powell: We begin with a question for you, Dr. Krieger. What recourse is there when a country violates international law?

David Krieger: It depends which country violates international law. In the case of smaller and weaker countries, there is recourse through the United Nations Security Council. In the case of the more powerful nations, including the United States, there’s very little recourse at the international level. So the only level, really, truthfully, in which recourse can take place when a powerful country like the United States violates international law, is internally from its own citizens. It’s from its own citizens standing up and saying, “We will not tolerate such behavior from our government. We demand more of the government.” And I would also call to your attention in regard to international law that after the Second World War we had the Nuremberg Trials and those set out the Nuremberg Principles which said that any violation of international criminal law by leaders of a nation…they would be held to account for that under international law. And there has been created an International Criminal Court although the United States is not yet a party to that—in fact the present administration has withdrawn our signature from that important treaty, but there is an International Criminal Court which can hold individuals to account, which has ongoing trials, and sometimes, even though a leader is not held to account at the time that he perpetrates a crime under international law, he may be turned over to that tribunal at a later date.

Robert Powell: Thank you. For Professor Peterson, what is the purpose of continuing research into science that could lead to weapons that are even more powerful than the hydrogen bomb? What purpose does that research serve?

Per Peterson: I don’t believe that we have research on weapons more powerful than the hydrogen bomb or any need to do it. One of the popular topics right now is the “mini-nuke,” which is the opposite direction, something much smaller that could possibly be used to penetrate and damage or destroy underground bunkers—I think it’s about $16 million that’s going into the budget for this project. And the UC laboratory management has studiously avoided taking any position on this technology, either pro or against. The interesting point about is that it’s obvious and well-known that these weapons will have substantial collateral damage and this is not something that one would debate scientifically, which means that the main question is one for policymakers.

On the other hand, working on this technology is not potentially of substantial importance relative to other problems which we should be thinking about, perhaps as having higher priority. In particular, we have issues now related to North Korea and Iran, the diffusion of enrichment technology which are much tougher questions for us to try to address. And the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator is such a trivially simple question technically that it really is a battle, an ideological battle that’s going on politically where the laboratories are really not engaged in anything—somewhat like ballistic missile defense where you have an obvious answer and the question is why the policy is not changing as a consequence. On the other hand, when you get to really difficult questions that have a very difficult technical complement, where enrichment technology and its dispersion is a clear example, one of the reasons that we’re not seeing a coherent debate is because the range of possible technical outcomes is so large that it’s very difficult to actually make reasonable policy questions. And this is precisely the case where you want to have the very best possible scientific and technical advice and the laboratories are a place to provide them.

Robert Powell: Thank you. This question is for both of you and perhaps Professor Peterson can go first. If UC does not compete or competes and loses, who would you expect to take over the management of the labs and how would that be better or worse than to stick with continuing UC management? A related follow-on: which companies could possibly take over the labs and what are their histories and priorities?

Per Peterson: If I understand correctly, the likely bidders for at least the Los Alamos contract will include University of Texas in collaboration with an industrial partner, possibly Battelle and I’m not sure who else. I suspect that that will become clear at the time that the RFP comes out and there’s some response. There are two possible changes. The first is that one could go from having academic management of the science and technology activities at the labs to having corporate management. This would be a major change in terms of the way the laboratories are run and the environment that is provided for the people who work there, particularly in terms of their abilities to pursue projects that they believe are important. I also think that transitioning from academic management to corporate management would weaken the current system where the fees that come to the labs are recycled back in to provide what’s called Laboratory Directed Research Funding, which allows scientists and engineers to pursue projects of their own interest and to advance questions that might not otherwise be advanced. And this would then impact other labs because it’s really the academically managed labs that are the source of this [inaudible] funding.

If another university were to take over the only possibility would be that it would be a university with less stature and poorer credentials than the University of California and in my opinion that would damage the labs and [inaudible].

David Krieger: It seems to me that if UC doesn’t compete for the labs, the University of Texas has said that they will throw their hat into the ring and submit a bid. I think possibly Lockheed-Martin has talked about it. But who could manage the labs in the absence of the UC? UC does the lab management under contract from the Department of Energy and since it’s the Department of Energy, part of the United States government, they could in fact decide to manage the labs directly themselves. I don’t know that this would be an improvement. I certainly don’t think that necessarily Lockheed-Martin or another corporate entity would be an improvement. What I think needs to happen, however, is that the University of California needs to take a principled position that this is not an appropriate activity for the University and that it’s not an appropriate activity for the country to be engaging in. I think the University of California has to say, “We’re out of the secret research game; we’re not going to do this.” If you want to talk about some of the things that Dr. Peterson has talked about like centrifuge technology and so forth, I’m not certain why that can’t be done more openly. Certainly the spread of centrifuge technology seems to be pretty much out there already so I’m not sure why that needs to be done secretly under the mantle of the labs.

So I’m concerned about who might step in to replace the University of California but I think the greater interest of the society is for the University of California to send a very strong message that the further development of nuclear weapons is simply beyond the pale and that the United States itself, the people of the United states and the government of the United States need to have a new policy that works urgently and effectively toward nuclear disarmament rather than developing new, more usable nuclear weapons.

Robert Powell: Thank you. Another question for both of you: how much money does the University receive to run the labs? Does the University make a profit? And somewhat broader, what are the concrete benefits do you see to maintaining control of the laboratories?

Per Peterson: The University of California essentially receives no money. I guess it’s such a small quantity that it’s effectively zero. The money which the federal government pays for the management of the labs is recycled back to fund research. And so there really isn’t a fee currently. If UC bids it will most likely be with the participation of an industrial partner that will be responsible for implementing security and for taking care of business practices and that industrial partner will certainly be along on a for-profit basis but I’m skeptical that UC will ever consider trying to turn the laboratories into a source of funding to, say, displace state support for the campuses. The principle reason that UC manages the labs and should continue to manage the labs is because it is a key aspect of national service and is extraordinarily important for national and international security.

Working with secrecy is something that one has to do when you’re dealing with technologies that could so readily be misused. For example, if you are trying to determine what are the characteristics of, say, an improvised nuclear device so that you can both figure out how to prevent access to material for it and then figure out how to manage the consequences if one were to be built and detonated. It’s clear that you can’t go around and publicize the characteristics of what an improvised nuclear device would look like and so it is necessary to do work on technologies—certain aspects of technology—under classification guidance. That doesn’t make it impossible to then abstract from that work useful information that can be used in policymaking.

One of the key questions when you get this information—for example, information about the possible utility of reactor-grade plutonium for nuclear devices—you don’t want to have published designs for reactor-grade plutonium nuclear devices. You do want policymakers to understand the relative risks associated with these materials so they can make the appropriate decisions about the level of protection they require and we’ve done a relatively good job in most of those areas trying to provide useful information for policymakers about things where you cannot, in good conscience, give complete information.

David Krieger: My understanding is that the UC receives some tens of millions of dollars for its administration and its oversight at the laboratories, probably not a very large part of the UC budget. But this concept of “national service” keeps coming up and I think we need to examine what “national service” means in this context. National service, as I understand the labs to be carrying it out, is to carry out the directives of the Department of Energy and to do what the government and any particular administration call upon the labs to do and what Congress calls upon the labs to do. So my question really is, does that constitute a service to the nation? I would argue that by continuing to develop and improve our nuclear technology and to send that message to the world we are actually instigating other countries to take similar steps and undermining the security of the nation. So what may appear from the perspective of the Department of Energy of the United States government to be national service I would say is a great disservice to the people of the United States of America and that has to do with policymakers leading the country in the wrong direction, leading the country toward a future that relies upon nuclear weapons for national security rather than a future that eliminates these weapons. And once again I would say that if the work of the laboratories were on sustainable energy or on how to work toward verifiable nuclear disarmament, I think that would be legitimate work and it could be done largely in the open. But the work on developing new and better nuclear weapons technology needs to go. It shouldn’t happen in the United States of America any longer. We need government leaders who recognize this and lead the United States toward taking a leadership role in the world on these issues and we can’t let the labs, which sometimes push the Administration and push Congress with their lobbying for new weapons designs, to lead the way in the wrong direction. So I think again in closing I would just say that UC needs to be out of this business. They need to take a strong stance. It’s not an issue of doing it for money—that would be very perverse for a great university to take that perspective—but it shouldn’t also be perceived as an issue of national service since that’s really very questionable.

Robert Powell: Thank you. I had hoped to be able to squeeze in one more question but unfortunately the present time has made that impossible. So I would very much like to thank both of the speakers for sharing their opinions with us.

(Applause).