The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory grew out of a lab established in 1952 by a group of dedicated individuals who believed they could do better than Los Alamos, and build a hydrogen bomb. Some of them also believed that Los Alamos was run by communist sympathizers, and testified in Congress to that effect.

The two establishments have had a less-than-cordial relationship ever since. Their rivalry retains a sharp edge: only last year, Livermore staff sabotaged an effort to foist on them a director who had spent most of his career at Los Alamos (see Nature 417, 577; 200210.1038/417577c). The rivalry has suited successive US governments just fine, but the latest arena of competition may be less pleasing to Washington. Almost five years after Los Alamos descended into the Wen Ho Lee spy scandal, Livermore has now embarked on a spectacular riposte (see page 651).

Los Alamos may have been content to oversee the bungled investigation of a middle-aged Taiwanese mechanical engineer, struggling to figure out which thermodynamics meetings he had attended in Asia. Livermore, as always, seems to have been up to something more exotic.

According to court documents, the head of security at Livermore (before he resigned last week) enjoyed an on–off relationship over many years with a Los Angeles socialite and Republican fundraiser, Katrina Leung, who worked for the FBI but is now in prison pending trial on charges that she was also operating as a double agent for Beijing. The FBI's nightmare is that her alleged operation may have enabled China to keep an eye on all of the agency's spying investigations — including those involving leaks from Livermore, Los Alamos and elsewhere — over two decades.

There's no sign that any scientists from Livermore were invited to the splendid garden parties that Leung liked to throw in one of Los Angeles' smartest neighbourhoods. It's not clear that she was particularly interested in the technicalities of nuclear weaponry: she was more of a person person, by all accounts.

Nonetheless, the queue of postdocs keen to further their careers at both Livermore and Los Alamos remains impressive. It isn't just the glamour that draws them, it is the money that Congress continues to pump into each establishment. During the Wen Ho Lee scandal, there was talk that this largesse might dry up; instead, it has multiplied. If, as seems increasingly certain, Livermore's most valuable innovations in the miniaturization of thermonuclear warheads were passed straight to Beijing in the 1980s, that's all the more reason, Congress seems to think, to innovate some more.