Washington

Lee: release from prison has prompted optimism.

Ever since March 1999, when allegations of Chinese spying at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico burst into public view, draconian security measures have been imposed at Los Alamos and other laboratories run by the US Department of Energy (DoE). But following the release of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born scientist accused of passing on nuclear secrets, on 13 September, scientists are cautiously optimistic that the measures — which have caused a crisis of morale at the labs (see Nature 407, 447–448; 2000) —will begin to be rolled back.

Last week, several developments suggested that the worst of the storm may be passing and that Washington is preparing to take steps to repair the damage caused by the espionage investigation. On 25 September, a report prepared by former Republican senator Howard Baker and former Democrat representative Lee Hamilton — two highly respected figures in Washington — denounced the impact of recent Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into the temporary disappearance of two computer hard drives at Los Alamos in May. “The most worrisome known consequence of the hard-drive incident is the devastating effect on the morale and productivity of the laboratory,” their report said.

Two days later, at a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) meeting on scientific communication and national security, Neal Lane, science adviser to President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that new security controls at the laboratories “have overshot the mark”. Lane said that scientists there “have been subjected to sensational allegations by the press and by Congress”, leading to “a siege mentality at the laboratories”.

The next day, negotiators from the two houses of Congress agreed a budget bill for the DoE that would restore the sum of money that the weapons labs' directors can spend on science at their own discretion from 4% to 6% of their budgets. The reduction of this fund a year ago had curtailed some of the basic, non-classified research that attracts top scientific talent to the laboratories (see Nature 402, 449; 1999).

But the increased bureaucracy resulting from the security clampdown is also causing problems at DoE labs that do not do classified research. “There are two distinct problems,” explains Wolfgang Panofsky, a leading physicist and veteran of the Los Alamos Manhattan Project, now at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. “The weapons laboratories are demoralized, and the rest of the DoE laboratories have all this paperwork and regulation to deal with.”

Energy department officials now say that they intend to work with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous agency established to run the weapons laboratories, to make a new start in their efforts to improve both security and morale. “We realize that the way things are now is not going to work,” says Marshall Combs, an adviser to energy secretary Bill Richardson. “This is going to be a new time. We are going to pull this off.”

Energy stall: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center does no classified work, but is still restricted. Credit: PETER MENZEL/SPL

But researchers and managers at the DoE labs warn that rebuilding morale will be difficult. Los Alamos suffered another blow last week, with reports that senior staff there, including the director John Browne, will be disciplined by the University of California for their role in the hard-drive incident. At the NAS meeting, ample evidence was presented of the toll the crisis is taking at its weapons labs as well as at the DoE's huge network of non-weapons labs.

Jonathan Dorfan, director of SLAC, which does no classified work at all, says the agency nonetheless faces “an unrelenting affront to the open research environment” characterized by “ill-conceived, one-size-fits-all directives”. In June 1999, he says, there were 11 security directives pertinent to SLAC; now there are 31, with 21 more in draft. According to Ned Sauthoff of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, one draft asks researchers to get permission before making an international phone call.

Dorfan wants laboratories such as SLAC exempted from the rules. But the case for exemption is complicated by the intermediate status of predominantly civilian laboratories such as Brookhaven in New York and Argonne in Illinois, which perform small amounts of classified work.

The best hope for a new beginning at the laboratory complex is perhaps the congressionally mandated NNSA, which has assumed responsibility for all of their nuclear weapons-related work. Will Happer, the Princeton University physicist and former assistant energy secretary, who organized last week's NAS meeting, predicts that the NNSA will prove effective — once it establishes autonomy on a par with that enjoyed, for example, by the National Institutes of Health within the health department. John Gordon — a former physics researcher and later a general in the Air Force — was appointed this summer as the NNSA's first administrator. Whereas other senior posts in the government will rotate after next month's elections, Gordon has been told by both political parties that he will serve for at least three years, ensuring continuity.