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By Forrest Wilder

This article originally appeared in the Dallas Peace Times

As the 60th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, the University of Texas is trying to get a piece of the Manhattan Project's legacy. UT has teamed up with Lockheed-Martin Corp, the world's #1 defense contractor, to submit a bid to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, the United States' principal nuclear weapons lab and architect of 80 percent of the nukes ever built in the U.S.

With a Texan in the White House and a nuclear weapons complex both searching for an identity and anticipating a renaissance, UT is hitching its carriage to a nuclear future for better or worse.

For over 60 years, the University of California (UC) has been in charge of running Los Alamos, located in northern New Mexico, for the Department of Energy. The alliance between the nation's war machine and the premier public university system has always been a strange and uneasy alliance. What the nuclear establishment gets is clear: access to the best and brightest scientific minds and "a fig leaf of respectability" for a WMD facility, as Tara Dorabji of Tri-Valley CARES, a California-based nuclear watchdog, puts it.

The University of California, on the other hand, has never been able to say for sure how it benefits from Los Alamos. What exactly is the utility in assuming responsibility for a nuclear weapons lab plagued with enormous security, safety, environmental, and management problems? Classified material has gone missing; mock terror drills in the late 90s demonstrated that Los Alamos' plutonium and uranium is vulnerable to theft; and an estimated 17.5 million cubic feet of hazardous and radioactive waste sit at Los Alamos, posing a threat to groundwater and the Rio Grande. Fed up with interminable breaches of security, Pete Nanos, the director of Los Alamos, shut the lab down for six months in 2004 at a cost to taxpayers of up to $367 million. "Los Alamos is deeply troubled," say Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group. "Only about, I would say, 10 percent of the problems have been written about in the papers."

While the press loves an occasional juicy scandal, the government abhors them. So, now the Department of Energy is shopping for a new manager for Los Alamo s. Proposals were due July 19th and a new management team will be picked by December 1. The way the Request for Proposals is written basically forces a university-corporate team to take over. UC has chosen Bechtel, a global engineering and construction firm with enormous contracts to rebuild Iraq, as its corporate partner. UT has thrown its hat into the ring with Lockheed as well as Fluor Corp, an engineering company that recently relocated to Texas, and CH2M Hill, the company in charge of handling clean-up at the retired Rocky Flats, Colorado plutonium facility.

Missing from the debate about how to manage Los Alamos is the question of should Los Alamos be managed, especially by a university with a purported commitment to the public interest and corporations with vested interests in perpetuating weapons. Few outside of the peace community ask the question: Is it morally or ethically sound for a university to be complicit in building weapons of mass destruction, especially in a time when the risk of nuclear proliferation is dire and the U.S. is calling on other nations to abandon their nuclear ambitions? "I have a date when I think the [University of California] should have gotten out of the nuclear weapons business," says Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "December, 1944 - when it was discovered that Germany did not have the Bomb."

UT expresses few, if any, qualms about assuming responsibilities at Los Alamos. Officials with the UT System insist that Lockheed will tackle the thorny management and security issues while UT will focus on the "science" at Los Alamos. UT System Chancellor Mark Yudof and UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner have publicly pointed to UT's partnership with Lockheed at Sandia National Laboratory, the facility in Albuquerque run by Lockheed that makes the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons, as a "model" for how Lockheed and UT would run Los Alamos. In April of this year, UT and Sandia signed a deal whereby the University would oversee the peer-review process at Sandia, collaborate in certain program areas, and send professors to teach classes at the lab. Paul Robinson, who stepped down as CEO of Sandia to head the UT-Lockheed bid for Los Alamos, has written that the Sandia arrangement is a n "academic/industrial partnership" that "should be the driving force to 'reengineer' Los Alamos…" Despite the talk of "re-engineering" Los Alamos, the fundamental mission of the lab remains the same: the continuance of the nation's enormous nuclear stockpile.

Lab proponents like to play up the basic science that is conducted at Los Alamos in order to downplay the 80-90 percent of the budget that goes towards nuclear weapons-related work. "[Los Alamos] is not a big Shangri-la, unless it's plutonium," Greg Mello says to dispel the notion that UT scientists and students would have access to cutting-edge research should the University win the contract. In fact, the University is bidding for Los Alamos at a time when nuclear weapons are once again rising to the forefront of U.S. military policy.

The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review set the tone by strengthening the stance that the U.S. reserves the right to use nukes against other countries even if they are non-nuclear states; encouraging the development of new nuclear weapons, such as nuclear-tipped "bunker-busters"; expanding the facilities necessary for nuclear weapons production; and reducing the time it would take to resume nuclear testing. The Bush administration has repeatedly called on Congress to fund programs to carry out this wide-scale escalation of the nuclear weapons complex. Much of the requested funding would flow to the national laboratories and the companies that thrive off of them. Luckily, Congress has not been keen on Bush's Strangelovian plans, refusing to fund most of the administration's programs. Nonetheless, leaders at Los Alamos and the other labs have wholeheartedly endorsed a new, expanded role for nuclear weapons. Recently, a task force composed of ex-lab officials and members of the private sector recommended that the nuclear weapons complex be radically overhauled to make way for newer, more reliable warheads. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "The work of the weapons complex would be driven more by engineering and rigorous cost reduction than by an interchange of scientific ideas conducted in a university-like setting…" The subtext of this report can be read to mean a privatization of the nuclear weapons regime in which a corporation such as Lockheed runs the show while universities play a subservient role as recruiter and overseer of the scientific and engineering expertise necessary to produce the new bombs.

"I think the [Los Alamos bid] is part of the privatization of the military-industrial-complex," says Jackie Cabasso of the Western States Legal Foundation. She points out that the Department of Energy's request for proposals is written to encourage a defense company to assume most of the management duties. But Cabasso doesn't have time for parsing who would best oversee Los Alamos. "The question for me is not who's managing Auschwitz, but should Auschwitz exist."