Forrest Wilder interviews Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group at UT

8 March 2004
originally published in issue, issue #5, page 3

Q: Why should a university, specifically the University of Texas, be wary or opposed to managing Los Alamos?

A: A university should be wary of managing Los Alamos because Los Alamos is basically unmanageable. Its location, its mission, and at this point its 60 years of tradition, make it really an incorrigible management problem. It's a very difficult problem. I don't think the University of Texas can manage Los Alamos; the University of California couldn't. One of the reasons for this is because the work that Los Alamos does cannot be rationalized in an ordinary management fashion. Los Alamos exists for its own sake to soak up the money. Basically, the more layers that you take off of it, the more you find incoherence in the way problems are defined and the way problems are resolved.

Q: And what do you say to the students who say, ‘Well not only does Los Alamos provide an essential service to national security, but its also going to be an opportunity for me individually as a scientist to be able to do valuable work?'

A: I don't see any connections between the University of Texas operating Los Alamos and there being jobs for faculty or students or grants or research collaborations here at the University of Texas. I think that those are open now. I think those are pursued in an entirely adventitious manner by Los Alamos, and Los Alamos makes relationships as it needs to, as the individual researchers and the groups want to. I don't think that people at the University of Texas would have any leg up.

Q: Would undergraduates see any benefits?

A: I don't think so. There's a lot of students who are there in the summertime, and it's conceivable that it might be easier for University of Texas students to be there, but I think that they draw those students from wherever they can get them. I think it's a competitive process; they want good people. They don't want people just from their home university.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the work that your organization does?

A: We basically are a disarmament and non-proliferation research and advocacy organization. We try to find out what is going on [at Los Alamos Labs], and we try to communicate that to decision makers and to the general public, Congress, journalists, and diplomats.

Q: Do you have community support?

A: Yes, that's all we have.

Q: What do you see for the future of Los Alamos, considering the trajectory that the Bush Administration has put us on, especially when it comes to our nuclear posture?

A: That's a good question. Whether the course that the United States has embarked upon is remotely sustainable is a very good question. Actually, the total amount being spent this year, in this coming fiscal year, on the military exceeds $600 billion, including the interest, the veterans, the benefits, the Department of Energy component, the Iraq war. We have a budget where the military consumes about 60% of the discretionary funds in the federal budget. In a way, University of Texas' talk about bidding on Los Alamos is kind of like jumping aboard the boat that's floating the highest, but none of this is fiscally sustainable. So whether there will be a day of reckoning at Los Alamos we don't know; what is possible is that someday there will be an accident so bad at Los Alamos that the community, the Congress, and whoever is operating the laboratory, will begin to turn away from it. At that point, there will be some sort of jar, but for the time being, the whole configuration is extremely stable. It just seems to go on and on. The faces change, the slogans change, administrations change, but there is no apparent change in the flow of money, in the general mediocre level of accomplishment, or the culture.

For more info: www.lasg.org