THE venerable seat of nuclear knowledge in the US has been at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the desert hills of New Mexico ever since the first atomic bomb was developed there in the 1940s. But the laboratory is now in hot water. Last year it was revealed that lab workers had been charged with dipping into the ample funds at the laboratory.
One employee allegedly tried to use lab funds to buy a new car. Some other staff members are accused of using credit cards issued to them to buy what was claimed to be essential research items, which turned out to be lawn mowers, air conditioners and kits for picking locks.
Congress has now taken Los Alamos to task. Outraged members of Congress (and wrath hath no equal to a representative who, with the lights on and cameras recording every word, has caught government workers with their hands in the taxpayer鈥檚 pocket) recently heard from investigators who discovered what they called a 鈥渃ulture鈥� of theft at Los Alamos. Managers at the lab had hired those investigators to investigate rumours of theft, but then fired them in short order after they turned up evidence that confirmed it.
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Five heads have rolled at Los Alamos already, but the stain is creeping upwards to the University of California, which has run the lab for over half a century. There are suggestions that the 60-year tenure has turned into a sinecure. University officials are working overtime to assure that a new broom has swept Los Alamos clean. But the University of California also runs the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the other jewel in the nation鈥檚 nuclear crown. Some people in Congress want to send in the investigators to sniff around there as well. The government pays the university billions of dollars a year to run the labs. It is no longer easy money.
So far, the Department of Energy has been able to stay well clear of the fray, after all the university was supposed to take care of business.
NOBODY plays the blame game better than the US Congress, but sometimes caution is needed. The first few weeks after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, it would have been unseemly to ask NASA officials questions that were too pointed. They had just suffered a death in the family, as virtually everyone in the space agency and the national media described it, and even Congress knows better than to berate the bereaved.
But it couldn鈥檛 last. By the end of February, there was Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner of New York practically shouting at NASA Administrator Sean O鈥橩eefe, asking how he could not have known about emails from NASA engineers, written while Columbia was in orbit, warning that exploding tyres could spell doom for the shuttle.
Weiner was, of course, untroubled by the fact that the authors of the memos insisted even as they were writing them that the memos were only intended as 鈥渨hat if鈥� scenarios, and did not suggest that the tyres would explode.
O鈥橩eefe, who remained remarkably calm during the verbal assault, also pointed out that it was impossible to read all of the thousands of emails that were written by NASA employees about the shuttle, and these had been read by programme managers within the agency, who did not feel they deserved O鈥橩eefe鈥檚 attention.
Unfortunately, when you鈥檙e playing the blame game details can be largely irrelevant.
