Mission Impossible: Nuclear Weapons, Mission Importance, and the U.S. Labs

(Thanks to PONI coordinator Mark Jansson for some valuable comments)

As the dust settles from the third installment of the Gang of 4 op-ed, the emphasis upon maintaining a strong deterrent as key “as we work to reduce nuclear weaponry and to realize the vision of a world without nuclear weapons” has provided a big enough cake for everyone to take their own slice. Apparently, the op-ed simultaneously rebuffs Kyl’s claims, “broke camp" with past op-eds and "headed back to the nuclear reservation,” emphasized the importance of confidence in deterrence, and had both good and questionable signs. As is oft the case with debates on nuclear issues, how you interpret the op-ed probably depends on your starting point and what sections you choose to quote.

The primary argument highlighted here that didn’t receive as much attention in other coverage of the op-ed is the emphasis upon the importance of ensuring recruiting the best and the brightest to ensure technical competency on nuclear weapons. Travis Sharp, now at CNAS, argued that reports of funding increases in FY2011 and some DoD money for the labs helps alleviate part of the concern but that worries about the mission importance are overstated. He argues:

JASON’s warning about perceived lack of mission importance, however, strikes me as a lesser concern. The nuclear laboratories and the U.S. military should communicate their concerns about morale up the chain of command, and the concerns should be taken into consideration because less-than-happy scientific and military personnel will not maximize U.S. national security. From an arms control perspective, I would add that innovative, technically rigorous, science-based initiatives contribute mightily to nonproliferation, and you are certainly not going to get Teh Scyense from Beltway hacks like yours truly. However, let’s make one thing absolutely clear. While people are an invaluable part of the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, the FEELINGS of the nuclear bureaucracy should not be the determinative factor when formulating U.S. nuclear weapons policy. In response to JASON’s concern about the perceived lack of mission importance, let me just say that I’m so sorry the Cold War had to end and nuclear weapons work became so much less interesting and such an unstable career path. We should definitely forget about President Obama’s plan to reduce unnecessary nuclear weapons so that it doesn’t scare away the best and brightest lab workers. The job security of U.S. governmental personnel should be the primary driver of U.S. foreign policy, after all. Lest we forget, the commander in chief throws the signs, and the nuclear laboratories and the U.S. military hook up the beats with clout – regardless of how they feel they are progressing on their self-actualization charts. When it comes to determining U.S. nuclear weapons policy, sustaining the morale of governmental personnel in the nuclear complex must not be permitted to trump the primary objective of protecting the American people from the threat posed by nuclear weapons. [emphasis in original]
 

Sharp raises a few important questions about what it means to have a suitable sense of mission and purpose at the laboratories that desereve further examination.  There are three major points to emphasize:

1. Mission importance is a big deal

The problems facing the weapons labs, Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia, are somewhat parallel to the problem facing U.S. nuclear weapons policy and strategy. During the Cold War, the answer was pretty clear: build nuclear weapons as fast as possible to prevent strategic imbalance with the Soviets. For the weapons labs, their purpose was to design, test, weaponize, and certify (thermo)nuclear warheads, as explained by one of the forthcoming papers in the 2009 PONI Conference Series Publications.

Fast forward a couple decades and the answers are much less clear. With the reduced role (and numbers) of nuclear weapons and a testing moratorium in-place, the mission of the laboratories has evolved to include doing science with a wide range of commercial and national security applications. Jobs have been cut and more cuts are planned (20% by the year 2030 according to the NNSA’s complex transformation plan). The time for change to the supporting infrastructure has no-doubt arrived and I don’t think anyone is missing that point.

At the same time, President Obama has been clear that the United States will maintain a “safe, secure, and effective arsenal” “as long as these weapons exist.” Achieving a world free of nuclear weapons is a worthy goal, but most agree that we need nuclear weapons today, which means they need to be scientifically safe, secure, and effective. (How many we need and for how long will remain hotly contested questions.) The problem in squaring these two somewhat opposing objectives is that all of the technical and organizational currents moving against scientific efforts to maintain the arsenal combine to undermine the intrinsic appeal that working on nuclear weapons provides an interesting and valuable form of science that serves a significant benefit to national security.

The point that Gang of Four were making relates to things such a stable funding for programs, job security for young professionals, an efficient organizational structure and effective management system, and, yes, a sense that the work that they are doing is meaningful. The important thing here is that nuclear security sciences at the laboratories are leveraged off of the weapons program. According to the ones I’ve talked to, you can’t do the nonproliferation and nuclear security work without a weapons program and knowledge of how nuclear weapons work.
 

That’s why the Gang of 4 stated that

Maintaining high confidence in our nuclear arsenal . . . is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in nonproliferation, risk reduction, and arms reduction goals. By providing for the long-term investments required, we also strengthen trust and confidence in our technical capabilities to take the essential steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers throughout the globe. These steps include preventing proliferation and preventing nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material from getting into dangerous hands.
 

As within any policy decision, vested bureaucratic interests inevitably play a role. They always do. It is not the case, however, that the arguments in favor can be chalked up to the “FEELINGS of the nuclear bureaucracy,” which is a rather ambiguous term. Over the past year in particular, “nuclear bureaucracy” is a phrase that seems to have come to create a monolithic pro-nuclear weapons boogeyman. It has been used to refer to anyone ranging from OSD Policy and the Joint Staff to the “nuclear laboratories, the defense contractors, the ideologues.”  It’s not that there’s no such thing as a nuclear bureaucracy (the NNSA is just that). But it’s not fair to assert that arguments made against, for example, deep cuts in the stockpile must necessarily be disingenuous tactics to protect a status quo. In-fact, it would be inaccurate to directly correlate something like stockpile size with the size or mental health of the workforce needed to sustain it – just as it would be inaccurate to make conducting nuclear tests resulting in an explosive yield the sine qua non of “interesting work” at the labs. The point is that given the relationship between the weapons program and other vital nuclear security sciences, arguments expressing concern about the state of the intellectual infrastructure may be doing so for good reasons.

The concern about mission importance heading into the future is not that we are trying to preserve outdated jobs not with the times. Rather, it is about trying to recruit the kids coming out of college and graduate school in the field of science to choose to work on nuclear weapons science. The Stimson Center report Leveraging Science for Security explains:

The backbone of our deterrent is the scientific base at our nuclear weapons Laboratories.
In order to recruit, train, and retain young, talented scientists, our political leaders must articulate a vision for the Laboratories that translates into meaningful work – a mission that young scientists can embrace and to which they will dedicate their professional lives.
 

Likewise, Linton Brooks, head of the nuclear weapons complex during a portion of the Bush administration, explains in Eyes of the Experts:

None of the steps implied by the discussion so far will succeed over the long term without support from senior leadership, including the President and the Secretaries of Defense and Energy. As a recent Defense Science Board report noted:
In both the short and long term, retention of the right caliber technical staff for the mission will depend significantly on staff perception of the national importance of the mission and the amount of time they are allowed to spend on the technical aspects of the mission. A number of staff interviewed perceived the nuclear weapons enterprise as a declining industry. [emphasis in original]7
The Infrastructure EWG strongly endorses this view, which is also one of the fundamental conclusions of the recent Schlesinger panel.

A number of bipartisan, high-level reports, commissions, and articles, including the Gang of 4, have pointed to the urgent personnel problem facing the labs. On the flip side, there have been surprisingly few, if any, major reports to the contrary.

2.  The issue is more than the Benjamins

Rumors of FY11 budget increases and the ability to “communicate their concerns about morale up the chain of command” won’t work when there are chain of command issues that need to be sorted out in the first place. The point here is that it takes more than the throwing money at the issue in order for the scientists and engineers at the labs to “hook up the beats with clout,” when the signal is thrown by the President – no matter what that signal might be.

The purported 10% budget increase for FY11 will help matters, but only so much. It does little to address the mission problem, explained above, or the morale problem. For example, the article points out Chu’s December letter is silent on the question of new facilities, an expensive but needed upgrade from some of the decrepit facilities being used since the Manhattan project. More to the point, this budget increase is only one very small step in creating the “program stability” called for in the JASON’s report. Budgets have been on the decline for a while and so the first plus-up in years likely will not be sufficient to cultivate a sense that whatever the “Stockpile Management Program” comes to entail will be here to stay for the long haul (see RRW).

The morale concerns will also be much tougher to address than simply relaying concerns up the ladder. For starters, there is discontent among the staff at the national laboratories about the leadership performance of the management teams at the labs and at NNSA. Under the government owned, contractor operated (GOCO) model the thick bureaucratic layer of management has been problematic and, by some accounts, precipitated layoffs of large numbers of employees to clear the way for the hiring of bureaucratic managers. There is indeed a problem with a nuclear bureaucracy that inhibits scientists and engineers from hooking up the best possible beats, But it is important not to (a) confuse that issue with mere bureaucratic resistance to change and (b) attribute policy disagreements to dishonest haggling by a monolithic nuclear bureaucracy out to protect its own interests. Consider a December 2009 post on the “LANL: the Rest of the Story,” a fascinating, albeit less than optimistic, blog about lab culture at LANL.  Reviewing survey results it finds: 

Let's cut to the quick. Here are the key percentages that register in this document as "Agree"...
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The leadership team is working together to advance the Laboratory mission. : 37.75 %

Career opportunities at the Laboratory are good. : 33.73 %

Laboratory managers set good examples. : 27.58%

I have confidence in the leadership of the Laboratory. : 28.69 %

The morale of my co-workers is good. : 27.75 %

Laboratory managers consult employees about decisions that affect them. : 25.42 %

The Laboratory rewards those who contribute most. : 23.57 %

I believe that action will be taken on the results of this survey. : 17.30 %
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In most organizations, abysmal ratings like this would result the the sudden resignation of the executive management. It indicates a total failure of leadership and severe lack of trust of the employees in their top management team. However, with LANS you can be almost certain that there will be no real outcome for their poor leadership skills. PBIs, baby! That's all that matters to NNSA.

In other words, the chain of command is broken. Telling your boss he or she is not getting the job done is real tough and the likelihood they report that up the chain with enthusiasm is low. The broken chain of command also does not stop with the labs. As explained the Stimson Task Force, the laboratory leadership also suffers from a lack of guidance from the top:

The Labs require greater strategic guidance from NNSA (or their primary government sponsor) without unnecessarily curtailing their management autonomy and operational flexibility. The Laboratories need top-down coordination and political consensus in order to achieve their mission. Currently, imposed constraints and bureaucracy are unmanageable for Laboratory leadership. Simultaneously, the federal government has failed to define the Laboratories’ mission effectively.

All of these disconnects beg an even more fundamental question: what is the role of the nuclear weapons labs in the 21st century? During the Cold War, the weapons labs were nukes as money poured in to rapidly build the arsenal. This robust funding allowed for high risk, high reward research on difficult issues that provided additional national security benefits. These days? Not as much. As Harold Smith noted in Eyes of the Experts:

In the days when nuclear weapons were being designed and tested in a near-continuous process, the laboratories operated under a few, very large contracts, which at the margin, supported WFO (Work for Others) in areas of national interest at relatively low cost to the sponsors. Such work was permitted but not encouraged. Those days are gone. Now, the concept—even the title—of WFO no longer applies. If the weapons laboratories are to become national laboratories, all sponsors must pay their share of the total costs. There should be no work at the margin and there should be no “others”—all sponsors will have to be treated equally.

As the weapons labs suffer from the double whammy of drastically reducing the Cold War nuclear mission and parts of government like DoD and the IC supporting the labs by “buying wine by the glass instead of the bottle,” there remain tough questions to answer about how to define a role for the nuclear weapons labs in 21st century national security. Suggestions have been made to try to broaden the labs to be “national security labs” which can encompass cousin programs like forensics. This can be a start but the Stimson Center Task force drove home why retaining the core competency of nuclear weapons is critical to 21st century national security

Nuclear weapons competence – often obliquely referred to as “core competence” of the nuclear weapons laboratories – remains a national security necessity. Whether or not one believes that nuclear disarmament is desirable or feasible, a strong cadre of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers is required well into the foreseeable future as a hedge against strategic surprise as well as to ensure, at a minimum, the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile. In the past, the core competencies of the US nuclear weapons program have provided a set of capabilities that have been applied to national security challenges going far beyond the design, engineering and development of nuclear weapons. For example, the skills developed under the weapons program have been applied to the areas of nonproliferation, threat reduction, and nuclear counterterrorism, including stabilization, safety assurance, and assessment of terrorist nuclear devices, and especially nuclear forensics. These capabilities are used to inform intelligence assessments about foreign nuclear programs and to develop technologies and systems that facilitate nuclear material detection and address broader problems in intelligence collection. Many of these skills have also been applied to problems confronted by the Pentagon, most recently with IEDs, where the Laboratories and the NTS have performed critical roles. Unfortunately, maintaining such competence has become an increasingly difficult task for a variety of political and other reasons. As indicated by the DSB study cited above, a key concern for the immediate future is that the core nuclear weapons program does not provide the necessary opportunities for exercising critical competencies and keeping them honed. In addition, the US is not recruiting and training the next generation of talent in these core areas. [emphasis mine]
 

3. Nuclear weapons science has to viewed as part of the Prague agenda, not in opposition to it.
 

The argument in favor of nuclear weapons science is not  based on "progressing on their self-actualization charts" or job security driving national security.  Quite the opposite.   The problems facing the intellectual infrastructure, which include morale and job security, are detrimental to national security.  This is true in at least three ways.

First, core competency is critical to maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal on the decades long road to abolition. The road to abolition cannot be achieved by simply letting nuclear weapons rot out of existence. They serve a valuable deterrent and extended deterrent function that play a valuable role in national security and nonproliferation.  
 

Second, core competency enhances the Prague agenda by allowing reductions. As the Gang of 4 noted in their recent op-ed:

Maintaining high confidence in our nuclear arsenal is critical as the number of these weapons goes down. It is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in nonproliferation, risk reduction, and arms reduction goals.

Part of the reason that the U.S. retains so many nuclear weapons is to maintain a hedge against technical or geopolitical surprise. Ensuring the highest level of confidence in our weapons allows us to make larger reductions faster and will also probably have benefits for other nonproliferation agenda items like allaying arsenal fears in debates about the CTBT ratification.

Third, the science base produced by core competency is vital to dealing with nonproliferation and disarmament challenges. As noted above, the skills developed by working on nuclear weapons have provided immeasurable benefits to related fields like nuclear forensics, detection, and safety, to name a few.  It is important to note that the inverse of this relationship, investment in "cousin" programs to help maintain the arsenal, does not work.   Nuclear weapons core competancy is a unique science that can only be attained by actually working on the weapon through the entire cycle. Furthermore, investment in core competency will also play a vital role in beginning to some of the innumerable challenges related to moving toward a world without nuclear weapons.  There are many paths on the way to zero and the challenge is figuring out the best way there, if there is one.   Some ways are worse than others and so ignoring the role of how the labs function may result in some nuclear science babies being thrown out with the nuclear weapons bathwater. Nuclear weapons science will be critical to tackle issues like warhead verification which is key on issues ranging from trying to solve the TNW problem all the way down to zero.  The Gang of 4 explains that:

This scientific capability is equally important to the long-term goal of achieving and maintaining a world free of nuclear weapons—with all the attendant expertise on verification, detection, prevention and enforcement that is required.

There will continue to be debates about how to best calibrate the requirements for a safe, secure, and effective arsenal with trying to shore up the necessary international cooperation to tackle nonproliferation challenges but the Gang of 4 made sure to note: 

If we are to succeed in avoiding these dangers, increased international cooperation is vital. As we work to build this cooperation, our friends and allies, as well as our adversaries, will take note of our own actions in the nuclear arena. Providing for this nation's defense will always take precedence over all other priorities.
 

Retaining the core competancy of our nuclear weapons science is an important national security priority in both the short and long term as the United States adapts to the current geopolitical environment and tries to move toward a world without nuclear weapons.  It is a multi-faceted problem that cannot be whisked away by adding a small budget increase next fiscal year.  The United States needs to figure out at the top-levels how it wants to define the mission of the weapons laboratories in the 21st century and how it will provide the program stability and mission importance needed to attract the best and brightest to work on nuclear weapons science.