The Cold War's End at the Los Alamos National Laboratory

WAYS OF KNOWING ABOUT WEAPONS: THE COLD WAR'S END AT THE LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY BY LAURA AGNES MCNAMARA B.S., Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1991 M.A., Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1994 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Anthropology The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2001 WAYS OF KNOWING ABOUT WEAPONS: THE COLD WAR’S END AT THE LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORTORY By Laura Agnes McNamara B.S., Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1991 M.A., Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1994 Ph.D., Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 2001 Dr. Marta M. Weigle, Department of Anthropology Committee Chair ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses questions of knowledge, identity, scientific activity and social reproduction among nuclear weapons experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Throughout the Cold War, the laboratory’s weapons community produced an enormous body of knowledge about nuclear weapons through engaging iteratively in an experimental cycle that consisted of designing, building and testing experimental nuclear explosives. This design and test cycle also fulfilled critical social functions, providing a site for the reproduction of skills and understandings in novice weaponeers as well as an engine for the ongoing integration of the many “ways of knowing” that existed in the laboratory. However, Congressional legislation halted the design and test cycle in 1992, and since that time, the laboratory has neither designed new nuclear devices nor tested any existing ones. Without the design and test cycle, senior weapons experts frequently express concern that the laboratory is on the verge of losing critical skills, understandings and abilities necessary to make judgments about the state of the stockpile. This dissertation explores the “knowledge loss” problem at Los Alamos, drawing on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, participant observation, and archival research conducted among weapons experts between August of 1997 and April of 2000. I explore learning as social process that takes place through engagement with other people, and with various aspects of the physical world, within locally meaningful settings – in this case, a nuclear weapons laboratory. In doing so, I argue that learning must be understood as a process of identity formation through which unknowing, unschooled novices gradually come to understand themselves as contributing, knowing members of a particular community of practice – in this case, nuclear weapons experts. With this comes far more than just a set of weapons-related skills. As people engage in the laboratory’s activities, they come to understand their work as meaningful in relation to larger moral, social, and political bodies of knowledge – about the moral rightness of nuclear deterrence to prevent war, for example, or the social and political position of the United States vis-à-vis other nations. In that sense, the activity settings through which people learn how to move fluently through the world of weaponeering – in security training sessions, in working with high explosive assemblies, as novice weapon designers – are properly understood as the mechanisms through which the larger weapons community and its many interrelated ways of knowing about weapons – technical, moral, social, political – are reproduced. Anthropologists, you miss a chance By examining not what makes A warhead scientist salivate. Homo Los Alamos! How deservedly unique! - Don Eduardo de Los Alamos (Edward B. Grothus) Local resident and antinuclear activist, Los Alamos, NM CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I did not begin my doctoral fieldwork intending to write an ethnography of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers. When I arrived at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the summer of 1997, I knew a great deal about the town of Los Alamos, a little about the organization, and nearly nothing about nuclear weapons. Like most anthropologists, I came to my field site prepared to study the people in its margins, not at its center: I went to the laboratory to explore the formation of social networks among women and minority scientists, to see how they built supportive, career enhancing mentoring relationships in the traditionally white, masculine domains of physics and engineering, in a weapons laboratory whose management structure was replete with men, not women. However, after several months at my field site I found a more compelling topic: the fear, widely shared among many staff members, that crucial skills and understandings, local “ways of knowing” about nuclear weapons, might be disappearing. By the time I began my fieldwork, knowledge loss had been a major concern at Los Alamos since the late 1980s, when political trends at the end of the Cold War began to impact the laboratory’s research environment. Throughout the Cold War, Los Alamos was the nation’s flagship nuclear weapons research and development laboratory, one of three such facilities owned by the United States Department of Energy (DOE). Los 1 Alamos and its sister design laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, have historically been responsible for designing and certifying prototype nuclear explosives for the United States’ nuclear stockpile. Staff at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque have acted as an engineering bridge between Livermore and Los Alamos and the Department of Defense to ensure that the DOE’s nuclear explosives are properly fitted to the DOD’s missiles and bombs. Throughout the Cold War, the three laboratories designed, built and tested nuclear explosives in support of the nation’s nuclear deterrent, certifying that weapons in the stockpile were safe to handle, secure from terrorist detonation, and would work reliably when required to do so. For nearly fifty years, weapons experts at Los Alamos fulfilled this weapons research and development mission through an iterative experimental process that consisted of conceptualizing prototype nuclear explosives, refining these concepts through computer simulations and high-explosive experiments, and testing the prototype at the United States nuclear proving ground, the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Between 1945 and 1992, the weapons community at Los Alamos engaged in hundreds of iterations of this “design and test cycle” in the course of developing and certifying nuclear explosives for insertion in bombs and missiles in the American nuclear stockpile. Testing drove the ongoing expansion of the laboratory’s scientific and engineering knowledge base, providing a foundation of expertise for policy decisions in fields from strategic defense to arms control. In addition, the experimental process provided a site for novice weaponeers to engage in the specific test-related problems and activities, so they could gain expertise in the arcana of nuclear weapons research. 2 Mission Crisis However, between 1988 and 1993, a rapid series of political put the laboratory’s weapons mission in jeopardy. The crisis began in the late 1980s, when revelations of environmental mismanagement at DOE materials production and processing facilities eroded public support for continued investment in nuclear weapons (Fehner and Holl 1994, Bartimus and McCartney 1991: 192-195). At the same time, the Soviet Union was rapidly dissolving, leaving the United States unchallenged as a military superpower. In combination with a politically powerful antinuclear movement in the United States and Europe, these trends put both the Bush administration and Congress under intense domestic pressure to cut military spending and end the arms race. After declaring an end to the Cold War in November of 1990, President Bush pursued a series of unilateral arms withdrawals as well as the Strategic Arms Reduction (START I and II) negotiations, which called for bilateral reductions in strategic weapons. In addition, he cancelled several new orders for new nuclear weapons systems, effectively placing a moratorium on design activities at Los Alamos. Spurred by the rapid deflation of the arms race, Congress soon followed with the bipartisan Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment (or “Hatfield amendment”) to the fiscal 1993 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, the legislation that provides funding to the Department of Energy. Named for its sponsoring senators, the Hatfield amendment required a temporary nine-month moratorium on all nuclear tests and called for the President to pursue negotiations towards a CTBT by 1996. Within a few short months, then, scientists and engineers at Los Alamos found their expensive experiments quite 3 literally suspended, left hanging above the dry desert floor of the NTS as funding for the testing program evaporated. If the United States had permanently renounced nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, the test moratorium might well have marked the end of the laboratory’s weapons mission. Indeed, by the time the Clinton administration came into office, laboratory officials were quite concerned about the institution’s future, given the Clinton administration’s strong opposition to nuclear testing and its definition of national security as a matter of economic competitiveness rather than military might. Anticipating more changes in defense policy, laboratory managers developed an aggressive post-Cold War mission marketing strategy, identifying a swath of politically popular social issues – including environmental degradation, energy, economic competitiveness,

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