In the 1997 film The Peacemaker, a government scientist, played by Nicole Kidman, discovers that a Russian nuclear warhead has been stolen by terrorists, tracks it down on the streets of Manhattan, and finally defuses the device with a pocketknife. Those heroics must have brought a bit of cheer to a federal agency best known for its own narrow escape from annihilation: the Department of Energy. Kidman's character, the film explained, had acquired her nuclear expertise at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Stopping the proliferation and potential terrorist use of so-called weapons of mass destruction has become, during the Clinton years, one of the hottest topics in national security policy-and it is "the side of DOE I want to strengthen the most," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in an interview.
A former-New Mexico-congressman-turned-United Nations-ambassador who has been at Energy only since August, Richardson has created two new positions: 1) intelligence chief, which is held by the CIA's Lawrence H. Sanchez, who reports directly to the Secretary; and 2) personal adviser to the Secretary on counterterrorism, which is filled by the State Department's Randolph P. Eddy. (Rose E. Gottemoeller, the head of nonproliferation, is being promoted to assistant secretary rank, but she is not yet confirmed.)
But this more muscular headquarters team must win some bureaucratic turf wars-including one within its own notoriously disorganized department-before Richardson can truly show off what he calls "our crown jewels": the national laboratories.
The 27 labs predate the department, which was cobbled together under President Carter and has a reputation for institutional incoherence: "It is not well integrated," admitted former Deputy Energy Secretary Charles B. Curtis. "The thing that holds it mostly together is the national laboratory system."
For 50 years, that system's main mission was to design, build, and support America's atomic arsenal. In the post-Cold War world, however, the labs have increasingly applied their expertise to peaceful uses. Richardson's new adviser, Eddy, summed it up: "Being the people who designed and built the nuclear bombs, we are also the best people to take them apart."
At home, Energy maintains a range of rapid-response teams-teams composed almost entirely of scientists who already work full time at the labs and who volunteer to be on call to race to the scene of a nuclear accident or a terrorist threat, sometimes with as little as four hours' notice. Once a weapon is defused, it is also the labs that take custody of its radioactive core.
Overseas, once ex-Soviet weapons are dismantled under the U.S. military's Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the still-usable uranium or plutonium becomes Energy's problem-as do the raw materials that are not used for bombs. Since 1994, one of Energy's top priorities has been an aid program that helps the decaying ex-Soviet laboratories protect their vast stockpiles from theft. These efforts, too, draw on the labs, whose full-time weapons scientists take regular trips to the former Soviet Union to advise their counterparts. Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., just back from a trip to Russia, said the personal relationships between our lab scientists and their Russian counterparts are essential to U.S.-Russian cooperation: "They really come in contact with American scientists and understand what might be available in that kind of relationship."
Other federal agencies also use the labs. "I can pick up the phone, call someone at DOE, tell them what we need, and they can mobilize the technical people," said Joel Wit, a State Department official-now on leave at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.-who oversaw the (now unraveling) 1994 agreement to demilitarize North Korea's nuclear program. "The State Department isn't really capable of putting all that together."
Even "the Department of Defense does not handle the raw fissile material-the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium," said Jeff Starr, a Defense Department nonproliferation official. Starr helped organize 1994's Project Sapphire and this spring's Auburn Endeavour, in which Energy's Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory and the military retrieved poorly guarded uranium from Kazakhstan and Georgia before it could be stolen. And both the Defense Department and the U.S. Customs Service send former East Bloc border guards to Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., for technical courses on stopping nuclear smugglers.
In interviews with 15 staffers from five agencies and both chambers of Congress, all agreed that Energy's labs hold enormous nuclear expertise. Even Sen. Rodney D. Grams, R-Minn., who wrote the latest bill to dissolve Energy, praised the labs: "They do a good job, [and] we rely on them." The problem, Grams said, is the labs' billions in overhead costs.
"Their infrastructure exceeds the demand," agreed a House staffer, one of many government officials who think that Energy has too much of a good thing going. And when outside agencies turn to the labs for help, they pay the price, because the labs charge for their services-and steeply. "They are just outrageously expensive," said one former CIA official, who added that though he often contracts with the labs, "you certainly wince every time you do it."
With the nuclear buildup over, however, the labs are under intense pressure to find outside sources of cash. "Our salaries come from our contracts," explained Dr. William C. Cliff, who heads border guard training at the Pacific Northwest lab. "I have to put down a charge code for every hour of the day. ... Years ago, it was very stable, but in recent years, people have gotten laid off." With jobs at stake and with so many labs chasing the same contracts, the atmosphere, said Cliff, "is more competitive than you'd like." "There are times when the competition [between labs] improves the work of the laboratories; there are other times where it can be very destructive," admitted former Energy Deputy Secretary Curtis.
A senior administration official was not alone in uttering harsher words: "The laboratories are notorious for playing organizations at [Energy's] headquarters against each other." Nor are the labs reluctant, several sources said, to head straight to Capitol Hill.
"We're actually much better than we used to be, as far as the fighting amongst the labs," countered Sanchez, Energy's new intelligence chief. "I see a lot more now with the labs working with each other." One of Sanchez's roles will be to serve as a single point of contact for all outside agencies seeking to hire the labs for nuclear intelligence analysis, so he can consolidate redundant requests and send them to the most appropriate scientists-at several rival labs if need be.
Energy aims to impose such central control in all areas: "We need to manage the department better," admitted Richardson. "We need to make it very clear that DOE headquarters [is] running the show."
But some skeptics wonder whether the result of more control will just be more red tape. "Headquarters gets upset if you don't go through them," said the former CIA official, "and that gets to be a significant delay [which] can even kill a program."
Killing lab programs is the last thing Richardson wants. He envisions the labs as a national brain trust, devising high-tech defenses against weapons of mass destruction, not just in the nuclear field but "especially in chemical/biological terrorism."
Such statements raise eyebrows among experts and hackles among turf-conscious officials in other agencies. The same staff members who praise the labs' atomic expertise doubt their familiarity with poison gas and other plagues: "I generally would not call the labs on such subjects," said the former CIA official. Many officials, and not just in the Pentagon, regard defense against chemical and biological attack as the military's specialty-and Energy's much-publicized work in the field as a lab grab for cash.
But lab scientists argue that they have expertise in chemical dangers because the manufacture of nuclear weapons involves extremely hazardous chemicals. They also point out that labs have studied biology from the beginning, with (sometimes highly unethical) experiments on radiation effects on human beings. "They've been involved in biology for a long time," said professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard University, a biological warfare expert who praised the labs' work, "this is nothing new." Dr. Joshua Lederberg of Rockefeller University agreed: "Of course they are looking for work! . . . [But] they do bring enormous sophistication to state-of-the-art biodiagnostics."
It is on those diagnostics-sensors to sniff out germs and poison gas-that Richardson stakes his claim. "The early preparations for the Atlanta Olympics [in 1996] had revealed a pressing need" for such sensors, he said. "No one else in or out of the U.S. government has been able to deliver on this need, and we have, [because] we're the lead agency that has the technology and the research capability to do the job-and it's not mission creep, because technology is our expertise."
Richardson's counterterrorism adviser, Eddy, added that government will increasingly need such expertise to confront a "new face of terrorism," a threat potentially armed with nuclear, biological, chemical, and other wonder weapons that "require much more scientific, technical, medical response" than ordinary bombs and guns. To stop the spread of such weapons, to detect and defuse them, and-in the worst case-to clean up ground zero will require technical knowledge from departments as far afield from State and Defense as the Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, and Energy itself. At least for Energy, said Eddy, "this isn't a departure." With its intimate knowledge of nuclear weapons, Eddy insisted, "the Department of Energy is a national security agency, probably before it is anything else."
Convincing the rest of the world will not be easy. Energy "has been a stepchild of both Administration and congressional forces," said former Deputy Secretary Curtis. Many Energy staffers seem to feel underappreciated by a technologically illiterate political elite: Curtis was just one of three former DOE officials to independently call the department "a stepchild."
"Those characterizations are true," said Richardson. "We need within the Department of Energy to explain ourselves better, our purpose, to the American public. ... We need to throw our elbows around in the bureaucracy. . . . We need to convince the Congress [that Energy] needs more resources."
If Energy, the stepchild, sees itself as Cinderella (with Nicole Kidman playing the part), then the ambitious Richardson is cast as its Prince Charming. But in real life, said one former lab physicist, Kidman's character in the movie would have died of plutonium poisoning. Energy's new team hopes to have a happier ending.
NEXT STORY: White House weighs impeachment prospect