Tri-Valley CAREs

Friday, January 05, 2007  
Nation's nuclear lab chief loses job

By: Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Published In: San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/05/MNGSKND93U1.DTL

SUBTITLE: Linton Brooks asked to resign over security and management issues



The head of the nation's nuclear weapons agency, who tried last year to implement several dramatic reforms in security and safety at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, has been fired following security breakdowns at different federal facilities, including a nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico.



Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation's nuclear weapons labs for the U.S. Energy Department, said in a statement Thursday he would leave the job within two to three weeks.



Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told reporters Thursday the nuclear agency under Brooks had not adequately corrected security problems: "I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA." He said an acting head of the agency will be named soon.

Brooks, a former ambassador and arms-control negotiator who was appointed to the post in May 2003, said Bodman asked for his resignation because of a number of management issues, the most recent of which was a security breach at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.



In October, classified nuclear-related documents were discovered at the home of a former Los Alamos lab employee during a drug raid. In June, Bodman reprimanded Brooks for failing to report an incident at an Energy Department office in Albuquerque, where Social Security numbers and computerized personnel records of 1,500 staffers were stolen.

In a media statement, Brooks -- who has been a harsh critic of safety hazards at the Lawrence Livermore lab -- acknowledged that he has been unable to prevent the kinds of management problems that led to the creation of the NNSA in the first place.



"This is not a decision that I would have preferred," Brooks said, "but it was made by a thoughtful and honorable man and is based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service."

Brooks attracted attention in the Bay Area last year for his efforts to shake up security and sloppy safety practices at the Livermore lab.



In February, Brooks blasted lab management after officials admitted that several contract workers and lab staff had accidentally inhaled plutonium into their noses. In a letter to the lab's then-chief, Brooks said the incident exposed "the need for significant improvement in (the lab's) nuclear safety culture ... and casts significant doubt on the Laboratory's ability to effectively analyze and correct performance problems."

That same month, at a lab news conference, Brooks gained media attention when he unveiled a new security measure at the lab: Gatling guns, which are high-powered, multibarreled machine guns intended to repel attackers.

Soon afterward, a Brooks subordinate told Congress that all nuclear-weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium would be shipped out of Lawrence Livermore lab to another site by 2014. Washington insiders say the new site is likely to be in another state, perhaps New Mexico or Nevada. Anti-nuclear activists have often charged that Livermore's cache of hundreds of pounds of plutonium -- the explosive material in nuclear bombs -- is a threat to the surrounding suburban community.



Even so, Brooks' actions weren't enough to satisfy his critics, even among anti-nuclear activists who thought he wasn't trying hard enough to contain the growth of the nuclear weapons arsenal.



His dismissal "is a warranted and positive development," said veteran anti-nuclear weapons activist Marylia Kelley, head of Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) in Livermore.



"I am hopeful that Linton Brooks' resignation will mean, one, that (the Energy Department and its nuclear weapons division) will finally, after all these years, respond appropriately to the security dangers that exist not only at Los Alamos lab but also at Lawrence Livermore and throughout the NNSA complex, and, two, that the next NNSA administrator will be less intent on developing new nuclear weapons and more focused on global nuclear nonproliferation -- a task that requires U.S. restraint in its own nuclear development and real leadership internationally to accomplish," Kelley said in an e-mail.



Another leading critic of the weapons labs, Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, told The Chronicle that Brooks should go because "he wasn't candid with his boss (Bodman), and he wasn't candid with Congress."

Brooks, he noted, told the nuclear weapons lab directors "they should go all out to explore new warhead concepts" while telling the House Appropriations Committee "quite a different story, promising great restraint in pursuing new warhead concepts."



Kinder words came from Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, who issued a short statement saying, "Ambassador Brooks has served the nuclear complexes and the nation admirably."



The Associated Press contributed to this report. E-mail Keay Davidson at [email protected].

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