Atomic lab chief feels power of blog

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, N.M., the U.S. government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defences of Nanos' management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

"Some here will celebrate that they have been able to run the sheriff out of Dodge," Gary Stradling, a veteran Los Alamos scientist who is a staunch defender of Nanos, wrote Tuesday on the blog.

"It might be a good idea," he added, "to shut down the celebration and form a work party to clean up Dodge City, because the new sheriff will if we do not.''

The blogging comes at a delicate moment in the 60-year history of Los Alamos. The University of California, which has helped run the lab for the federal government since the days of the Manhattan Project, faces close scrutiny in Washington as to whether its contract should be renewed. And resignations and fears of an exodus have recently roiled the waters. Some analysts believe that now, given the public outcry, the university will have to abandon Nanos in order to make a tenable bid to keep its contract.

Nanos would not comment. A spokesman for Los Alamos, Kevin Roark, said false rumours of the director's resignation had circulated for months. Roark added Nanos was extraordinarily proud of what he had accomplished at Los Alamos, which employs 14,000 people on an annual budget of $2.2 billion. He called the vitriolic blogging unrepresentative of the majority of employees and said it often had the tone of a sophomoric Halloween prank.

"Everybody, I think, was a little surprised at how mean it got," Roark said.

Several outside experts said that the director's quick departure was inevitable and that the blog's attacks were playing a significant role.

"Nanos is leaving," said Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a private organization in Albuquerque that monitors weapons laboratories. "The blog changed the climate, giving people an outlet they didn't have before.''

Blogs seem to be everywhere. But this one is unusual, in that the Los Alamos National Laboratory, isolated in the mountains of New Mexico, has a long history of maintaining the highest level of federal secrecy. The lab's very existence was once classified. Today, barbed wire rings many of its buildings, federal agents monitor its communications, and its employees are constantly reminded that loose lips sink ships.

The blog (http://www.lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com) went public in January and since then has registered more than 100,000 visits, with over half a million pages viewed and more than 5,000 comments. Discussions run on a variety of topics, from the sanctity of retirement benefits to the likely identity of the next contractor who will run Los Alamos.

Since most messages are anonymous, there is no way to know how many lab employees contribute to the blog. Even so, from the sheer volume, detail and differing styles of the messages, the number is clearly many more than a handful. The language, often studded with obscure acronyms, suggests that the authors have a deep knowledge of the lab's exotic culture.

Furious debate centres on Nanos, a retired vice admiral of the U.S. Navy who holds a doctorate in physics from Princeton and became the lab's director two years ago. Many bloggers criticize his decision to shut down most of the laboratory last July, when he cited "egregious" safety and security violations after two computer disks with secret information were reported missing and an intern working with a laser suffered an eye injury.

The security alarm turned out to be a clerical error — the disks, in fact, never existed. Still, Nanos kept many lab areas closed for seven months, until late January. During that time, lab personnel worked on improving safety and security.

Dr. Thomas Meyer, a distinguished chemist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences who oversaw 2,000 employees as head of the lab's strategic research, resigned in October during the shutdown and afterward filed a long critique of the episode and the director's acts.

"He chose to transfer blame and intimidate individuals even with a staff that was often attempting to implement difficult and complex safety processes," Meyer said in his critique, which was posted on the blog. He called the director's treatment of lab employees "vindictive and abusive.''

A banner atop the blog site sets the tone, asserting that the shutdown cost American taxpayers "approximately $850 million, an exodus of highly talented staff members, and the loss of untold millions of dollars of funding from customers who have taken their business elsewhere.''

Lab officials say the shutdown probably cost $120 million (all figures U.S. dollars) and federal officials recently put the figure at $370 million.

Roark, the Los Alamos spokesman, acknowledged that the lab was worried about a recent spike in retirement inquiries.

"We're not anticipating a mass exodus," he said. "But that doesn't mean we're not concerned about the possibility. We are.''

The blog's creator is Doug Roberts, a computer scientist who is a 20-year lab veteran. In an interview, he said he was inspired to start the blog when he and his colleagues had their critical submissions to a forum on the lab's online newspaper rejected. Roberts said it was impossible to know how many lab personnel contributed to the blog, since it was set up to protect their identity, if so desired. He estimated the vocal population at 200 to 500 employees.

The blog runs a petition for Nanos' removal; it has garnered more than 100 signers, although most have concealed their names.

One who signed openly in February was Dr. Brad Lee Holian, a theoretical physicist who worked at the lab for 32 years. He retired a month later.

"People were feeling like they were in a pressure cooker,'' Holian said in a recent interview. "Nanos is so abusive, not just to the general staff, but his underlings. People were afraid to say anything. On the blog they could vent without fear of reprisal.''

Jeff Jarvis, who publishes BuzzMachine, a blog that focuses on media issues, said the Los Alamos site showed "a new ethic of transparency" that has come with the explosion of electronic self-publishing.

"It's not just the power of the blog," Jarvis said, "it's the power of the citizen.''