Comment:
Thank you Rebecca and the New Mexican for this introduction, which should beg many questions in curious readers’ minds. While LANL is a unique, and uniquely troubled, site as far as its operating culture goes (as many federal officials with wide experience in the nuclear weapons complex have privately said), NNSA as a whole (as the head of a congressionally-mandated review once testified) is itself a “failed experiment in governance.” VP Joe Biden wondered why NNSA fails so often, and this 2 pp memo was prepared for him in answer: http://www.lasg.org/Modernization/StructuralFeaturesMakingNNSAUnusualFedAgency.pdf.
On the eve of the later-terminated LANL contract, we reviewed the DOE and NNSA contracting cabal (http://www.lasg.org/NNSAPrivatization.pdf), in what now might be called a partial sketch of the NNSA portion of the Deep State.
Conventional reforms and “cultural change” plans for LANL have failed literally dozens of times. Our most recent prescription is here: http://www.lasg.org/documents/CRENEL_26Sep2014.pdf.
It really doesn’t matter much who runs LANL.
Conspicuously missing from this article however, and from the New Mexican’s coverage of this issue generally, are factual moral, legal, and scientific analyses and frames that might offend the mighty LANL, the nuclear weapons cabal that holds sway in our state, or the lab’s Democratic Party minions and supporters. The billions spent at LANL have bought plenty of souls in northern New Mexico and there is a cost to that, a huge cost. There are literally dozens of ways LANL avoids accountability, distorts democratic processes, and corrupts our institutions. As nuclear lab budgets went up, New Mexico went down relative to other states, to the very bottom. A coincidence? Not really. As one senior economics professor remarked to me, failure to grasp that The Bomb was a profound mistake is the fundamental reason northern New Mexico has failed to thrive.
We still have a World War II economy, with a huge economic black hole on the Pajarito Plateau that produces nothing of positive value, and much that is of negative value. Our cultural institutions, like the Santa Fe Opera this summer, will be wallowing in this nostalgic mire. They are indeed, as in Donne’s sonnet, “betroth’d unto your enemy” unable to “divorce…untie or break that knot again.”
LANL is the world’s best-funded site for weapons of mass destruction. It hosts the state’s largest nuclear waste dump site, which is still being used. The New Mexican, like our Democrat politicians, avoids these and related elephants in the room at the cost of its objectivity — and the region’s future. Possible nuclear weapons in North Korea, and non-existent nuclear weapons in Iran, dominant US media coverage. The New Mexican covers LANL as if its product was, oh, fertilizer.