SAN FRANCISCO — The nation's top nuclear-weapons design lab has laid off hundreds of workers, raising concerns about a brain drain and stirring fears that some of these highly specialized scientists will sell their expertise to foreign governments, perhaps hostile ones.
Because of budget cuts and higher costs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory laid off 440 employees May 22 and 23. Over the past 2 1/2 years, attrition and layoffs have reduced the work force of 8,000 by about 1,800 altogether.
According to a list obtained by The Associated Press, about 60 of the recently laid-off workers were engineers, around 30 were physicists and about 15 were chemists. Some, but not all, were involved in nuclear weapons work or nonproliferation efforts, and all had put in at least 20 years at the lab.
Some lawmakers and others said they fear the loss of important institutional knowledge about designing warheads and detecting whether other countries are going nuclear.
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Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the layoffs at Lawrence Livermore and two other big U.S. weapons labs represent "a national security danger point." These unemployed experts might take their skills overseas, Feinstein said.
"The fact is, these are all people who are human — they have homes, they have families, they have educations to pay for," she said. "And I very much worry where they go for their next job."
The possibility is also on the mind of the nation's top nuclear weapons official, said National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D'Agostino.
"Always in a situation where people leave under less-than-ideal circumstances, we worry about that, and it's something I assure you we're looking at closely," D'Agostino said. "I'm always concerned about the counterintelligence part of our mission, and we have an active program to go make sure we understand where we're vulnerable and where we're not."
NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency is "always on guard for foreign entities approaching our employees, active or retired, but it's their responsibility to alert us to those circumstances."
The NNSA is aware of no instance in which a U.S. nuclear weapons scientist had gone to work overseas, he said.
He said the agency regards the possibility of a hostile government picking up laid-off workers as "highly unlikely," in part because these are American citizens who have responsibly held high-level clearances for many years, and because federal law provides stiff penalties — which range as high as life in prison — for divulging nuclear secrets.
Wilkes said the notion these scientists would sell their country out insults "their personal integrity and their patriotism."
Ken Sale, a physicist laid off from Lawrence Livermore on May 23, said taking his knowledge overseas would be unthinkable, and that he knows of no laid-off colleague who would even consider it.
But "the recent history of spying has all been money-based," Sale said. "Being concerned about expertise you wouldn't want rattling around in the whole world, and workers being desperate for a job, is a reasonable concern."
