Todd LaPorte, is a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. LaPorte was an "ex officio" member of the 1996 NMT Science and Technology Assessment Review Committee.
Social scientists rarely have the opportunity to become familiar with operations that combine demanding technologies, high national purpose, and extraordinary institutional challenges. Such an opportunity was afforded me this year by the Nuclear Material Technology (NMT) Division and the Nuclear Materials and Stockpile Management Program Office. The experience was at once engaging, informing, and unsettling. This editorial reflects my unusual view of LANL's evolution and could be seen, in part, as a letter to those who so graciously became my teachers.
As the readers of this quarterly know, LANL, especially its plutonium-handling facilities (Technical Area-55, managed by NMT), has been tasked to demonstrate its ability to become the nation's leading organization with the capacity for "pit remanufacture," i.e., periodic remanufacture of the plutonium components needed to maintain nuclear weapons in a state of highly reliable readiness. Since there is no other facility with sufficient capacity, TA-55 is, in effect, the U.S. plutonium fabricator of last resort, a facility that is likely to be required for the foreseeable future.
In taking up its expanded role, LANL has joined with DOE in using the metaphor of "stewardship" to focus on these responsibilities and public service. With regard to managing nuclear materials, especially in the coming era of regulatory transparency, the role of "institutional steward" is quite extraordinary. To the attentive public, "stewardship" is likely to imply that LANL and DOE are claiming they can assure highly reliable operations for many work and management generations, perhaps for hundreds of years, in a manner that evokes deep, sustained public trust and confidence. From an institutional perspective, these are very demanding goals to achieve and sustain. Indeed, the recent extension of LANL's mission challenges our capacity to maintain an organization's operational balance and to successfully navigate the turbulent waters of national politics.
The Lab and NMT already demonstrate an understanding of highly reliable operations. The requisites for evoking the public's trust and confidence are more problematic but have drawn a good deal of comment and some analysis. I leave this discussion for another venue. Assuring high performance in the spirit of stewardship for many generations, i.e., "institutional constancy," is another matter. It is an unexpected, unfamiliar, though apt challenge. Institutional constancy is a prime condition undergirding the exercise of honorable institutional stewardship. It is not well understood and is unexpected within an American political culture that lauds change and shrinks from continuities of power. Institutional constancy implies the faithful adherence to a mission and its operational imperatives in the face of a variety of social and institutional changes and requires adaptability to meet institutional and public commitments.
LANL already seeks to assure continuity of top technical talent in its recruiting and mentoring activities, key mechanisms in socializing and training generations of able professionals in the spirit of enterprise. But there are only meager analytical bases for achieving organizational qualities that address the challenge of constancy. What little that has been done suggests that these qualities require steadfast political will and what one might call the "organizational infrastructure of constancy."
Political will is likely to be enhanced by strong articulation of commitments by agency leaders to unswerving adherence to the spirit of the initial agreement as well as vigorous external reinforcement from regulatory agencies and public "watchdog groups." The organizational infrastructure of constancy is less familiar and includes
Institutional constancy must be seen in terms of the missions animating an institution-in the case of LANL and NMT-research and development goals. The challenge in the future will be to integrate R&D with excellence in specialty production, activities that some observers believe to be intrinsically at odds. The dimensions of this challenge are suggested by the objectives the U.S. seems to be pursuing, i.e., to manage nuclear materials in a manner that 1) emphasizes a self-conscious spirit of sustained institutional stewardship; 2) aims to be the best in the world, not only in the U.S.; and 3) equips technical and operational professionals to demonstrate, via their interactions with professional counterparts throughout the world, that the U.S. retains an effective nuclear weapons deterrent capacity for the indefinite future.
These are as unusual and demanding a set of institutional goals as ever to be proposed for technical organizations and programs. Goals 1) and 3) above have rarely been sought, authorized, or supported by sponsors in the past, nor are they particularly honored by political, media, or economic leaders in our political culture. Yet the multigenerational demands of these goals raise the issue of "institutional honor," a topic almost absent from organizational studies and broached only hesitantly in technical professional conversation.
Our generation is, in effect, handing down undeniable demands to the fourth and fifth generations. Meeting these demands will be difficult, especially in view of the fact that the major benefits of nuclear deterrence have accrued to the present generation but with much of their cost deferred to future generations. Will these obligations requiring some of their generations' best and brightest be readily taken up by our descendants? Will it be an honorable and honored "taking up"? As the political situation that bolstered the dedication of national resources to nuclear stewardship attenuates with time, future generations without our frame of reference may find our "gift" increasingly onerous. The conditions necessary to nurture an honored institution within the society at large apply as well to according honor to technical production activities and research and development so that sustained, high-quality technical operations may be ensured.
In the context of LANL's past, this discussion may seem unduly alarming. After all, LANL, under the benign oversight of the University of California system, has repeatedly made unique and invaluable contributions to advance basic scientific knowledge and to overcome a vigorous adversary. Couldn't we expect the same "world class" performance in the new era? Perhaps, but to leave it there misses the emerging public skepticism regarding technical systems generally, a particularly acerbic skepticism regarding the nuclear enterprise. It can be argued that those who are technically engaged in the various aspects of this enterprise have not been particularly well served by their governmental or commercial sponsors and promoters. Recent history suggests failures of institutional competence, policy determination, and public disclosure. The accumulation of these failures exhausts public patience, erodes confidence in technical professionals (and their overseers), and accretes layers of resentment harbored in the social psyches of a distracted and anxious public.
While the technical parameters of "science-based stockpile stewardship" may be in the process of becoming clarified, operational lineaments remain opaque and institutional imperatives illusive. This presents the current leadership not only with demanding technical obstacles, but with extraordinary institutional ones as well. The metaphor of stewardship is apt and warranted. Offered in the face of historical residues and evolving conditions, that stewardship lays demanding charges upon current leadership and taxes our institutional capacities. It also taxes our abilities to frame perspectives that acknowledge the political strain intrinsic to maintaining those technical capabilities that have been central to achieving global dominance.
It is possible, perhaps likely, that leaders in Washington have neither the capacity nor the full resolve to initiate the necessary stewardship-enhancing changes. To the degree this is so, developments in the relationships of LANL with the external world and changes within the weapons programs themselves must be initiated mostly from within the Lab, probably in the face of at least residual resistance from its overseers. But if stewardship-enhancing measures are broadly effective, technical and institutional leaders will recover the confidence of able Americans. This is a requisite to nurture a climate of understanding and honor in which each generation assumes the obligation of managing the burden of nuclear weapons and materials in such a way that their successors in the "fourth generation" will inherit a system at least no more difficult to manage than the one they received.
It will be a challenge. There is no credible basis for confidently selecting out those organizational solutions that will be suitable for the future on the basis of short-term managerial, economic, or political considerations. In effect, we could, in all good-hearted earnestness, start out wrong, as history would surely note.
The ideas presented in this editorial are the author's and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California, the Department of Energy, or the U.S. government.
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