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Fire danger: Very high Director answers employee questions Laboratory Director John Browne has completed a set of answers to questions submitted to future@lanl.gov (see the Director's home page under "Ask the Director"). In this latest set, the director answers questions on limited term staff and the moratorium, consistent treatment of students, RealAudio broadcasts on the Web, fairness in parking, LDRD and more. The director always is open to employee questions and will answer those sent to him at future@lanl.gov. Employees also are reminded that questions sent to future@lanl.gov are received by the Ombuds office and any information that might identify the questioner is removed before they are sent to the director. Also new on the "Ask the Director," a searchable database of all questions and answers. Users of the searchable database can perform simple word or phrase searches, or use a more advanced search option. The search will provide the user with a list of "Ask the Director" volumes that contain the search criteria. To find the specific question, open the volume then choose the "find" option from the browsers "edit" menu and enter the search criteria. For more information or questions concerning the database, contact Denise Bjarke at dbjarke@lanl.gov. Prescribed burn planned for today Staff from the Española Ranger District of the Santa Fe National Forest on Wednesday are scheduled to conduct a prescribed burn of some 3,700 acres of sagebrush, piñon and juniper to Sagrebrush Flats east of the White Rock Overlook. The scheduled work, which will depend on weather conditions, may cause smoke to be visible in White Rock and Los Alamos, and possibly areas east and north of the prescribed burn site, depending on wind conditions, said Kevin Joseph of the U.S. Forest Service. Earlier this month, the U.S. Forest Service "blacklined" the area in preparation for the controlled burning activity. Blacklining is a procedure where fire management specialists use drip torches to make a 50- to 200-foot wide ring around the area subject to the prescribed burn. This makes the area devoid of flammable vegetation, Joseph said. On Wednesday Joseph said forest service personnel will use helicopters to ignite the area. Ping-pong size balls are shot out of a plastic sphere dispenser from the helicopter, which hovers over the area. When the ping-pong size ball hits the ground it ignites, he explained. About 3,740 acres of Sagebrush Flats will be burned. The goal is to reduce sagebrush and piñon-juniper densities by 20 to 40 percent and increase vegetation ground cover between 10 and 30 percent. A federal Environmental Protection Agency grant is being used to pay for the aerial ignition prescribed burn. For more information, call Kevin Joseph at 438-7802 or 753-7331. --Steve Sandoval B Division resources dedicated to notable scientists The resource areas in the Bioscience (B) Division are now named in honor of four prominent scientists, including Wright Langham, a leading researcher at the Laboratory at the time of his death in a 1972 plane crash. Employees assigned to the four resources, which are comparable to groups except they are organized geographically instead of by discipline, chose the names as a way to help establish an organizational identity and to honor the legacy of biological research. B Division Director Jill Trewhella, who announced the selections at a division meeting last week, said employees were asked to consider such factors as public service and social contributions, as well as scientific achievement. In addition to Langham, the selected names were pioneer physicist and biologist Leo Szilard and Nobel laureates Barbara McClintock and Albert Michelson. Langham, who worked at the Laboratory from 1944 until his death, was a pioneer in plutonium research and a leader in establishing a biological research capability at the Laboratory. He was instrumental in obtaining approval for building the Human Resources Laboratory, where much of the Lab's research in the biosciences is conducted. His widow, Julie Langham Grilly, attended the division meeting at which the resource names were dedicated. "Wright worked very hard getting the HRL built," she said. "It's great to see how much it has expanded. It's wonderful." The Langham Resource (B-N2), led by Basil Swanson, is located at the HRL, as is the McClintock Resource (B-N1), which is led by Jim Brainard. The Szilard Resource (B-S1), led by Bob Atcher, is at Technical Area 35, and the Michelson Resource (B-S2) at TA-46 is led by Paul Gilna. Szilard was a well-known physicist when he helped persuade Albert Einstein to write the 1939 letter urging U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to authorize the development of atomic weapons. He later became a strong advocate of peaceful uses of atomic energy and international control of nuclear weapons and changed his field of research to molecular biology. McClintock received the 1983 Nobel Prize for medicine for her discovery of mobile genetic elements, also known as "jumping genes." She began her research into plant genetics while a student at Cornell University and later taught at Cornell and worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Michelson was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing and using precision optical instruments. He established the speed of light as a fundamental constant and was also the first person to determine the size of a star accurately. --John A. Webster 'China, Nuclear Weapons, and Arms Control' subject of recent talk China's strategic posture, nuclear doctrine, arms control strategy and relationship with the United States were all discussed in an April 17 talk at the Material Science Lab Auditorium by Brad Roberts of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Roberts, currently a political scientist on the staff of the IDA and a member of the Laboratory's Technology and Safety Assessment Division's Advisory Committee, served previously as the editor of Washington Quarterly and as a board member for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Roberts' talk outlined the findings of a roundtable discussion started in 1998 on the future of China's nuclear posture, cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Defense University and the IDA. Roberts was one of three co-chairs who wrote the roundtable report, titled "China, Nuclear Weapons, and Arms Control: A Preliminary Assessment." The full text of the study is available on the Council on Foreign Relations Web site at http://www.foreignrelations.org/p/. Roberts said the roundtable was created to gather for the first time members of three distinct policy communities: China experts, those with expertise in nuclear issues, like Roberts and members of the ballistic missile defense community. Little cross-cutting research was being done on nuclear issues in China prior to the creation of the roundtable. Roberts stressed that their recent report and his talk are preliminary and are not designed to end the debate on China's strategic direction. Rather, as Lawrence Korb states in the report's foreword, the goal is "to provoke new discussion about China's role in shaping the nuclear future and how to best engage China on matters nuclear." Roberts said that there are significant gaps in the unclassified information available on China's nuclear strategy and that China is the least transparent, or open, of the known nuclear powers. "Many of the assumptions that we as Americans make about China's nuclear forces are often incorrect," Roberts said. "True, they have a nuclear triad made up of land-, air- and sea-based nuclear arms, but until recently the core of China's strategic force has been its mid-range conventional-tipped missiles. This strategy was based on what they perceived to be the lessons learned from the Iran-Iraq war." Although the Chinese have been modernizing their nuclear arsenal since it was first introduced, Roberts said that a significant doctrinal debate has emerged in China only in the last five years regarding the future role of nuclear weapons. Previous Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping viewed nuclear weapons modernization as a low priority, but this changed as China's view of the world began to shift in 1995. Roberts said that China began to view the United States as more of a threat with the confluence of the end of the Cold War and America's overwhelming technical superiority demonstrated in the Persian Gulf and later in the former Yugoslavia. In the eyes of Beijing, Roberts said that American policy was seen as one of containment and encirclement. The Chinese perceive encirclement, being surrounded by threats, in U.S. military cooperation with Japan and efforts to provide ballistic missile defense to Japan and Taiwan. This understanding of an aggressive United States solidified after the bombing of the Chinese embassy by U.S. planes in Belgrade in 1999. Chinese leaders felt it was time to start a more robust modernization program to counter the perceived rise of American power politics and hegemony. Roberts said that a number of factors will influence Chinese nuclear modernization efforts in coming years, including how U.S. relations with Russia evolve, whether the United States decides to implement either a national or theater missile defense system, whether an arms race erupts with China's neighbors India and Pakistan and how the United States continues to interact with China. He said that actions such as the potential development of a theater or national missile defense system, as well as an unclear definition of the future of American nuclear forces, tends to encourage the view that U.S. encirclement of China is occurring. Roberts indicated that China's future nuclear path is of great importance to the United States and the U.S. approach to China needs to be considered carefully. The report notes that U.S. strategy for engaging China on these issues should follow some simple principles: Keep expectations modest; build on areas of existing agreement; cooperate to strengthen the global treaties controlling the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; and deal with specific proliferation problems in Asia. At the same time, the United States could do more to keep China informed about developments in the U.S.-Russian strategic dialogue, according to Roberts. In closing, Roberts noted that the window of opportunity for meaningful dialogue with China on the issue of nuclear strategy is closing. Significant U.S. decisions on the issues of ballistic missile defense and on START III negotiations that are coming up in the near future have the potential to significantly impact how China views the United States, and consequently how China feels it needs to proceed with its own nuclear strategy. --David Lyons
Wildfire evacuation drill to be held Thursday The Dynamic Experimentation Division (DX) plans a wildfire evacuation drill beginning at about 2 p.m. Thursday afternoon. The objective of the drill is to evacuate personnel in Technical Areas 8, 9, 14, 15, 22, 36, 39 and 40 in a safe, timely and orderly manner, said Kathy Smith of Detonation Science and Technology (DX-1). The evacuation drill will cause increased traffic entering West Jemez Road from TA-69. Motorists are advised to drive with extra caution in that area on Thursday afternoon. For more information, contact Smith at kws@lanl.gov. UC Laboratory Security Panel focus on computer security PHOTO: Laboratory Director John Browne, left, and Admiral Tom Brooks look over the agenda for the inagural meeting of the University of California Laboratory Security Panel last week at Los Alamos. Panel Chairman Brooks said the meeting focused on computer security, which he called "the most vexing security problem that the national laboratories face." The panel also reviewed the status of several other security issues, including polygraphs, electronic mail surveillance, and personnel and physical security, he said. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez
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