SO LONG, SPENCE

Most of the atten­tion today is on Colin and Condi. But Defense Tech has had a some­what, um, inti­mate rela­tion­ship with the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs. And so I’d like to dis­tract you for a moment, with a bit about Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham’s depar­ture from the cab­i­net. Because he may have been one of the few, authen­tic good guys on Dubya’s first-​​term team.
As the Times rightly points out, gas prices nearly dou­bled under Abraham’s watch. And the coun­try never could put together a par­tic­u­larly coher­ent energy pol­icy. But with two oil­men as his bosses, I don’t think Abraham ever really had much of a chance in these areas.
What Abraham did have con­trol over is the country’s nuclear research cen­ters. And on that topic, you’ve got to give him some credit. Because he leaves the American nuclear weapons com­plex safer than when he found it.
After a seemingly-​​endless series of scan­dals at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Abraham forced the feck­less lab chief John Browne out, and installed a for­mer admi­ral in his place. When com­puter disks with atomic secrets went miss­ing, Abraham ordered the labs to stop using ‘em, and move to a “disk­less” work­ing envi­ron­ment, instead a move watch­dog groups had been beg­ging for years for some­one to make. He ordered the removal of nuclear mate­r­ial from the lab’s most vul­ner­a­ble areas. And Abraham broke with 60 years of tra­di­tion, open­ing up Los Alamos’ man­age­ment con­tract to com­pet­i­tive bid­ding for the first time, the San Francisco Chronicle notes.

Abraham was “a real vision­ary” in his push for improved secu­rity at the nation’s post-​​9/​11 nuclear weapons com­plex, said Danielle Brian, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Project on Government Procurement, an activist group in Washington, D.C., that is nor­mally highly crit­i­cal of the Energy Department.
“He was able to dra­mat­i­cally increase secu­rity stan­dards and really was will­ing to go head to head with a very stub­born bureau­cracy” that pre­ferred less strin­gent safe­guards — in par­tic­u­lar, the National Nuclear Security Administration, whose employ­ees tend to be overly close to the nuclear weapons labs that they’re charged with over­see­ing, Brian said.
“It’s a club — it’s very insu­lar,” and Abraham tried with some suc­cess to over­come its insu­lar­ity, she added. “The next (energy) sec­re­tary will have to fill big shoes.” 

November 16th, 2004 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.