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THE NEW MEXICAN Sunday, October 12, 2014
Fired: Group plans to put findings on display next spring Continued from Page C-1 replacement parts for nuclear weapons. He intends to study whether that’s true and report his findings to Congress and the United Nations in hopes of influencing policy decisions involving nuclear defense priorities. The nonprofit Ploughshares Fund, which advocates abolition of nuclear weapons, is financing the project. Doyle is also fighting the U.S. Department of Energy over his dismissal from LANL. He contends his firing was in retaliation for his persistent challenges to the Energy Department’s classification of an article he’d written about nonproliferation, which the department’s monitors initially approved as declassified for publication, only to change their minds after its public release in an international journal. As a result of the reclassification, the lab suspended Doyle for one day and stripped him of various high-level security clearances necessary to do his job, before ultimately firing him. The lab told Doyle his dismissal was a routine layoff. The lab has declined to comment on the firing, citing its policy against publicly discussing personnel issues. “My contention is that my termination was absolutely retaliation for not giving up on complaining about what I perceived to be impossible classification,” Doyle told The New Mexican. “If I had rolled over and let this go away a year ago, I’d still be working there.” Instead, Doyle filed a whistleblower complaint against the department, claiming it had made a mistake by declaring his article classified. Last month, the Energy Department notified Doyle that it had rejected his final appeal to have that complaint heard. However, the Energy Department’s response indicated it was launching an investigation into whether retaliation played a part in Doyle’s firing. “The department’s senior leadership takes the issue you raise seriously, and will not tolerate retaliation or dismissal of employees or contractors for the views expressed in scholarly publications,” the Energy Department’s letter said. The letter described steps the department was taking to initiate an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General “into whether Mr. Doyle’s termination resulted, in whole or in part, from the publication of his article in question or the views expressed in it.” Doyle filed a new whistleblower complaint Oct. 6. Rather than focusing on the classification change, it challenges the lab’s explanation for his firing and accuses LANL of terminating him in retaliation for questioning the retroactive classification of his article. The complaint points out that Doyle was the only person laid off in his 50-person department. “The timing alone renders this action in a suspicious light,” the complaint says. According to the complaint,
Doyle “was denied access to his computer files and literally escorted out of the building without any notice.” Jay Coghlan When news of Doyle’s firing broke, Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s leaders were among the first to publicly offer words of support. The Federation of American Scientists wrote to President Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, urging him to intervene on Doyle’s behalf and calling his termination an affront to free discussion and dissenting voices in policy discussions. Landing Doyle has added to Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s cachet among nonproliferation circles. Already, the group plans to put his findings on display at a United Nations conference on arms reduction treaties next spring. “He’s a rock star,” said Jay Coghlan, the group’s executive director. In his new endeavor, Doyle says speaking his mind won’t be a problem. “I’ll be a lot more free to weigh in with my opinions and the opinions of outside observers about whether the scope of these activities at the national laboratories are appropriate,” he said. “I’ll be less constrained by knowing a certain program manager or officials in Washington don’t think something has a lot of promise.” The downside of monitoring nuclear weapons reduction from outside the lab establishment is the restricted access to data and scientists that were easily within reach when Doyle had security clearance. To overcome that, he said, “I hope my relationships pay off.” Doyle plans to assess whether the Energy Department has invested enough in field testing remote monitoring, radiation detection and confirming that waste can be analyzed without opening containers, among other aspects of the U.S. commitment to weapons reduction. Doyle and Nuclear Watch New Mexico have an ambitious schedule for completing the work and presenting it to Congress, with an eye on influencing federal spending on steps toward weapons reduction in fiscal year 2016. That would represent an about-face from the current budgeted agenda, which prioritizes stepped-up production of nuclear weapons components — with Los Alamos leading the way — while deep budget cuts are aimed at nonproliferation programs. “We don’t want another study that’s just going to gather dust,” Coghlan said. Contact Patrick Malone at 986-3017 or pmalone@ sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter @pmalonenm.
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Transcripts point to scientist’s loyalty Newly declassified pages seem to exonerate top atomic physicist By William J. Broad The New York Times
At the height of the McCarthy era, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the government’s top atomic physicist, came under suspicion as a Soviet spy. After 19 days of secret hearings in April and May of 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance. The action brought his career to a humiliating close, and Oppenheimer, until then a hero of American science, lived out his life a broken man. But now, hundreds of newly declassified pages from the hearings suggest that Oppenheimer was anything but disloyal. Historians and nuclear experts who have studied the declassified material — roughly a tenth of the hearing transcripts — say that it offers no damning evidence against him, and that the testimony that has been kept secret all these years tends to exonerate him. “It’s hard to see why it was classified,” Richard Polenberg, a historian at Cornell University who edited a much earlier, sanitized version of the hearings, said in an interview. “It’s hard to see a principle here — except that some of the testimony was sympathetic to Oppenheimer, some of it very sympathetic.” A crucial element in the case against Oppenheimer derived from his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb. The physicist Edward Teller, who long advocated a crash program to devise such a weapon, told the hearing that he mistrusted Oppenheimer’s judgment, testifying that “I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.” But the declassified material, released Oct. 3 by the Energy Department, suggests that Oppenheimer opposed the hydrogen bomb project on technical and military grounds, not out of Soviet sympathies. Richard Rhodes, author of the 1995 book Dark Sun: The
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LOBORATORIES/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, said the records showed that making fuel to test one of Teller’s early H-bomb ideas would have forced the nation to forgo up to 80 atomic bombs. “Oppenheimer was worried about war on the ground in Europe,” Rhodes said in an interview. He saw the need for “a large stockpile of fission weapons that could be used to turn back a Soviet ground assault.” The formerly secret testimony “was immensely relevant to Oppenheimer’s opposition,” he said, adding, “There’s a lot here for historians to digest.” Robert S. Norris, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and the author of Racing for the Bomb, a biography of Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the military leader of the World War II project to develop the atomic bomb, said a reading of the formerly secret testimony showed it had little or nothing to do with national security. “In many cases, they deleted material that was embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “That’s pretty obvious.” The Energy Department, a successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, offered no public analysis of the 19 volumes and no explanation for why it was releasing the material now. It did, however, note that the step took 60 years. Sidestepping questions of guilt or innocence, it referred to the 1954 hearing as a federal assessment of
Oppenheimer “as a possible security risk.” Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ J. Robert Oppenheimer project on government secrecy, called the release “long overdue” and added, “It lifts the last remaining cloud from the subject.” Priscilla McMillan, an atomic historian at Harvard and author of The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, applauded the release but also expressed bafflement at its having taken six decades, saying her own research suggested that the transcripts held “zero classified data.” An eccentric genius fond of pipes and porkpie hats, Oppenheimer grew up in an elegant building on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, attended the Ethical Culture School and graduated from Harvard in three years. After studies in Europe, he taught physics at the University of California, Berkeley. As a young professor, he crashed his car while racing a train, leaving his girlfriend unconscious. His father gave the young woman a painting and a Cézanne drawing. In the 1930s, like many liberals, Oppenheimer belonged to groups led or infiltrated by communists; his brother, his wife and his former fiancée
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Scientists and military officials, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, third from left, view the base of the steel tower on which the first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity Site near Alamagordo on July 16, 1945. Recently released transcripts suggest Oppenheimer was anything but disloyal.
were party members. In the 1940s at Los Alamos in New Mexico, in great secrecy, he led the scientific effort that invented the atom bomb. Afterward, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s main advisory body, he helped direct the nation’s postwar nuclear developments. Oppenheimer’s downfall came amid Cold War fears over Soviet strides in atomic weaponry and communist subversion at home. In 1953, a former congressional aide charged in a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the celebrated physicist was a Soviet spy. Troubled by the allegation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered “a blank wall” erected between Oppenheimer and any nuclear secrets. No evidence came to light that supported the spy charge. But the security board found that Oppenheimer’s early views on the hydrogen bomb “had an adverse effect on recruitment of scientists and the progress of the scientific effort.” He died in 1967, at 62. Experts who have looked at the declassified transcripts say they cast startling new light on the Oppenheimer case. Polenberg of Cornell, for example, expressed bewilderment that 12 pages of testimony from Lee A. DuBridge, a friend and colleague of Oppenheimer’s who discussed the atomic trade-offs and the European war situation, had remained secret for 60 years. “A difference of opinion doesn’t mean disloyalty,” he said. “It’s hard to see why it was redacted.” Polenberg also pointed to 45 pages of declassified testimony from Walter G. Whitman, an MIT engineer and member of the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory body. “In my judgment,” Whitman said of Oppenheimer, “his advice and his arguments for a gamut of atomic weapons, extending even over to the use of the atomic weapon in air defense of the United States, has been more productive than any other one individual.” Asked his opinion of Oppenheimer as a security risk, he called him “completely loyal.”
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