U.S. official praises scientists' work, fervor since 9/11 attack
LIVERMORE - To the strains of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A.," the scenic majesty of a nation - golden Alaskan sunrises to the Minnesota lakes to hazy Tennessee hills - unfolded on a giant screen, interspersed with images of bald eagles, Stars and Stripes and U.S. soldiers, both at war and burying their dead.
At the bidding of Sandia National Laboratories' nuclear weapons chief Tom Hunter, a roomful of career weaponeers rose and self-consciously murmured their way through the national anthem.
The absence of vocal vigor hardly marked a lack of emotion - several dabbed at their eyes when the lights came up. Here at Sandia, where people perform the hands-on engineering work of maintaining the world's most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, patriotism is never in short supply.
Since Sept. 11, however, patriotism among weaponeers has assumed a new, inward fervor, redirected with official encouragement from a monolithic but defunct Soviet enemy to the elusive attackers of Americans at home.
Last week, a senior government nuclear-weapons executive hailed that patriotism repeatedly in a rare ceremony for awarding "excellence" in weapons work. David Crandall, deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons labs, told Sandians of a young acquaintance who had worked in a World Trade Center tower and now suffers survivor's guilt.
"It's the people who live who make the ultimate contributions," Crandall assured Sandia's engineers, technologists, chemists and physicists. "You're the people who make the contributions that make the nation strong. And there's no less patriotism in that than in giving one's life for their ,country.... You are our heroes. We want you to understand that you are highly valued, what you do is highly valued," he said
The menace of the communist Soviet Union that originally drew many Sandia weaponeers to their jobs - and defined the bombs they engineered - is nearly gone.
Its collapse and the limited horizons of weapons advances without testing have diminished the attraction of fresh, young talent, making the federal government anxious to communicate appreciation for its aging weaponeers and keep them on board.
In the mid-1990s, government weapons executives dusted off the "nuclear weapons awards of excellence" and began doling them out, more than 100 a year.
Weapons scientists are uniquely barred from the professional rewards of reporting on their work in public. They publish in classified journals and secret government reports, but otherwise they rarely get recognition.
To hear Sandians, they were pleased to get their awards and stand with Crandall and lab executives for photographs, but all the pomp was hardly necessary.
"The real award is knowing that people who do this kind of work are fundamentally patriots to the core - even if you don't get a ceremony," said Steven Robinson, a materials scientist whose team won an award for measuring and modeling radiation effects on U.S. nuclear warheads.
"I think 9/11 just brought things so much closer to home," said veteran engineer Al Baker, who led studies driving toward an improved nuclear earth penetrator.
Mechanical engineer Jack O'Connor's team performs work so sensitive that he must be careful what he reveals to other Sandians. He almost never discusses it in public. The very name of his team - the W80 Plastics and Materials Implementation Team - is meaningless code.
"Plastics" had nothing to do with it. The team found new, fairly inexpensive ways to keep unauthorized persons from detonating the thermonuclear warheads inside cruise missiles launched by U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft. Such "use control" or "use denial" information, designed to ensure only the president and his constitutional successors can authorize a nuclear attack, is among the government's most prized nuclear secrets.
O'Connor will not discuss it, of course, but scientists and engineers have thought of many ways to prevent unauthorized detonations, including encryption-based Permissive Action Links or PALs that reportedly can lock down or disable a weapon if someone feeds in the wrong codes for operating it.
O'Connor's team worked to integrate new ideas economically, then had to check with weapons physicists at Lawrence Livermore to be sure the new schemes would not interfere with the reliability of the weapon.
"To me, this job is really exciting. It's something I can think about all the time. And all the people on the team are the same way. We all care about the problem very much," he said.
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