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Higher Education: UC poll says faculty backs nuclear labs, But they strongly oppose making atomic bomb parts
by Keay Davidson, May 20, 2004

In an online poll by the University of California Academic Senate, UC faculty expressed unusually strong support for the university's continued management of the nation's two top nuclear weapons labs, while firmly opposing plans to manufacture atomic bomb components at one of the labs.

Sixty-seven percent of the faculty who participated in the online poll said the UC regents should compete for new contracts to run the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Academic Senate officials announced Wednesday. Twenty-one percent were opposed, and the rest took no position.

However, "an overwhelming majority" of faculty voted to oppose the recent push to manufacture some nuclear weapons components at the Los Alamos lab, George Blumenthal, vice chair of the UC Academic Senate, told the regents at their meeting in San Francisco. In response to a poll question asking whether such work was "an appropriate activity," only 25 percent of those participating said they "somewhat agree" or "strongly agree."

UC has managed the labs under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy since they were created a half-century ago. After a scandal involving finances, missing equipment and mismanagement that broke in 2002, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Congress took steps to open future contracts to competitive bidding. The current UC contracts for Los Alamos and Livermore run out in late 2005.

For more than a year, UC officials and members of the board have hesitated on the question of whether they'll compete for the contracts. They initially indicated they wouldn't compete to keep the long-held contracts, then began waffling on the question after Abraham threw the Los Alamos bid open to competition.

Some UC officials and regents question whether California can afford the cost of competing with potential bidders -- who could range from private firms such as Battelle to the giant University of Texas system -- at a time of state financial crisis.

Only limited results of the faculty online vote were released Wednesday. About 3,300 of the 12,000 faculty at UC campuses participated in the two-week poll, which was completed Monday. More specific results of the poll will appear in a report by the Academic Senate scheduled for release in about two weeks.

The poll results reveal a significant and unusually broad rise in UC faculty support for the weapons labs in recent years, support that would have stunned Cold Warriors and peace activists during the uneasy twilight of the Cold War.

Indeed, the results are almost exactly the reverse of those in a similar poll in 1990, when 64 percent of UC faculty voted against renewal of UC's contract to run the labs, said Blumenthal, who is also an astronomy professor at UC Santa Cruz.

By 1996, faculty support for another contract renewal had soared to 61 percent, he said.

The poll shows remarkable uniformity among participating faculty, regardless of gender or professional status, in their attitudes toward the weapons labs. Men and women showed almost equal levels of support for continued UC management of the weapons labs, Blumenthal said.

Also, differences between faculty specialties such as social sciences and physical sciences were "almost indiscernible," he said.

However, the poll's strong opposition to manufacture of nuclear weapons components at Los Alamos is telling, Blumenthal added.

"Clearly," he said in a statement issued to the press, "even those faculty supportive of the labs find weapons component manufacturing a bitter pill to swallow."

The strong faculty support for the university's management role at the labs surprised Regent Peter Preuss of La Jolla (San Diego County), whom Gov. Pete Wilson appointed to the UC board in 1996. Preuss chairs the regents' committee on oversight of the Energy Department labs.

"This very clear result is something few of us expected at this point," Preuss said.

Also pleased was S. Robert Foley, UC vice president for laboratory management, who oversees the UC weapons labs. "I like the results of the poll..." he said in an interview after the regents meeting. "I was surprised by the degree of support. If it had been close to 50-50, it wouldn't have surprised me."

However, Foley would not offer a specific response to the strongly adverse vote on the question of nuclear weapon component-making at Los Alamos. He did, though, suggest the value of having nuclear weapons labs that can seek nonexplosive ways to test the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons "in an era when you're no longer doing nuclear (bomb) testing." The United States has not exploded a full-scale nuclear weapon since 1992; it remains uncertain whether it will ever do so again.

Originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle.

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