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The Bids for the Bomb Labs

    Last updated June 6, 2006

  • Compiled by Will Parrish

Index:

  • The Bid for Armageddon, Round 2: Livermore
  • The Bid for Los Alamos - 2003-2005
  • Los Alamos: The US’ New Bomb Factory
  • The UC: Managing Armageddon
  • Background on UC Bid Partners
  • UT and Los Alamos
  • UT-Lockheed University Partners

The Bid for Armageddon, Round 2: Livermore

With a new management team now in place at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, its counterpart in California, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, will now be the subject of a similar public bidding competition. In May, the Department of Energy opened its "comment period" regarding its draft Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Livermore lab, a massive document that sets the terms and conditions for the prospective bidders. The potential bidders had until June 5 to make comments on the RFP draft. After all of the comments have been considered (so the official story goes), the lab management contract will officially go up for bid, and the LLNL management hopefuls will have 60 days to submit their proposals.

The winner of the new LLNL management contract will be announced in early-2007, and will take over management of the lab on October 1, 2007, barring any delays. The UC and Bechtel have already stated their intention to partner once again to bid for LLNL. The UC Regents are likely to formalize this partnership at either their July or September meeting, each of which will take place at UC San Francisco.

The contract to manage LLNL is likely to be virtually identitical to the Los Alamos management contract that entered into force on June, with a corporate, profit-driven management team taking over oversight of the facility and privatizing virtually every aspect of the lab's work (or, at least, that which is not already privatized). Thus far, only the UC-Bechtel and Battelle Memorial Institute are the only entities that have publicly expressed interest in bidding. Battelle also manages the nuclear weapons laboratories in Idaho and Tennessee.

For a detailed explanation of what the LLNL bid means in a larger context, please see Competition - or Collusion? Privatization and Crony Capitalism in the Nuclear Weapons Complex: Some Questions from New Mexico" by Greg Mello and Damon Hill. Although the article specifically focuses on the Los Alamos lab, the primary lessons from the Los Alamos bid process and new management team also apply directly to LLNL.

The Bid for Los Alamos - 2003-2005

  • In July 2005, two massive university-corporate conglomerates entered bids to win a new seven-year contract to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  The bidding competition was sponsored by the Department of Energy, which oversees the lab’s $2.2 billion annual budget, while also directing the policies and procedures carried out by the titular new lab “manager.”

  • On one side of the academic-industrial competition was the University of California, which has teamed with Bechtel Corporation, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International, and New Mexico’s three major research universities (the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University and New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology) in its bid to retain oversight of the lab it has “managed” since 1943. 

    On the other side was the University of Texas, which partnered with Lockheed Martin, CH2MHill, Flour Corp, and 33 different university systems nationwide in its effort to wrest lab management status away from the UC.

  • The UC's decision to partner with Bechtel -- one of the world's most notorious war profiteers and most powerful crony corporations (with deep connections to the Republican Party in particular), which once built chemical weapons facilities on behalf of Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- was met with massive resistance from UC students, as part of their larger efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and demilitarize the University of California. Many University of Texas and other students mobilized opposition to university involvement in the weapons labs as well. The coordinated opposition culminated with the "Universities Out of Bed with Bombs" Day of Action on November 30, 2005.

  • The Department of Energy finally announced the winner of the competition in December 2005. The new, seven-year Los Alamos management contract (which also includes options for a series of extensions, which could make the contract an agreement of up to 20 years) entered into effect on June 1, 2006. The winner of the bid was Los Alamos National Security LLC: the UC, Bechtel, BWX, Washington Group, and the New Mexico universities.

    Meanwhile, the DOE plans to put the contract to manage the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory up for bid sometime in 2007.  It is likely that, if the UC loses out to the UT in the bid competition (which appears increasingly likely), that it will reconstitute its partnership with Bechtel in an effort to retain oversight at Livermore.

    In the final tally, the outcome of the bid is, to borrow a phrase from long-time Coalition to Demilitarize the UC activist Tara Dorabji, "nukes on steroids." The nuclear weapons complex of the United States has been privatized to a degree never before seen; yet, the University of California continues to be involved, lending its name and veneer of academic legitimacy to the development of the most horrific weapons ever devised.

    Los Alamos: The New USA Bomb Factory

    The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s mission has been quietly evolving for several years.  On the surface, LANL was put up for bid due to a series of management scandals, including the trial of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of espionage on behalf of the Chinese government (Lee was cleared of all charges, except for a minor infraction having little do with his case) and the supposed loss of extensive “classified data” in 2003. The loss of the data prompted then-director Pete Nanos to close he lab for eight months while an FBI investigation occurred.  The FBI determined that the “missing data” was actually a clerical error: the data in question probably never existed in the first place.

    The UC has been implicated in many such public scandals at the labs, however, all without having its once-ironclad contract taken away or even seriously jeopardized. 

    It appears that one of the real, underlying motivations for the LANL bid is the increasing emphasis on plutonium pit production at LANL.  Once solely a research and design facility, LANL is currently the only facility in the US nuclear weapons complex capable of large-scale manufacturing operations.   As part of the US’ Reliable Replacement Warhead program, as many as 40 plutonium pits a year are expected to be produced at LANL by the year 2010.

    Plutonium pits are the cores of nuclear weapons.  The UC is not equipped to oversee extensive nuclear weapons manufacturing.  The bid for the lab was necessary to open the door for oversight of the facility to be put under the jurisdiction of industrial weapons contractors, such as BWX Technologies, one of the partners in the UC-Bechtel-led Los Alamos National Security.

    In late-April, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requested that the NNSA Los Alamos Site Office oversee the drafting of a new Los Alamos lab Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement.  The stated reason was that Los Alamos’ core mission would soon be changing.  Los Alamos has mainly been a research and design lab since the mid-1950s, but its main focus will soon be the creation of nuclear weapons components, according to the NNSA.

    In addition, the DOE’s Request for Proposals (RFP) -- the document that sets the management terms for the two corporate-university partnerships currently vying to win the new seven-year contract (one led by the UC and Bechtel, the other by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin) -- contains several sentences much like this one: “The Contractor shall manufacture pits for the stockpile in quantities specified by NNSA.”

  • Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Agency, publicly admitted that LANL is slated for increased pit production for the first time in a San Francisco Chronicle article this past January.

    More information on LANL pit production:

    The UC’s Role in Nuclear Weapons Development

    In addition to the resources available at ucnuclearfree.org, you can find information on the history of the UC’s management of the Los Alamos and Livermore labs in the context of the bidding process here:

    UT and Los Alamos

    The University of Texas’ interest in managing the lab was analyzed incisively by a handful of folks in Texas.

    Background on UC LANS Partners

    • Bechtel is by far the world’s largest engineering and construction corporation, and its portfolio includes contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq, engineering the Hoover Dam, building the first oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia, and construction 45 nuclear power plants (of a total of 100) in 22 states in the US.  It is also manager of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where the US conducted nearly 1,000 tests of nuclear bombs between 1951 and 1992.  Bechtel enjoys 50-50 status in its partnership with the UC, whereas the other public and private entities have “junior partner” status. 

Resources on Bechtel:

- Reaching Critical Will’s “Dirty Dozen” Bechtel Page:
- CorpWatch’s Bechtel Page by CorpWatch, Global Exchange, & Public Citizen:
- “Bechtel, More Powerful Than the US Army” by Jeffrey St. Clair:

For extensive background on the UC's other bid partners, as well as how the privatization of Los Alamos relates to larger developments within the US nuclear weapons complex, please see Competition - or Collusion? Privatization and Crony Capitalism in the Nuclear Weapons Complex: Some Questions from New Mexico" by Greg Mello and Damon Hill.

UT-Lockheed Bid Consortium: University Partners

The following universities have the dubious distinction of having partnered with the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin in their failed bid to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

* Arizona State University
* Carnegie Mellon University
* Colorado School of Mines
* Florida State University
* Georgia Institute of Technology
* Indiana University System
* Johns Hopkins University
* Lehigh University
* Michigan Technological University
* Purdue University
* Rice University
* Texas A&M System
* University of Arizona
* University of Colorado System
* University of Florida
* University of Michigan
* University of Utah
* University of Wisconsin - Madison
* The University of Texas System

 

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