The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts

The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts: Nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos now say that morale there is the worst it has ever been in the lab’s seven-decade history, and that Los Alamos’s ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile has been substantially undermined. This institutional havoc has been wrought not by the left but by congressmen and government officials claiming to act in the name of national security and efficiency. They framed Los Alamos as an institution in need of reform and, by “improving” management practices, reduced the laboratory’s effectiveness. Their counterproductive actions were often justified by an assumption, largely erroneous, that Los Alamos had an organizational culture characterized by arrogance and carelessness.