[CPEO-MEF] Chronicle+Herald/LLNL scientist quits weapons work

[marylia@earthlink.net]

Dear colleagues:

Following are 2 articles stemming from the press conferences yesterday at
which Issac Trotts announced his resignation from Livermore Lab and
released an open letter calling on his former colleagues to also quit all
nuclear weapons work. The open letter is available on Tri-Valley CAREs' web
site at www.igc.org/tvc. The first article is from the San Francisco
Chronicle, the second from the Tri-Valley Herald. Both are quite good.
There was also a good article in the Valley Times. (If you see any
additional articles on this, please send me an electronic copy, if
possible.) Thanks. --Marylia

(Note especially the Livermore Lab spokesman below saying: "New [military]
capabilities are part of weapons modifications...")

ENGINEER QUITS, BLASTS LIVERMORE LAB
RECRUITERS MISLED HIM ON WEAPONS WORK, HE SAYS

San Francisco Chronicle -- Friday, March 16, 2001
by David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Livermore -- A young computer software engineer announced yesterday that he
has quit his $85,000-a-year job at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory because, he said, he was "deceived" by recruiters, who did not
tell him he would be working to improve the killing ability of nuclear
weapons.

Isaac Trotts, 25, conceded to reporters that he may have been more than a
little naive when he took the job at the weapons lab in October thinking he
would be helping make nuclear warheads safe. Instead, he found his work
involved making them more effective.

At a press conference yesterday organized by an anti-nuclear group, Trotts
said he hoped his action would inspire his former Livermore co-workers to
join him in refusing to "help maintain, enhance, design and build weapons
of mass destruction."

Trotts is a specialist in programming computers to visualize physical
phenomena in three dimensions, a field he had pursued as a visiting
aeronautics and astronautics researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

His Livermore job was unclassified and involved researching and developing
complex new methods for viewing simulated explosions of nuclear warheads,
he said. His department is part of a national supercomputer facility in the
Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Program, designed to keep
America's nuclear arsenal from deteriorating.

During the press conference at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco
yesterday, Trotts insisted that the Livermore recruiters who interviewed
him led him to believe that his job would help to assure the "safety and
reliability" of nuclear weapons but not to improve them.

"I was a little uneasy about going to work there at first," he told
reporters, "but I thought that making sure those weapons were safe, that
they wouldn't explode accidentally and pollute the environment with
radioactivity -- that way at least I'd be helping to make the world a
better place.

"I was assured no new weapons development was taking place, but it was a
deception," he said.

Trotts said he began to learn from government documents supplied by
"activist" organizations that many of the nuclear warheads were in fact
being modified to make them more effective -- armoring them to improve
their earth- penetrating power, for example, or "suspicious things" like
enabling them to explode at new and different heights.

The Livermore laboratory stopped all weapons design and development work in
1992, a Livermore lab spokesman insisted yesterday, and designing new ones
would require congressional approval.

Modifying nuclear warheads to meet new military needs has been openly part
of the Stockpile Stewardship Program since it was begun in 1993, the
spokesman said, and does not involve new designs. Modifications do not
alter a warhead's nuclear components and are not barred by treaty, he said.

As for Trotts himself, the Livermore spokesman said that "all his
colleagues agreed he was a really bright guy."

Trotts said that after he grew more uneasy about his job at Livermore, much
of what he learned about the implications of the work came from Department
of Energy documents on warhead modifications obtained by Tri-Valley CAREs,
an anti-nuclear group based in Livermore whose acronym stands for
Communities Against a Radioactive Environment.


Ex-lab scientist 'misled' about weapons development:
Lab denies deceiving former employees of work's nature

By Glenn Roberts Jr.
STAFF WRITER,
ANG newspapers

LIVERMORE --Recruiters drew Issac Trotts to an $85,000-a-year job at
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his conscience led him to walk away.

Trotts, 25, said he was misled during the interview process about the
purpose of an Energy Department program that he would be supporting through
his work at the lab.

"I was assured that no new weapons development was taking place," he said.
"As I later found out, Livermore Lab deceived me both during the interview
process and afterward."

David Schwoegler a lab spokesman, said, "Any scientist would be advised in
unclassified terms during recruiting of what his or her job will eventually
involve." He added that Trotts would have been given the opportunity, too,
to ask questions about the nature of his job assignment.

Trotts talked Thursday during a press conference at the Livermore Lab
Visitors Center about his search for answers that led him to leave the lab
and speak out against nuclear weapons development.

A handful of anti-nuclear activists, including a former Livermore Lab
scientist who resigned one year ago, offered support for Trotts during the
event.

Trotts was hired in October 2000 as a computer scientist and mathematical
programmer for the lab's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. Trotts
said it was months later when he had proved to himself that this program
had assisted efforts to add new capabilities to nuclear weapons designs.

ASCI uses supercomputers to simulate nuclear weapons and is one component
of the nation's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which Energy Department and
lab officials say is designed to ensure the "safety and reliability" of
weapons in the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Lab officials also have denied that lab researchers are helping to develop
new nuclear weapons, though several existing warhead designs in the nuclear
arsenal have been or will be redesigned with more modern components or new
capabilities.

Trotts said that he searched the Web for information about stockpile
stewardship and found a number of nuclear watchdog sites that questioned
the aims of the program.

In February, he found a 1999 U.S. State Department report that credited the
ASCI program for assisting with the addition of an earth-penetrating
feature to a weapon in the U.S. stockpile called the B61.

The ASCI program ran computer models that "allowed analysis of the forces
and environments experienced by an earth-penetrating weapon and greatly
assisted in the design and certification process necessary to put this
modified weapon in the active inventory," the report states.

Trotts said that report was the "smoking gun" for him, and he resigned
two days later.

Schwoegler said the B61 modification was conducted by Los Alamos Laboratory
in New Mexico, though he said that some ASCI scientists at Livermore Lab do
assist in weapons modifications.

"New capabilities are part of weapons modifications and some ASCI
scientists (at Livermore) would work in these areas," he said. "It's no
secret that there are modifications."

He added that Trotts did not yet have a security clearance, and "ASCI
scientists with clearances work on stockpile stewardship."

Andreas Toupadakis, a former lab employee who quit in Jan. 31 to speak out
against nuclear weapons development, said he respects Trotts for choosing
to leave the lab.

 "We are in important times," Toupadakis said. "If we really do not act
courageously toward more peace, we're going to see the unthinkable soon. We
should find jobs for lifting humanity instead of destroying humanity."

A 1999 graduate of the University of California, Davis, Trotts said he
plans to talk to university students and professors about his experiences
at the lab.
                                          -----------------
                                            ©1999-2001 by
                                        MediaNews Group, Inc.
                                         and ANG Newspapers
        (Note: Includes Tri-Valley Herald, Oakland Tribune and others)


Marylia Kelley
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA USA 94550

<http://www.igc.org/tvc/> - is our web site, please visit us there!

(925) 443-7148 - is our phone
(925) 443-0177 - is our fax

Working for peace, justice and a healthy environment since 1983, Tri-Valley
CAREs has been a member of the nation-wide Alliance for Nuclear
Accountability in the U.S. since 1989, and is a co-founding member of the
Abolition 2000 global network for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the
U.S. Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Back From the Brink
campaign to get nuclear weapons taken off hair-trigger alert.



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