Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is not a whining socialist. He is not a gamy-handed collectivist. He is not a isolationist. That said, he is in favor of the government keeping some people employed for their whole lives. Those people would be the nuclear scientists working on building, improving, and keeping going America’s nuclear arsenal. A good number of those people work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Some of those people are being laid off. Per the Associated Press:
Because of budget cuts and higher costs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory laid off 440 employees May 22 and 23. Over the past 2 1/2 years, attrition and layoffs have reduced the work force of 8,000 by about 1,800 altogether.
According to a list obtained by The Associated Press, about 60 of the recently laid-off workers were engineers, around 30 were physicists and about 15 were chemists. Some, but not all, were involved in nuclear weapons work or nonproliferation efforts, and all had put in at least 20 years at the lab.
Some lawmakers and others said they fear the loss of important institutional knowledge about designing warheads and detecting whether other countries are going nuclear.
Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said job reductions at Lawrence Livermore and two other big U.S. weapons labs represent “a national security danger point.” These unemployed experts might take their skills overseas, Feinstein said.
[…]
The possibility is also on the mind of the nation’s top nuclear weapons official, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D’Agostino.
“Always in a situation where people leave under less-than-ideal circumstances, we worry about that, and it’s something I assure you we’re looking at closely,” D’Agostino said. “I’m always concerned about the counterintelligence part of our mission, and we have an active program to go make sure we understand where we’re vulnerable and where we’re not.”
Asked to elaborate, NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency is “always on guard for foreign entities approaching our employees, active or retired, but it’s their responsibility to alert us to those circumstances.”
The NNSA is aware of no instance in which a U.S. nuclear weapons scientist had gone to work overseas, he said.
He said the agency regards the possibility of a hostile government picking up laid-off workers as “highly unlikely,” in part because these are American citizens who have responsibly held high-level clearances for many years, and because federal law provide stiff penalties  which range as high as life in prison  for divulging nuclear secrets.
[…]
Lawmakers and others have expressed concern that wave after wave of work force reductions will diminish the lab’s expertise. D’Agostino said he could not guarantee that national security would not be harmed.
With a self-imposed nuclear test ban in place since 1992, maintenance of the warhead stockpile  Lawrence Livermore’s top responsibility  is performed on supercomputers. So is the task of designing a new generation of warhead, which Lawrence Livermore won the right to do last year.
The layoffs have reduced the lab’s roster of experts with invaluable experience they had gleaned from taking part in actual nuclear tests, Sale [a laid-off physicist who until recently worked at Livermore] and others said. “Designing, building and seeing a device go off is very different from designing a device and handing it to a computer jockey,” Sale said.
Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, whose district includes part of the lab, said the stakes are especially high as the United States tries to divine through science what other countries are doing inside their weapons programs.
[…]
Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory that built the atom bomb during World War II, cut its work force last year by about 550 through retirements and attrition, and Sandia, also largely in New Mexico, plans to shed dozens of workers.
Congress cut $100 million from Lawrence Livermore’s budget in the fiscal 2008 budget, and the lab has been hit with an additional $180 million in unexpected costs from its transfer last year to a new management company, lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton said.
So it seems that your Maximum Leader joins California Senator Diane Feinstein (D) in her concern over these lay-offs. Your Maximum Leader and Senator Feinstein doesn’t see too many issues on which he and the Senator agree. (Although it is possible that there are on plenty of mundane issues that never bubble up into the media on which they agree.)
Your Maximum Leader is a free-trader. The downsizing of American Airlines, United Airlines, GM and a host of other companies don’t scare your Maximum Leader. He is disappointed that these companies haven’t found ways to get healthy and competitive faster; but those are the breaks. That said, your Maximum Leader does fear that our national security is too seriously jeopardized by the outsourcing of our defence related industries. He is also worried about what is happening to our nuclear scientists. He doesn’t advocate permanent employment as policy. But he is willing to make an exception for people who can help a hostile power develop the weapons needed to destroy us.
Before you think your Maximum Leader has gone all soft on you… Yes, he knows that brainpower alone isn’t enough to get a bomb. You need materials, specially engineered equipment, etc etc. Let it be known that your Maximum Leader isn’t convinced that non-proliferation protocols work well. He doesn’t want to tempt fate by letting our brain-power proliferate too…
Carry on.
