Amb. Linton Brooks

The NNSA's Linton Brooks

October / November 06 Volume 4 Number 5

Print this Article

E-mail this Article

Ambassador Linton F. Brooks was sworn in as under secretary of energy for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2003. The NNSA includes approximately 37,000 federal, military and contractor personnel charged with carrying out the national security responsibilities of the Department of Energy. These responsibilities include designing, producing and maintaining safe and reliable nuclear weapons for the military, providing safe, militarily effective naval nuclear propulsion plants and promotion of international nuclear safety and nonproliferation.

Ambassador Brooks has over four decades of experience in national security, much of it associated with nuclear weapons. As a career Navy officer he deployed on four nuclear-equipped ships. In Washington he was the White House official responsible, among other things, for all DOE nuclear programs and for U.S. nuclear testing policy during the final third of the Reagan Administration.

For the eight years before joining the Bush Administration, Brooks served as a vice president at the Center for Naval Analyses, where he directed research and analysis of issues of national importance.

In addition to his security and weapons background, Brooks has extensive arms control experience. During the first Bush administration, he served as assistant director for strategic and nuclear affairs at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and in the State Department as head of the U.S. delegation on nuclear and space talks and chief strategic arms reductions (START) negotiator.

Brooks holds a B.S. in physics from Duke University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. in government and politics from the University of Maryland.

He spoke with Innovation during a visit to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.

The NNSA website lists 18 functions for the NNSA administrator. Of your responsibilities, which take the bulk of your attention and time?

I think what takes the bulk of my attention and time is trying to set a vision for the future and make sure we don't lose track of it, and that
involves people, it involves budget, it involves programs, so that's what ought to take the bulk of my time. Then there's a certain amount of day-to-day business, depending on the time of the year, associated with the Hill and the budget.

What does it mean to be a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy and why is that important to the laboratories within the NNSA?

Well, I don't know whether it's important to the laboratory. What it means is that we are separately organized. It means that while I take direction from the Secretary and the Deputy, that people who work for me can't be directed by other parts of the organization, and I think the biggest benefit to the laboratory is clarity of authority and responsibility from me to the site office manager, so that what we hope to do is have a situation where the federal government is speaking with one voice and the laboratory is only having to deal with one set of requirements.

NNSA's complex 2030 plan outlines the future path of NNSA to establish a smaller, more efficient nuclear weapons complex. A shorter term goal is to reduce the stockpile by 50 percent by 2012. How do you see these directives impacting the NNSA national laboratories, in terms of mission and size of work force?

In terms of mission, I don't think it affects them. The mission of the labs will remain, because we believe that the reliable replacement warhead is a prerequisite to getting the complex of the future. The laboratories will take on and are taking on the new mission to help us design the warhead we always would have designed if we'd known as much as we know now. I think the other thing where it will affect the national laboratories is special nuclear material. Ultimately, we will be out of the business of having special nuclear material at the national labs. Soon for Sandia, a little less soon for Livermore, and then Los Alamos is far in the future, because we'll have to figure out where the consolidated plutonium center is going to go. And what that will do is it will save security costs and let the labs focus more on their mission of science and engineering and weapons science.

There's been discussion lately of the ageing of the laboratory's work force and the possibility of large numbers retiring in the not distant future. The recent Augustine report on American competitiveness emphasized the need for increased education of our youth in science and math. How do you see these factors affecting NNSA in the long term?

Well, the NNSA is part of the nation. If the nation does not reverse the present decline in the number of people going into math, science and engineering, then if you look far enough out I think that the technological advantage the United States has always had is at risk. In the near term, we're doing well on recruiting. A lot of our replacement warhead research is letting us transfer to a new generation some of the knowledge of how you go about looking at a complex nuclear problem, and because we have facilities like the MESA [Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications] complex, we are drawing bright young people because they have opportunities to explore problems in our labs they can't explore anywhere else. The Department of Energy, through the Office of Science, is really trying to focus on broad scientific education. I see NNSA like all other technological organizations, as dependent on the long-term health of American science and
technology.

How do you see the private sector and the national laboratories collaborating in the future?

You're seeing a couple of things. You're seeing the experiment that's now in place at Los Alamos, where it's run by an entity that we hope will ring together the scientific expertise and vision and commitment to truth of a great university with the operational excellence of companies with great experience in managing complex nuclear operations, so that's one area. We have a request for a proposal out [to manage] Livermore. It's premature to talk about who's going to participate, but I would not be surprised if at least some of the competitors are a similar consortium. That's one area. Secondly, as we look at moving toward the complex of the future and reliable replacement warhead, we're trying to couple the science and design much more closely with the production capability within our own complex. It's an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that in the Cold War, we designed weapons and then sort of threw them over to the engineers and said, "Build this." And now, competing design teams spent a lot of time talking about what particular design features would make it easier in the production and assembly. So I think that in the narrower area of nuclear weapons, you're going to see more and more integration between the production and the design. And finally, obviously, as the whole premise of your magazine is based on, I think more and more we will continue to try to migrate the knowledge that grows out of these labs the broader society, technology transfer. commercialization and other things. At the same time, what we're seeing —€”because the government generally is a much smaller fraction of the business—€”is that we're being driven away from specialized components, specialized technology, to a much greater use of commercial shell technology. If you go back 30 years ago, we were a very large fraction of the electronic industry's business. We're not now. The electronics industry is not going to jump through a bunch of hoops for the national security community, and so we are being driven to being integrated more closely. And then finally, there are lots of very specific partnerships that we keep coming across between labs and individual private sector companies, so I think there's a great deal of overlapping connections.

How do you see tech transfer as part of the mission of NNSA?

Well, I think it is clearly our mission to encourage that, both by making sure we're not putting in excessive roadblocks and just by an attitude. At the same time, our primary mission remains the national security and so we always have to sort of strike a little bit of a balance.