National Labs

and competition.

The gentleman quoted in this post mentions his concerns:

"...But it did have some drawbacks and that is,
that Los Alamos had built the first bombs, and by God,
if Livermore hadn't existed, we would still be
building round bombs today. I am convinced of it,
because the only reason that people that went on and
that we got more innovative was because of the
competition because of Livermore and Los Alamos. And
that has been the same in all of the branches of
science that go on in Los Alamos.
We had counterparts in other organizations
that we were trying to outdo, and we -- although we
shared our knowledge very carefully with them, it --
it stimulated that interchange, and in some cases it
actually improved things.
For example, some of my ideas I could not
get past our management at Los Alamos because they
knew how to do it. From the other side, I freely
communicated those with Livermore and Sandia, and
because of that those things are in the stockpile
today. It would not have happened with just Los
Alamos because of the rigid -- you know, the boss
knows best and -- and so, don't -- don't make any
waves. And that is what -- that's one of the things
that I worry very much about in the consolidation
efforts that you are talking about. And I am very
much against the consolidation of all tritium work at


one laboratory, one place, or all explosive work at
one laboratory. I realize that you probably -- you
can't build two -- two plutonium production pit
production places, so the competition will have to
come in in a different fashion than that. But unless
you want to have a dead DOE or NNSA, you can't -- I
would recommend you never go down below two competing
sources.
And then a lot of planning that goes on, you
hear people say the weapons are lasting, the pits are
going to last this long. Well, I know some things
about that that indicate that nothing is going to keep
going along.
I think everybody alive is familiar with a
pocket comb. How long does your pocket comb last? Do
you know that our explosives are made of organic
materials just like -- just like the pocket comb? The
binders that we use to hold the explosives together
are plastics. These deteriorate over time.."

His fears arrive:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons complex is shifting design work on a key warhead component — the tritium gas system — from one government laboratory to another, a move that is generating some controversy (see GSN, Nov. 10, 2008).

Robert Smolen — until last month a top National Nuclear Security Administration official — announced the decision in a Jan. 5 internal memo. The agency, he said, would soon consolidate responsibility for designing tritium “gas transfer systems” from the two organizations currently performing the work — the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories — down to a single site, Sandia’s facility in Livermore, Calif.

Congress in 2000 established the National Nuclear Security Administration as a semiautonomous arm of the Energy Department. The agency oversees the national laboratories as part of its mandate to maintain the stockpile.

The component at the center of debate, called the “gas transfer system,” moves tritium from container bottles into the core of the nuclear warhead as the weapon explodes. It “enables tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, to boost the yield of a nuclear weapon,” according to an NNSA statement issued a day after Smolen’s internal memo.

The news release heralded the decision without identifying New Mexico-based Los Alamos as the facility expected to lose the work.

Expect the worst from this administration, always hope for the best though:

The North Koreans are actually quite stupid. It's not necessarily wise to be the first country to test Obama's resolve.
--Korea expert Gordon Flake, an adviser to President Barack Obama during the campaign for the White House, ahead of an anticipated North Korean rocket launch.

Somehow I think that the Norks will get away with their brash demeanor.