Red Flag at a Weapons Lab

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Physicist Edward Teller has a reputation for thinking big: during World War II, as other Manhattan Project scientists were racing to build the first atom bomb, the Hungarian-born Teller was already working on the hydrogen bomb. While the H-bomb was both a technological tour de force and a hellishly effective weapon, however, one of Teller's more recent enthusiasms -- the X- ray laser -- could turn out to be an expensive dud. That possibility has ignited a fire storm of accusations that has set off a federal investigation into recent goings-on at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country's two weapons-development centers.

The problem, charges Roy Woodruff, the former director of weapons research at Livermore, is that Teller oversold the X-ray laser, a proposed Star Wars device under development at the lab, to President Reagan. Not only were some of Teller's statements "technically incorrect," claims Woodruff, but "the optimistic schedules proposed by Dr. Teller for deployment of an X-ray laser weapon are impossible." Woodruff's accusations have split the lab into bitter factions; they have also cast doubt on the scientific integrity of Livermore, a facility founded with Teller's support in 1952, and cast a shadow over Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

Tensions over the development of the X-ray laser might have remained behind closed doors if Woodruff had not been demoted by Livermore Director Roger Batzel in what Woodruff claims was retaliation for trying to put a lid on Teller. Prior to his transfer, Woodruff was responsible for proposed SDI weapons like the X-ray laser, a device that was supposed to channel the intense X rays from a nuclear bomb into a beam of radiation. In theory, the X rays would be capable of destroying enemy ICBMs in mid-flight. But tests showed that although such devices work on a small scale, there was little evidence that they could be made powerful enough to work as effective antimissile weapons.

Woodruff questions whether Teller passed along such doubts to the President or his aides. In 1983, he points out, Teller sent a letter to then White House Science Adviser George Keyworth saying the laser was ready for "engineering phase" -- implying that only a few details remained to be worked out before the weapon could be built. And as late as 1987, Lowell Wood, a manager of weapons development at Livermore and Teller's protege, told a House subcommittee how "X-ray lasers can be used to destroy any type of platforms in space, including defensive platforms, so the counterdefensive role is being explored extensively, and it is this role in which X-ray lasers might be expected to first come into play . . ."

Woodruff claims he confronted Lab Director Batzel several times, asking him to refute the claims made by Teller and Wood. Batzel allegedly refused. According to Woodruff, Batzel explained by saying "No one listens to Edward and Lowell." In fact, says Woodruff, at that time "Teller was the only guy in the lab who could go and see the President." Because of Teller's reputation for hyperbole, concedes Democratic Representative from California George Brown Jr., an SDI opponent and the member of the House intelligence committee who initiated a General Accounting Office probe, "Those in Congress and the scientific community tend to discount his exuberance. The President doesn't. The President thinks he is speaking with revealed wisdom."

In late 1985 Woodruff resigned to protest Batzel's inaction and asked for a transfer; he was demoted to a lower-level position and denied salary increases. After a two-year investigation, the University of California ruled in December that Woodruff had been unfairly reassigned. He was promptly named head of Livermore's verification program, which advises the Defense Department on technical issues concerning compliance with arms-control treaties.

Teller and Wood, for their part, refuse to comment directly on Woodruff's charges. Even so, Teller told TIME last week, "I'm most unhappy to see a great scientific discovery, the X-ray laser, is reported not for its merits or its possible use for defense, but as an object of controversy." Contends Livermore Physicist Hugh DeWitt: "Woodruff did a damn good job of blowing the whistle on the extravagant claims of those two men." And while Woodruff's employment status has been resolved, the issues have not. The conclusions of the GAO investigation are expected by June; at stake is not just the future of the X-ray laser, but the reputations of Livermore's scientists. "When I go to Washington now, people jokingly ask me what's the next lie that going to come out of here," says John Harvey, Livermore's project manager for advanced strategic systems. "Your technical credibility is the only thing that you ever have to offer anyone. That's one of the things the laboratory has been strong on in the past." Now, though, it is a commodity in short supply.

With reporting by Dick Thompson/San Francisco