Science: Red Flag at a Weapons Lab

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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 . . ."