Media overlook weapons, security at Alamos
Lab
Your coverage of Bill Richardson’s appearance at the most
recent regents meeting (“Lab contract pushed,” Nov. 18)
omitted several important details about the topic at hand ““
the University of California’s management of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. If the university is going to make an
intelligent decision whether to bid for the contract to manage
LANL, several incontestable facts need to be made clear.
First of all, LANL is primarily a nuclear weapons research,
design and production laboratory. It is not a
“multi-disciplinary research institution,” as The Bruin
and most mass media report. Most of the lab’s roughly $1.7
billion budget is dedicated to nuclear weaponry. For example, in
2005 the laboratory plans to spend a mere $34 million on
energy-related research, while pumping $1.4 billion into
“weapons activities.”
Secondly, security at LANL is a problem without a solution. Any
institution dedicated to the mission of nuclear weapons will remain
an incurable contradiction of top secrecy and open science. Combine
this conundrum with LANL’s literally indefensible terrain and
you can see LANL is by definition a security risk any way you look
at it.
Both of these unreported points are part of the larger story
that has been absent in the UC’s board meetings as well as in
the press. Should the university manage a weapons of mass
destruction facility? Is this the proper role of an institution
dedicated to the public good? And do the security problems at Los
Alamos ““ missing disks, stolen items, vulnerability to
sabotage and attack ““ reflect a deeper truth about the
mission of nuclear weapons science? Namely, rather than making us
secure and putting us on the “cutting edge” of science,
do these facilities actually make us profoundly insecure?
Darwin Bond Graham Graduate student in sociology, UC
Santa Barbara
Protestors must get a grip on financial
reality
The protestors are at it again. This time their target is the
newest UC fee increase, levied in response to California’s
budget deficit. While I too loathe paying increased fees, I
understand that they are necessary to keep UCLA competitive as an
elite university in light of our reduced funding caused by the
budget crisis.
As a public university we receive much of our funds from the
California state pool of taxes, the same pool from which funds are
used for all other state programs. Given the political leanings of
our campus, I am confident that most of the protestors voted in
favor of the recent initiatives that provide state funding for stem
cell research, children’s hospitals and mental health
treatment. Each of these sound great at face value ““ I
support stem cell research, children’s health, and public
sanity ““ but we are facing a serious budget deficit
continually fueled by the irresponsible passage of costly
initiatives.
Increasing taxes will just drive away more businesses and
further deteriorate our economy, so something has got to give. Each
program sucks more and more money from the taxpayers and further
draws funds away from public education.
Campus protestors need to choose their battles and end the
hypocrisy of their stances. The regents must now regrettably raise
fees to keep UCLA and the entire UC system competitive with private
universities.
Dave Schrenzel Second-year, undeclared