From swords to plowshares

There is a growing amount of talk about how the nation's nuclear weapons labs must diversify into non-weapons work.
Here are links to two articles from today's Albuquerque Tribune.

The first one is by Greg Mello and states the need for change but makes few actual recommendations about how to do it.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jun/28/editorial-weapons-labs-need-embrace-change/

The second one is an editorial by the Tribune itself and makes the point, known by many for years, that if nuclear weapons were an economic driver New Mexico would not be such a poor state.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jun/28/commentary-nuclear-weapons-labs-hurt-new-mexicos-e/


An unanswered question, especially for Los Alamos, is "How do you make the change over?"

The Galvin report, in 1992, made two conclusions about LANL:

1. If Motorola were run the way that LANL was, Motorola would be out of business in a month.
2. LANL should not do anything other than weapons because they were not competitive at anything else.

Here I put forth some tentative proposals on how to change. Each proposal has some validity with respect to Los Alamos. Each has some difficulties.

1. The Yogi Berra proposal (with apologies to Steve Chu at LBL) - Declare that LANL will compete effectively in alternative energy research, allocate internal funds to people who can do the experiments necessary to compete effectively, get money to fund this from various sources while using part of the current income to fund the new direction.
2. The Lockheed approach - start a skunkworks that will bring in money and projects for a new Lab direction. Only allow bright, hard working people into the skunkworks and not very many of them. Protect the skunkworks from organizational politics and turf battles. Keep the skunkworks if it works. Lockheed designed a brand new plane in secret by using his method.
3. The dishwasher approach (from Westinghouse) - Assume that many of the current employees are in the wrong places in today's organization to be most effective in the organization that has an altered mission. Fire all of them. Then let them apply for the jobs that are needed in the organization with a new mission. Westinghouse did this when it realized that the engineers who were great at building mechanical dishwashers were not the right people for producing electronically controlled dishwashers. There was chaos for a while at Westinghouse, but eventually people realized that their new job was less stressful and a better fit than their old job.