Blue Sky Dream (29 page)

During one visit to a Silicon Valley company, the young, modern president is paid tribute by technology used to create the special effects in
Terminator II.
As Bill Clinton watches, faces on a video screen “morph” from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan, who sent more military dollars per capita to Silicon Valley than anywhere else, is left out of the morphing as the audience claps and Bill Clinton offers one of his ingratiating, lip-biting smiles.

I
t is April of 1994 and once again I am seeking conversion upon the Hill. This day I am in the office of George Brown, Democratic
Representative from Southern California. He is a genial fellow with a grandfatherly face and one of the more intriguing résumés in Congress. He studied physics before the atom bomb was invented. He was the first member of Congress to oppose the Vietnam War. He politicked early and hard for projects ranging from renewable energy and ozone layer protection to the space station and the superconducting supercollider. He is today the Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology at a moment when the Congress and White House are both under Democratic control. He is a man, in short, who has long hungered for the opportunity now at hand, the chance to lead in the greening of a new, federally funded technoscience agenda for America.

He is beginning to realize, the day I visit him, that his chance will never arrive. Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Pentagon still funds about half of all federally sponsored research and development. Meanwhile, the entire federal R&D budget is dropping just when many corporations are downsizing their labs, causing some experts to predict a glut of underemployed PhDs soon. Thousands of physicists are already scrambling for work now that their superconducting supercollider is a half-finished ruin in the Texas desert, Congress having pulled the plug on that monument to Big Science.

“The nation is never united so much as when it is threatened by something,” George Brown muses, harking back to those misty olden days, the Cold War. “Once that pressure is over, then things tend to ease up and you no longer have a sense of a society devoted to a common goal. Religion doesn’t provide it. Political leadership doesn’t provide it. Writers don’t provide it. Of course when you have this image of how great you are and how valiant your battle against the enemy is—in this case, the Communists—it provides a sort of negative unity. You’re not sure of what you are trying to achieve. You know you don’t want the bad guys to overcome you, and that’s what held us together. Now we don’t even have that.

“No sense of unity. No sense of unity,” says George Brown,
summing up his fading hopes for a nation’s ability to dream a common future, and for his government’s ability to coherently plan for and invest in the technoscience to help bring about that future. “If I am hearing you right,” I say, “you are close to despairing that a political coalition can ever be built that will be strong enough to support the kind of government-led science and technological development that we saw during the Cold War.”

“I am becoming somewhat pessimistic about that happening,” George Brown answers.

As he does, neither of us has an inkling that he is soon to lose his leadership of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. That autumn, the Republicans, riding a wave of anger at a federal government that no longer inspires, will sweep into power in both houses of Congress. When looking to the sky for a new science and technology agenda, the Republicans will find it easier to imagine a nuclear attack than a stripped ozone layer, and so they will push for a 25 percent increase in Star Wars funding and try to stall a ban on chloroflouride production. The two Republican members of Congress authoring the bills against the CFC ban will be named, aptly, Doolittle (John) and DeLay (Tom). The leader of the Republican charge into power will be Newt Gingrich. A basher of government welfare and a self-declared true believer in the privatized free market, Newt Gingrich will, nevertheless, also be a stalwart friend to the aerospace industry and higher military budgets, coming as he does from the Atlanta suburb that contains Lockheed’s largest complex.

Months after my visit and shortly after the Republican victory, I will dial George Brown’s number only to hear a taped message from Skip Stiles, his aide on the Committee for Science, Space and Technology. Making reference to the Borg, a race of lockstep, soulless automatons featured on
Star Trek
, the aide’s voice will flatly inform: “We are Skip. As with all Democrats we have been assimilated according to the post-election plan. Leave a message at the tone. Or hit zero to speak to another unit in central processing. Thank you.”

L
ate in the summer of 1994, a pleasant, kind-faced woman named Carol Alonso is telling me how it used to go when she would get one of her creative flashes. It would come, sometimes, at home in the evening, as she gazed into the fire. The idea would take shape the next morning as she showered, made breakfast for her husband and two children, pulled her Porsche out of the driveway of her split-level home in the Northern California suburb of Orinda. At the office she’d try the idea on her closest workmates. If they liked it, she’d create some computer models, deliver some briefings, submit her idea to rigorous scrutiny by the best in the business. Every step would grow more and more competitive and Carol Alonso had “seen grown men cry” as they watched their ideas “picked to pieces.” Still, when one of hers made it through, the pain all seemed worthwhile, for Carol Alonso would be handed the prize she and her peers had spent their lives chasing. She would be given America’s next nuclear explosion.

Then would follow the heady days leading up to an underground test, Carol Alonso directing her team toward the “shot” deadline a year away. If this meant Dad and the kids saw less of Mom, the Alonsos, a thoroughly modern family, coped. After all, they had been through this many times before. And, too, they had something to look forward to. Once Mom’s creative flash did become a thermonuclear reaction causing the Nevada desert to rumble with the unleashed force of 150,000 tons of TNT, once Mom’s bomb
did
go off, the family would celebrate together, unwind, escape. They’d all take a nice vacation.

“We sailed together in the kingdom of Tonga. We hiked in the Himalayas. We sailed in the Caribbean several times. We went to Tahiti and sailed around it in a chartered boat,” says Carol Alonso, eyes alight with the memories. “We had wonderful times together.”

Wonderful times together for Carol Alonso and her fellow nuclear weapons designers are rumored to be nearing an end the day she and I talk at her workplace, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Treaties oblige the United States to cut its warhead stockpile by nearly half within the decade. Gone is the heyday that saw up to four shots a month, more than 1,000 explosions since 1945. President Clinton’s renewed moratorium means there hasn’t been a single underground test for three years and the world is moving toward a comprehensive test ban. Some members of Congress, Republican as well as Democrat, are urging that Lawrence Livermore be shut down and its work be shifted to its sister lab in Los Alamos. Weaponeers tell me the mood of the place is souring as they see slipping away their reason for being. “We’re subcritical now,” one old-timer dourly confides, fearing there are too few left with the know-how to carry on the tradition of nuclear bomb making.

In reading about the crisis of purpose in America’s nuclear laboratories, I see that MIT anthropologist Hugh Gusterson and I independently have come to share a metaphorical perspective. He has studied nuclear weaponeers for years and finds them to be a tribal society whose central ritual was the underground test that Carol Alonso so fondly remembers. For elders, the test built stature and gave them “a feeling of power over their weapons.” For young weapons designers, the test was “a rite of passage” into the tribal inner circle. But now their central ritual is banned and so the nostalgia and fretting I encounter at Lawrence Livermore should be no surprise.

What surprises me is where hope has been found to live. The nuclear weaponeers see a way to keep their central ritual, if only in “virtual” form. The labs and their allies are campaigning for a new generation of technology that will allow nuclear explosions to be simulated in the laboratory so that the design—and testing—of nuclear weapons concepts can continue apace. The centerpiece of this program would be a $1.8 billion superlaser to be located at Lawrence Livermore. It would be the largest single military project ever built at the lab, and a magnet for more
weapons talent, money, and work. Critics argue that “virtual” testing is an expensive boondoggle that will make a mockery of test ban efforts and promote nuclear proliferation. But the weaponeers I speak with at Lawrence Livermore are hopeful that President Clinton will give the go ahead on the superlaser, hopeful that this will stave off the extinction of their culture. (Their prayers for rejuvenation will be answered two months later as the superlaser receives White House approval.)

On the day I visit, one of the most upbeat Lawrence Livermore denizens is a bearded baby boomer named Kent Johnson, who tells me he was heartened to see that a recent job posting for a nuclear weapons designer drew forty applicants. If the superlaser comes through, he suggests, think of all the fresh blood the tribe might initiate. “I really believe we can recruit people,” he says, “if we have the money.” The fact that the nuclear weapons stockpile is officially said to be 8,000 warheads too full at the moment when he is telling me this does not seem to matter to Kent Johnson, who remains very much interested in the design and testing of nuclear weapons, who expresses no interest in finding other work. Kent Johnson snaps my wandering thoughts back to our conversation by asking, “Your dad. What’s his name?” He is intrigued that I have mentioned my father’s career as a Lockheed Missiles and Space Company engineer. “I’ve worked with a lot of Lockheed folks,” says the nuclear weapon designer. “I might have worked with your father on a project or two.”

“No, I’m sure you haven’t,” I say, though of course I can’t be sure, so ultimately intertwined are the various projects of the extended tribe, so translatable, across the various subcultures within the extended tribe, are certain beliefs and symbols and language and ritual, and the instinctive desire to preserve all this.

T
he electronic mail is beginning to trickle onto my computer screen in the autumn of 1994. I have sent a message to a few sites
on the Web where aerospace people converse. I have asked, “How does it feel to be in aerospace today?” and every time I check in, a few more answers await me. Today there is this from a twenty-nine-year-old aerospace engineer:

There is this as well from a senior aerospace specialist at AlliedSignal Engines who asks, like nearly all the others, that I not reveal his identity for fear that being seen to complain might further dim his worsening prospects: