The U.S. Energy Department is setting a dangerous precedent for academic independence by involving some of the nation's leading universities in nuclear weapons-related computer research and by pushing classified weapons research programs into the academic arena, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The report, issued on Friday, criticizes the Academic Strategic Alliances Program, a $200 million, 10-year project financed by the Energy Department. Last year the program created research centers at five universities in support of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, or ASCI.
The goal of the computing initiative is to have a supercomputer capable of performing 100 trillion calculations per second in place by 2004. Such a computer would be about 100 times faster than the fastest machine in the nation's weapons laboratories today and 100 million times faster than today's personal computers.
Computer simulation of nuclear explosions has become an increasingly vital research area for the nation's weapons laboratories since President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. In the past it was possible to validate simulations by conducting real nuclear tests.
The defense council's report says the nation's program for simulating the testing of nuclear weapons is being aided by university research in related scientific areas that do not directly involve simulating nuclear explosions.
Energy Department officials rejected the conclusions of the report.
"The purpose of the department's simulation research funding is to improve our ability to maintain the nation's nuclear stockpile, not to improve its performance," said Joan Rohlfing, a science policy adviser to Energy Secretary Federico F. Pena. There are no differences between this program and other government research funding for universities, she added.
The report is called "Explosive Alliances: Nuclear Weapons Simulation Research at American Universities." Expanding scientific research that is closely related to weapons design at academic centers, the report warned, raises the risk of the proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons technology.
"The problem of proliferation is not simply a question of information leaking out of a safe or a computer file," said Christopher Paine, an author of the report. "What we're witnessing in this program is the erosion of the distinction between classified and nonclassified information."
The Academic Strategic Alliances Program has created research centers at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Utah, each specializing in a different area of advanced computer simulation technology.
"Caltech is looking at properties of high explosives" and their impact on materials, Paine said, "and there aren't many applications in this field that are non-nuclear."
Several researchers said they thought it was possible to preserve the separation of academic and weapons research.
Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Ill., noted that some of academia's brightest minds had been recruited by the Energy Department. "The question is, are these people doing advanced computer science, or are they surreptitiously working on nuclear weapons?" he said. "My feeling is that it's a fairly clean division."
He said that the research at the University of Chicago into supernovas was far removed from nuclear weapons research.
The director of the Center for Integrated Turbulence Simulations at Stanford University, where researchers are studying gas turbines, also disputed the conclusions of the study.
"This is no different than any other research for the
government," said William Reynolds, the center's director and a
Stanford professor of mechanical engineering. "Everything we do is
open and open to anyone. The people who are going to benefit most
from this program are U.S. engine companies."