Nanos Leaves Los Alamos

G. Peter Nanos, the controversial director of Los Alamos National Laboratory since January 2003, announced his resignation in mid-May. That announcement ended a tumultuous tenure in which he called the lab’s nuclear scientists “cowboys and buttheads” and shut down the facility for nearly seven months as part of a security crackdown. Nanos, a retired US Navy admiral, is taking a job at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Nanos’s departure had been rumored for weeks on a weblog established by LANL employees (see http://www.lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com ). Many postings made to that site after the 6 May announcement applauded his resignation. Nanos was appointed as interim director after Bush administration officials pressured John Browne to step down as director following a series of security and accounting problems at the lab in 2002.

The Univerity of California, which manages the lab, announced that Robert Kuckuck, a former National Nuclear Security Administration official and a deputy director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, would become interim director of LANL on 16 May.