Taking the King’s Shilling: The Pleasures and Consequences of Working ‘Inside’

When a British soldier in the 19th century accepted the king’s shilling as a bounty for his enlistment, he committed himself to obey the king’s regulations and the king’s orders as given by the officers of his unit. Similarly, when an academic physicist decides to accept a job in government, and particularly when he accepts a political appointment serving “at the pleasure of the president,” he also accepts the obligation to obey a web of regulations, written and unwritten, governing his activities and his freedom to speak his mind in public. The restrictions can last the rest of the person’s lifetime. If you did accept the shilling, you may not be allowed to speak on certain subjects. Or at least you must submit the piece for review and clearance, which can be a lengthy process. Clearance is difficult to achieve, and it sometimes seems as if it is withheld to stifle dissent.

In 1984 I moved from a tenured job at Louisiana State University to take a one-year fellowship in strategic arms control in the first Reagan administration. After a few weeks of waiting for CIA and DOE blessings, I was granted SITK, which is the fundamental intelligence clearance, got my nuclear weapons Q clearance, and had a book in my safe that described the design principles of every nuclear weapon from Little Boy to the W-88 (listed as “to be built”). And I found out that all those designs were truly neat physics.

My first task was to study images of a high mountain that had some strange structures on it. I saw instantly, with fairly high certainty, what nobody else with the clearance to see these fabulous images did. In my academic career I had seen blue-prints for almost the identical perfectly ordinary structures. Out of context, they could have been benign or hostile, for science or intelligence gathering, but they were not the super antisatellite weapon that some feared. The task illustrated what intelligence analysts had known for decades: If you don’t already know what you’re seeing, chances are you won’t identify it in an overhead image. I’ve never written about those images before because they were classified until the Soviet Union collapsed. Today the facility is virtually nonexistent thanks to weather effects and lack of maintenance.

My access to highly classified information means I have modest restrictions on my travel, but I have had the opportunity to accomplish something positive and to play a role in formulating and implementing government policy. Policy decisions are made in the government, not by outside activists. Of course, decisions can be influenced by outside groups, but strident appeals are counterproductive both on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch. If you do not sit at the table where decisions are made, your voice is muted or ignored by those who have real responsibilities.

The government inherently resists appeals that are based more on ideology than on either good physics or good policy. Many idealistic non-governmental organizations come across as strident, ideological, and demonstrating little understanding of the practicalities of accomplishing things within the US government and between governments.

Comprehensive test Ban treaty

Perhaps once or twice in a career, one has the good fortune to be part of a historic decision. That happened to me in 1995. I was a consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), although the word consultant hardly captured the role of somebody who was in the office three or four days every week, and who stayed most nights until the lights went out. My job was to answer the fairly specific question: “Is the United States, from the point of view of its own security and ignoring my own personal preferences and prejudices, better off demanding that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty allow states to conduct nuclear explosions at a very low level [at the time set at the equivalent of four pounds of TNT]. Or should the US accept the general world position that no nuclear explosions were permissible, no matter how low the yield?” The treaty does not define yield or explosion.

Full disclosure: When I started working for ACDA, I thought very-low-yield testing would likely be necessary. After many briefings by nuclear weapons designers, and even more off-the-record talks with retired designers, I understood what a few pounds of nuclear yield might bring for stockpile stewardship and weapons development—for the American program, the programs for the other four official nuclear weapons states, and the handful of proliferators and nuclear beginners. I made a large number of calculations using illustrative (if simplified) models of various kinds of weapons, and ultimately reached the conclusion shared by many: Tests with a yield of just four pounds would make no contribution to ensuring the reliability of the US nuclear stockpile, but could help proliferators develop more efficient and reliable weapons. I had a thick classified file on yields and results of real tests at low yield, including the most important experiments of all—those that resulted in total failure.

One afternoon John Holum, then the director of ACDA, called and asked to see me in his office to brief him on my study. I arrived with about four pages of notes on yellow legal paper. I talked for about 10 minutes and then withstood a grilling not much less intense than that for my oral PhD qualifying exam. After half an hour, John asked for my notes, folded the pages, put them in his jacket pocket, and saw me out.

When the decision on the CTBT was publicly announced the next day, I learned that John was driven directly to the White House for a meeting of the principals’ committee of the National Security Council with President Clinton chairing the meeting. The issue to be decided was whether the US could and should accept a no-threshold CTBT. John, of course, argued for the zero option and told me later that he spoke using my notes. No bonus, no extra pay, but in 1996 I found myself the holder of a ticket for one of the few seats allocated to ACDA to witness President Clinton’s signing of the treaty. I take little credit for my role in the decision, since many others had argued the case for years. But my notes were there when it mattered.

At the end of July 1998, Director Holum asked me to be his chief scientific adviser with the title of ambassador. I declined the title because the required Senate confirmation would not be possible while Jesse Helms was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After the usual White House and FBI checks, I took office as ACDA’s chief scientist. One of my first duties was to attend a meeting of a National Security Council working group where the US position on retaining or destroying the smallpox virus was to be decided. My only instructions were to listen to the arguments, pro and con, use my own judgment, and vote as I thought in the best interests of the US. I voted for, and when it came time to say “aye” or “no,” the room was almost unanimously in favor.

But I lost as many as I won, including the estimate of the North Korean missile threat and some other issues. I thought I had put the hafnium bomb where it belongs when a JASON report I commissioned on behalf of the State Department said that the concept was unworkable and that the paper that claimed triggering of the long-lived ¹⁷⁸Hf^m2 isomer was unlikely to be true (Physics Today, May 2004, page 21 ,). The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been spending millions on the idea anyway, despite a detailed report by the Institute for Defense Analyses stating that the original paper in Physical Review Letters was flawed and should not have passed peer review. We killed it with laughter. Late last year the House and Senate zeroed out hafnium research for FY 2005.

Dirty bombs

My job at ACDA became a State Department job when ACDA was merged into State in 1999, but it remained a political appointment. I left State when the Clinton administration ended and a few months later joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was the first chief scientist the committee had. I had fun there except for the anthrax attack. The Democrats were in the majority, and Senator Joseph Biden pretty much gave me my head to look at anything that combined science and foreign policy. The hearings Senator Biden chaired (the public one and the ones you haven’t heard about in detail) went a long way toward establishing that a dirty bomb is a serious problem, but that it is a weapon of disruption, not mass destruction. Representatives from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories brought replicas of real terrorist-style nuclear devices to one of those meetings. Picture, if you will, trying to bring a nuclear device, even just a full-scale inert model (containing ²³⁸U instead of ²³⁵U), into the US Capitol. The guard begins: “Sir, what do you have in that crate?” “An atomic bomb.” “May I examine it?” “No.”

It turns out, however, that the Capitol police are an outstanding organization and have a hazardous devices team that is one of the best in Washington. The police had clearances to see anything, and although nobody had asked to bring in a nuke before, they had handled plenty of strange requests. To them it was “no problem, sir,” and the crates were inspected on the loading dock and brought up to the secure facility.

Imagine how I felt when we lifted the replica out of the container and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton nudged me and asked if that could really be a nuclear weapon. When I said yes, she said, “My husband never told me about that!” Our case for strengthened safeguards had been made by demonstrating to powerful legislators that a terrorist nuclear device was not difficult to make, and that it was small enough to fit in the back of a minivan.

Potomac fever, although serious, can be cured; I have now moved back to an academic position where I hope to write, speak (almost) freely, and train a successor generation of physicists who will join the fray as full participants, not outside kibitzers. I carry with me knowledge and experience of what works and doesn’t work in Washington, and some insights into secret but elegant technology. I can recommend a stint in government if you care about politics and national security.