ON JULY 16th 1945 the skies of New Mexico lit up and a thunderous roar whooshed across the desert. Los Alamos National Laboratory has been living ever since on the reputation it won from that history-changing event, the explosion of the first atomic bomb. But smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures. A series of farcical events, ranging from secret data going missing (only to be discovered behind a copying machine) to false charges of espionage being laid against an American scientist of Chinese descent, led the then director, Pete Nanos, to describe his staff as “cowboys” and “butt-heads”, and to close the place down for seven months in 2004, to try to clean things up.The result is a change of management. At the beginning of June the University of California, which had run Los Alamos since the days of the Manhattan Project, ceded control to a consortium known as Los Alamos National Security. Though the university remains one of the consortium's members, it will now share what bouquets and brickbats come Los Alamos's way with three firms that make a lot of their money as military contractors. These are Bechtel and Washington Group International, two large engineering and construction companies, and BWX technologies, a concern that specialises in managing nuclear facilities.Unlike the university, the new consortium will be aiming to make a decent profit from its activities. It is also thought likely to change the emphasis of the laboratory from research (in a wide range of subjects, not all of them to do with defence, let alone nuclear weapons), to the more mundane business of making the detonators of nuclear warheads.The consortium is making reassuring noises. According to Jeff Berger, its director of communications, “There is a popular misconception that we're out to change the lab's mission.” Nevertheless, many of Los Alamos's researchers sense a shift of direction. Indeed, quite a few have left. That, though, is hardly the point. The question is whether any change that does come will serve America's national interest.Full Story Or PDF up right here.