Since the mid‐twentieth century, the U.S. government has supported hundreds of science and technology laboratories, many for military purposes. Those designated national laboratories combine wide‐ranging research and development programs with administration by the Department of Energy (1977) as government‐owned, contractor‐operated facilities. Although the national laboratory system traces its roots to World War II's atomic bomb project, only three have maintained significant roles in designing, developing, and engineering nuclear weapons: Los Alamos (1943), Sandia (1948), and Lawrence Livermore (1952). The two other major wartime laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, abandoned military‐related work. An additional three national laboratories created subsequently—Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi Nation al Accelerator Laboratory, and Idaho National Engineering Laboratory—rarely performed any.
Until the early twentieth century, new military technology normally originated outside the military establishment. Although individual soldiers might have a hand in invention, manufacturing rather than innovation tended to characterize the century‐old network of army arsenals and navy shipyards. In 1915, however, the creation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) inaugurated a new era.
Advisory to be sure, NACA (1915–58) also directed a premier research facility, Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia. Not only did NACA become an interwar byword for cutting‐edge military (and civilian) aeronautical research, it also provided the Office of Scientific Research and Development with a model for organizing American science in World War II. Government contracts with well‐established academic and industrial organizations became the normal route for military research and development during the war and after.
Ultimately, the most renowned instance of this new partnership was the Manhattan Project. To produce a totally new weapon, the atomic bomb, the army's wartime Manhattan Engineer District contracted with universities and corporations for the necessary applied scientific research, engineering development, proof testing, and manufacturing. Facilities created to further the project included what would become the national laboratories, all inherited by the Atomic Energy Commission (1947–75) when it succeeded the army team.
When the war ended, only Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory managed by the University of California, remained in the weapons business, though it soon had company. The laboratory's weaponization group (responsible for converting designs to functional weapons) moved to Albuquerque, changed its name to Sandia, and became an independent engineering laboratory in 1948. The following year, its management passed from the university to Bell Telephone, succeeded in its turn by Martin Marietta in 1995.
Concerns about the development of thermonuclear weapons underlay the 1952 establishment of the third nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore, California. Originally a branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), Lawrence Livermore became independent in 1971, though still under university management. To provide weaponization support for the new laboratory, Sandia in 1956 opened its own branch laboratory in Livermore.
Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia were responsible for designing and developing every warhead in America's entire nuclear arsenal. And although the research, development, and testing of nuclear weapons remains their core concern, they expanded their scope far beyond any narrow military requirements into such areas as computers, lasers, and biomedical technology.
[See also Atomic Scientists.]
Bibliography
- Richard G. Hewlett, et al., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission,
3 vols., 1962–89. - Thomas E. Cochran, et al., Nuclear Weapons Databook, Vol. 3: U.S. Nuclear Warhead Facility Profiles, 1987
