(2 of 3)
Keyworth objected to the press's use of the phrase Star Wars to describe what he called the President's new defensive concept. Admitting "the American people are not likely to enthusiastically support the placement of nuclear weapons in space," he urged the assembled scientists to start thinking instead about ways to get their share of the huge research-and-development money involved in putting laser beams in space. In Los Alamos, weapons are bread and butter.
Thirty-four miles southeast, the selfconsciously self-aware Anglos who live in Santa Fe like to talk reverently about "the energy that comes off the mountains." They mean spiritual, natural, ancestral energy, not the kind that could come off the high-tech Machu Picchu on the hill. In Los Alamos, the holistic weapons careerists in the cafeteria choose beansprouts and yogurt and reject actual nuclear war as theoretically implausible. It is downright rude in Los Alamos for an outsider—or even an insider—to raise questions concerning war or peace. The first causes moral qualm, the second unemployment.
Living on the edge of contradiction is not easy, even for people who like to describe themselves as high-performance professionals. A trip to the yard seems to offer a chance to domesticate some of that contradiction, to turn some small piece of it into something comprehensibly useful.
None of the stuff in the salvage yard is radioactive. It does not directly bear any functional relationship to an atomic bomb. The prices are dirt cheap, but it is not fair to view the yard as another glaring example of Government waste. Compared with the military, for example, the lab, which is managed by the University of California for the Department of Energy, is positively thrifty. Or so insists Allen Wallace, property disposal supervisor for the Zia Co., the contractor that serves, to use local parlance, as the interface between the lab and the outside world. Says Wallace: "It is important to understand this is the last step." Before this, usable surplus has been offered to other Government agencies through excess-property catalogues, and then to state and local agencies. Finally, it goes to the yard.
Five minutes after noon the scroungers have established territorial piles of gleanings. Inside a dumpster filled with old electronics (40¢ per lb.), three men are crawling around stripping out switches, relays and diodes. In the steel pile (7¢ per lb.), a swarm is hauling off a transformer cabinet, a 16-in. pipe and a chunk of plate steel left in fanciful cookie-cutter shapes by a plasma-arc cutter. Two men are momentarily baffled by a machined piece. "I don't know what they could have meant to do with this," says one. "It could have been a detector, something to let low-energy particles through. . ."
Rich Hassman, a computer-systems manager in the waste-management group, is taking apart some Unistrut metal framing with a socket wrench. "Right now," he says, "I'm thinking of using this as a base for a water bed. I like to make things. A friend of mine is building a 35-ft. steel ketch, and he turned me on to metal welding. So I got a Heliarc." A steel ketch? In New Mexico?