Washington. -- Military bases used to be the champs at survival when the budget cutters went on the rampage.
But, with the Cold War passing into history, Army, Navy and Air Force installations are actually being shut down.
Now rapidly coming along as their successors in eluding extinction are scientific vestiges of the Cold War, the big research centers that assured nuclear pre-eminence against the Soviet Union.
The U.S. no longer manufactures or tests nuclear weapons, and is on the way to reducing its nuclear-weapons stockpile by 90 percent by the year 2002. Nonetheless, the Department of Energy is still spending some $2.2 billion a year on weapons research in its laboratories at Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
In efforts to stay alive, the laboratories have also taken on a good deal of non-military research, some of it important, much of it make-work, but almost all performable at less costly facilities. Knowing that their lifelines run to Washington, employees of the laboratories keep a close watch on their senators and congressmen. Political survival depends on keeping the labs in business.
Isn't it time, however, to decommission, or at least seriously shrink, these relics of bygone international animosity and redeploy their hefty budgets to useful tasks?
That's the basic question that the Energy Department put last year to a blue-ribbon committee chaired by Robert Galvin, former chief executive officer of Motorola, Inc.
The answer, delivered last Wednesday, reflects the strong life spirit that kept many military bases thriving for years beyond reasonable need.
The long-awaited report condemns the Department of Energy as a bloated haven of red tape and waste, noting, for example, that it has little to show for the $23 billion it has spent since 1989 on trying to clean up nuclear pollution.
It questions the value of collaborative research deals that the laboratories have struck with industry to attract funds and cultivate a post-Cold War mission.
Describing many of these contractual research arrangements as "unfocused" and "often oversold," the report says, "The laboratories should not aspire to become research boutiques for industries." And it calls for consolidating weapons research in just one laboratory.
Nonetheless, the report advocates keeping the three laboratories alive as privatized research centers, with boards of private-sector industrial representatives guiding their work, and the U.S. government as a leading customer.
Chairman Galvin said organizational innovation is required to make use of the strengths of the laboratories while shedding their weaknesses in a competitive marketplace. Right now, he said, there's nothing like the proposed organizational arrangement on the American landscape.
But, he emphasized, the specialized equipment and well-trained scientists, engineers and technicians at the laboratories are a highly valuable resource that should be preserved. To accomplish that, he said, his study group started with a "clean sheet of paper," and worked its way to an original solution.
The failing of this "solution" is that, in its quest to preserve parts of an antiquated research enterprise, it ignores the hard times that now plague productive sectors of research outside of the Department of Energy.
If good sense prevailed in the disposition of federal research funds, the money going into the weapons laboratories would be redeployed to worthier research purposes.
Chief among them is basic research in universities, which are the training grounds for the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Shabbiness and dated equipment are common in university research facilities as the result of sluggish budget growth in the federal agencies on which they depend for money.
With the Republican majorities and the Clinton administration talking about a new day in the disposition of federal money, there's no reason to stretch for a rationale to preserve these leftovers of the Cold War. They've done their job. Thoughtful, humane arrangements should be made for their staffs. The few bits of their facilities that are indeed scientifically useful and unique should be maintained. But the rest should fade away.
Wanna bet? It will be a long time before that happens.
Daniel S. Greenberg is a syndicated columnist specializing in the politics of science and health.