On the menu today: For the second time in about three months, the Morning Jolt turns its attention to Lawrence Livermore National Labs, across the bay from San Francisco in California. I could begin with, “Nyah-nyah I was right,” and no doubt you should read the NR editorial this morning. But instead of gloating, it’s probably more useful to lay out some background about the Department of Energy laboratory that now concludes — with “low confidence” — that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak after previously stating it was undecided on this point.
A Very Good Laboratory Investigates a Very Bad One
Last night, it wasn’t hard to find random people on Twitter dismissing the Department of Energy laboratory report in the Wall Street Journal and insisting, “That department has no expertise whatsoever.”
Why would the U.S. Department of Energy be weighing in on an investigation into the origins of Covid-19? The short answer is because the Energy Department has a special division that, as part of its mission to track and mitigate the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, specializes in the study of biological weapons such as viruses.
There are a lot of first-rate research institutions in the United States, but no one would dispute that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the biggest of the big-time. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, establishing itself as a true military rival to the U.S., and launching the Cold War nuclear-arms race. The University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch, opened September 2, 1952, on the site of a decommissioned Naval Air Station — and quickly became known as one of the two major government-funded labs developing and maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The U.S. intelligence community wanted to know everything it could about Soviet nuclear capabilities and would often turn to Livermore scientists to analyze atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the Soviets as well as soil samples. The site was renamed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1971.
In 1965, lab director Dr. John Foster Jr. established a formal relationship with the intelligence community and formed “Z Division” to analyze and understand the Soviet threat and develop innovative technologies for intelligence agencies.
In a book marking Lawrence Livermore labs’ 65th anniversary, the lab revealed that scientists and engineers in Z Division continued to analyze radiological samples from Soviet, and later Chinese, nuclear tests. They also “developed new technologies for monitoring tests and collecting data that allowed analysts to determine what type of weapon was being tested — atomic or thermonuclear. Anticipating that nuclear proliferation could become a major problem, Z Division started a proliferation monitoring program in the mid-1970s.”
Year by year, Z Division’s mission expanded:
The program also provides innovative analysis to anticipate new and developing terrorist threats involving the use of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons and investigate opportunities to counter them. Z Program also works to understand the state of foreign weapons of mass destruction programs; informs U.S. counterproliferation decisions, policies, and efforts; and develops supporting technology solutions to dissuade or prevent states from acquiring WMD-related technologies, materials, and expertise.
Nuclear weapons are expensive, research- and infrastructure-intensive, and hard to hide. Chemical weapons are the cheapest, but least likely to be deadly as clouds disperse, winds can shift, etc. Biological weapons require extremely careful handling, but are extremely hard to defend against, and the information about how to develop them is widely available. The minds at Livermore Labs have spent a great deal of time thinking about how to mitigate the consequences of a deliberate release of a deadly virus.
In the early 2000s, Livermore built a new state-of-the-art, 64,000-square-foot building for its International Security Research Facility, which, while not confirmed, is where Z Division likely operates.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Z Division is so secretive it makes the Central Intelligence Agency look chatty. As William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson of the George Washington University National Security Archive have concluded, “While the CIA has declassified some of its analytical work on nonproliferation issues, the Z Division, a little known but important office in the Department of Energy nuclear complex, has released virtually none of its output.”
Very little of what Z Division does gets declassified, and when their publications are declassified, there are often whole pages redacted, as you can see in this 1998 assessment of the Indian nuclear-weapons program and this May 1999 assessment of the Pakistani nuclear-weapons program. Declassified documents from other agencies give us a sense of the kinds of problems that Z Division is asked to tackle. In 1978, the U.S. State Department asked Z Division to study the Pakistani government’s capability to build a nuclear bomb using plutonium, either by reprocessing spent fuel from the reactor at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, which was overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or by building a secret production reactor as a source for spent fuel.
In 2009, Fred Mackie, a proliferation analyst in Z Program/Z Division for 30 years who had retired in 2007, offered a brief portrait of what made his division different from other parts of the government:
Mackie commented on Livermore’s unique approach to proliferation analysis. “We’re the only place that pulls together analysts from multiple fields — physics, chemistry, engineering, materials science, computations, weapons design, political science — to work as a team.”
“Proliferation analysis is puzzle-solving,” Mackie said. “You have a handful of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and you try to describe what the whole thing looks like.”
He also noted that LLNL’s distance from Washington D.C., is a distinct advantage. “We’re not consumed by the day-to-day crises so we can look at the big picture. We’ve been able to undertake long-term analysis, following a country for many years, and this has led to several successes.”
While Z Division is particularly secretive, there’s a lot more information about how Livermore Labs as a whole researched biological weapons such as viruses and developed countermeasures. The lab’s research had expanded into biology and genes since 1963, when it began to study the human-health consequences of environmental radiation exposure. Lawrence Livermore was major contributor to the Human Genome Project.
Livermore Labs has a Biosciences and Biotechnology Division, whose past projects have included studies of “how to better determine the origin of a virus,” how coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS transferred from animals to human beings, portable virus-detection technologies, rare mutations of viruses within animal hosts, the movement of virus-like particles through the air, and to identify effective countermeasures.
But hey, what would the U.S. Department of Energy know about researching the origin of a virus, huh?
In the 1990s, Livermore’s research efforts began to focus on emerging concerns about bioterrorism as a threat to international security. In 1991, the lab established its Forensic Science Center, one of the two U.S. laboratories to be internationally accredited to analyze suspected chemical-warfare agents. The center boasts that it “combines state-of-the-art science and technology with expertise in chemical, nuclear, biological, and high-explosives forensic science to provide 24/7 counterterrorism support to federal agencies.”
Lawrence Livermore scientists served as members of the United Nations inspection teams that inspected Iraqi facilities in between the Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.
The lab focused its efforts on bioterrorism even more after the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailings. After 9/11, “Within days Z Division analysts went back to Washington, D.C. to support the CIA’s Technical Experts Cell and other elements of the intelligence community,” and “more than 60 Laboratory employees in a dozen different groups were deployed to New York City, Florida, Washington, D.C. and other locations.”
The anthrax mailings were even more in the Livermore teams’ wheelhouse:
On Oct. 4, the nation was stunned with the anthrax-in-the-mail attack at the Florida headquarters of the American Media Company. Shortly thereafter, seven Lab employees were deployed to Florida to help screen U.S. mail. They used their prototype Bioaerosol Mass Spectrometer, which can analyze biological samples straight from an aerosol without a sample preparation step, to screen for mail contaminated with bacillus spores. (One species of bacillus, B. anthracis, causes anthrax.)
In the wake of the anthrax attacks, calls went out for any and all kinds of biodetectors, including the Laboratory’s Handheld Advanced Nucleic Acid Analyzer. This instrument was the first truly portable, battery-operated, handheld DNA analyzer. HANAA technology was in the process of being licensed to a commercial manufacturer, with first commercial units planned for spring 2002. To help the company meet an order from the U.S. military for 50 HANAAs, the Laboratory’s Microtechnology Center launched a crash program to fabricate 300 thermal cyclers (silicon chambers used for rapidly heating and cooling samples) — the key component of miniaturized PCR instruments.
In partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Livermore Labs developed the Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System, which was used in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of security at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games — the system “operated for 35 days at sports venues, urban areas and transportation hubs. In all, 2,200 air samples were analyzed.”
In other words, when there’s a suspected threat of biological weapons — bacterial, viral, or other infectious pathogens — the U.S. government calls Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And when the U.S. government needs answers and the rest of the intelligence community is stumped, it calls Z Division. The Division’s assessments are not to be ignored, dismissed, or hand-waved away.
And yes, Z Division’s conclusion is of “low confidence,” meaning it’s only leaning a little in the direction of a lab leak. But clearly, it has encountered something new that prompted it to reevaluate its conclusions and shifted its thinking — and whatever that “something new” is, it’s probably extremely significant; Z Division doesn’t change its mind willy-nilly or on a vague hunch.
Some people whose understanding of what the U.S. Department of Energy does is limited to watching the series Stranger Things will tell you that “that department has no expertise whatsoever.” Now you know better.
ADDENDUM: For some reason, this exchange between CIA director William Burns and anchor Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation made me chuckle:
MARGARET BRENNAN: You’ve got the whole world to watch right now, so I know you’re a busy man. I want to start on Ukraine and Russia with this anniversary. On the cusp of Russia’s invasion, you flew to Kyiv and you told President Zelensky, tell me if this is right, the Russians are coming to kill you. Was that the very first thing you said?
DIRECTOR BURNS: It wasn’t the very first thing I said to President Zelensky.
That would be an awkward start, wouldn’t it? “President Zelensky, it’s good to see you. I hate to be a downer, but Putin’s sending his army to kill you.”