I am pleased to share a few thoughts based on my experience as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from January 1986 to November 1997. If there is no security, the mission is lost. If there is little science, the mission remains unfulfilled. Yet, there is a fundamental tension between world-class science and secrecy in any endeavor, be it military or commercial. At Los Alamos, these tensions have existed since the early days of the Manhattan Project when J. Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of his scientific recruits refused to wear General Groves' army uniforms.
Science requires creativity, open collaboration, and peer review.
Often, completely unpredictable connections or inferences will lead to the greatest breakthroughs. Great science is hard to plan in a rigid and well-controlled manner. Secrecy, on the other hand, requires the strictest discipline, control of information, and formality. The challenge from the beginning has been to manage this tension. The security risks represented by the foreign-born scientists were balanced against the scientific contributions they could make to the project.