The Fifth Risk(11)

Sitting at his kitchen table with me, MacWilliams picks up his cell phone. “We’re a major target of espionage,” he says. “You just have to assume that you are being monitored all the time.” I look around. We’re surrounded by a lot of green Long Island tranquillity.

“By who?” I ask, with what I hope is a trace of scorn.

“The Russians. The Chinese.”

“How?”

“Every phone I have. Every computer.”

Outside, on his back lawn, overlooking a lovely estuary, MacWilliams had placed silhouettes of wild beasts to deter Canada geese from landing. I laugh.

“You seriously think someone might be listening to us right now?”

“I may have dropped off their radar,” he says. “But you are definitely monitored while you are there.”

I check my watch. I have important op-eds to write, and perhaps a few meetings with people who might know people who might know the Koch brothers. If I’m a Trump person I’m going to assume the people in charge of the nuclear weapons are sufficiently alive to the risks around them that they don’t need Rick Perry’s help. After all, the only thing Trump had to say publicly about Rick Perry during the campaign was that he “should be forced to take an IQ test” and that “he put glasses on so people think he’s smart.”

“What’s the second risk on your list?” I ask.

“North Korea would be up there,” says MacWilliams.

Why do I, as an incoming official at the DOE, need to be worried about North Korea?

MacWilliams explains, patiently, that there lately have been signs that the risk of some kind of attack by North Korea is increasing. The missiles the North Koreans have been firing into the sea are not the absurd acts of a lunatic mind but experiments. Obviously, the DOE is not the only agency inside the U.S. government trying to make sense of these experiments, but the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do. “For a variety of reasons, the risk curve has changed,” says MacWilliams guardedly. “The risk of mistakes being made and lots of people being killed is increasing dramatically. It wouldn’t necessarily be a nuclear weapon they might deliver. It could be sarin gas.”

As he doesn’t want to go into further detail and maybe divulge information I am not cleared to hear, I press him to move on. “Okay, give me the third risk on your list.”

“This is in no particular order,” he says with remarkable patience. “But Iran is somewhere in the top five.” He’d watched Secretary Moniz help negotiate the deal that removed from Iran the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. There were only three paths to a nuclear weapon. The Iranians might produce enriched uranium—but that required using centrifuges. They might produce plutonium—but that required a reactor that the deal had dismantled and removed. Or they might simply go out and buy a weapon on the open market. The national labs played a big role in policing all three paths. “These labs are incredible national resources, and they are directly responsible for keeping us safe,” said MacWilliams. “It’s because of them that we can say with absolute certainty that Iran cannot surprise us with a nuclear weapon.” After the deal was done, U.S. Army officers had approached DOE officials to thank them for saving American lives. The deal, they felt sure, had greatly lessened the chance of yet another war in the Middle East that the United States would inevitably be dragged into.

At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal.? Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they said.

Yeah, well, never mind science —we’ll deal with Iran, I could hear some Trump person thinking to himself.



By early summer of 2017 I had spoken with twenty or so of the people who had run the department, along with a handful of career people. All of them understood their agency as a powerful tool for dealing with the most alarming risks facing humanity. All thought the tool was being badly mishandled and at risk of being busted. They’d grown used to the outside world not particularly knowing, or caring, what they did—unless they screwed up. At which point they became the face of government waste or stupidity. “No one notices when something goes right,” as Max Stier put it to me. “There is no bright-spot analysis.” How can an organization survive that stresses and responds only to the worst stuff that happens inside it? How does it encourage more of the best stuff, if it doesn’t reward it?

The $70 billion loan program that John MacWilliams had been hired to evaluate was a case in point. It had been authorized by Congress in 2005 to lend money, at very low interest rates, to businesses, so that they might develop game-changing energy technologies. The idea that the private sector underinvests in energy innovation is part of the origin story of the DOE. “The basic problem is that there is no constituency for an energy program,” James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, said as he left the job. “There are many constituencies opposed.” Existing energy businesses—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app. Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The Obama administration set a goal in 2009 of getting the cost of utility-scale solar energy down by 2020 from 27 cents a kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. It’s now at 7 cents, and competitive with natural gas because of loans made by the DOE. “The private sector only steps in once DOE shows it can work,” said Franklin Orr, a Stanford professor of engineering who took a two-year leave of absence to oversee the DOE’s science programs.