Intelligence

Supporting the Intelligence Community

For nearly 60 years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has delivered analyses, developed technologies and provided operational support for the Intelligence Community, the warfighter and policymaker.

What began in 1965 as a realization that emergent science and technology presented threats to national security, and an urgent call to evaluate the Soviet Union’s nascent nuclear weapons program, has expanded into a world-class program with the ability and expertise to assess complex threats across new domains, numerous actors and disruptive technologies and offer insight into and solutions for the nation’s most pressing national security challenges.

The “Big Ideas” Laboratory

The Soviet Union tested a nuclear device for the first time in 1949. Although initial intelligence estimates indicated the Soviets were on a path to acquiring the bomb by 1949, follow-on estimates repeatedly extended the date, so the 1949 event came as a surprise. The Soviets were also aggressively building a fleet of long-range aircraft, prompting concern that the U.S. strategic advantage was fading, if not being overcome. To counter this, the U.S. government agreed in 1952 to establish a second nuclear weapon laboratory at Livermore, charged with executing Edward Teller’s vision of developing smaller, lighter, less costly, high-yield, state-of-the-art technology: a thermonuclear device.

The United States successfully tested the world’s first thermonuclear device, a megaton bomb codenamed “Mike,” in 1952, ushering in a significant change to force structure. Concerns over long-range bombers gave way to ballistic missiles of increasing range, and by the end of the 1950s, this included a Teller-inspired plan to place a nuclear warhead on a submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM).

The 50s and Early 60s

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Livermore Radiation Laboratory, as the Laboratory was then known, established significant nuclear weapon expertise, which the Intelligence Community drew upon to aid in understanding nuclear-related developments in the Soviet Union and, later, China, which successfully tested a nuclear device in 1964. In 1965, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) formed a formal relationship, named “Project Ironbush,” through a memorandum of understanding, establishing a “Special Projects Group” at Livermore Laboratory known as “Z Division,” which would later become Z Program. William Raborn, the Director for the Central Intelligence Agency, and Glenn Seaborg, the Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, signed the agreement. Z Program initially supported two missions: first, provide the Intelligence Community with technical assessments of foreign nuclear programs and weapon capabilities; second, develop fieldable technologies to monitor nuclear tests and collect data that would allow analysts to determine the types of weapons in development.

Black and white photo of nuclear bomb mushroom cloud

The late 60s and early 70s

Although largely singularly focused for a time on the Soviet Union, in the 1960s and 1970s, Z Program’s mission expanded to include proliferation concerns in China, India, Pakistan and other countries and was no longer limited to assessing nuclear-weapon technical advances in these countries. We were also assessing nuclear fuel cycle developments around the world, looking for indications of illicit nuclear material production and of uranium enrichment and/or reprocessing, in particular.

As the threat environment evolved through the 1970s, so did our charge. Given our nuclear mission, Lawrence Laboratory established chemical and biological expertise to understand radiochemistry and the impact of radiation on living organisms. We applied this expertise to understand adversary interest in chemical and biological agents for weapons purposes. At this time, the adversary landscape was shifting on at least two fronts. First, cooperation among adversary states was on the rise, so observed technical shortcomings within one state may be short-lived given assistance from a partner. Second, state-sponsored programs were no longer the sole concern. Non-state actors, including terrorist groups and lone actors, also showed signs of interest in developing WMD to support certain causes.

Black and white image of a missile firing off a submarine on ocean’s surface.

The late 70s

In 1976, the CIA authored a memorandum for the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) establishing a policy to release foreign intelligence to contractors, which included a select set of the national laboratories. This effectively expanded Z Program’s intelligence access pipeline, allowing for a significantly larger data stream to do research.

Z Program’s assessments were largely technical, but broader access to intelligence presented an opportunity to explore issues more deeply, including aspects of foreign decision-making. Z Program was shifting to a “country analysis” model, seeking to examine a range of factors – not just technical – that might contribute to nuclear proliferation in developing countries, including motivation, perceived threats, in-country expertise and political acceptability. In 1976, Z Program hired its first social scientist, Kathleen Amiri (later Bailey), marking the first time we could claim a complete multi-disciplinary approach to understanding developments, nuclear and otherwise, across the national security landscape. Amiri helped establish and lead the Proliferation Assessments Program, the cornerstone programmatic effort in Z Program to this day (this program has since changed its name to International Assessments).

The Present Day

To this day, we leverage subject-matter expertise across the Laboratory to understand national security threats as comprehensively as possible. These experts include, and are not limited to, nuclear physicists, chemical and electrical engineers, metallurgists, material scientists, software developers, organic chemists, statisticians and social scientists.