The head of a team challenging the University of California for command of the birthplace of the bomb is mightily offended by the university's suggestions that corporations such as his employer, Lockheed Martin, lack the ability or integrity to do real science.

C. Paul Robinson, physicist and former Sandia National Laboratories director, lashed back Friday, saying his team was appalled at the lack of competent business practices and focused scientific direction at Los Alamos National Laboratory, run by the University of California since 1943.

"No wonder science is hurting. You've got scientists with no support for their work," Robinson said. "We think Sandia is a good proof test that good processes are not incompatible with good science. We know how to bring processes into being that can streamline and simplify things for scientists."

After a series of high-profile lapses in security, safety and financial control at Los Alamos, the secretary of energy concluded the lab was plagued by "systemic management failures" and opened its management contract to competitive bidding for the first time.

More than a dozen defense and engineering contractors and universities jockeyed for a shot at running the $2.2 billion a year laboratory. With 12,000 employees and subcontractors, Los Alamos performs a variety of unclassified and classified research but primarily is responsible for maintaining the H-bombs and warheads comprising 60 percent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The contest narrowed this week to two teams: the University of California paired with Bechtel National and two nuclear firms versus Lockheed, the world's largest defense contractor, paired with the University of Texas and two firms experienced in nuclear operations and cleanup — CH2M Hill, based in Englewood, Colo., and Fluor Corp.

University of California officials recently have suggested that only academia has the scientific rigor and "moral strength" to watch over the aging nuclear explosives in the U.S. arsenal and objectively judge, for example, whether a return to nuclear testing is necessary. A defense firm, they suggested, might not encourage enough scientific depth to answer those questions or might skew the answers in the interest of profits.

Robinson said he felt insulted: "Wouldn't you be?"

When Lockheed took over Sandia from AT&T, firm president Norman Augustine called Robinson, the lab's new director, in for a talk and said he'd always admired Sandia's devotion to the interests of the nation. He warned Robinson never to let anyone put Lockheed's interest above those of the country.

"'Don't let that happen,' he said. 'If people won't listen to you, my phone is always open to you and I'll tell them,'" Robinson recalled. "As a statement of academic freedom, I was empowered as never before."

Robinson said the idea of managing science is a bit of a misnomer. Paraphrasing a friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, he said, "the best scientific innovations happen at this boundary between order and chaos."

"You don't tread too far into order or you won't have science. You also don't want to drift out into incoherence, and I wonder if over the last five or 10 years if that hasn't been the case at Los Alamos," Robinson said.

National lab executives should set broad research agendas that don't compete with universities but draw upon the labs' strengths in having multiple disciplines working under one outfit, he said.

"That's about all the managing that I think you can do of science," he said. "I hope to stimulate it out of the best minds that are there and then set directions for the science quest going forward to get people excited about things."

But "we find almost no research themes that you can articulate" at Los Alamos, Robinson said. "There just don't seem to be any organizing principles."

Lockheed's team found more "shocking" lapses in basic business processes, such as purchasing controls and personnel management.

"There seems to be a great insufficiency of any kind of business processes, and it's showed up again and again in the problems that have come out in the press," Robinson said. Los Alamos executives were inexplicably slow to diagnose and fix the problems, he said.

In the last decade, Los Alamos has returned to a limited role producing weapons components as the lab did in the Cold War. For help with that work, Lockheed beat out Northrop Grumman in negotiations for a teaming arrangement with CH2M Hill.

The engineering and environmental firm helped dismantle and clean up Rocky Flats, a defunct factory near Boulder, Colo., that made plutonium fission cores or pits until 1989. When detonated by high explosives, they provide the atomic fire to ignite all thermonuclear weapons.

Los Alamos inherited the controversial job of making pits, albeit just a few each year, while the government considers building a larger factory. Plans for that factory have stalled, and each of the teams competing for the Los Alamos management contract now will be judged on the ability to ramp up pit production if requested by the federal government.

CH2M Hill hired several former Rocky Flats pit makers and now has what is believed to be the nation's only pit-making expertise in the private sector.

"They put a team together that numbers above 20 people figuring that someday the United States is going to need pit manufacturing again, and they wanted to be ready," Robinson said.

Lockheed plans to meld that talent with methods used at Sandia to design weapons components partly for manufacturing ease and reduced cost.

"Instead of throwing a design over the transom to the production plant, the folks doing the design will actually fabricate the device in cyberspace and look at what changes will be necessary to help manufacture it."

For now, Los Alamos is moving toward making warhead pits to replace the several removed from the nuclear arsenal every year for routine examination and experiments to spot signs of aging. But key lawmakers in Congress are prodding the Bush administration toward redesigning weapons to resist aging and be cheaper to make and maintain.

Making pits for what Congress has called the Reliable Replacement Warhead program could become part of Los Alamos' mission if a larger factory is not built soon. But first, Robinson said, the nation needs a wide-ranging debate on the role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era. That debate would point to what kinds of weapons the nation needs, he said.

"Maybe if we get some real understanding of what the future stockpile would look like, we could do some design to produce weapons so their lifetimes will be a lot longer and many of us wouldn't have to worry at night about corrosion and deterioration," Robinson said.