Continued UC management of the weapons lab would be good for Los Alamos but not for the university.

Secretary Abraham's decision to solicit other bids to manage Los Alamos follows a run of bad press for the remote New Mexico facility. In 1999, Los Alamos was rocked by allegations that lax security procedures at the lab had allowed Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee to copy top-secret bomb codes and perhaps share them with China. (Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was later exonerated.)

This was followed by an incident in which computer disks with detailed bomb- design information went missing for a couple of weeks, only to be found, after scores of FBI agents descended on the facility, behind a Xerox machine.

Most recently, lab whistle-blowers triggered a congressional investigation with revelations that lax accounting procedures had allowed employees to get away with charging personal items -- including a Ford Mustang -- to lab credit cards.

In truth, Los Alamos is run no worse today than it has ever been. The public is just paying more attention. There have always been scandals at Los Alamos and its sister laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, also managed by the University of California. In the 1970s, for example, a Livermore scientist gave away the design of the neutron bomb to China. And in the 1980s, undercover investigators found a network of drug-dealers with security clearances at Livermore, while federal auditors found millions of dollars of missing property.

Times were different then, and Washington extended UC's management contract without demur. Today such revelations would provoke uproar.

UC management has been good for Los Alamos because it can trade on the UC brand name. It has been able to lure good scientists to work there with the promise that they will be working not for a mere bomb shop but for the University of California, that they will share in the largesse of UC's famed retirement plan and that their children will get in-state tuition at the UC schools.

In the meantime, UC ran Los Alamos the way the British ran their empire: through indirect rule. UC officials put in place some general accounting procedures and sometimes showed up for ceremonies with the natives but, in general, they allowed the lab to manage itself. In more than 10 years during which I have interviewed hundreds of Livermore and Los Alamos employees for two books on the weapons labs, nobody has ever suggested that I talk to a UC official to get a better understanding of the labs!

There are three possible scenarios if Washington picks a new manager for Los Alamos:

Retain the status quo. The most likely, given the deeply ingrained nature of the Los Alamos organizational culture, is that nothing much will change. Los Alamos paychecks will bear the logo of the University of Texas or Bechtel rather than UC, but the lab will continue in practice to be run by its own physicist-managers perpetuating both their good traditions of scientific excellence and their bad traditions of occasional security lapses and bad accounting.

Effective overhaul. The least likely scenario is that a new contractor will dramatically improve the management of the lab. It is possible to change the organizational culture of Los Alamos, but only if a new contractor is willing to spend a lot of money retraining Los Alamos employees and installing scores of middle managers from corporate headquarters. For the current management fee of $7 million a year, no contractor will work that kind of miracle. Meanwhile, some of those mentioned as contractors, such as Bechtel, have problems of their own that suggest they themselves could use new management.

Decline and stagnation. The most troubling scenario is that a new contractor could send Los Alamos into a tailspin of decline. Los Alamos is already having difficulty recruiting good scientists to work on nuclear weapons in an era where no new designs are on the drawing board and nuclear testing is forbidden. If the university of Oppenheimer is replaced by a corporate contractor that imposes a bottom-line mentality in place of an old permissive culture that made space for scientific creativity, then older Los Alamos scientists will retire en masse and it will be hard to replace them. Already retirements at Los Alamos this year are running at twice last year's rate.

But we must ask not just what is good for Los Alamos but what is good for the University of California. It has always been incongruous for a university dedicated to the principles of academic freedom and openness to manage a weapons laboratory organized around secrecy. At times, UC's management of the weapons labs has provoked deep divisions among its faculty, and now it has brought four years of bad press to the university.

If the university decides to bid on the Los Alamos contract, it will have to spend millions of dollars on the bid that could otherwise be spent on library books, new dorm rooms and travel to academic conferences. If ever there was a time for the university to reconsider its relationship to the labs, surely it is now.

Hugh Gusterson, an associate professor of anthropology and science studies at MIT, is the author of "Nuclear Rites" (University of California Press, 1996), which examined the weapons scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.