The University of Texas Board of Regents voted unanimously Wednesday to spend $500,000 "to initiate planning for a potential bid" to take over the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico, presently run by the University of California under contract to the U.S. Energy Department.

The vote does not formally commit the University of Texas to seek the coveted contract. Still, after the vote, UT officials stressed their excitement over the possibility of running one of the nation's national laboratories. In terms of economic spin-offs and international prestige, such a contract might yield great benefits for the Lone Star state.

"We have been encouraged by the political leadership in Texas and by our United States senators" to seriously investigate the possibility of running Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was born in 1945, UT Chancellor Mark Yudof said after the UT regents' vote in Brownsville, Texas.

"We see it as an opportunity for service to the state and the country. ... We think we can do a great job."

Activists protest

The decision was quickly attacked by anti-nuclear activists in Texas, and by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a Texas native. Now an activist international lawyer, Clark said it is "damning for a university" to dabble in the business of "weapons of mass destruction. ... The universities of California and Texas must have better lessons to teach."

UT officials refused to rule out the possibility of competing for contracts to run two other Energy Department labs in Northern California: Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, also managed by UC.

"I would say 'one step at a time,' " said Dan Burck, the former UT system chancellor who is chairing the UT task force. "We're going to take a hard look at Los Alamos. We're interested in the national lab business."

Texas officials speculated that they might seek a contract to run Los Alamos in collaboration with a partner, ranging from a private firm to another university. "I feel sure we will have some dialogue with the New Mexico universities" about the possibility of them joining such a collaboration, Burck said.

Little reaction from UC

UC officials reacted calmly to the news of a possible face-to-face, even three-way, competition with the giant University of Texas system. Although the UC regents haven't voted on whether to compete for the next Los Alamos contract, the university is "preparing as if we will compete," said UC spokesman Chris Harrington.

UC's contract expires in September 2005. UC has run the lab without competition since the 1940s. A year ago, UC officials said they wouldn't compete at all if forced to do so. Since then they have changed their tone; now they say they'll compete only if the regents decide that UC can afford to do so, given California's budget crisis. A competition might cost tens of millions of dollars, according to some estimates.

In early 2003, following months of financial and managerial scandal at Los Alamos, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he would require competitive bidding on the next contract to manage Los Alamos. Since then, Congress has ordered competitive bidding for management at all three of the UC-run labs, plus at two other national labs. The Department of Energy will decide who gets the contract.

UT's decision criticized

Meanwhile, a nascent movement against the UT move was announced Wednesday by activists in Texas. Texas state Rep. Lon Burnam of Fort Worth called the UT regents' decision "outrageous" on moral grounds: "No university system should be involved with developing mini-nukes and neutron bombs," he told The Chronicle.

Ironically, the fuss over the Los Alamos contract has so far stirred little activism at UC Berkeley, once a hotbed of anti-nuclear politics.

"I think most of the (UC) people who've engaged in that opposition years ago felt exhausted and frustrated by the fact that the (UC) Board of Regents had no interest in paying attention to the faculty unless the faculty said what the Board of Regents wanted to hear," said emeritus UC Berkeley physics Professor Charles Schwartz, a veteran foe of UC's tie to the weapons lab.