A day after his resignation as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory took effect, physicist John Browne was back in the place he’d been five years earlier—the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The laboratory’s particle accelerator is housed there and Browne, who ran the center before becoming LANL director, was working out plans to “reengage in some of the work I did over 20 years ago in looking at nuclear reactions on nuclei of interest to nuclear astrophysics and nuclear weapons physics.”
Returning to the physics lab wasn’t in his plans. As recently as mid-December Browne was dealing with yet another in what has been a seemingly endless string of controversies and crises that have marked his five-year tenure as director. The FBI, two congressional committees, and US Department of Energy (DOE) officials were investigating charges that there was widespread abuse of procurement card purchases, as well as theft...
