Paul Basken has an excellent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about what is at stake if the Obama administration acts on a proposal to shift the nuclear weapons labs out of the Department of Energy and into the Pentagon:

Some experts who have studied or worked with the labs fear that change could reduce the quality of research. “They’ve already made it much harder for themselves to attract good people,” said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University who has spent years studying the culture of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, talking about the management changes. A further shift, he said, “will just compound the difficulty.”