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The New Mexico lab maintains that Doyle, a 17-year veteran of Los Alamos, wasn’t fired, but laid off “due to the lack of available or anticipated funding in his area of expertise.” (Virtually all the lab’s funding comes from congressional appropriations.) According to an email from lab spokesman Kevin Roark, “the separation was unrelated to his publications or professional writings.”

But the lab has also asserted that Doyle’s article contained classified information he wasn’t authorized to divulge. It has classified the article itself, so its voluminous paperwork on the case doesn’t even refer to the piece by name, and Doyle and his attorney, Mark Zaid, can’t discuss it with one another. (But you can read it here, on the website of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, where it was published originally.)

Doyle’s case was laid out in a lengthy piece by Douglas Birch of the Center for Public Integrity. A follow-up appears in the current issue of Science. Zaid says he’ll be appealing Doyle’s termination to the secretary of Energy and bringing it before other Washington officials who investigate allegations of retaliations against whistleblowers. So you can expect to hear more about it.

We’ve asked for a comment from the University of California, which is a major partner in the consortium that manages Los Alamos for the government and has three representatives on its board, including the board chairman, UC Regent Norman J. Pattiz, but haven’t received an answer.

Zaid, who says he represents other government whistleblowers, doesn’t buy the lab’s explanation. “It’s very easy for a government agency to independently justify any personnel action against someone,” he told us. But he questions how “someone with Doyle’s expertise, long-standing history with the lab, and stellar personal evaluations can suddenly be [laid off] as ‘non-essential.'”

The 8,100-word article at the center of the case appeared in Survival in February 2013 under the title, “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?” Written on Doyle’s own time and presented explicitly as the author’s own views, it’s a sober and closely argued analysis of the postwar doctrine of “deterrence.”……

On the surface, Doyle’s argument that “nuclear weapons should be eliminated” parallels the Obama administration’s stated goal of “a world without nuclear weapons.” But it’s at odds with the defining mission of Los Alamos, which is devoted to weapons development……..

Doyle’s analysis should be heeded. The U.S. government’s nuclear doctrine must be updated to the 21st century. Mutually assured deterrence doesn’t work against the nonstate groups that pose the greatest threat to national security. More than ever, a world awash with nuclear weapons is in peril. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-antinuclear-article-20140815-column.html#page=1