Secrets, Part Two

By Arnold Mann/Washington

As if they weren't in enough trouble for letting the Chinese steal nuclear secrets, the national labs are about to get blasted for some high-tech appropriation of their own. In the past six years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has raked in $3.5 million in commercial license fees--and many millions more in government contracts--for a new ultra-wide-band "pulse" radar that can peer through walls and spot Stealth planes. Former Livermore researcher THOMAS MCEWAN filed his first patent for "micropower impulse radar" in 1993, for which he was named "Distinguished Inventor of 1994."

The problem is, McEwan wasn't the first to invent the technology--if he invented it at all. It was first patented in 1987 by LARRY FULLERTON, founder of Alabama-based Time Domain Corp., and featured at a 1990 Los Alamos meeting attended by McEwan and his Livermore associates. In response to a Time Domain challenge, the U.S. Patent Office has initially rejected Livermore's key patents. Next month the House Science Committee will release a report that, sources tell TIME, will cite more cases of intellectual-property infringement committed by the weapons-making labs as they scrambled to find new raisons d'etre in the post-cold war era.

--By Arnold Mann/Washington