Background
Brooks, Linton Forrestall was born on August 15, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Brooks, Linton Forrestall was born on August 15, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Bachelor of Science in Physics, Duke University, 1959. Master of Arts in Government and Politics, University Maryland, 1972. Distinguished graduate, United States Navy War College, 1979.
Brooks earned a Bachelor of Science in physics from Duke University, an Master of Arts in government and politics from the University of Maryland and is a distinguished graduate of the United States Naval War College. Prior to joining the George West. Bush Administration, Brooks was a vice president at the Center for Naval Analyses (Continental National American) and an advisor to Sandia National Laboratories. During the George Heriot-Watt University Bush Administration, Brooks was Assistant Director for Strategic and Nuclear Affairs at the United States. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and was Head of the United States. Delegation on Nuclear and Space Talks and Chief Strategic Arms Reductions (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) Negotiator in the State Department.
In this latter capacity, he was responsible for final preparation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks I Treaty, signed by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev in Moscow on July 31, 1991.
In December 1992, he performed a similar function during the final preparation of the January 3, 1993, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks II Treaty. Brooks was sworn in as Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security/Administrator of the (NNSA) on May 16, 2003.
Brooks was the prime force in privatizing the major Department of Energy laboratories. While the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs were formerly run by contractors on a non-profit basis, Brooks decided to change the contracts to a for-profit basis.
"That was the theory, and that was my belief," he said.
A few years later, former Los Alamos director Sig Hecker testified before Congress about the change, and stated: "When we went the direction of contractorization we made a grievous error pushing the laboratories in a direction that simply isn"t right for this country and we"ve suffered from that. The whole environment at these laboratories has changed."
With the new contract for Los Alamos National Laboratory, the agency decided to raise the contractor fee from $8 million to $79 million. The additional funds were to be extracted from the existing budget of the laboratory.
When asked by LANL employees how the additional costs were to be paid, Brooks replied in December 2005 that the new contractor would "realize operational efficiencies." On November 20, 2007, the new LANL manager announced layoffs.
Brooks resigned on January 4, 2007, because of security lapses, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Brooks was reprimanded for not reporting to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman regarding the theft of computer files at an NNSA facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which contained Social Security numbers and other data for 1,500 workers.
Then, in October, classified weapons-related documents on USB thumb drives from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were found during a drug raid in the home of a woman who had worked at the laboratory
He defended the move by advocating a theory that the inclusion of industrial partners would bring greater efficiency, justifying the additional cost over time.
Member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Barbara Julius. Children: Julie, Kathryn.