Officials from many of the universities cited in a Department of Energy study released last week said in interviews Friday their institutions had never had any involvement in nuclear weapons testing.
Every Ivy League institution except Dartmouth College was listed in the study as a possible site of nuclear weapons testing. Other schools cited in the report were prominent research universities such as Stanford, Caltech, MIT and Berkeley.
Spokesmen at most of the schools contacted expressed confusion as to how the DOE obtained their names for the list, pointing out the extreme ambiguity of the study published in Thursday's edition of the USA Today.
Bob Sanders, a spokesman for Berkeley, said his school has "never done any classified work for the government."
While Berkeley is home to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab on its campus, and was involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II, Sanders explicitly said the school has never been involved in any weapons development.
Ethan Cascio, a Harvard researcher, said he was greatly amused when informed that Harvard's electron accelerator was listed in the DOE report as a weapons testing site.
That accelerator was shut down in the early 1970s, and Harvard has not been involved with the Department of Energy since then, Cascio said.
Spokesmen for both Brown and Cornell said they were extremely confused by their schools' listing in the DOE report and are currently investigating the matter.
Cornell's Linda Grace-Kobas pointed out that the university's medical college, listed in the report as being located in Ithaca, N.Y., is actually located in New York City.
Grace-Kobas said Cornell is in the process of obtaining more information on the circumstances for which the DOE cited the school in its report.
Mark Nickel, a spokesman for Brown, stated that the university is "at a loss" as to "what exactly the DOE means."
Nickel said Brown has, by faculty policy, never been involved in any classified research. Nickel said the report may be referring to the university hospital, which uses radioactive isotopes for diagnostic testing.
He noted that the DOE study was "unclear" and "lacking in information."
"It raised more questions than it answered," he said.
A Columbia University spokesman had no statement regarding the school's listing in the report, dismissing the DOE study as lacking in substance.
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