BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - The relationship between the University of California and the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab began as a wartime affair conducted against the tense backdrop of the race to finish an atomic bomb.

But for 63 years - many good, some rocky, lately, mostly rocky - the union endured.

Wednesday marked a new chapter as the government - apparently forgiving a series of financial and security gaffes - asked UC to continue as manager. The UC bid, made in partnership with engineering company Bechtel Corp., beat rival team the University of Texas and defense contractor Lockheed Martin in what was the first-ever competition for the contract.

UC's ties to Los Alamos go back to 1943.

Many at UC had little idea what Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues were working on in the New Mexico desert. Even the man who signed the first management contract, UC Board of Regents Secretary Robert Underhill, wasn't told about the secret until months later.

But having civilian control was important to scientists at Los Alamos, some of whom had balked at a plan to give them U.S. Army commissions.

After World War II ended with the deployment of the weapons Los Alamos scientists had concocted, some UC leaders wanted out. President Robert C. Sproul went so far as to tell regents he wanted to "get rid of bomb-making, plutonium and New Mexico," said Gregg Herken, a UC Merced history professor and author of "Brotherhood of the Bomb," an account of the men who developed atomic weapons.

Others argued in favor of keeping UC's ties to Los Alamos, particularly famed Berkeley scientist Ernest O. Lawrence, a prime mover behind the atomic bomb project. Government officials also were keen on keeping the relationship going.

"There's no question that the university was pressured by the Army to continue that contract," said Herken.

For years, the UC-Los Alamos connection was relatively smooth.

"Things were going very well for a while," said Sidney Drell, a physicist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The system created an atmosphere and a culture that attracted good scientists who felt they were "free to do good work and didn't worry about job shopping," he said.

Trouble was not unknown at the lab. After all, there had been scandal as early as 1945 when Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, gave the Soviet Union the main elements of the design of the atomic bomb.

But it was the 1999 Wen Ho Lee case that really sent the relationship downhill.

Lee, a Los Alamos scientist, was initially charged with 59 counts of mishandling sensitive information. All but one of the charges was later dismissed and then-President Clinton apologized for the government's treatment of him.

Still, the case raised questions about UC's management skills, questions that only increased a year later when two computer disks containing nuclear secrets vanished. Investigators later concluded there was an inventory error, and the disks never existed.

"One could argue that leading up to the University of California's problems at Los Alamos there wasn't a proper balance - science got away with being a little cavalier about security," said Drell, who was a member of a commission that wrote a scathing report on the issue in 1999 titled "Science At Its Best, Security At Its Worst."

More gaffes followed, including fraudulent charges to a lab credit card and security and inventory problems that led to a seven-month shutdown.

UC worked hard in recent years to fix things, taking a much more hands-on role, restructuring management ranks and implementing stricter security.

That paid off Wednesday as the government announced it had confidence in UC reforms. The new contract will last seven years and could be extended as long as 20 years.

UC President Robert C. Dynes said in a statement the contract decision signaled the beginning of a new era and expressed his confidence that Los Alamos workers will "continue to chart new frontiers and help solve some of the greatest scientific and technological problems of our time. All of us at the University of California look forward to being a part of the great science yet to come at Los Alamos."