Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website.
During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration.
We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search on this page to navigate our oral histories or to use our catalog to locate oral history interviews by keyword.
Please contact [email protected] with any feedback.
Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics.
This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials.
Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. The original typescript is available.
In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this:
Interview of Bruce Tarter by David Zierler on May 7, 2020,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/44812
For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Bruce Tarter, director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tarter recounts his childhood in Kentucky and Illinois and his experiences as an undergraduate at MIT and his early commitment to pursuing research in theoretical physics. He describes his graduate work at Cornell where he conducted research on the interaction of x-ray sources with optically thin environments. Tarter discusses his post-doctoral research at Goddard, his increasing focus on astrophysics and some formative interactions with Edward Teller. He explains his early work at Livermore and the series of promotions that led to his leadership positions there. Tarter provides a detailed overview of his work on Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and his contributions to the planning of the California Seismic Safety Commission (SSC). He discusses the impact of the post-Cold War security environment on Livermore and describes the policy relationship between the lab and Department of Energy (DOE). Tarter explains the impact of September 11 on the lab’s operations, he discusses the advisory work he has done in recent years, and he explains his current focus on climate change and AI issues.
This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is May 7, 2020. I am delighted to be here with Dr. Bruce Tarter. Bruce, thank you so much for being with me today.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
To start, please tell me your most recent title and institutional affiliation.
The official title is director emeritus at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Fantastic. And let’s now go right back to the beginning. Tell me about your childhood, your birthplace, and your family background.
I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and my father had enlisted in Officer Candidate School. His Officer Training School was in Texas, so we moved there when I was 1/2, or 1, or something like that. He then left for five years in India and China, was with the Flying Tigers as a supply officer. My mother and I went to Evanston, Illinois, to live with her parents and that was one of the most, fortuitous events in my life. My mother had been a bit of a prodigy when she grew up. She graduated from high school at 14, and college at 18, and then eventually got married, so it didn’t turn into major things. But she’d been placed in this odd school in Kentucky where it was ungraded, and they picked 25 people across the city and they just went as fast as they could, and that’s how she just finished school way ahead of her age. And she actually graduated from Northwestern with a degree in criminal psychology during the Dillinger era.
Oh, wow.
So, it was all sort of weird. Anyway, we were there for three or four years when my father was in India and China, and I became very close to my grandfather — it was like having two tutors for three or four years. And so, I could read and do all kinds of math problems and other stuff by the time I got into elementary school. And then my father came home, we went back to Kentucky, and so I had a normal public school 12 years, or 11 and a half years or some such. And then obviously, I liked math and science, and simply applied a bunch of places for college, and I chose MIT. And that was sort of the start of the professional world.
Bruce, I can’t help but ask. My grandfather was in the Flying Tigers, and he died young. And he never talked about it. Did your father ever talk about his experiences?
Almost never.
Yeah.
What I did find was a diary he kept. Well, the house was filled — our houses were always filled with Chinese paintings and other stuff he brought back. And he’s got a lot of decorations on the walls from the Chinese American wing. But he never talked about it. But this diary, mostly it’s what they had to eat for dinner. But there were some incidents which were just extraordinary. One was when he was on part of a court martial panel, and the person who was accused had shot somebody in the back of the airplane who was on fire and begged to be shot. So, there are a few of those things that just sort of sneaked into the, “What did you have for dinner” that filled most pages.
Right.
But he never talked about the experience.
And that’s the kind of passage that makes you understand why they didn’t talk about their experiences so much.
Yeah. And there were a few other — he gave talks on it to Rotary Club like places occasionally, and so there are snippets, but nothing like a, “Here’s what I did in the war.”
Yeah. Now, Bruce, in high school, did you particularly distinguish yourself in math and science?
You know, I won the science prize, and there was some algebra competition in the south, you know, in the 11th grade Algebra 2 or whatever. We didn’t do calculus in my era, but the Algebra 2—There was a regional test given to all the southern states, and I got the first perfect score in the history of the test. And so, there were these — I call them “snippets.” And I think I was the only one from the state of Kentucky to enter MIT in the freshman year of 1957. I mean, MIT always prided itself on having almost a complete 48 states, or 50, or whatever.
Sure.
But I was it that year from Kentucky.
Was MIT for you the end-all and be-all? Did you apply to Caltech, Stanford, also?
No. You know, I didn’t know anything about anything west of the Mississippi. My second choice was Rice, and Rice was basically so rich with the oil money that it essentially had free tuition for everybody. And so, that was a competitor.
For your family, reduced tuition was an attractive possibility.
You know, my father ran the insurance agency in Kentucky, and then he eventually became the vice president in New York. But you know, MIT, like now, was not cheap. And I didn’t know that much about schools, but my three best friends all went to Princeton and all became doctors. So there was a certain thing that just said, if you’re really pretty good, you go east.
Right. [laughs] Did you enter MIT thinking you were going to major in physics, or that decision came later?
Yes. In that era, which was way before your time obviously, the entering class at MIT was basically a thousand people, and still is. That’s a standard undergraduate entering class. In those days, which was basically the fall of ’57, of the thousand entering people, 400 indicated physics, 400 indicated electrical engineering, and everything else was about 200, split among all the rest. By the end of two years, we still had something like 200 physics majors.
After the weeding-out process, you mean.
Sputnik was the big driver, because Sputnik had just gone up, and so we had that as a huge incentive for all of the physical sciences.
Right. So, what professors at MIT did you become close with?
You know, my favorite instructor was Francis Low, who taught the introductory quantum mechanics course. Arthur Kerman, who I became very good friends with later, taught senior classical mechanics. My thesis advisor was Lee Grodzins, who was an experimentalist. But I’m a theory person, and there are two incidents to prove it. At MIT in those days, atomic physics labs still included blowing glass and making a ball-peen hammer. And I was so bad in labs that other people made them for me. I had a job in the summers as a technician at General Electric, because the guy who interviewed me for MIT ran the Range departments. The last year I went back to my third year of having that job in the summers in Louisville, they presented me with a life insurance policy for $10K, with them as the beneficiaries, for that policy for the summer.
[laughs] Wow.
And the instruction was: stay out of the lab. You talk to the boss. So I had zero experimental — aptitude. Mine was all going to be theory from day 1.
And did that influence the kinds of courses that you took? As an undergraduate, did you have that leeway to sort of design your own curriculum based on your interests?
In those days the physics majors had a standard curriculum that basically determined the entire thing. You took — you know, the first two years, then you did a EE course, and you did Quantum Mechanics 1 and 2. You did Classical E&M, Classical Mechanics, Thermodynamics. I mean, it was pretty much — there was almost no leeway beyond that, and you did all the mathematics to go with it. And everything else you did, you had minors and things like — I took a minor in economics and music. But you know, it was a standard curriculum— there wasn’t much flexibility, and you did have to take the labs, which I somehow survived.
[laughs] Now, in the summers, did you pursue physics-related internships?
Again, as an undergraduate, it was just that I went back to work as this technician at General Electric in Louisville in the Range division. I actually worked on the first microwave ovens before they became commercial. You measured the field strength, and you know, the field strength inside the ovens was very inhomogeneous, and I managed to set one on fire.
[laughs] Did you hurt yourself?
No, it was no big deal
Now, was there a senior thesis for you?
Yes.
And what did you do it on?
And mine consisted of doing parity non-conservation in beta decay, which essentially measured asymmetries in Strontium-90 decay, and basically all I did was take the data. My adviser handled the radioactive sources, and I write it up and did the theory, You had to do an experimental thesis at MIT, because you were assumed, even by senior year, not to know enough theory to do anything original. I don’t know what the math majors did, but for all the other undergraduate majors, you had to do an experimental thesis.
Right, which probably in retrospect, I’m sure you found valuable.
Yeah, it was fun.
At what point did you get on a trajectory where you knew that graduate school was the next logical step for you? I mean, as opposed to entering industry or other opportunities?
You know, our senior year — again, physics was such a huge thing with 200 undergraduate majors. They gave — we had a special 1-hour course, our entire senior year, that went through every graduate school in the country. And they’d spend an hour on all the kind of graduate schools, describing the particular characteristics.
Yeah.
So it was just almost assumed that if you wanted to be a physicist, you were going to graduate school, period.
Right. So basically, everybody who was serious about physics, that was their trajectory.
Absolutely.
Yeah. And so, what were some of the schools that you heard about that were most enticing?
Basically, I applied to three. The advice from MIT was not to stay at MIT, because they basically wanted diversity and perspective. And so, I applied to Cornell, MIT, and Harvard. I got into Cornell and MIT, and I didn’t get into Harvard, which I think retrospectively was fine. And I chose Cornell for the reason — you know, there it was. I took the advice of not staying at MIT. And so, Cornell very good — and it turned out because of things that happened once I got there, it was even better than I’d imagined. Bethe was there and had been there for a long time and was sort of the central figure. My eventual thesis advisor was Ed Salpeter, who was, had written the book with Bethe on Quantum Mechanics had been at Cornell Feynman and Freeman Dyson in very recent years, and so it really was a very potent place in theory.
But you did not cross paths with Feynman and Dyson at Cornell.
No.
They had left by the time you had gotten there.
Right. That’s correct.
But I’m sure you felt the tail of the comet, so to speak.
So new physics grad students had a pretty standard curriculum, and you had both an oral qualifying and a written qualifying in your second year, and then orals for the Ph.D. And every graduate school, as you know, has different variations on the same theme. But I wasn’t a 100 percent convinced in my first year that I still wanted physics. And the Vietnam War was also a threat even though I was momentarily exempt. And so, after a year of being a TA, I was pretty sure I did not want to be a faculty member. That was a decision — not a decision, but a preference that was clear to me during my first year in graduate school. And that’s unusual for somebody who wants to be a physicist. So, I actually applied to the Harvard Business School and thought about law school, and I got a fellowship at the Harvard Business School and had to make a choice. So, as a consequence, I got permission to take the oral qualifying early before the written and skip the written, which I did at the end of my first year, and so it was sort of a coup. And so, everything worked out. I passed the oral, I stayed with physics, and I was already jumped ahead a little and didn’t have to do the written.
Who were some of your mentors or people that you sought advice from in terms of making this momentous decision?
There were 50 graduate students, give or take, who entered Cornell as first-year graduate students, and they basically split them up into groups of five and attached them to one faculty member as a general adviser and mine was Prof. Richard Silsbee. Silsbee was condensed matter, which was not what I wanted to do, but he was a tremendous mentor for all five of us, as a person. Just extraordinary. And it turned out the other people in our mentorship group were also people with reasonably — what do they call it? Social skills. And so, we became good friends for the entire period of graduate school. And so, Silsbee was a personal mentor. And, any time there was a decision about personal matters I would talk with him. And, I took several courses from both Bethe and Salpeter. Bethe, who was — I don’t know if you ever met Bethe.
No. No. I wish.
He was amazing. He’s the only person who could ever have given his lectures or taken notes in ink. He was the classic German — precise and methodical, but just extraordinary. Then there was Pete Carruthers, who you probably don’t know.
No, I don’t know that name.
Pete was Bethe’s protégé. He eventually went to Los Alamos to run the theory division, but Pete was made an honorary graduate student by all the graduate students. So, Pete was also there as a mentor. And then Salpeter eventually became a very close, personal friend as well as an advisor. So, that’s sort of the combination.
So, what was the decisive factor for you to stick with physics?
You know, I said I could always go back and do the other things later, and I still love physics.
Yeah. So, meaning that there is a momentum to physics that if you hopped off, it would have been hard to get back on?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so, that was pretty much the decision. I’m not sure it was ever a serious consideration of the others, but I liked other things too, so it was a flirtation.
Yeah. So, the obvious question at this point is: when you did your summer internship at Lawrence Livermore, fast-forward. Were your initial impressions like, “This is my spot. This is where I want to be”?
No. I thought — actually, I went there because at MIT, I’d been in the Sigma Chi fraternity, and I had seven fraternity brothers out of 35 from California. And they had all lived — most — all but one was from the Bay area. They had summer places, and I had never been west of the Mississippi, so I didn’t care where I went to work. I looked on the bulletin board. In those days, you could get a summer job if you could write your name. And so, I just picked the lab, because they paid travel — uniquely, out of all the places I could have gotten a job. And so, I said: what the heck, and I drove cross country. And I showed up at the lab and had two or three fraternity brother friends for the summer. And I was put into the theory part of the magnetic fusion program at the Lab.
Who was running the program at that point?
Dick Post, who died a couple of years ago at age 90, was nominally head of it. So, basically Dick ran the magnetic fusion program, but I worked with a guy named John Hiskes who was their resident atomic physicist. And we did, simple atomic physics calculations relevant to magnetic fusion environments. And, I got my first taste of computing on real supercomputers. And I also was introduced to the broader lab, and when I came back for a second summer it turned out Hiskes had gone to Europe on a sabbatical. And so, the head of the theory division, who was Sid Fernbach, who was sort of the father of modern supercomputing in the world, and built the industry along with Seymour Cray, and he was on vacation. So, I occupied Sid’s office for about three or four weeks while people would wander in in the mornings to see him at 11. And I’d be there at 10:00 in the morning as a graduate student, and they’d say, “Where’s Sid?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. He’s on vacation. I’m just working here.” And so the place was so informal and so relaxed and so amenable to doing research 12 hours a day or eight hours a day and keeping your own hours, and I just fell in love with that aspect of the place. And it was just — and the computers that I loved — and so all those things, but it didn’t say, “I’m going to come back for good.” It said, “This is a great place to have been.” And the second summer, I worked by myself, and I wrote the only paper that I ever got published in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, on hypergeometric functions. So, it was just a — it was a kick. – the Lab was a wonderful place to work.
Yeah, and I’ve also heard — even for people lower on the totem pole, such as a summer intern, that they were valued. Right? That the mentality there was not particularly hierarchical. If a graduate student had a good idea, it would be taken seriously like anybody else.
Oh, absolutely. And everybody was — you were treated — you always went to the lunches. I mean, no, there was nothing of the Herr Professor model at all.
Yeah. And I’m curious. To what extent did the Cold War loom large over the laboratory? Did you feel it? Did you feel the legacy of Sputnik? Was that part of the equation at all?
The two years in the summer, the first year was magnetic fusion, a hundred percent, and although I got a clearance, I never really entered the classified area except to use the computers. The second year, I did a little bit of work for one of the weapons codes, I basically derived some simpler bremsstrahlung expressions which were straightforward, but I never got connected to the weapons program, per se, during the summer years. So, I was really pretty oblivious, doing my own thing. So it didn’t have an impact at the time.
Now, were you thinking about doing another summer internship for subsequent years?
No, because I got into the research piece enough at Cornell, so I was supported for the summers after that. So, that was it.
Right. So, let’s get back to Ithaca. What was the process of determining your dissertation topic and the main professors that you wanted to work with?
I talked to — you know, like all theoretical physicists at the time, high energy was the Holy Grail. And so, I talked to various people. Steve Frautschi was an assistant professor who had some reputation — Carruthers did. And you know, none of it struck me as interesting— it was almost just manipulating symbols. We had the weekly seminars. Gell-Mann had come and done the first discussion of quarks, but still, it was — it just felt more like manipulations than physics. . I’d enjoyed Salpeter. I had both E&M and statistical mechanics from him, and he had moved from being a pure quantum mechanical person into really becoming very prominent in doing theoretical astrophysics. And it turned out that completely coincided with the overwhelming revolution in astronomy that took the field from being classification of stellar types and measuring the tiny little curve of the Hubble constant, into something with quasars, black holes, X-ray sources, and the black-body radiation, all of that happened just when I was basically going into my third and fourth year at Cornell. And so, it had just exploded.
Yeah. Right.
And so I just — and Ed said, you know, “Come work with me,” basically, and I did. And it was one of those fortuitous choices that really worked out.
It was. It was.
And, because astronomy is what got me excited when I was 9 and 10. I read George Gamow’s One, Two, Three… Infinity, Fred Hoyle’s books, and so that was already where I had great enthusiasm. So, this was the perfect match. And so, I worked for Ed, and I worked for a year, sort of at a dead end on basically the accretion problem for black holes.
Now, was this also what Ed was working on?
Ed was so phenomenal because he tried new fields, and he would write short, insightful, qualitative, phenomenological papers that would set the standard for the field, and then he would move on. And so, he didn’t — he never stayed with a niche. And he was famous. He wrote the first paper on star formation, the first paper on statistical mechanics of white dwarfs and neutron stars, and he became famous and won the Nobel his of astronomy when he and Fred Hoyle both separately found the key that got you through — essentially got helium burning to form Carbon-12, which was the missing link in how you’d basically do nucleosynthesis. And so, he would pick a thing and find a way to get — make a major contribution, and then go to something else. And so, his graduate students — and there were like, 50 of us overall who we went back for his festschrift — had covered the whole spectrum of things in astrophysics. We were also forming a group, even as his graduate students then, and there were probably half a dozen of us simultaneous Ph.D. degrees.
And what did you see, as you were developing the topic as sort of the broader questions that you were interested in, beyond the narrow focus of a given dissertation?
You know, I liked all of astrophysics. I really did. I thought, you know, the best single reference was — the first year, I think, of what was called the “Texas conference,” for many years, was called “the Texas Conference on Relativistic Astrophysics,” and even when held in in Germany, it was still called the “Texas conference.” And it met every other year. I was interested in nucleosynthesis, which I almost went to work on at the lab, supernovae explosions, the quasars, black holes. I mean, it covered the spectrum. And so, it was just all over the map.
And in terms of developing your specific dissertation topic, did you mostly come up with that on your own, or were you sort of given the research question to work on?
You know, it was probably — I didn’t invent it, but there was a huge interest in whether a quasar was really something coming from a black hole or not. I’m trying to reinvent the actual sense. But the signatures of quasars had much stronger ultraviolet spectral lines than came — sort of like would come from normal gaseous nebulae, but much, much stronger lines, and much more — higher degrees of ionization. And there were X-ray sources being discovered, and so the question is basically: what will a quasar do to its environment, and what distinguishes it? And that was about as far as it got. And from then on, I sort of invented the rest of what the framework was, the structure of the problem. And you know, the eventual thesis produced two papers. One was, I think, “The Interaction of X-Ray Sources with Optically Thin Environments,” and one with optically thick environments, and the optically thin environments turned out to be sort of a citation index classic. The single parameter you could describe it with, you know, allowed a lot of characterizations. So, it was a pretty important paper, although the second one took a lot more work. But to do it, you really had to do a huge computational thing, and so I fell in love with doing supercomputer calculations. And I would sit at the — and you got better computer time by doing it overnight. And I would sit at the computer for two or three hours, between midnight and 2 or 3 in the morning, and listen to the printer go, “kachunk, kachunk.” That was the thesis.
Given how rapidly computer technology was advancing in this age, were you aware of those changes, and was that an influence in the kind of research you’d be able to do?
I just was excited. It turned out that I knew I needed to use computers to do this. I knew nothing about them, and so there was a tiny little room on the third floor of Newman Hall, which is where Bethe, Salpeter, and the theorists live, and the experimentalist on the second floor, had their offices. Because Bob Wilson, who was also at Cornell and was the first director at Fermilab, was also — ran one of the two weekly seminars. There’s a physics seminar, and then the lab nuclear science seminars, which Wilson would run on Fridays, and everyone would go to. So, we really had an extraordinary physics interaction for all aspects of Cornell. But back to the computer stuff. So, we had a tiny little computer with a 4K capacity in this little room, and Ken Wilson — who was a young assistant professor — and I learned how to program together with little paper tape that mostly broke.
But you know, he eventually got the first Nobel Prize for computational stuff in physics. And we learned to program together in Fortran on this little funny 4K thing. And then I used the main Cornell computer, which was a 16K CDC machine, which was not as good as the ones the lab had, but it was still pretty good for the time.
Who else was on your committee?
Silsbee was on the committee, just as another physicist from condensed matter, and then somebody from the math department. I remember all the physicists— the interesting thing was, all the physics graduate students said: we need a math course in integral equations, because we don’t have enough math. We all went over to take this course in integral equations they gave, and we knew we’d made a mistake when there was no integral sign that appeared during the entire course.
Which tells you what?
They were mathematicians, and we had no overlap between the two. I mean, there was zip. It was not good.
What’s roughly the date of your defense? This is the spring of ’67? TARTER. But the actual defense was done in the fall, and then you had to get — you did a thesis defense, which you had and — typed it up, written it up, all that stuff. So it was probably either late fall of ’66 or spring of ’67.
Right. And so I’m wondering — you already made passing reference to it, but was the draft on your mind in terms of the timing of defending and getting out of school and putting together a new opportunity?
Yeah. It was always there, but it turns out, my first year in graduate school, my first wife — I was a teaching assistant for my first wife…
Wow.
…whose name was Jill Cornell, and she was one of the Cornells.
Like, one of the Cornells?
Yeah. And she was always annoyed, because in the Cornell family fellowship, women were not eligible, and she was one of the two women in the engineering school. You will probably know her, if you think about it. Subsequently — we got divorced. But subsequently, she was the role model for Jodie Foster in the movie Contact.
Oh, wow! Oh, yeah. Okay. Right.
She’s done SETI her entire life. She was an engineering physics major, and so we sort of talked about it. And my last year at Cornell, and her fifth year at engineering physics, she got pregnant, and so that bumped me out of the draft problem. So, at least that alleviated that. Without that, I’m not sure, because I had passed the age of 26, which was magical, but everything was falling apart about magic at that time.
Right. So, what were some of your options as you decided what to do next?
Yeah, that’s interesting, because I had a bunch of options. I applied — I got a postdoc at Goddard. Ed said he could get me a postdoc anyplace I wanted, within limits. I went to the west coast to apply, because I really liked California. So, I had job offers from Jet Propulsion Lab, from the Aerospace Corporation, from the Livermore Lab, and then from this funny place called — which was essentially the aerospace part of Ford — called Aeronutronic, in Newport Beach. Jill and I were setting on the living room floor, and we kept — you know, you would try to do analysis of pros and cons, and finally I said, “I’m going to go with this place. It’s the most industrial, and I might as well try it and see what happens.” So, I did, and within two weeks — I guess they hired about 10 people of my cohort, new Ph.D.’s, to come work on an automated biological laboratory for Mars. And by the time we got there, they had lost the contract. Of the 10 Ph.D.’s, eight had been basically laid off. One other guy and I were still employed — I became group leader about three months after I got there, on sort of a variety, a collection of projects, some defense, some not.
So, I was doing alright, but it was clear within a month or two this was not a good choice. So, we had the baby, and I applied back to the lab, which was the easiest thing. And it’s probably produced something which actually turns out, retrospectively, to have been an extraordinary thing. Teller, who at this stage, is now the head of the physics department at Livermore. And so, anybody who was hired by the physics department had to be interviewed by Teller, so I was brought up for a day of interviews. And Teller was the first thing in the morning, and he asked me what I thought, because he had written the paper on a matter/antimatter explanation for quasars at a symposium for a Bethe birthday thing. And I didn’t remember the paper, but all day, I sort of went to the library off and on to sort of remind myself of what it was. But in any case, the day was a whirlwind. I got back to Newport Beach —
Bruce, I have to ask you. Were you nervous to talk to Teller?
You know, a little bit, but while we were having this interview, he got a phone call from someplace that I think was the Chicago Tribune,” and he turned to me and said, “What should I tell them?” Which was a characteristic he would use often. . Eventually we get to the main topics. But I got a letter the next day from Teller, which is a famous letter in the history of the lab, because it has a second paragraph. And in fact, Bill Goldstein who is the current director, has shown the letter up on various “state of the lab” talks, because it said in the letter, written by Teller and dictated to his secretary. After some introductory comments it said, “We expect you to spend half of your time on astrophysics, and half of your time on astrophysical engineering. I’m sure you know what those words mean.” And I took that as an extraordinary statement, because it said: I don’t want you to just work on programmatic stuff. I want you to be an astrophysicist as well as the other stuff, and that’s — I highlighted in yellow — just is something so extraordinary, because that was not what the classical part of the weapons program of the lab usually had in mind at all.
So, what do you think the larger message there was?
It said: I want you to be a famous — IBM at the time had a saying that said, “Be famous and vital to IBM.” So, it was dual charge, and I think it was the same dual charge, at least in Teller’s mind at the time. And the director of the lab at the time, who became my ultimate mentor at Livermore, was Mike May. And Mike May, before he became director, had taken a sabbatical year at Teller Tech, and written the first paper on the gravitational collapse to a black hole. And he had been at the Cornell Summer School in relativistic astrophysics. And Stirling Colgate had done the first calculations of supernova explosions at the lab, and so it was clear the lab had an extraordinary interest in computational astrophysics, which is something which, again, was a huge motivation.
Right.
And you know, I just said, this is fantastic.
This is it.
Yup.
What were some of your first projects?
On the applied side, it took about two or three months to get a clearance, and then I was assigned to a premortem.
Now, Bruce, I want to ask. You needed a clearance because everybody had a clearance, or because you were specifically going to be working on classified programs?
Essentially, every technical person — with the possible exception of the biology people, and there were only a hundred of those — for two reasons: one, I needed it for what I was going to work on; but two, to be able to have access throughout the site, you really needed a clearance. You know, the biology people would stay in a small area, but if you wanted access in general — if you were a serious senior scientist outside of biology, you needed to be able to go to meetings and talks and all of that stuff, and they were in the classified areas.
Right. And is that more bureaucratic, or were you really working in a classified environment, and the stuff you were dealing with was indeed sensitive?
Half time, I was working on classified stuff. My first job, my first classified task, was basically on a premortem, which was a term invented by Livermore when it was first founded, because the first experiments failed miserably. And so, Lawrence and Teller together — with Herb York as the facilitator between the two of them, the first director, invented the idea of a premortem, which is to create a committee that’s not really working on the particular test of a specific nuclear experiment, but in fact, there are some of the right people who know about the science, and their assumption is the test fails. So, that’s why it’s called a premortem. You tell us why, before we do it, that it’s failed.
Wow.
It’s the ultimate red team. It was my way of being introduced to the science behind weapons was becoming a member of the premortem. And I had done a lot of — you know, my thesis was “Radiative Transfer in a Gas Excited by X-Rays,” basically was the formal title. And that’s how bombs work, is radiation transfer by X-rays in a dense environment. And so, I had a lot of stuff on non-equilibrium physics that I could do little funny things with, and so, I did it. And I got to meet people and get my exposure to the physics. And it turned out, within again, a year or something, the new head of the theory division, Fernbach, the guy who I had known in the summers, was head of both theory and computations. But basically, the guy became head of theory, and he formed — because what you do when you become head of something, you always reorganize it. And so, he reorganized the theory division about a year and a half after I got there. The theory division has about a hundred people: 80 Ph.D.’s and 20 support people. And I got made head of a group. And everybody else was head of a group that had content, like nuclear physics or nuclear data, or hydrodynamics. And everything that was left over, he just gave me a title so I could have a group. And it was called “Macroscopic properties of matter,” and then a bunch of crazy people, and so now I was part of a group.
And the project that I got was — the first serious project I got occurred — about four months before that, Mike May, the director, came over to see me. I was just in my office one day, and he wandered in and said, “You know, the opacity work here hasn’t really been of the caliber at Los Alamos. Would you mind taking a look at this?” And I said, “Sure,” because a lot of the stuff I had done was atomic physics applied to radiative transfer and quasars and all that stuff. But that was how I got the first job assignment. No piece of paper. Mike just came by, and so I said, “Okay.” I started out to write — and you know, one of the first things I did was to go to Los Alamos and meet the people who had done the big opacity codes and you know, we formed good friendships. So, I ran the opacity thing for probably four or five years.
So, Bruce, I want to ask you. At this point, you’re named the group leader. You’re being sent on this fact-finding mission to Los Alamos. Is your sense, to the extent that you’ve thought about these things, that you were sort of on a fast-track to leadership at the lab?
Yeah, you know, it was hard not to think so.
Right.
And in fact, I worked — I was going to redo — Art Cox was the classic guy who wrote the astrophysics opacity code that was used by everybody for a zillion years, for all stellar models, and I said, “I can do a lot better,” because Art had written it a long time ago, and so I started to write my own code. And I just never quite got enough time to write a full-blown code, but — oh, the other important thing that happened though was I was standing in front of the elevators in my building — the theory and computation building, and I was — it turned out, postdocs would often come from Berkeley or other places and be assigned a lab person to give them access. So, there was a guy from Berkeley who was officially working for Teller at the lab, but also George Field and other people at Berkeley, doing his thesis on the two stream instability. And I happened to meet him, and he was assigned to me because I had been an astrophysicist, or was an astrophysicist. It turned out to be Chris McKee, who is my oldest colleague, who, you know, has been everything in astronomy and astrophysics, And is a member of the National Academy. We wrote seven or eight papers together. I met him in front of the elevators, and we sort of hit it off and talked for two or three hours. And that was my connectivity. And all of a sudden, I begin to go into Berkeley astronomy colloquium on Thursday afternoons, because they had Chris as a new person; Jon Arons in plasma astrophysics; Joe Silk, who became a famous guy; Frank Shu, who was — and so the whole group, and so I became sort of an adjunct participant, with no official thing, but a connectivity to the whole Berkeley astronomy world; and Stu Bowyer, the X-ray astronomer guy — so, all kinds of people at Berkeley. So, I had all of that going, my own opacity stuff, and then some classified things, so it was already sort of a full plate.
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the connection to Berkeley. I mean, you said earlier that you knew early on that you didn’t want to pursue a faculty position, so I wonder if your access to Berkeley sort of was the best of both worlds, that you could dip your toe into the academic environment when you wanted to.
Yeah. I mean, I found it that way, and you know, for the first 15 years at the lab, I kept — I’ll call it a third of my time free. I made Chris a consultant, and it’s sort of implicit in the CV, but I created — and I said: I’m going to take over an informal astronomy and astrophysics piece at the lab, and we’ll get together at lunches, because we were spread all over the place. Because Jim Wilson, who succeeded Stirling as the supernova guru there, was tremendous. There were a lot of astrophysicists hired for obvious reasons. Stars and weapons were pretty similar. And so I just organized this to keep the astrophysics for people who wanted to at a functional level.
Yeah. And I wanted to ask about that, because just tracing the intellectual history of thinking about space in a militarized context, or a theater of possible war — coming to Livermore, how well developed was your sense of this line of thinking before your time?
The military applications of space almost didn’t exist.
You’re saying, until you arrived on scene?
Even when I was there, we never touched that. We did astronomy and astrophysics in academic astronomy and astrophysics, and then we just applied the internal stuff of that. The calculations for weapons were so similar, but the actual military applications in space almost didn’t exist.
So then I guess my follow-on question to that is: in order to make the case to do basic research in astronomy and astrophysics. Right? Did you feel pressure to justify it within the larger weapons/military mission of the lab, or you didn’t need to do that?
It’s a superb question, and the answer is: in the physics department, I had Teller’s letter, and as long as I was doing good other stuff in the physics department, you could have that mandate and make it stick without too much trouble.
Right.
If you were in the weapons divisions, you had to do it more on your own time. So, when I tried to convene these lab-wide luncheon other meetings and continue the interest, it was pretty easy for me, but it wasn’t so easy for some of them.
Right.
On the other hand, Jim Wilson had made incredible weapons contributions, and so if your profile is high enough, you’ve got a lot of freedom. But just because you had a degree, you couldn’t set there and do all the papers you wanted to do. But you know, the thing I wanted to do, and I would have done if I hadn’t got attached to all the other stuff — I wanted to basically do full-blown supernova calculations with complete nucleosynthesis. But that would have been a full-time research project for years, and I never got the chance, really, just to delve in.
So, to fast-forward with this narrative, obviously from the beginning of your time, as you said, it wasn’t really part of the equation. And it’s interesting and very telling that you didn’t feel like you needed to justify it within that context. And yet, these connections are being made. So, my question is: when did those connections really start, and who were the driving forces in terms of putting them together and making it a part of national policy?
Why don’t you try and slightly — either expand the question a little, or refocus it a little?
[laughs] It’s a mouthful. Right?
National policy is too big a framework.
[laughs] Right. I mean, the immediate question —
You know, I think the simple version is that if you were someone who was making — back to my comment about IBM, “vital to IBM and famous.”
Right.
If you were vital to the laboratory and famous, you could —I won’t say get away with, but you have the freedom to pursue some of their own interests, if you were successful in pursuing those interests, and if you could have those people be important for other stuff.
Let me put it like this. Maybe we can reverse engineer the question. Right? So, let’s say we’re fast-forwarding to the 1980s, and we’re talking about SDI. Obviously, there’s a history behind this. This doesn’t just pop out of nowhere in 1981, or something like that. So, my question obviously — you’re correct. It’s too much to ask you to comment on national policy, but the more narrow question for you is: from your vantage point, when did you see — if the end-point here is SDI, and the beginning point is you arrive at Livermore…
Okay.
…and no one is talking about making these connections, from your vantage point, where do you see these connections at least start to come?
Okay. So, now I can do a better question and there will be an intermediate state. Okay?
Sure.
So, the person I haven’t mentioned yet or gone back to again — two people: one, Edward Teller’s protégé, beginning roughly at the same time when I got to the laboratory, was someone named Lowell Wood. And Lowell, in fact, was one of the people who interviewed me, and Teller had around him a cadre of perhaps a half a dozen people who were his inner circle. And Lowell was his principal. A guy named Harry Sahlin, who died of a heart attack young, and there were several other people who were truly his inside — the word doesn’t fit with Teller, but with other people, his kitchen cabinet, the people he had talked with. For my entire career at the laboratory, from almost day 1 until the day Teller died, I occupied a purgatorial state that I always found a way to be acceptable to join when the circle expanded, but I was never captured by the circle.
[laughs] That’s great.
And that was an incredibly conscious, delicate balance on an inherently unstable equilibrium. Because I knew to be part of his inner circle would have been death. But I also knew that to be ignored by it would also be a very difficult thing to cope with, within the framework of the laboratory.
Now, by “death,” you mean this would have just subsumed all of your —
Absolutely.
Yeah.
He would say, “Go look at this for me.” So, I just didn’t do that. I mean, we’ll come back with the SDI when we get there, and in principle, I ended up being in charge of part of it in a strange fashion. But anyway, the ’70s were a decade of social rest at the laboratory and at Los Alamos. Most of the weapons program had accomplished its intellectual breakthroughs prior to 1970, and so not much happened during the ’80s. It was like fins on a Chevrolet for the ’76 model instead of the ’75 model. That’s probably not good for publication, but it was pretty close to being true.
Bruce, what do you ascribe this to? I mean, is it sort of like — did the technology sort of hit a wall? Was the theory — did you push it as far as you could? I mean, what underpinned this?
You know, if it goes “bang,” you can make it go “bang” about as big as you want. It can fit in most things. And so, what’s next to do? Without crossing a border, I can’t do much better, but it really was. A lot of focus was put on safety and security. For example, even still a big debate on the — which you can read — is whether in fact you use insensitive high explosive or normal high explosive, because it’s a lot safer to use insensitive high explosive. But if you use insensitive high explosive, it takes more space, so your trade-offs — and so a lot of stuff was focused on safety and security, so the advances were really made in that region, not on making it go “bang” with slightly better stuff. An important thing is that George Chapline —who was sort of a colleague of Lowell’s, who came the same time I did, wrote an unclassified paper with Lowell in Physics Today on the X-ray laser. And it became — they explored all the possibilities that you could do in an unclassified framework. And there’s a whole wing of the lab that — my predecessor is director John Nuckolls. He was a close colleague of Teller’s and also worked a lot with Lowell, and they would do crazy stuff. And so again, I was in the conventional world. They were in the crazy world.
So, the ’70s were a lot of spinning wheels, and the fact that it was a period of social rest gave me a lot of that freedom to do the astrophysics, because there was no great projects that had to be done. That got us through roughly up to the early ’80s, and before we get to SDI, Lowell was still agitating for stuff. The other thing that happened during the late ’70s and up into the ’80s is that the University of California essentially re-intruded into both laboratories. What happened at UC was that — have you gone to any of the UC system or not?
No. But I’m generally aware.
Okay. But the master plan for the University of California campuses was done by Clark Kerr in the mid-’60s.
Right.
And basically, that took Berkeley — it added on a strengthened UCLA, and it took Davis and field stations at other places and created the nine-campus system. Once you had the nine-campus system, you created a systemwide academic senate. Once there’s the systemwide academic senate, they said, “What are these three laboratories doing there?” And so, there were two different reports over different cycles, and so on. My glorious book, which you can see, is — don’t even — yeah. All the stuff is there. But in the context of having these commissions that said, “If the university is going to have these labs, they have to basically engage more.” And each of these reports was put out, and not much happened. So finally, UC around 1980, said: do it, or else. And so it turned out, Chris McKee, back in 1967, or when I saw him in 1968, was the last postdoc the lab had had, and the postdoc program had been cancelled in 1968.
And who was the driving force behind that?
The whole place said: we don’t have time for that. There’s all kinds of stuff going on. And there was a high-energy group that had gotten stopped, that used to live on postdocs.
And what kind of pushback was there? I mean, did people recognize how devastating this was?
You almost have to read the book, or we’ll go off on a long tangent. So, a committee was established. The lab — shortest history I can do. The first five directors of the lab were all spectacular individuals with extraordinary careers. The first was Herb York, who then became the first head of DARPA, the first chancellor of UC-San Diego. The next director was Teller, for two years. The third director was Harold Brown, who became Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense. There was Johnny Foster, who was probably the strongest director in the history of Livermore, who also was the third person to become — York, Brown, and Foster — as the head of research and engineering at DOD. And then there was Mike May, who after he finished being director and staying at the lab, has ran international security studies group with Bill Perryt Stanford for a bunch of years. Just, extraordinary humans, each of whom was there for, at most, five years or a few years.
Right.
The sixth director was Roger Batzel, who was a physical chemist, barely spoke, and was director for 17 years. So, my book is organized around three eras: the era before Batzel, which is all weapons; Batzel, which is ’71 to ’88, until the end of the Cold War; and then after the Cold War. So, this middle era is really this funny thing, where the first years, not much happened, and then you see introduced there was a postdoc committee, because Batzel had to do something, because UC was yelling. And so, he asked for the committee to get a recommendation. The person who chaired that committee was John Browne, who then became director of Los Alamos later on. And John left Livermore in part because the recommendations to reestablish the postdoc program were not followed. So, it’s a very —
He left in protest, essentially.
More or less. There were other reasons, because Los Alamos did the experimental stuff he did. And you know, John and I still talk probably twice a week, so we’re good friends and the whole thing. But that was a factor, because he chaired this big committee. It said: do postdocs. And there was a big battle over whether he should become part of the institution, or all that stuff. So, the physics department had the time, found a bureaucratic way to slip the postdoc program in, and having had the last postdoc in Chris McKee, I hired the first two new postdocs at the lab in 1981. Rich London, who I think is still there, and Rick White, who then went to Space Telescope after the postdoc. And then the postdoc program expanded and became like all other postdoc programs. It just took off and exploded. So, that was something that happened in the early ’80s. The postdoc program happened.
We established five or six institutes with the University of California at various places. I ran the first — I got the first one going: the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, which also had a branch at Los Alamos and at various other places. The one thing I did at Livermore in the early ’80s was sort of reintroduce and create the research piece of postdocs, institutes, and UC connectivity. And we introduced the laboratory directed research program, which took 6 percent of the budget and competed for funds each year to do best projects. So, Mike May had this committee for the long-range planning committee, which Nuckolls and I were both on two years and basically sort of created all of these mechanisms to reestablish the research piece. The other incredibly active person was Claire Max, who had come to the lab in the early ’70s, become a close personal friend of mine, and she was the first director of IGPP. She probably could have been director of the lab if she’d wanted to stay. But she, along with Will Happer at JASONs, invented adaptive optics, and all the telescopes in the world now use the adaptive optics, which was done at Livermore, with the lasers, because we had the big laser program. So, it’s really this incredible network of the early ’80s before SDI, we’re completely re-establishing first-class research, networks of people in all kinds of fields, and the place took on an academic credibility that now was comparable to any other place, which it had not really had during those years prior to that.
Yeah. I want to ask at this point, before we move too far away. This idea that, you know, in the ’70s, you were able to sort of do the pure astrophysics, just from the basic science perspective. And I’m curious there how well integrated you are with your academic colleagues. Are you writing papers? Are you collaborating with faculty members?
Yes.
Are you attending conferences?
Yeah. Absolutely.
All of the above.
And the same thing at Los Alamos, because Los Alamos had always had the similar thing. So, you know, I attended conferences like the International Astronomical Union , the APS, the AAS and so on. , My cohorts were Chris McKee at Berkeley, Jon Weisheit who I hired at the lab (and who eventually went to Harvard the Rice, where he was eventually was a faculty member. I collaborated all over the US because I had this one very, very large computer code, which basically could do all kinds of astrophysical situations with complex atomic physics. So, I had several papers written with academic people, who — I would do the calculations, and they would call me, and we would collaborate. I’d make them consultants. So, it was across the board.
Right. Right.
So, it wasn’t a gazillion papers, but a lot of the papers were with people who, in fact, a couple with people I never physically met.
And to continue with this thread on developing the intellectual development of militarizing space, right — in terms of the people that you were collaborating with during this time, were these connections being made outside of Livermore as well, do you think?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. No, I would go back and I — sure.
Like, what would be a good example of who was thinking along these lines, outside of Livermore?
Oh, you mean in terms of that?
Right.
In terms of the military stuff? No, that was all inside Livermore.
That was all inside Livermore. Okay. That’s very useful.
Let’s jump to the SDI piece.
Okay.
And I’ve got to be very — when I wrote the book, it obviously had to go through classification reviews, and there were only two hard parts to be incredibly careful in the wording. The first is the invention Livermore made well before I got there, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, that enabled submarine-launched ballistic missiles to happen. And again, there’s a long story. Polaris was Livermore’s success, and it changed the Cold War into a Cold War, because once you could put missiles on submarines, now you always had a responsive strike, and so there were no longer bombers ready to go etc. That was the first “careful” topic. . The second area I’ve always had trouble with the classification on, which is still even more sensitive, is aspects of the strategic defense stuff. So, all I can say is that — I think, unless I go back and very carefully vet the comments — it was clear that Teller was pushing very, very hard for strategic defense across the board. And he was looking for nuclear weapons based stuff that would work in space. And as you probably know, if you’ve read any of this stuff on it, he did not treat the laboratory boundary as a barrier to his conversations. And like everything he ever did, he would overhype. I mean, it’s true, but everyone knew that. But no matter what the topic was — and he was one of the world’s worst managers, and he considered engineering details to be trivial. But the lab knew how to cope with Teller. But I think I describe in the book that this was Edward’s last hurrah. You know, this was it. He was — after being sort of in a wasteland for a bunch of years, all of a sudden, he was back.
What do you think, from your vantage point — what was Teller trying to achieve, in terms of this across-the-board vision? What was the perfect defense posture outcome that he envisioned?
That’s actually a good question, and I’m not sure I have a completely coherent answer.
Okay. That’s fine.
He certainly did not want to — I think he believed that, at least in a good interpretation, that having a strong defensive posture was a — would help preserve the quid pro quo with the Soviet Union. I’m not sure how he would have answered the question.
So, maybe a more concrete — maybe a more — I mean, I’m not asking you obviously to get in Teller’s head, but maybe a more concrete question would be: this is a vision that demands partners. Right? And so, who were Teller’s partners, both within and without, in terms of looking at Livermore and looking at who in Washington would have been right there with him in terms of achieving this?
Sure. Certainly, Lowell Wood was his principal partner inside the laboratory.
Yeah. And they saw eye-to-eye on this.
Oh, I would say it’s different. I would say Lowell was a prime mover, and Edward took what Lowell said, if not at face value, close enough to face value on what was technically possible. And outside, they were people who I didn’t really know, who were part of what got created in SDI. I think Abramson was the first head of SDI, so he used people who were in Washington, and they became strong supporters. Inside the laboratory, you know, Roy Woodruff, the person with whom he and Teller became bitter foes, was head of the weapons program. And so, he said: I am in charge. Teller didn’t argue. He said: we’re all trying to help. We’re on the same wavelength. And Roy essentially said: I don’t want you telling people how we’re doing, because I’m in charge, and I’m going to tell you how they’re doing, because you don’t tell it right. And so, Roy — you know, I have a phrase in the book, and Roger Bates was the director, who in theory would be in charge. This was near the end of Batzel’s 17 years, and he was not a strong personality, and he was not intellectually of the same capability as the other protagonists.
And so, my phrase in the book is: there are no winners in any of this. The lab’s reputation suffered enormously. A lot of people, including myself, stayed on the sidelines. We would offer commentary that said: this is technically too far ahead of itself, and so on. But if we jump ahead, Batzel stepped down at the end of his term in ’88. My predecessor, John Nuckolls, was chosen. And John was an extraordinarily brilliant guy, and I became essentially the — they’re called associate directors — the associate director for physics. And part of physics had expanded greatly, so the physics department had not just the normal nuclear, atomic, molecular physics, but we owned — as an organization, we owned all of the climate studies. We owned all of the laser fusion work, and we also owned Lowell’s division, which was essentially — had started as a skunkworks for Teller, and now expanded into the full, effectively, SDI division. Even different than the weapons program, which did the real science of things, but Lowell’s people did a lot of work, too. So, in theory, I was in charge of Lowell, but in practice, Lowell talked to Hank Cooper, who at that time had become head of SDI, and I talked to the colonels who worked for him.
Okay. That’s —
And I had a deputy who would also work on that. And for me, fortunately, the weapons piece of the classified piece was still done with the weapons program as such, where Brilliant Pebbles, which was largely unclassified — not in detail, but it didn’t have the same sensitivity — I thought was a fantastically interesting idea. I didn’t care much about it for strategic defense because I couldn’t imagine how you could ever test constellations of a thousand satellites doing whatever they’re going to do by killing missiles. But the Brilliant Pebble itself, which was still in development as a single entity, was terrifically interesting and fun, and as you know, we went to the Moon.
[laughs] Right.
We did Brilliant Pebbles jointly with the Naval Research Lab. They did the spacecraft itself. We did all the instrumentation and integrated it. We had this place in Alexandria where we built our own space center, and I’d go back and interact with the team, and it was just great fun to do Brilliant Pebbles.
Yeah. And where did it originate? What was the beginning of Brilliant Pebbles?
You would have to go back into Lowell, and Greg Canavan, who was from Los Alamos, and I think Greg — he initially called it Smart Rocks. And then Lowell’s follow-on was going to be called Genius Sand. So, some funny combination of Greg and Lowell, came up with Brilliant Pebbles.
But was the — I mean, whatever the nomenclature, was the overall goal consistent, or did it change over time?
I think the goal of the SDI was pretty consistent. I think the other piece though, which I think was an important part of the fabric of the world — which is now back to your space thing — Dan Goldin had become head of NASA. Dan Goldin was also a friend of Lowell’s. And Lowell essentially convinced him that “smaller, cheaper, faster” was a much better way to do space than gigantic platforms. And there was a giant platform being built at NASA before Goldin got there, which I think was called — it’s called EOS, the Erath Observing System. . It was going to be a humongous thing, going to take years to even build and launch, and the technology for it would be outmoded 15 years before it ever got into space. And Lowell’s view, I think, really did help catalyze the revolution in NASA, which said “smaller, cheaper, faster” is not a bad way to go. And that’s what Brilliant Pebbles, from my point of view, that’s what it proved, that you could do this project for almost a song and much quicker. I still remember my first talk to the regents on three days’ notice after I had become acting director. I had a camera that would fit into one hand which had taken all these pictures of the Moon, from the Brilliant Pebble, and it was just a stunning thing to see those photographs taken by this tiny little camera and this spacecraft that was very small. . So, from my point of view, it was fantastic to do, and I would go back and give talks at NASA, and they were just furious about the whole notion of not having the NASA system. So, there’s a lot of other politics apart from the militarization of space that I think got played into that. And that’s the part I thought was great fun.
Yeah. Now, I want to develop the narrative. As you’re moving up the hierarchy at Livermore, and the first — I was waiting for it — your first reference to talking to the colonels. Right? So, my question is — and it’s a broad question: at what point in your career at Livermore were you really starting to talk with — whatever it is, politicians, DOE, the military. When did that start, and who were some of your key contacts in Washington?
Sure. First, of course, everybody who’s in a DOE lab of any kind has contacts with people in their own scientific area. That sort of goes without saying.
Sure. Of course.
So, I don’t think I got any broad exposure outside of the laboratory except within my own field until I became the associate director for physics, which was 1988, because that puts you as one of the 10 to 12 associate directors in the lab at any given time.
And they are reporting to the deputy director?
They report to the director.
Straight to the director.
Absolutely. On paper, to the director. The deputy director, historically, runs operations. All of the other associate directors run programmatic or technical functions. And so, they really do report to the director, both in principle and often in practice.
But on the org chart, the deputy director is above the associate director?
Yeah. And when I became director, I formally instituted two deputy directors: one for operations, one for science and technology.
Yeah, that would seem — right.
. But the first serious association with the world outside of Livermore, apart from my own field, was after I became the associate director in 1988. And you know, it’s more like the great stories than doing serious policy, apart from Brilliant Pebbles stuff. I talked to the colonels. But you may remember — I’m sure you do remember, even at your young age, that the superconducting supercollider was a huge item for physics.
Sure. Of course. Of course.
And you can go back and read the various histories of it. Get Roy Schwitter’s version.
I’m talking to him tomorrow, as it were.
Or Al Trivelpiece who claims he sold it to Reagan. Did the initial half-hour briefing. Anyway, the SSC was going on, and you also know Sam Ting, or at least of Sam Ting.
Yeah.
Well, as you know, Sam Ting is a bit of a pariah. He’s just not accepted by much of the other high-energy physics community. Well, he had one of two or three big collaborations that was being put together each with a thousand participants for the SSC. But most of the normal high-energy physics establishment didn’t want to work with Sam. So, Sam recruited the weapons labs and the Russian labs to be part of his team, because obviously, doing SSC has as much to do with construction and high-field magnets and all that stuff as it does with cleverness and high-energy theory, because you know, the papers have a thousand people. So, Sam came when I was associate director of physics, with Kerman — the guy from MIT, who I mentioned — I took classical mechanics senior year at MIT and he has been a friend ever since. And Kerman brought him out for a talk to Livermore, and Sam recruited — I remember Kerman and I were sitting across from Sam, and he said, “We want you to be part of our collaboration.” I said, “Sam, we don’t have anybody who does high-energy physics.” He said, “Well, come to CERN, and we’ll find some.” So, we go to CERN. And I interviewed, and we picked about seven or eight people as potential hires, who were assistant professor or postdoc grades. And then we went on to Russia, where we gave talks. I remember giving a talk at the Russian national academy there on how they can also join in Sam’s collaboration.
Oh, wow. [laughs]
I mean, the whole thing was bizarre. Right?
Yeah.
I mean, this is crazy stuff. And it turned out we actually became a core member of the collaboration. The collaboration then dissolved when Sam didn’t get selected as a participant. But then we were taken over and became part of Barry Barish’s collaboration. And what that turned into eventually was a — we became partners with Stanford on the B Factory because of our involvement with the people we got from CERN, and Karl van Bibber, who was a pretty good guy at the lab. And so, along with Berkeley, we were there when Burt dedicated the B Factory at Stanford. And that has led now to the strong collaboration, when Stanford is now a light source, to having a light source. So, all this happened because of one conversation between Kerman and Sam Ting and me, in sometime like 1988. So, there are all these very complicated webs.
Right. And did you see it from that one conversation? Did you have any inkling that it was going to play out like this?
Oh, no. None whatsoever. I remember when Van Bibber was trying to maintain the B Factory connection, and we had to find money to pay one guy a salary. So, it was a tenuous thing when the SSC collapsed. So, we thought we’d be a small — our motto was, we would provide strong engineering and other talent to the collaborations, just enough to pay the salaries of the serious physicists who would be here and help supervise that.
Right.
So, we had an elaborate model. But this is a model that sort of worked. But no, it was just — I was pushing on — I was trying to push us into physics on all kinds of things. Claire was doing her adaptive optics, and we were spending that independent research money making that become a reality. We hired Charles Alcock to become Claire’s successor in astrophysics. He’s been head of the Smithsonian now for about 10 years. And Charles did his project on MACHO, which was the first detection of the dark matter, cover of Nature. And we have guys going to Australia. So, it was one of the great — it was the best job I ever had.
Yeah.
We had all kinds of great physics. We started the Axion project with Van Bibber. We just did terrific stuff for that period of time, and it was fantastic.
So, I want to ask about the SSC in terms of — how closely were you following the development, and what were — at what point did you see that this was headed south, and how did that affect Livermore’s response?
Number one, we were somewhat sheltered because Sam is so dominant. Like everybody else, I followed it through science magazine articles and Physics Today, and not much more.
Okay.
I knew a little bit more because Berkeley had its own views in their high-energy world, and there were a lot of threads. But you know, I was still young enough and naïve enough to not understand Washington politics.
Right. But in terms of the kinds of things that would have happened as a result, if SSC had gotten through. Right?
We didn’t have a big enough stake that it was going to matter too much.
That’s my question. Okay.
Yeah. The people probably would have left and gone someplace else, because the whole country — high-energy physics world would have collapsed to some degree.
Yeah. Now, in terms of the Axion project, when did that take hold?
You know, I can’t remember Karl’s exact date, but what he did was steal — “steal” is the wrong word. He used equipment from the big magnetic fusion facility that had gone defunct during the ’80s, which had huge magnets. So, he got to sort of scavenge that facility, and that started it. And he hired a couple of assistant-professor level people. I think Rosenberg is a name that comes to mind. Eventually, they went other places, because Livermore is a very expensive place to live on NSF grants, but much of the early work was done at Livermore.
Sure.
The overhead and the cost are just too high.
Yeah. Now, when you became — I want to develop a little bit more about your contacts with people in Washington, this idea of “outside of your field.” So, you mentioned the colonels with Brilliant Pebbles. Who are some other people that you were in daily, weekly contact with, in the political and military spheres?
As associate director of physics, not all that much. But I think — and I forget the name change — but the head of energy research, which became the office of science, I was still basically the head of physics at the lab when we had the climate stuff and the space stuff and the laser fusion stuff. So, I basically interacted with all the pieces of — let me use the current name for it — the office of science. And so, Ari Patrinos, who was head of all of the climate stuff, the atmospheric research stuff, and the biology stuff, I basically became a very, very close friend of Ari’s, and I would go back there and talk to him many times. So, he was a close confidante. I had some association, but not much, with the weapons part of DOE at that time. Mostly, it was the science piece of DOE, the nuclear energy part of DOE. But I also — it was interesting — we had a guy who had been at the lab for years named Tom Palmieri, who was at OMB, who I had written papers with in X-ray astronomy in the ’70s, and he was fairly high up as a — I even forget the term for it — in OMB as an examiner for OMB. And I would go back every trip and have lunch with Tom and talk about OMB. And so, I sort of learned OMB in a funny way, and how it worked. And I would go to the SDI stuff. So, that was kind of what, as the head of physics — the head of physics at the lab had essentially become the deputy for science and technology. All the other chemistry and stuff, really — I was essentially the deputy for science.
Now, from your vantage point and your involvement in SDI, by the late 1980s, was this proceeding more or less — were you surprised at how it had proceeded, or was everything sort of going according to plan as far as you saw?
I actually — I think the end of the Cold War ended the program. It took a while to end, but it ended the program as a full-scale military program, because I don’t think much of the SDI, Pentagon apparatus thought much of Brilliant Pebbles. I think — and I’m not sure — I think the heads of SDI did, but not the substructure within the Pentagon. It needed a zealot.
[laughs] Right.
And it got managers. And once you have managers, they don’t react well to places that are basically skunkworks. But again, my approach was not to work with Lowell. It was to work with all the people who were incredibly smart who worked for him. And I would go down there in the evenings and hang out.
So, it sounds like in your capacity as associate director, most of your contacts, the basis is the science. You’re really not thinking about policy and budget at this point.
Except for SDI, because I also got to know some of the people, which would come in handy when I became director. Duncan Hunter — and there were many Duncan Hunters, so this was the one that actually was there for a while — I think had become head of the House Armed Services committee, depending on which party was in power. And Duncan was a big pusher, a good friend of Lowell’s. And so, I would go talk to Duncan. And so, the sub-pieces of SDI, plus the pieces of DOE within the science establishment was pretty much the associate director of physics’ connections outside.
Yeah. And so in ’93, you’re named acting deputy director. What is the “acting”? What does that imply there?
You can’t be — you’ve got to be voted onto the regents.
I see. And was your sense that — were you being groomed for leadership at this point? Was that clear to you?
This is — again, it’s hard to know. I had to make a choice. What had happened in physics when John was the associate director of physics, and I was his deputy, we formed a functional, effective team. John would hire crazy people, run over the budgets, and I would more or less manage the place and talk to all the people who actually worked in physics who were normal.
Right.
And it had been a pretty good combination. So, my question when he essentially asked: would I do the same thing for him as director? Because his five-year review took place in ’93, and it was very clear to everyone — it was in the press every day — that John was probably not going to do well in his five-year review. On the other hand, no one knows what was actually going to occur, and so when he asked me to be deputy, I had to decide what would happen if John did or did not get re-upped for another five years, and if he did, I’d be deputy for presumably five years. If he didn’t, then I’m essentially giving away my job to take this other short-term thing. And I finally said — the best I can do, if I do a sort of a prisoner’s dilemma — I said, what the heck. And so, I took the job, and within a very, very short time, what this meant was clear.
I was attending meetings for John at DOE and elsewhere, and so, it turns out that a thing which University of California had put into place as part of their management was that every quarter, the three lab directors from Livermore, Berkeley, and Los Alamos would get together with the two senior vice presidents from UC — one for the administration, one for the provost — and we’d have a dinner a quarter, which always annoyed Los Alamos, because you would have to come up to the Bay area for the meeting. But nonetheless, I went to one of those meetings with Sig Hecker and Chuck Shank, and Walter Massey had been brought in as a new provost about six months or nine months before. And he was brought in with the presumption he would take over for Jack Peltason, who was the interim president of the university. I mean, Peltason was a nice guy, but no one expected him to be the guy. Walter was brought in to be his replacement. So, Walter was at the dinner, and whoever else was the admin VP at the time. So, we finished the dinner at the Claremont Hotel, which is in Berkeley, and we’re walking out. Walter taps me on the shoulder and says, “Wait a second.” And we’re walking, and he says, “John Nuckolls is going to resign tomorrow. Are you willing to be acting director?”
Oh, wow.
And it wasn’t a surprise, but the specifics were a surprise. And I said, “Well, Walter, sure. Let’s give it a try.” And that was it. And I like Walter a lot. As it turns out, Walter ran into huge troubles dealing with the regents and the newspapers in California, and it would be a very turbulent couple of years. But I think he loved the labs, because he’d been head of Argonne, and at the NSF, and so on. So, you know, it was a lot of fun with Walter. So, I became acting director, and within three days, I had that first talk to the regents. I mean, everything changed overnight.
Now, I grabbed on your — you know, when you split the deputy position, so it had the two people that had two functions, I’m curious if the need for that dawned on you, like, on Day 1 when you were in that role, of the importance —
Absolutely.
Yeah. So, give me a sense, in terms of the workaday responsibilities that said to you: this is nuts. This is just too much for one portfolio.
Well, to begin with, I was a deputy for everything. But I immediately, instantly knew there needed to be one to operate the place, and one for the science. And so, I asked — I’d have to look up the administrative sequence, but one of my closest scientific colleagues over all the years, Bill Lokke made the deputy for S&T, acting, presumably; I made the acting deputy for operations Bob Kuckuck, ultimately became the deputy for everybody, NNSA, UCE, all kinds of things over the years. And within a short time, they were occupying those two new roles. So, that was almost instantaneous.
Yeah. As sensible as this decision was, obviously it hadn’t been like that until you instituted it. And so, I wonder then if that represents the fact that Livermore had just grown to the point where this was not feasible for one person to do all of this work. Or, it had always been a problem, and you were the first to address it?
You know, I essentially had already occupied this role as the deputy — as the associate director for physics, and Nuckolls had brought in Duane Sewell, who was the historical deputy for operations, without the words. He’s only an operational guy. So, it already had been functioning this way. It just hadn’t named the head of physics as that thing.
I see.
And so, it was pretty much no one even particularly blinked.
Right. So, when you became — when you assumed this role, had you now — in terms of your vantage point on budget and policy and relations with the DOE, were you seeing things that you had not seen before? Were you having conversations that you were not having before, or was this sort of more —
Oh, 100 percent. It was beyond day and night because of two things: one, because in the post-Cold War world, the entire Clinton administration was basically trying to harvest a peace dividend. And so, even in Nuckolls’ last year and a half, the weapons budget had dropped by — I’ll not get the number right, but by more than a factor of two. Half of that factor of two had been replaced by tech transfer, where we would sign CRADAs with money that was available, which was probably one of the least effective programs ever run, but it kept people employed. And there was — and Jack Gibbons had become the science advisor, and Jack’s a good guy, but this was probably maybe a little more of a pure principle thing for Jack. Martha Krebs was head of what was then the Office of Energy Research and became the Office of Science, who was married to Phil Coyle, who was a former Livermore associate director. And I knew Martha very well from previous stuff. But the Gibbons plan, under the Clinton administration, was to basically look at every federal agency that did science and then restructure and rethink it, and have commissions to examine every agency that would do science and decide what should be done in the post-Cold War world. For the Department of Energy, it was the Galvin Commission. And Bob Galvin was basically given the commission to — Hazel O’Leary had been named Secretary of Energy, and Bob Galvin was to look at the whole DOE and come up with recommendations for its future. Livermore was the poster child for defense conversion.
Right. And you felt that right away? The bullseye was right there? You knew it was coming?
Absolutely. And that’s what I inherited. And I remember having a meeting with the associate directors when I became acting, and I said, “Look. It doesn’t matter whether I get this job for real or not. There’ll be a search and a posting and all that stuff. But for at least the next year, you guys cannot act like we all have acted historically, which is as internal competitors. We actually have to act in a fairly coherent version if you want the lab to be around.” And they essentially, more or less, bought that for the entire period of the next couple of years. But the thing which saved us and saved the laboratory were several things. The first was that Vic Reis was named as associate director, as you know, for defense programs. And you’ve got his story. And Vic and I will tell almost the same story, but not quite. But Vic was — you know, there’s that old cliché that, you know, every success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.
Right.
Well, in this case, there are a lot of people who will claim responsibility for having created stockpile stewardship, but the only absolutely essential ingredient was Vic Reese. Without Vic, Livermore probably wouldn’t be here, and he just did such an extraordinary job. And you already have his oral history, so I’ll let his story speak for itself. But nonetheless, a thing that I think happened — and I think Vic would probably — does acknowledge it, that there was a thing called a review done by the DOE bureaucratic structure for every lab, every year. Incredibly boring, tedious, all-day meetings. And so, Vic was scheduled — we had no idea who Vic was. You know? He came from the Lincoln Labs, the DOD. A few people knew him. Not much. So, Vic shows up for this meeting, and I remember calling a Saturday meeting of all the Associate Directors, because Vic had said: I want to be — redo this. So, we completely threw away the normal agenda, and I think it was as close to a marriage made in heaven as you could find at Livermore. He was unconventional. We prided ourselves on being unconventional. And it just took off.
Now, Bruce, in terms of your — I mean, was your perspective — did the peace dividend — I mean, speaking in your capacity as a citizen, not as wearing the Livermore hat, did the peace dividend — did that make sense to you personally? “The Cold War is over. We need to rethink our defense posture.” Or, did you not agree with that? And then to sort of put your Livermore hat back on, were there — what were your options in terms of how to preserve the budget and how possibly to push back against these structural changes?
An interesting thing, which — again, covered in the book — about six of us had gotten together around — again, the dates — around ’91 or ’92, not including the then-director Nuckolls. This was myself, George Miller — who was my second successor — Bill Lokke he guy I made head of S&T, other people, and we met for about three months offsite to try to think what the future nuclear weapons program could, and should, look like.
Right.
And our product was a letter to the president, because we thought that would be a way of focusing the conversation. And what I’ve said in retrospect is, we got quite a few things right. We didn’t go anywhere near as far as Vic eventually did.
Did you present options, or did you present a singular vision?
You know, it always has options, but it was a vision that had a — you know, one of the curious things is, we can’t find the final documents anymore. We’ve all looked, all the members. So, in the book, I didn’t know what to do. I think we had a great reduced production capacity. We didn’t go — but we certainly had two laboratories, and I think that we couldn’t remove the bias from that point of view anyway from us. We didn’t get that close to Vic’s thing, but I think we understood what the structure of a significantly reduced, no production capacity, no testing, or very limited testing, program would look like. We just didn’t go as far as Vic’s pure science with computers as a center. We certainly got fairly close, and when Vic came, that’s why it was an easy arabesque to join onto that, because we’d been thinking about that for a long time.
Right. And how smooth — as you envision the transition, what were the budgetary implications of this? Were you aiming for status quo? Did you accept a reduction no matter what was going to happen? I mean, what were you thinking in that regard?
Oh, yeah. We accepted a reduction, I think, without any question.
So, there was no universe in which the budget stays the same, and the peace dividend and its impact on Livermore —
No, no. I think we all — and we assumed there would be great expansion in energy, environment, and the other stuff, and we would compete for that and do well. I mean, I think that was the presumption.
Yeah.
But no, I think we had no hesitation about assuming we were going to have a significantly reduced program.
And so, how did that play out? What were the reductions, and when did they come?
You know, the tech transfer thing was funny, but I remember — and so, I don’t know if I’ve got the numbers exactly. It’s probably, again, in the book. But the first “real” stewardship budget was about 4 B$, substantially down from the pre-Cold War end numbers but good to start with. Charlie Curtis was an equally important part of DOE to make Vic’s thing happen.
Where was Charlie? What was his office?
Charlie was the — the way DOE used to be structured was kind of peculiar. There was a Secretary of Energy. And there was a Deputy Secretary, who was almost perennially an energy and gas person. And then there was an undersecretary, who effectively was the operating officer for the Department of Energy as such. That, I think, was Charlie’s official title at the time. So, Charlie was in charge of vetting Vic’s stuff for the Secretary, Hazel O’Leary, and didn’t have to pay much attention to the Deputy. Charlie was one of the finest public servants I’ve ever known, Drell. We gave him headaches. We gave him all kinds of trouble. And Charlie would take it with good grace and occasionally push back. And he taught us all kinds of stuff. And he was an equally valuable asset to Vic, and I don’t think Vic even completely understands how important Charlie was to his ultimate success. I mean, Vic mobilized the entire DOD world in his vision, in the national security world. But Charlie was the instrument within the DOE who made that function and helped him, although Vic interacted with Hazel himself.
Right. Now, I want to sort of stick on the chronology, because we’re talking about things that bleed into when you were named director in 1994. So, I just want to stick on that for a second.
Right.
Can you just describe those circumstances? How did that come about, when you were named?
You know, I had been the acting director for seven months. And I formally applied to be director. Sent a letter. And then I was interviewed.
And applied to whom? What’s the process?
So, the process in those days, and for a while afterwards, was a very formal process from the University of California who made the selection. There would be a committee comprised of — there are two representatives from the lab, four or five regents, and two or three outside scientific people of great stature. Robbie Vogt was somebody who was there, off and on. Burt Richter. Sid Drell was on mine. People like that, from the outside, along with the regents and a couple of lab people. And so, if you’re chosen for an interview —— in those days, UC occupied the Kaiser Building, and the top floor of the 28 floors, there’s this big hall with velvet red carpets and you’re escorted down to the meeting room. One of the administrative people comes and gets you and brings you into the room, and basically you spend two hours interacting with the selection committee. Then you go away, and then they make their decision, and usually you get a phone call within two or three days about the result.
Now, were those conversations dominated by what was coming with the Clinton administration and what your vision was to adapt?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. My interview, to the degree I remember it, was I said, “This is what I’m going to do.” My approach was just, “It’s a continuation of what I’ve been doing. There’s no new news. Here’s what the plans are, here’s what it looks like, and here’s where we’re going.”
So, in a nutshell, what plan did you present?
I said we’re going to continue to be a national security laboratory, and we’ll also pursue the other areas in which we have special competence. The rest was just sort of adjectives on top of those two things. One of the things that’s curious — I remember when Nuckolls was the candidate for director before me in his administration. You know, he spent hours trying to know who the other candidates were. He had coaches. And I walked in. I had no — to this day, I do not know who the other candidates were. I didn’t care.
One thing, Bruce, that you might have cared about — I’m curious about this — in articulating your vision, how much were you paying attention to sentiment from your subordinates and from the rank-and-file? Were you thinking about what the people that you had spent your career with, what their hopes and dreams were, what they wanted to achieve in this new environment, or were you just — you saw what you wanted to do, and that’s what you articulated?
You know, we were so aligned at the time. There was nobody with whom — there was no competitor left, if you want to call them competitors. I was completely aligned with Mike Campbell on the National Ignition Facility, and with Vic. You know, George Miller and Mike Anastasio, two of my successors as Director, were with us in all the interactions with the communities. When, you know, as Vic probably told you — you know, when the three directors went back to Shalikashvili, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the National Security Advisor Tony Lake, we were in complete sync.
And I wonder, where in this narrative, inevitably, where are the hard-liners who are saying: I don’t care that the Soviet Union is no more. We still need this stuff.
Right. So, the time sequence for all this is: Vic does his magic and creates a lot of consensus on all these actions. So, the first piece in that — there are two pieces, and then a third, then the culmination — and the first piece is that a meeting called the “Confidence Conference” was called, at Strategic Command in Omaha in June of 1995. And we all go back there. And this is where your hard-liners are going to come in.
Okay.
And basically, Hazel comes, which is — Hazel even brings her own masseuse, if I remember correctly, to Strategic Command, which caused some consternation. Charlie Curtis comes. Charlie and Vic are there. The lab directors are there. And basically, it’s — and the room in Strategic Command has a big, U-shaped table. The principals — which, I’m a principal in this case — are at the main table. The second row, the colonels are in the next table, so there’s like 35 or 40 people. And one of the big debates is whether or not there should be a zero yield or a finite yield. Everything is triggered off the CTBT treaty. That’s the entire driver for everything, from Vic on down. Should we have any limit on testing, or not have testing? And so, Mike Anastasio from our lab, who then became head of the weapons program then head of both Livermore and then director of Los Alamos — Mike did the briefing on that topic and went through all the pros and cons for both sides of it. So now, we go to the executive session. And 20 people around the table, mostly from STRATCOM. To a person: the STRATCOM people said we have to have some testing.
Right.
Al Narath from Sandia: we don’t need testing. And Sig and I — I remember I looked at him and said: you know, Sandia doesn’t test anyway. What the hell is [laughs] — this costs you nothing. And I think Vic and Charlie said: we think we can do this without testing. And I think Sig and I had to give our opinions.
What’s Sig’s background?
You know, he was a plutonium guy who won the Lawrence Award. He was selected on the second round of people as the Los Alamos director at a very young age in 1985. He served as director for 12 years. So, a huge imprint on Los Alamos. And he was the major catalyst in engaging all of the Russian laboratories with the U.S. laboratories. He then took over the CISAC position at Stanford and received_ the Fermi award a couple of years ago.
Okay. Good.
In any case, at the Confidence Conference, Sig and I were in a tough place, and I can’t remember the words I used, but I said: look, I think we can do this. Testing has value. And we tried to be — we’re not policy guys. We’ve tried to give you the technical pros and cons. The rest of you decide, because this wasn’t a deciding place. So, that’s what took place at the Confidence Conference. But every hardliner in the room, every guy from STRATCOM, was just head-over-heels. We’ve got to have testing. The next thing that happened is that the three lab directors got called back for a meeting with Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then a meeting with Tony Lake, the National Security Adviser, in the situation room afterwards, to go through it again. So Sig and I and Al Narath met with Shalikashvili for about an hour and a half, and he basically gave a Ph.D. exam on whether — what it would mean not to test.
Oh, wow. Wow.
And as Sig has pointed out on a number of times, I was the only American-born person in the room. Shalikashvili is Polish. Narath is German. And Sig is Austrian. And my Kentucky probably only counts as half a state in the current world, so it really is not there. We then went over to the situation room in the White House, and I’ll never forget this. Vic probably forgot the story. But we all go into the situation room, which ain’t much of a room. It’s just kind of a little tiny room. And there’s some guy holding a baby as we walk in, and I remember Vic said, “We have a meeting here,” and the guy said, “Okay, I’ll get out.” And Vic turned and said, “What a country this is!” [laughs] This is just weird. So, we sat down. The Tony Lake thing was no big deal. But the thing with Shalli was a big deal. The next to last — the third event that happened is for the only time in my life I got a call from my secretary on a day in August about 4:00. I was over at an allergy doctor getting my monthly shot for allergy stuff. And she said, “You’ve got to come to the lab right away.” I said, “I’ve changed clothes and I don’t have my badge with me.” She said, “You don’t need your badge. Come to the lab.”
So, the first time I’ve ever driven through the lab gates without my badge in history, and I’ve got a two and a half hour classified call on the classified telephone with Charlie Curtis, who is basically reading out the plan for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, with all of the appendices and what they are, and he wants to know if I will be able to support that. He had had previous conversations that day with Sig, and I think with Paul Robinson by that time, who had replaced Al Narath. And basically, we went through it, and I think all the three lab directors said, you know: the thing says you have to have the resources to do it. It said all three labs have to be involved, not two. And basically, it was a classified call that was a, you know, probably less than two hours. And Charlie went through that with us.
When he asked you this question, was that a pro forma question, or did he really not know how you would respond?
I think he wanted — I think I said in my book that when we testified in 2000 on the test ban treaty, that all three of us effectively gave technical answers. We can’t officially have an opinion on whether we should pass this treaty or not, because that’s a political decision. All we can give you are the technical pros and cons.
So, what was he asking of you, exactly?
I’m going to get to that. So, what I said in the book is: if we had been asked what our personal opinions were on the treaty, I would have voted for it. I don’t know what John Brown or Sig would have said, and Paul would have voted against it. And so, what Charlie wanted was to have us on record with him, not just randomly, but with him, that we could support a program which didn’t have nuclear testing and believe that we could carry it out and make it work. And so, it may have been — you know, in a sense, all this had led up to — let me call it quasi pro forma, but every one of us had stuff that had to be there, in my case: Livermore has to be an equal partner. And if that wasn’t there, I would have said: I’m not sure I can support that. We have to have the resources, because we know we’re going to be shortchanged, and that’s got to be in this. And so, I think he wanted to work through the pieces to hear all of us talk through them. I don’t know what the other people said. And then on September 26, which is my birthday, which is why I know it, Clinton came out with this proclamation that said: no testing, it takes all three labs, , and it has all the appendices we had talked about.
Mission accomplished.
And so, at that moment, that September 26 of 1995, in my mind, was the time at which all the post-Cold War stuff had come to its conclusion, and at this moment, that started the new clock.
Wow. That’s great. That’s great. And so, how long did it take until these things were implemented and that it actually changed the day-to-day?
You know, again, I’d have to go back and look at the actual details. The two important events — one for everybody, one for Livermore — are the award of the first Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative contract with IBM, which Vic was the person who basically, really made it happen by talking to Gerstner, who was then head of IBM. And that computer was at Livermore. And I can’t remember when we — which date, whether it was before or after the ’95 date we signed. I think it was after that, we signed KD1, which was the authorization to proceed with the National Ignition Facility, which basically was the start for us, but it’s around that date, or very shortly thereafter. And I can obviously look it up, or when you get the copy of the book, you can look it up there. And I’m not sure what the date of the DAHRT facility at Los Alamos really was, or the MESA facility at Sandia. But we all knew the model. It’s one facility at each place. It’s computing for everybody. It was shared computing, and computers being altered at different sites. And you know, we were off and running.
Yeah. And that gets me back to — I was thinking about when you were talking about essentially your interview for the directorship, you must have really emphasized that Livermore was a place that could be nimble. Right? That could change and adapt with the times, because…
Absolutely.
…it had to. Right?
It had to.
So I wonder, you know, both from the fallout from the budget, and you referenced the genome project and things like that, I wonder how you helped foster a culture of being adaptive and nimble and really reactive to new opportunities, and to demonstrate that Livermore could be relevant in a post-Cold War era.
You know, I think again it’s mostly the people. Most of them are people I had professionally grown up with. Vic did a lot by having very senior people go back and do three-month or six-month tours of duty, and they were the ones who wrote the final program, not the conventional DOE approach. I don’t think Vic ever went to Germantown (where the workaday DOE people live) during his entire tenure. You know, he literally ran it with people from the labs. He had a couple of HQ people to do the facilitation of it within DOE, but he was running this thing with the lab people as his principal people,
Did you have contact with OSTP in the White House? Was that part of your orbit?
Yeah, and M. R. C. Greenwood was Gibbon’s deputy, and she eventually became chancellor at UC Santa Cruz I’d known M. R. C. for a while, so I had a lot of interactions with her in her role at OSTP. Also, there’s a lady named Sybil Francis at OSTP, who had been a doctoral student at the at the lab, got her degree formally from Harvard, with her thesis s on the weapons lab warhead competition. And so, I would always go and have lunch with Sybil and spend time with her, and I’d see M.R.C. And so, you know, I like Jack Gibbons, but Jack just wasn’t much of a mover and shaker. And so, I worked with the other people. I liked OSTP. I would go, and I was on the Army Science Board still, and I would do things in that capacity And I would just go around town. By the time we got done, I knew every Congress person in the Bay area on a first-name basis. The Friday night flight from Dulles to San Francisco was a place you did business across the board. You know, I have an oil painting from Feinstein she gave me when I retired. And you know, Barbara Boxer and I don’t have the same politics, but I actually found her more engaging than Feinstein, who was very precise and serious. Boxer was fun, and even though we probably only agreed on 10 or 20 percent of political matters, I can remember getting this call from her. I was in some airport or something, and she called, and she said: I need people to measure tritium, because she was worried about tritium in the ground water someplace, and we had the mass spectrometer, and we could do the measurements. And she said: I’d be very pleased if your lab could do it. I said, “Senator, it’s done. It’s done.” We just had a good working relationship— you know, the relationships were extremely important. And when Ellen Tauscher became our congresswoman, that really cemented or political liaisons in an extraordinary way.
I’m curious if September 11 materially changed either your outlook or what was going on at the lab, or if this was actually something that changed your day-to-day?
You know, it did. To just say — you know, the other thing which changed the climate enormously was the creation of the NNSA within the Department of Energy.
You mean, as a semi-independent agency?
Yeah. And you know, that was done over the violent protest of Bill Richardson, who was then the Secretary of Energy.
Right.
And John Gordon, who was the first head of it, never could take on Richardson. And so, that preceded 9/11 by about a year or so. But that was, I think, a terrible outcome for the DOE system
Because they ceded control?
No, because it just added the double layer of bureaucracy, and it separated us from the science piece, and it just — you know, it’s a whole separate story because that was the result of the Chinese spy scandal.
Right. Right.
Almost 100 percent.
Yeah.
And it was crazy. It made no sense. It was all one guy in DOE who made it all happen with Congress. And it was a bad thing. But as far as 9/11, it made some major differences, but I will tell you the story. Which, if you don’t know the stories —
Oh, I know the story. I know the story. [BREAK]
So, first the somewhat interesting story about 9/11. As it turns out, I was in Japan at a tri-annual laser fusion conference called IFSA, which alternates between the Japanese, the French, and the Americans. And I had given the keynote address, I think, on the Monday. And Mike Campbell, who had left the lab, but was still the organizer of much of the American program was there. And I’d gone to sleep on, say, Monday night, and I get this call at like, 11 at night. I’d gone to sleep at, say, 10:30. And Campbell is on the phone from the conference hotel, and he’s screaming: “We’ve been attacked! We’ve been attacked!” I said, “Campbell, you’re always hysterical. Go back to bed.” He said, “No, we’ve been attacked.” And so, he managed to get CNN on the one English language channel of the Japanese television. And so, I remember the next day, we had this big — that night before actually, the middle of the night, we had the big debate: should we have the conference or not? And we said, “We’re probably stuck here. We might as well do the conference.” And the Japanese installed big 8-foot high televisions, and we actually went on with the conference. And we’re on the first plane out of Osaka a week later back, with like a quarter of the people on the plane.
But the curious thing was, at Livermore, my executive officer was in Russia. Mike Anastasio, who was now one of the two deputies — was the deputy for operations — was on vacation in Europe, and the only guy left at the lab was Jeff Wadsworth, who was the deputy for S&T. So, we had this peculiar communication, all in the 9/11 first week. The one tangible thing we did do after 9/11, is that Livermore Lab is separated from the Livermore branch of Sandia by a street called East Avenue, which was a public road. And we’d had occasional things over the years of trouble with people lobbing things over the fences. And so, we worked with a local councilperson who basically closed that road off to the public. And I also thought it would help engage Sandia a little bit more, so that was a good thing. We actually closed a public road just to make it a big two-lab complex. Other than that, the thing which occurred — and this does now move ahead to the next — the summer of ’02, and Mike Anastasio has now been selected as my successor as lab director. And it’s sometime, let’s say, in June, and Mike is sort of waiting while the last three weeks go by. He takes over on July 1. I’m sitting in my office, not doing much, and our public affairs officer calls up and says: on the web, it says Livermore’s being transferred to the Department of Homeland Security. And I said, “Susan, the web has all kinds of crazy stuff. Don’t pay any attention.” So, Anastasio, who is going to take over the job, calls up and says, “Hey, what the hell is going on? I hear we’re being transferred to the Department of Homeland Security.” I said, “Mike, come on up.” And Wayne Shotts who runs that kind of area for the lab, we both blamed Wayne, and said, “Probably it’s Wayne screwing around.” Called up Wayne. He didn’t know anything. John Gordon, who is now head of NNSA, the responsible agency for us, is on travel someplace in the middle of the country, almost unfindable. And it turned out it was a real thing. The only thing was that if you looked on the web article, it says they’re transferring a budget of something like, say, $2 billion, but only 350 FTEs. So, you knew this was kind of nutty.
[laughs] Right.
It took Gordon probably three to six months to actually get it straightened out with the new DHS so that all three labs would have the kind of work they were doing in that area transferred effectively to DHS. No one was being transferred, blah, blah, blah. But it was a hard three to six months for Gordon to actually make that happen and not have something bizarre. So, the way it happened — and I get this from — if you know Rich Falkenrath at all, there were — you can get a much better detailed story. But there were six guys in a room, inventing the entire charter for DHS. And they had a week to do it, and they were not allowed to talk to the outside. So, Falkenrath was a good friend of Parney Albright, who was Livermore director for two years after Anastasio. And Parney had once told him that Livermore was a terrific participant in all of those kinds of activities. That’s all Falkenrath had, and he said, “Well, let’s put them in there, then.” And that was the whole story. So, you know, this was — so, for Anastasio, it was an introduction to being director.
What did you read into the fact that this was — you were not in the loop on all of this as it was playing out?
Well, the group of six was they told they couldn’t ask for input, because if they ever asked for real vetting from the 22 agencies that were put together to make up DHS, it would take 20 years and never happen. So, their marching orders were to come up with a complete plan. We’ll fix it later. But don’t talk to anybody outside the room. Yeah. I mean, you can’t make it up.
Right. [laughs] And so, what do you think the long-term implications of this was?
I don’t know how you judge Homeland Security as an entity. I think connecting all those places, all those different agencies, the Coast Guard, along with the research piece — I think what it did was lower the quality of the research to a more conventional DOD quality, which is not as good as the lab typical stuff.
Right. And has that had an impact on recruitment?
Not really, because you know, people can accommodate that to some degree. You know, they learned to live with it. I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable in detail. Some good projects have happened, but any agency that broad is just a collection not a focused entity.
Of course. So Bruce, to bring the story up to present day, what are some of the major things you’ve been involved with since your status as emeritus director?
Sure. You know, my last event really was the Lab’s 50th anniversary, which although effectively I left on July 1 that September of 2002 was the 50th anniversary, and so I’d done all the planning and all the organization, so even though Mike was officially director, the 50th anniversary in was my real swan song. And, during the preceding year I had gotten very interested in history, which I had never paid too much attention to, and so that’s when we decided, this lady from Public Affairs and I, to go out and do a lot of oral histories. The previous archivist basically retired and left. So, she and I were the ones who started the new oral history project. And I had some idea it might turn into a history of the lab, but not a serious one. We just thought we’d take on the — what the 50th anniversary year had done—and expand it. And so, she and I spent a couple of years going to interview Los Alamos people, former Livermore people, and so on. Livermore was started in a very strange way, where there was Teller and there was Lawrence, and everybody else on Day 1 was under 30 years old. So, it wasn’t a spectrum. So, they aged in place. It was a Lagrangian not an Eulerian place.
And so, many of them were still there, certainly in the area, and so we actually got to meet with many of the early Lab people. The oral histories were great fun. And then I started getting asked to be, like any ex-director is, on a lot of task forces. And so, I end up on the Defense Science Board and some National Academy studies, which are listed in the CV. I think certainly of all of the groups the DSB was one of the most interesting. It’s a really strong group of people, very smart. And that was fun. And Craig Fields was off and on head of it, and Craig is very bright and very clever. And a lot of really good people. The most impressive single task force was the Congressional Commission on the United States Strategic Future. And that was two years, and it was chaired by Bill Perry with Jim Schlesinger as a co-chair. And the other 10 people on it, each one of them had a political sponsor. Mine was Senator Levin from Michigan, and you know, we had John Glenn, Lee Hamilton, Jim Woolsey, and then a couple people I didn’t know so well, but really first-class people.
And we spent, I don’t know, monthly for two years, and we probably met with either the senior defense official or the ambassador from a dozen to 15 countries. And we spent probably four hours at the Russian Embassy with the ambassador. And I think the fascinating thing about the conversations is many of the people from Scandinavia, Australia, other places, would say: we can’t say this in public, but here’s what we actually think. And so we actually got insights into what the extended nuclear deterrent meant to those countries. And the other interesting thing about the task force, because I think Ellen Tauscher and probably Duncan kicked it off, I remember Ellen saying: you know, if you try too hard for a consensus, you won’t get anything done. If you make consensus too easy and the issues are too easy, it won’t mean anything.
There’s the balance.
You have to find something in between. And essentially, the final report had consensus on everything except nuclear testing, where the Republican half — and I was the Democratic half — both had strong views. What was fascinating at the end of it — because the process was just extraordinary, and we did the brief out to the National Security Advisor in the Roosevelt Room in the White House. But the process of writing the report, Brad Roberts was effectively the recording secretary, and we went through the 200 or so pages with Bill Perry in the lead, sentence by sentence, page by page, on probably four successive occasions, fighting for every single piece. And it was just an intense, incredibly extraordinary thing. And it set the blueprint for the Obama administration, the second term.
Yeah.
I mean, it laid down — and since the current NPR isn’t that different it really did lay down the guidelines for the strategic future plans.. And so, it was an extraordinary experience. And a lot of the other task forces were fun, but that was the one that really had an impact.
I’m curious, in terms of your evolving — you know, the roles that you’ve had over your career. If at this current point you identify yourself really as a strategic thinker, that you’re thinking long-term about the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century, or do you sort of — you don’t get close to those kinds of issues?
Then we ought to conclude with how I got finally to the book and stuff. It’s a short five-minute thing. You know, Rich Mies, a former Strat Com commander, every day, he sends out to everybody in the nuclear world — a hundred people on the email list — many articles on nuclear stuff. Clippings. Right? And I am probably one of the least addicted to looking at many of those articles. I read Science and Nature, and I read the politics pieces. I am personally incredibly focused on climate change, AI, and other kinds of technology that can really change the world.
So, I’m asking basically in your emeritus role, you don’t see yourself as a voice to turn to for long-range nuclear strategic thinking.
I would think there are many other people who have done a better job of maintaining that. What I’ve done — I’m on two other groups that have been interesting. I’m a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Angel investing group that I was on for about 10 years. In both cases I represent technical matters, in effect I’m sort of the rocket scientists. And, in both cases I’ve met first class and fascinating people so that’s opened up new worlds.
Right. [laughs]
And of course, as you know, you only know a little bit about anything, but you know where to find them an answer.
Sure, and in that room, you’re the guy. [laughs]
And so, I serve those roles on that, and that’s been a great deal of pleasure, because particularly the Council on Foreign Relations in the local chapter, which is — we occasionally have George Schultz still show up at 98 or something, but yeah, at the level there, I could be a nuclear expert, but I did not — if you asked me to give a talk on the current DOE plans to do a warhead that’s conventional — you know, all the stuff. I know about it, but I don’t know the depth, and I’m not one of those people.
So Bruce, before we get to that last item from your book, that I know you want to talk about, my last question for you is, sort of retrospectively, where do you see — how solid is Livermore’s footing nowadays, and where do you see your own role in where it is right now, in terms of what you built, what you strengthened, what you really left for your legacy?
Again, I still wander in about maybe two half-days a week until the recent virus.
Right. Yeah.
And I’ll talk to Bill Goldstein, the current director. I still run the Foster Award, and I do a thing or other two like that. But my own role is basically close to vanishing, except I like to go in and sit in my office and talk to people occasionally, and as long as I’m able to do that, it’s okay. I think when Bill leaves — and he’s been there five or six years — that may vanish, too. So, I don’t have much of a role at Livermore anymore. But I think, you know, subject to bureaucracy and the changing world, I think Livermore has done well budgetarily. They’ve done well in their relationships. Los Alamos continues to have operational difficulties.
But in terms of Livermore’s overall capacity to meet its mission, you feel confident about its future?
Yeah, it’s pretty strong. You know, one of the reasons I stopped getting interested, stopped being as interested in the nuclear weapons world, is that the long-term plan for nuclear weapons and the budgetary plan has like, a 30-year program, and a 40-year program. And there’s planning in the year 2029. And people take those things, at least in a certain literal sense, and I find that to be just nonsensical.
Sure. [laughs] A lot can happen in between, like Coronavirus, for example. [laughs]
So, my own view is that what I haven’t seen in the last few years, not at Livermore but in the whole nuclear weapons lab world, is that at the program level, it’s back to that decade in the ’70s of social rest.
Aha. Interesting.
This is like social rest. We’ve got the program. Every year there’s a plan. Every year there’s stuff. My own other thing, in addition to climate change, is I’ve remained very focused on the National Ignition Facility and trying to get ignition. And the three ex-directors, John Nuckolls, myself, and George Miller, occupy a cul-de-sac at the end of one hall, and all three of us are extremely committed to NIF. And I don’t think any of us are confident we’re going to get past that last factor of somewhere between 20 percent and 2, depending on what parameter you’re looking at, because it will take awfully clever work. And I think we’re still hoping.
So, let’s get to that last item from your book. What do you want to talk about there?
Well, it’s very brief. So, we did the oral histories, and finally when I got tired of flying to Washington for committees and task forces— which actually is pretty easy to do because,90 percent of the people either live there or they’re within a one-hour tight flight from the East Coast. For us, it’s five hours there, and six hours back, and going to an 8:00 meeting, which is a 5 a.m. meeting for us, often for a second-tier topic. So eventually, you just get tired, unless you’re overly masochistic. And so, when I finally finished that, I had sort of written the first third of the book, this first era, on weapons stuff. we actually got a lot of authors to come visit us during that early period, who had written a lot of the books on various aspects of the early weapons era.. And so I said: okay, let me take a shot at writing the second two pieces, the history of the ’70s and ’80s, and then the post-Cold War period of the ’90s.. And so I went ahead and I made a quick pass, and I said: you know, this maybe is doable. So eventually, I just sort of really pressed down, and I said: I’ll send the first third away, with outlines to the rest, and send it to three publishers: Stanford, the University of California, and John Hopkins where our archivist lady knew people and they were doing a nuclear stuff series. And so I never heard back from the University of California, not even a “thank you” for the manuscript.
Wow.
Stanford, I think I would have been accepted except that the notion of them doing a local University of California lab story as a Stanford Press — I got to the last stage, but I think — he said: look, it just didn’t seem to quite feel right to the group. Johns Hopkins said “yes.” And so at that moment, I acquired all the things — the accoutrements of editors and contracts and stuff. That was like, 2016. And so, I set to work and went through all the stages. Which, if anybody’s written a book, I learned for the first time. It had to go out for reviews for the first piece. Oh, the first piece went for reviews and that’s when I got the contract. And then when I finished, it also had to go back for serious reviews which were very useful. And we did all the other stuff. We got photographs. And then I learned something that only writers of books know, that when you do the index, you have to either pay for it or do it. So we did it, and although very tedious it was certainly worth the effort.
Welcome to the world of academic publishing.
Yup. So, I learned all these things, and voila, it happened. And was published in August of 2018. It’s done pretty well. I gave probably four, five, six talks in the area to audiences, from 50 to 500. It’s probably sold close a thousand copies, which for this kind of stuff is probably okay.
Sure.
It may have a second printing, because I think they printed a few less. And so, it’s done pretty well, and I feel pretty happy with it. And nobody found any major flaws. That’s the — it’s been — my great worry was sections that I had — you know, the laser program, which had its huge own culture, and nobody from there screamed and said: you got it wrong. So, I was pleased.
Well, that’s great.
So, when I finished that, I said: that’s pretty much it.
Well, Bruce, it’s been absolutely terrific talking with you today. I mean, it’s a wealth of insight. From my perspective, I’m the beneficiary. First of all, I want to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library has a copy of the book, and if they don’t, I’ll see to it that they do. And then obviously, I’ve been a beneficiary, because in writing this book, your memory has been primed to be talking about all these things, right at your fingertips. So, that’s really great. So, I really appreciate your time today. It’s been a pleasure.