John Browne

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.

ORAL HISTORIES

Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

Interviewed by

David Zierler

Interview date

May 22, 2020

Location

video conference

See catalog record for this interview.

Usage Information and Disclaimer

Disclaimer text

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.

Preferred citation

In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this:

Interview of John Browne by David Zierler on May 22, 2020,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX

For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location.

Abstract

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews John Browne, former Director of Los Alamos Laboratory. Browne recounts his working-class childhood in Pennsylvania. He discusses his early interests in science and the influence of his father, who was an electrician. He explains his decision to attend Drexel, and the factors leading his commitment to major in physics. Browne describes his graduate studies at Duke University, where he worked on techniques to create a feedback system with an atomic beam and a molecular beam. He discusses his decision to join Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and then Argonne National Laboratory. The bulk of the interview concerns Browne’s tenure at Los Alamos where he worked on the weapons program and diagnostic testing. He discusses his promotions at Los Alamos and his increasing communication with the DOE on policy relevant issues. Browne discusses his decision to accept the directorship at Los Alamos and the numerous security and accounting issues he had to deal with, which included the major security breach involving Wen Ho Lee. He discusses the creation of the NNSA and the impact of September 11th on Los Alamos and the national security world generally, and in the last portion of the interview, Browne describes his ongoing work in consulting and professional service.

Transcript

David Zieler:

OK. This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is May 22nd, 2020. It’s my great pleasure to be here with Dr. John Browne. John, thank you so much for being with me today.

John Browne:

Oh, my pleasure, David.

Zierler:

OK, so to get started, please tell me your most recent title and institutional affiliation.

Browne:

Well, I’ve been retired since 2003, but I maintained a consulting company from about 2005 until a couple years ago. And of course, it was a one-man show [laugh] but I was the head of my consulting company. Before that, my last appointment was as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1997 to 2003.

Zierler:

OK, great. So now let’s take it right back to the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your family background and your early childhood.

Browne:

OK, great, yeah. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia called Pottstown, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles northwest of Pottstown. I was the youngest child of five kids: two older brothers, and two older sisters.

My mother was an immigrant from Hungary when she was about 10 years old, and my father was second-generation Irish. My grandfather came from Ireland. So it was a relatively new family in that respect in terms of growing up. We were, I would say, lower middle-class type of family. My dad was an—

Zierler:

What was your father’s profession?

Browne:

He was an electrician. He had studied—he had gone to college for a while. But during the period of the Depression, he kind of ran out of money, and had to support a family, so he became an electrician. But education was a very important part of my family. My mother, having come here without speaking the language, had to help support her family at the age of 12.

Zierler:

Wow. [laugh]

Browne:

She had worked in a factory so to her, the most important thing was that her children were going to get an education. They were going to make something of their lives. So our family life really was surprisingly, for lower middle-class, very intellectual, a lot of discussions, books, and my dad loved poetry. He would read me poetry, I remember, as a child.

And so it’s was a very different life —if you just looked at the fact that he’s an electrician, and my mother was a housewife and we lived in this lower middle-class neighborhood, etc., etc. On the other hand, it was a very happy family, a very positive family looking especially toward education.

I remember my dad said to me when I was probably in ninth grade in high school, he said, “You know that I’m not going to be able to pay to send you to college, so”—and I had had pretty good grades in elementary school. But he said, “If you want to go to college, you’re probably going to have to find a way to get a scholarship to college.” He said, “I think you should, but I’m just telling you that’s where your priorities ought to be.” [laugh] Very, very interesting for a 14-year-old. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Now, growing up the son of an electrician, did he involve you in his work? Did you get a second-hand view of electricity and electronics?

Browne:

Browne:

[laugh] Exactly. So I went back to college to Drexel in the fall, and I went over to talk to the head of the physics department who was an older gentleman who wrote a really good elementary physics book. His name was Russell Wehr - Wehr and Richards. It was a very famous book in the ‘60s.

Anyway, Dr. Wehr said to me, “…look, if you’re really interested in physics, that’s great, and you should consider it, and we’d love to have you. But,” he said, “I don’t think you should do it unless you want to go all the way through to get a PhD. The bachelors in physics is nice, but it’s really not worth very much to you for your career.”

Zierler:

Now, was that the first time it really occurred to you about think—pursuing a graduate degree?

Browne:

It did, exactly. I had not thought about that. And, I went away and thought to myself, oh, my goodness. First of all, Drexel as a co-op school is five years, so I would be 23 when I get out. And I figured maybe another five years in graduate school, I’d be 28. And of course, when you’re 20 years old, that’s like forever, right?

Zierler:

Right, right. [laugh]

Browne:

But I thought about it for a long time, and then I said, well, it’s my career, and I’m going to be doing this for many, many years, so—and I’ve always had this feeling, no matter what you do, you better love what you do. And I’ve always told my kids the same thing. I don’t really care what you choose to do- to major in in college, or what you want to do in life, but you better love it. You really ought to care deeply about what you do.

And so I wound up for four years building nuclear attack submarines, and putting the reactors together, and basically using my physics background to help them as we not only installed them but tested them, and tried to understand changes that had to be made in the field, so to speak. That was a good experience for me. I had a really good boss. Everybody was very young in the field. I think everyone was under 30 years old when I started.

Yeah, I was surprised too. But there were a group of us that joined the APS in like 1964 or something like that, and we formed a student section. And we decided to do our own senior project jointly, and we picked some topic in nuclear physics- it was Compton scattering..

But anyway, it was a good experience. About four or five of us who did the experiment together, and wrote it up, and gave it to our professors. I think that might’ve stimulated them to think about a senior thesis in future years because we said, “…..It’s kind of what people do [laugh] at that stage in their career.”

Zierler:

So as you were coming closer to graduating, and you were thinking about graduate programs, what were some of the considerations that were on your mind at the time in terms of the kind of physics you wanted to do, the kind of people you wanted to work with, where you wanted to live? What were those options available to you?

Browne:

Right, yeah, I really didn’t care so much about where I lived. I was open to going wherever I wanted to. I was really interested in nuclear physics at the time. It was a hot, exciting field in the mid-’60s.

No, it turned out that coming from the town that I grew up in, this small town, my draft board was willing to classify me because I was going to graduate school—I can’t—what’s the classification? It was—they had something for national security or something like that. In my town, very few people went to college. I think of my high school graduating class maybe only 10% went to college.

So the draft board had plenty of people they could send off to Vietnam. So I was lucky and fortunate in that regard. I had a lot of friends who did have to go to Vietnam, but I basically sailed through that period without having to dodge the draft or do anything, frankly.

Zierler:

Yeah. So I assume that when you chose Duke, right, that the fact that they were competitive with places like Stanford, the physics department there probably saw themselves very much on the rise in terms of building the program, right?

Browne:

That’s exactly right. That was the other thing that attracted me. Maryland was a very big program. They had like 125 graduate students in physics coming in a class. Duke only had 25 or 30, and that appealed to me, a smaller class where I could get to know everybody.

The first two years was pretty solid coursework. And,I had some options where I could work in the labs kind of as an intern almost . In fact, they even had a name for it but I can’t remember what it was.

But we would work, for example, on an accelerator, and help some senior graduate student with his thesis work - whether it was filling vacuum traps with liquid nitrogen [laugh] or taking data, working on the computer, whatever, that kind of thing. So it was a learning experience. They really wouldn’t let you, I would say, for the first two years really start out on your own and do your own research, right. It was more that you’re going to work under somebody for a couple of years to get the feeling for what it’s like here.

Zierler:

Now, for the courses in terms of developing your own expertise and dissertation, what were the most important courses and professors for you?

Browne:

Yeah, I would say quantum mechanics, and it was Professor Biedenharn, who was pretty well-known, Lawrence Biedenharn. He did a lot of theory in quantum mechanics. He was a really, really tough professor [laugh] because he kept pushing us into areas where it was—for me, it was really new.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Browne:

[laugh] It was a pretty scary time though actually. They burnt down a lot of the city, and it was unfortunate but I understood the sentiment. It was really a pretty sad time. And so even though Duke was,kind of viewed as an elitist, wealthy campus, I would say the rest of the world was filtering into Duke at that period right after that.

Part of it, part of it was; I would say the experimental side of it very much so. The thesis overall would’ve actually lent itself to an academic appointment, I think, because it was a, broad topic, it was of high interest, and clearly could lead to other things in nuclear physics. And it did for other people; not so much for me.

But the experimental work was pretty challenging. And I think it helped me particularly at Livermore, They looked at what I had done, but they wanted me to do something totally different. But they saw that I could do experimental work.

Zierler:

So how did the opportunity at Livermore come about?

Browne:

That’s really interesting. They had just built a new electron linac at Livermore, a 100 MeV electron linac. It was based on the SLAC design, which so it was very easy for Livermore to pick up the technology, and put it in.

Zierler:

Now was the idea that Livermore was positioning itself to be a competitor to SLAC? Was that your sense?

Browne:

No. No, they had different interests. One was to make neutrons with gamma rays, gamma-n reactions, so it was a pulse neutron source for applied studies, both weapons and other reactor type of things. But they also had an idea which they had developed there, although at a earlier, smaller electron linac, which was to make positrons, accelerate the positrons, and then annihilate them in flight, so you would have monoenergetic photons—a tunable monoenergetic photon beam.

So they would do photo-nuclear experiments which were pretty impressive because,you didn’t have a background to subtract from like you do using a Bremsstrahlung beam to do the same kind of work. So it was a pretty cool group of people there. One of the people I worked with was named Charlie Bowman. Charlie had gone to Duke Graduate School with my thesis advisor back in the late ‘50s. And my advisor, Edward Bilpuch, was already on the faculty, but he was a pretty young guy.

But he and Charlie were friends, and so Charlie called him up and said, “Do you have any good students? We’re looking to hire somebody.” And Bilpuch said, “Well, I just happen to have this guy, John.” [laugh] So we wound up meeting at an APS meeting in Washington, D.C., in the old annual meetings they had at the two hotels there. And we talked about it.

And so Charlie said, “OK, we’re going to invite you out for an interview.” And that’s—I had had a couple of other ticklers, one from Argonne National Lab with John Schiffer. John Schiffer liked my work quite a bit. I did go to Argonne and interviewed there.

And Lowell Bollinger liked my work. He was a head of the physics department at Argonne at the time. And, let’s see, there were two other people- one was Hal Jackson. And so they said, “We would like you to come and be a postdoc at Argonne, and you’ll work for all four of us.” [laugh] And I said, “Wow.” [laugh]

Zierler:

Yeah. [laugh]

Browne:

“I’m not going to have an hour of time for myself.” [laugh] But the four people were just fantastic—Argonne was outstanding. I mean it still is. But I was really grateful. They were wonderful people to me. But I chose to go instead to Livermore because I thought it was—first of all, it wasn’t a postdoc position, although the postdoc position didn’t bother me.

Zierler:

It was a real job. It was a staff job.

Browne:

It was a real job, and I could see a career there. Whereas Argonne, I had two years, and I would work my tail off, which was fine, but then I’d have to go back into—into the mill to find another job, and so on. But, anyway, I kept all those friends at Argonne, so I never felt bad about that.

There’s an interesting story about how I got hired at Livermore. I went out, and it’s a typical interview job or interview process. I gave a talk on analog states of course. And who’s in the audience but John Anderson, the fellow who discovered analog states. [laugh] And so I knew John by reputation. I’d never met him before.

But after my talk, he came up and he said, “Oh, your data is so beautiful. I love this.” He was not a manager at the time. He was strictly a scientist—staff scientist. And he said, “I’ll help you if you come to the laboratory.” He said, “I think we would have fun working together.”

Zierler:

Right.

Browne:

So I kind of hemmed and hawed, and he said, “No, no, no. John, this is a very easy question. Either—if you say, ‘I won’t work’,” he said, “go work in academia.” He said, “I wish you well. I’m not opposed to you doing that. It’s just Livermore’s job, its mission is to work with nuclear weapons.”

And I said, “Well, look, I used to work with nuclear reactors and submarines and so on, and I had a security clearance then.” I said, “I could work with nuclear weapons.” And he said—he looked at me for a long time, and stared at me in the eyes, and then he said, “OK, you have a job.” [laugh]

Zierler:

Oh, yeah, that was really interesting. Two things had happened. One, I got a phone call from Jay Keyworth, who was now the head of the Physics division at Los Alamos. And I picked up the phone. He said, “How you doing?” I said, “Great.” He said, “How’d you like to come to Los Alamos and run Group P-3?”

Well, if you know Los Alamos, at that time it had this alphabet soup of groups: P-this, T-that, X-this. That sort of goes back to the Manhattan Project. P-3 had a history that went back to 1943. It actually was founded in that time period, and had a lot of great history about it. So I knew about the group, and I knew a lot of people in the group. I was a colleague of many of these people. We knew each other quite well.

And I said, “Well, I’m pretty happy at Livermore. [laugh] I’m not sure I really want to pick up things.” By this time, I was married, and had one child and another on the way. And so I’m thinking do I really want to pick up my family, and move to New Mexico?

California’s a pretty nice place to live. I like to ski. I like to play tennis. I like to bike ride. Los Alamos is a little bit different where it is. And then something happened that affected my decision. The Director of Livermore was Roger Batzel at that time. Roger had asked me to serve on a human resources committee about a year earlier, and asked me if I would do a study with a group of people about whether Livermore should start a postdoc program. And so we did.

We went out and talked to a lot of people in industry and all the other national labs: Argonne, Los Alamos, Brookhaven, etc. And we came back and wrote a report and said, “Yes, we think this would be very healthy for Livermore to have a postdoc program.” So he—Batzel said, “Come to my senior management group meeting on Monday, and present your findings.” So I did.

I wasn’t halfway into my briefing when several of the associate directors attacked me, saying, “This is the stupidest thing we ever heard. Why does Livermore need a postdoc program? We can go out and buy anybody we want.”

And I argued with them and said, “First, we can’t do that. That’s not why people come to Livermore. I didn’t come for the money. I came for the science and for the mission and what I could do here.” And they said, “Oh, you’re wrong. We can do anything we want,” blah, blah, blah.

And I was really disappointed in Batzel because Batzel had told me he wanted a postdoc program, and he caved at that time to his associate directors. And that really set this negative—second negative vibe to me about Livermore. The one earlier about the research on osmium-rhenium, and then “we can’t do a postdoc program because we can buy people”. So when I went back, I told Keyworth, “I’ll fly down and talk to you.” And I did, and, frankly, it was really exciting to be there.

Zierler:

Now, were you generally aware of what was going on at Los Alamos during your time at Livermore? Were you keeping up with what they were doing, or this was you were learning—

Browne:

No, I was very, very much attuned to what they did in the Physics division and so on. I knew a lot of the people there. So it wasn’t like I was going into an unknown situation at all.

Zierler:

Right, and generally, was this an attractive option for you, would you say?

Browne:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it definitely was. And Jay Keyworth asked me to do something. He said, “If you come,” he said, “I will also want you to start a new research program in the group.” And I said, “OK, in what?” And he said, “In weak interaction physics.”

Well, I didn’t know a lot about weak interaction physics. I knew a little bit. But he said, “You can hire people, and I want you to start a program in this.” Well, that was attractive to me, the more I read up on it. I said, “This is a pretty hot topic field - weak interaction physics.”

So I came, and I got to hire Tom Bowles, Hamish Robertson, and a few other very great people who since have left, but that’s OK too., People come and move elsewhere and take their careers in different directions. But the first experiment we did was a tritium beta decay experiment, and I worked on it with Hamish and Tom, and that was an exciting time.

So George became a mentor of mine, actually, as I took on management jobs. He was really a wonderful guy to work with. Also John Hopkins, who was maybe 10 or 15 years older than me, but John had connections to the early days of nuclear atmospheric nuclear testing, and so on. And so there was quite a cadre of people you could get to know.

I think it was only two or three years after that that Don Kerr, who was Los Alamos Director at the time, held the 40th anniversary of Los Alamos’s founding in 1983. And he invited back all of the remaining people from the Manhattan project. And so, Feynman came back and Wigner and Rabi -- it was a really [laugh] wonderful homecoming for a young guy to see. For me, I got to listen to them all tell their stories.

Zierler:

Now, was your sense when you got there that you were on a track that was going to lead ultimately to you heading the entire organization?

Browne:

No.

Zierler:

When did you first get that sense that that was sort of where your trajectory was headed?

Browne:

It wasn’t for a long time actually. After I was the group leader of P-3, Keyworth decided to organize all of nuclear physics into one group. So my group grew from 30 people to about 80 or 90 overnight. So I had all the nuclear physics in P Division. And then he gets picked to be Reagan’s science advisor, so now he’s gone.

And Don Kerr asks me if I’ll be head of the Physics division. Well, that’s a big job. There were 400 people in the Physics division, and it was everything from, laser, plasma physics, to solid-state physics, you name it. And that was a big jump. I mean, that was, for me, a management jump. That was no longer a research group job.

Managing a group of 400 people and making sure you can do all the best research and deliver on programs- that was full-time, and more than full-time, I found. I think that was the first position in which I started to think, well, maybe my career’s going somewhere different than I thought it was going. But I still kept my scientific fingers in some things.

But the amount of time I had to be an active researcher was very limited. It was weekends or nights and weekends- that kind of thing. Don Kerr then a few years later asked me—about three years later—to be an Associate Director of the lab. I was 42 years old. Yeah, that’s right, I was 42 years old.

And so he said, “I want you to be associate director of all the experimental physics at the lab.” And I thought [laugh] now I’ve got LAMPF under me. I’ve got the Magnetic Fusion program. I’ve got Accelerator Technology division, plus the Physics division. And that was again yet another step, all in a short period of time. And that’s when I started to think about my life is very, very different than when I came to Los Alamos.

After that time, I got exposed to more and more people in Washington because I had to go defend programs in DOE or in Congress. I had to go testify for the first time in Congress during that period to argue for a new building for neutron scattering research. That was an interesting experience.

I’d never been in Congress [laugh] since I was an eighth grade student on a field trip. I’d never had to testify to Congress before. And my counterpart next to me was Hermann Grunder [laugh]. Well, you know Hermann. Hermann and I are very good friends, but Hermann [laugh] didn’t need a microphone. His voice is so loud that he didn’t need the microphone [laugh].

And he was arguing for some facility. I think it was the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley. And I was arguing for this facility for neutron scattering at Los Alamos. So I was in a different world. I was living in a different world at that time.

Zierler:

What was your sense overall in the way that the relationship between the DOE and Los Alamos was different between the DOE and its relationship with Livermore?

Browne:

There’s a very different culture to the two laboratories, and it was very clear to me when I moved from Livermore to Los Alamos. Livermore has always been, in my opinion, more programmatic than Los Alamos. Los Alamos has been more interested in the science, even though they had—clearly had the same mission responsibilities that Livermore had.

As a matter of fact, Los Alamos actually had a larger fraction of the stockpile to worry about than Livermore did. A large number of weapons in the stockpile were Los Alamos weapons, not Livermore weapons. But the approach that Los Alamos tended to take was always more of a scientific approach.

Livermore tended to err more on the side of we can do this with whatever we know now. We don’t have to do any more research. We’ll just go build it and do it. Los Alamos was more of we better understand this more deeply before we go any further.

I really felt that Los Alamos was a very, very different place. And, I mean, there were pluses and minuses to that as well because sometimes Los Alamos, I think, over-researched stuff, if you know what I mean. Sometimes they never gave up their research bent to actually get the job done.

There were times when I think they could’ve solved the problem, and still done all the science they wanted, but they stretched it out by wanting to do the best science. Well, that’s not bad. But when you’re doing a program, sometimes you have to find a balance—when do you stop the research, and take the next step in the program, and then go back if you have to do more research.

Zierler:

I’m curious as you had moved up in the hierarchy, the extent to which you felt the political winds of change in Washington, and how they might have affected what was going on in Los Alamos? So an easy one is, for example, just the transition from Carter to Reagan. Did that transition and all that that entailed in terms of the way that he wanted to take national security and SDI and things like that, did those kinds of things reverberate all the way back to you at Los Alamos? Did you feel those things happening in Washington?

Browne:

Oh, big-time, big-time. The energy programs were significant in the Carter era, but when Reagan came in, those budgets were whacked, I mean, literally cut deeply.

I was running the Physics division at that time, and I had to fire ~100 people out of the 400 people in my division. That was the most painful period I had had as a manager, right. We wound up finding jobs for a fraction of them, but not all of them. A lot of people literally lost their jobs, and had to move on from Los Alamos to somewhere else in their career. It was a very sad time.

Then there was a major build-up in the weapons program because Reagan decided to renew the stockpile. If you remember that was one of his commitments to deal with the Soviets and so on. And so there was a lot of money that came into the weapons program for new nuclear weapon systems.

And two of the groups that I had responsibility for in the weapons program were diagnostic groups of the Nevada test site. They measured neutrons and gamma rays, and took pictures —nuclear pictures, right, not photographs, but neutron imaging, gamma ray imaging, that kind of measurement. I took advantage of that buildup during that period because one of the problems we were having was that we really needed better resolution on our X-rays. And we were starting to get involved with X-ray optics at the time.

And so the Brookhaven Light Source was coming on line. So I went back to DOE Defense Programs, and argued that we should build a beamline at the NSLS to do X-ray optics for the people trying to improve their capabilities. The other reason was that I wanted that group to do more physics. I thought they were too set in their ways of how they did their measurements. They were not as modern as they could be, in my view.

And this was one way to get them to rub shoulders with other people doing atomic physics, with, X- ray beamlines and so on. So we got that funded, and had a beamline there, and eventually got beamlines at several facilities, e.g., SSRL, with Livermore, and so on. But to me, that was one of my responsibilities as division leader that I felt I had.

Even though I knew this build-up in the weapons program was for making more bombs, I said, “This is an opportunity to do more physics, things we don’t know how to do today. And the money’s there, so we ought to try and do it now while we can get the resources to do it.”

Zierler:

Now one small item I’m interested in, when you headed the Physics division, I see that there was a biophysics program at Los Alamos. What was—

Browne:

Right, that was an exciting time.

Zierler:

What was Los Alamos’s interest in biophysics?

Browne:

Ah, that’s a good question. [laugh] It was twofold. There was a fellow who worked in nuclear physics named Ed Flynn. Ed came to me while I was Physics division leader. I knew that his wife had been seriously injured in an automobile accident, and her brain was severely damaged. I guess, essentially, they weren’t sure what her electrical activity was anymore.

And Ed came to me, and he said, “Would you support me for a year to learn how to build a device that measures the magnetic fields out of the brain, magnetoencephalography?” He said, “Superconducting SQUID technology is advancing to the point where I think I can build a helmet to go around a person’s head, and measure their electrical activity.”

And I had some discretionary funds at that time [laugh] so I gave—I think I gave him like four or five hundred thousand dollars and said, “Can you start a program on that?” And he started it, and it looked like it was going to be very, very promising. And so I went to see Senator Domenici, and told him what we were trying to do.

And Senator Domenici’s wife was there, and she got really excited about us working on medical physics. And so Domenici found us some additional funds to start this program. And then from there, it expanded into a biophysics program because Los Alamos already had a bioscience program (mostly biology) at the time, which went back to the old days of effects of radiation on human beings and so on.

In T Division, George Bell and Walter Goad started some of the initial work on—theoretical work on immunology, and how the immune system works. And that led to some work between T Division and the biology division on—that led the gene bank—the bank of all the gene sequences. The Bioscience Division had done some beautiful work on cell sorting – called flow cytometry that was also key to future directions.

Zierler:

It’s really an unsung story at the Department of Energy that the genome project—it’s not NIH; it’s DOE.

Browne:

It’s DOE, yeah, that’s exactly right. So as I started to work on this, there were a couple of other guys in the Physics division. And you probably know Herb Anderson

Zierler:

Yeah.

Browne:

He worked at the University of Chicago as a student of Enrico Fermi. He also worked on the Manhattan Project. Herb was working in the Los Alamos Physics division at the time on a high-energy physics problem. He came to see me, and said, “These biologists have it all wrong in how they measure electrophoresis.” So he started telling me that he had a bunch of people who had a better idea of how to sequence long DNA molecules and so on.

So I told Herb, “Go ahead and do it. See what comes out of it.” And then I wound up meeting Charles DeLisi in DOE. Charles was the head of the Office of Biological Environmental Sciences at the time, and Charles and I talked. It turns out Charles used to be a postdoc for George Bell back in the ‘70s. [laugh]

And he liked Los Alamos, so he said, “John, this is great.” He said, “Would you help me? I have this idea that we could actually build a human genome sequencing program.” And we went out and we drank beer for a couple of times [laugh] after work, and we just talked about this.

And I went back and talked to the Los Alamos Director, and said, “This is a great opportunity. We ought to combine physics, theory and the biology department, and really start pushing this stuff .” And one thing led to another, as you said, it’s a great story.

And about a year ago, I talked to Charles DeLisi about the early days. And he said, “Yeah, John,” he said, “I know, nobody remembers those days. All they remember is the NIH and all of the ultimate success and the glory.”

Yeah, I did- at least as part of a “pool” of people. While there is never any guarantee in this approach, he said he wanted there to be a group of people that the University of California could tap into internally who had a broad enough background to run the whole laboratory. That was a very responsible action by him as Lab Director. When Sig came in as Director, He made a big jump from deputy division leader in material science and engineering to Lab Director.

Well, he was a great guy; really smart. He and I had worked together. But he came into that job with not a lot of experience to run a major laboratory. It was a big step for Sig, and the first year was really hard for him. I think he was learning on the job, and we all supported him, and he became really good at it.

But I think he was also thinking about his own experience - of how I got thrown into this [laugh] and I didn’t know anything about this program or that program or how the lab worked in this area, and so on. So taking on Defense Research & Applications was a big responsibility for me because most of the job was on the road, frankly. There was one year where I was on travel 65% of the year, and mostly dealing with the Pentagon or the intelligence community.

Zierler:

[laugh] You did? You really did? [laugh]

Browne:

Yeah, I did. [laugh] And when people would come in, I would say, “OK, answer my questions.” And a lot of people couldn’t answer them because they’d never thought about it that way. And so that was really a transition for me to make myself think like a DARPA program manager thinks, right. And they don’t have a lot of time. They have to invest in things that really matter. But they’ve got to get it right too.

Zierler:

So when that question was not rhetorical, right, when you heard the most compelling answers to the question, “Why Los Alamos?” what were they? What were the most compelling answers that you would hear that would make you say, “Yeah, that makes sense to me”?

Browne:

Well, first, we had the kind of expertise that nobody else had in some areas. And our edge might be clever people, it might be equipment, facilities, or it might be that we have a unique idea that looks like it can solve the problem. And to me if you have a unique idea, nobody else has that idea, it’s worth exploring whether someone should take a look at that as the solution, rather than just another person coming in trying to tell DARPA or the Department of Defense how to do their job, right.

Technical divisions. They were usually people who were not fully funded by the nuclear weapons program or other programs. So this work that we did for DoD and the Intel community was called work for other agencies. And that money had to be generated every year new. There was no continuing budget. And so the pressure was huge—I mean, we built that program when I was in there to about $400 million a year. And the pressure was it could go away overnight if you lost your support in the Pentagon and we almost did lose it several times in the SDI program when we were working on the neutral particle beam.

Yeah, it is using lasers to compress a pellet, and create pure fusion in the laboratory. We were doing it with CO2 lasers at Los Alamos. Livermore was using neodymium glass lasers. Turned out that CO2 was the wrong wavelength; it had a longer wavelength than neodymium glass. And long wavelengths (microwaves) work great for cooking chicken, but they don’t work so great for compressing pellets, OK.

So we switched gears away from CO2 to develop a small effort to build krypton fluoride lasers, which are UV lasers, which have a shorter wavelength than what Livermore has in NIF. But the program in Washington decided to kill us. They said, “We can’t afford both programs. We’re going to go with Livermore’s program.”

Zierler:

Now this question is going to—it’s going to bleed over into your next position, you know, director for computational information systems. And it’s the overall question of how does the process of the end of the Cold War affect Los Alamos generally? That’s a very broad question, and I’m just—you know, really from reading tea leaves from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the—I say the process because it’s not a dramatic kind of thing, right.

The falling apart of the Soviet Empire really takes place over the course of two, three years. And so obviously, that process is of prime interest to Los Alamos and the things that it’s doing. And so as this process is playing out, I wonder if you could talk—sort of generally walk me through that narrative of watching this unfold, and what that means for Los Alamos in general?

Browne:

Yeah, it did have a big effect. But you’re correct that it was not an overnight effect. But there was a general appreciation that the world had changed, and that in particular the nuclear weapons world was going to change the most dramatically in the coming years. And we started to see the budgets falling from 1988 into the period before Bush stopped nuclear testing. Everyone was looking for a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War.

We had several major voluntary reductions in force at Los Alamos from 1988 through 1995 to deal with declining budgets. We lost a large fraction of the old, experienced workforce. The people who could retire, did retire. A lot of expertise went out the door, and nobody came in to replace them. We were not hiring, right, because there was no money to hire.

So this transition process dominated Sig Hecker’s strategic planning and the rest of the laboratory throughout that period. And a lot of things came to the fore. Should we look at more basic research? Should we look at working with industry? Should we look at working with the Department of Defense? What is the future of the laboratory?

There were a lot of hard-nosed discussions during that period. And to the credit of the weapons lab directors, the three weapons laboratories got together several times, and we would discuss this with the senior management of each laboratory, and we’d argue it through. But that was healthy because we were—we saw we were in the same boat, right.

And it wasn’t Los Alamos against Livermore, or Sandia standing off the side, holding our coats, letting us fight it out. We were all in the same fight together. I think it affected a lot of our thinking during that period. Some of it we got right, and some of it we got not so right.

I think our follow-up on the human genome was very important during that time. And Sig, to his credit, really got behind it when it became a big program, and he put his personal energy behind that during that period. I thought that was a big win for us doing that.

Then he decided that he did not want to be as heavily engaged with the Department of Defense. And that was one of the reasons why my program started to dribble off too because SDI, as you remember around 1990, was changing character quite a bit. When George H. W. Bush came in as president, it was not the same as Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t his program, right.

[laugh]

Yeah, I don’t think there was any pride of ownership, and it had a lot of technical problems in reliability of the beam for the user community. So the users weren’t happy. Roger Pynn was my deputy and he was an expert in neutron scattering. So we saw our job was to make the users happy, the user community. We worked on building the user community up, more users, get them involved in deciding more things, and trying to get more support for different instrumentation so the community could do different things. We changed the name from LAMPF to LANSCE (the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center) to highlight the change in direction.

And it was a real struggle, and I will say we didn’t quite get there during my tenure. [laugh] But I think we put the place on the right path. We got the right agreements between the Office of Science and Defense Programs. We put a memorandum of agreement together that said they will jointly support running this facility, which is a big deal. They don’t like signing MOUs in government. But they did, and that was renewed for many years.

So they both put money into it. The Office of Science would only put money into science, which we said was fine. They wouldn’t put money into the facility. They’d put money into instruments, but not into operations. And we said, “That’s fine.” I had to sell that to a lot of people who in Defense Programs said, “Why are we paying the bill for operating it, and they get a free ride and just do the science?” And I explained to them it was in their best interests. [laugh].

And it is. And I explained why. Because some of the materials science measurements were for materials of importance to the weapons program. They didn’t have to build new instruments to get their data. So this is back to—almost back—coming full circle to Teller’s argument that you do good science, and it folds back into the program in ways you can’t predict.

Zierler:

Yeah, right, I can see that that stayed with you.

Browne:

Yeah. Yeah, it did, big-time. After I retired, Sandia and Los Alamos have asked me to come back when they’ve had management training programs for young managers. And I told them that story. I said, “You got to remember ‘why Los Alamos?’” And one of the reasons why is because you can do good science to support the mission, but it can come the other way around too, yeah.

Zierler:

Right. Now, you were dealing with nuclear waste issues also during this time. I’m curious the extent to which you were involved in the larger issues with Yucca Mountain and Harry Reid and all of those things that were really a top-line agenda item in Washington at the time?

Browne:

Just a little bit; I didn’t have any direct responsibility for that, but I did know the people involved, and stayed abreast of what the issues were, technical issues, and so on. We were more intrigued with a bigger—what I would call a strategic issue. That is why don’t we burn the waste? Right. Burn it to the point where instead of it being a 10,000-year problem or a million year-problem, it’s a 300-year problem.

Because if you can do that, I believe that our society has examples where things can be stored for 300 years and dealt with. I don’t know how to deal sociologically with 10,000-year problems or million-year problems, right, which is what they still are dealing with in long term geologic storage. That’s why we really focused on the argument that accelerators can actually burn the waste down to 300 years, and they can. It’s just a question of, is the country willing to invest in that?

Zierler:

So you’re saying that it’s fundamentally a budgetary thing? This is not a concern over health impacts or anything like that? It’s just a matter of we have the funds; are we willing to invest in to do it this way?

Browne:

Yeah, I think fundamentally that’s the argument; the reactor and electric power industry do not want to put money into something like that. They say, “That’s the government’s problem. It’s their waste. It’s not my waste, right.” That’s partially the problem the country faces is no one owns the waste except the government.

And then the government says, “We don’t want to put money in new technology—we’re already putting a lot of money into burying this stuff. Why do I want to put money into burning it?” And are there technical issues? Of course there are going to be technical issues. I don’t mean to make light of the technical issues.

The biggest technical issue is the chemistry of taking the waste and making it into forms that are burnable. You’ve got to get it out of the waste form it’s in and convert it into fuel—but those are not insurmountable problems. And the reason they’re not insurmountable problems is we do that to make nuclear weapons, right. [laugh] How do you get plutonium in the first place? [laugh] Right. Yeah.

So, I’ve argued with Ernie Moniz about this a lot. Ernie will support research on transmutation of waste. He just does not want to build anything yet because he thinks that the problem isn’t far enough along technically to build anything. And that’s just his opinion, and that’s fine.

And he would rather drill a bore hole down in the ocean floor and put it under there. And I always say, “Look, what if the world sometime needs this energy? There’s all this energy that we’re throwing away. Why do you want to throw all that energy away?”

Zierler:

All right. Now, I want to get to the transition to you being named director in November 1997. So my first question there is, obviously it’s lonely at the top, and you don’t really know the full spectrum of all of the issues until you get into that position, right. But my question is, the problems that came to a head in 2002, they didn’t pop up overnight, and they certainly didn’t pop up only during your tenure as Director.

So my question is, when you decide to take on this position, how much are you girding yourself knowing, right, that these things are there? It’s not going to be so easy to resolve them because they’re structural and they’re decades long, and perhaps maybe this is going to be a bigger problem than what I wanted to sign on for to begin with. How—just in terms of the constellation of ideas going through your mind, just sort of walk me through your decision-making process as you’re offered this position, and how you intend to deal with it once you become director in November ‘97.

Browne:

Yeah, good point, good point. I did realize that there were a lot of issues. Some of them I thought were short-term issues that I could deal with.

Zierler:

Right. So let’s compartmentalize them. What would be some short-term—like some low-hanging fruit that you could just, you know, “I got this. We can take care of this”?

Browne:

I don’t think Sig really wanted to leave as Director, frankly. I don’t know if he was forced or not, but he had this reduction in force in 1995 that led to a class action lawsuit against the University of California. He fired 200 people, and the justification for firing those people was that he decided to lower the overhead of the laboratory budget by $50 million. Admittedly, Secretary of Energy O’Leary was pushing for overhead reductions at that time. But that RIF affected mostly Hispanic people because they were in the jobs that were in those overhead positions.

And so I thought I could solve that in a period of time, and I thought I had a short-term and a long-term solution to the problem. The short-term solution was that we would have to negotiate a settlement. We were not going to be able to walk away and just snub our nose at 200 people who have the publicity in all the local newspapers day in and day out about how rotten we are.

And so we actually wound up settling it in about six or seven months. It cost the University of California some money. It cost us some positions because we agreed to hire back some people who we thought were not fairly treated in the firing process. And there were some people who we said we’d never take back because we thought they were poor performing employees and should’ve been fired long ago , and the track record was there to justify that decision. It was just that nobody had taken the action to fire them.

So we actually did wind up settling it, and the RIF issue went away very quickly after that. It just sort of dropped off the radar screen for—in the newspaper. There were still unhappy people. I don’t mean to say that. But it was viewed as a fair settlement by the local community, by the larger community in Northern New Mexico, by the university, and by the legal system. They all said it was a fair solution.

The longer-term part of that problem was addressed by creating the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. Before that time, we had no way to support the communities in our area because you can’t use government funds. It’s appropriated for specific programmatic purposes. So we created a foundation, and got Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman to support us, and the DOE supported this too. And the University of California kicked in money, and we sort of started slowly.

And the purpose of the foundation was essentially to build community relationships, improve community relationships. It’s still going today, 23 years later, and it’s more powerful and has a bigger impact in Northern New Mexico than I ever could’ve imagined. As part of this Foundation, we started scholarship programs for all the kids in the local region; not just Los Alamos; but Santa Fe, Española, Taos, and all these little communities. And we put our own money behind it.

We have an annual giving campaign for scholarships for high school students. And now there are so many scholarships available for kids in Northern New Mexico. So that helped address the longer-term problem. You know, there’s still going to be arguments about why does Los Alamos do this, and why doesn’t do that…and that’s always going to be the case of any large institution in any community. I mean, that never goes away.

Well, these two individuals, in my opinion, as former policemen came into a large national laboratory with a different policing mindset that we normally saw. One was a state cop, and the other was some kind of policeman. I don’t know exactly why they were hired, frankly. But once they were hired, nobody gave them a charter as to what their job was.

So they had only been at the lab a few months before they decided by reading certain reports that we were hiding information from the general public. So they had only snippets of information. Somebody wrote something in an email or this or that. They were not privy to the whole budget of the laboratory. They were not privy to our management and control systems for equipment.

They said things like, “Well, we couldn’t find this particular computer.” Well, the answer was the reason we couldn’t find that particular computer was it was destroyed in an experiment at the Nevada Test Site or it was permanently installed in an experiment at Brookhaven. They said, “I couldn’t find a magnet, a big, million-dollar magnet at LAMPF.” Well, guess what, the million-dollar magnet’s sitting under 20 feet of concrete and steel shielding to prevent radiation from getting out to the employees or the public, but it’s there.

But they didn’t understand that DOE does not inventory property the way a business does. If you’re at IBM, and you buy a computer, five years later that computer is obsolete, right. So IBM writes off the computer. DOE does not write off the computer. If you’ve got a 30-year-old piece of equipment, it’s still worth what you paid for it in 1980. I don’t know why they do that, but that’s how they did their management of property.

So at that time, we were totally in compliance with DOE’s rules for finding property. We matched everything they said. Well, then, these people come in and said, “Yeah, but you can’t find 100%.” Well, DOE doesn’t say you have to find 100%. Can you imagine going into McDonald’s and saying, “You have to find 100% of everything—piece of property you own”?

Yeah, right. Yeah, I’d known him probably for 15 years. So, I mean, I did not know anything about this case at that point. So I went to see him the next day, and he told me whom the individual was. I had never heard of Wen Ho Lee. I did not know him.

He’d worked at X Division, and he was a code person who worked on hydro—hydrodynamic codes. I knew a lot of people in X Division because of my career at Los Alamos. I mean, I knew probably a good half of the people who were in that division. I’d never heard of Wen Ho Lee, and so it was like who the heck is this guy?

Zierler:

Now, was that because he was pretty low on the totem pole?

Browne:

I think so. I think so. Yeah, I think mostly—he didn’t—he never talked at meetings. I would go to meetings where X Division people would talk about the research going on in X Division. I never heard him talk once, and that’s a big deal, because most people there talk a lot [laugh] about their work—in classified areas.

So, anyway, our counterintelligence guy said, “This is coming from the DOE Office of Intelligence, from an individual named Notra Trulock.” Well, I happened to know Notra Trulock because he used to work for me when I was AD for defense research and applications.

One of the organizations I had at that time was a center for strategic studies. It was called CNSS, Center for National Security Studies. Notra Trulock was a Russian expert in that organization. He’s not a scientist in that sense. He’s a political scientist. He’s a Russian expert.

And Notra became a very unhappy camper under Sig for whatever reason, and he left. He stayed as a Los Alamos employee but became an assignee to DOE to the Office of Intelligence. Somewhere during that tenure as an assignee, he found out about some information that would indicate that somehow the nuclear information on the W88 warhead was compromised, and that the Chinese had stolen it.

And he was the one who was pushing this as his agenda within DOE. And he pushed it with Los Alamos. He pushed it with the intelligence community. He’s written a book about it, and I don’t know if you’ve ever read it. It’s—it goes into great detail with his arguments for why this was espionage.

But, anyway, I know Notra, so I say, “Well, I’d like to talk to Notra.” And this counterintelligence guy said, “Well, he’s coming to the lab in two or three weeks. Why don’t you sit down and talk to him?” So, anyway, I did, and he brought another fellow with him from the CIA, and they explained their arguments to me.

Here’s the real kicker. I did obviously go and talk to the Albuquerque FBI local area office, and I asked them that question. “If this a problem, why don’t we take him out of the security area?” And the answer was, “No, we don’t want to alert him because we don’t have enough evidence. We don’t know if this is real or not,”

I got the impression that the FBI at that point had this as very low priority—very low priority. They were really interested in catching drug lords coming through New Mexico. And this thing was sort of on the back burner—I think they had one person working on it part-time, and not one of their top agents. And they said, “You have to keep this person in this job.” And so I wasn’t very happy, but nobody told me that there was anything different that we could do.

So this continued on for many months. I kept asking questions, “What’s going on with this case?” We kept pushing—and my counterintelligence guy would push the FBI. And I went back and talked to high levels in the bureau, I mean, all the way up to the senior leadership. And I never got very satisfactory answers.

And I didn’t think most of them thought it was as serious a case as the DOE, Notra Trulock felt it was. It wasn’t they were ignoring it. I just never got the feeling like the FBI was all over this, like you’d expect with a Klaus Fuchs case, right?

Zierler:

Yeah, I mean, we’re talking nuclear espionage. This is a big deal.

Browne:

Right. Yeah, well, at that point, we didn’t know what had happened, except it was all innuendo. It was there’s a piece of information here, there’s a piece of information there. We can connect these dots. Wen Ho Lee has been to China many times, which is true. We knew that.

Did we catch him in any falsehoods at that point? Not really. I mean, there were some discrepancies which we didn’t understand, etc. But at that point, we couldn’t prove anything. I wish at that point I had taken unilateral action but the Justice Department was precluding that—and I didn’t find out till much later that I could have done so.

The FBI told me this after the case was all over that we were referred to as the—now, see, I’ve used their terms correctly. It was like we were the “victim” agency in this. And as the “victim” agency, you have certain rights. But they never told us what those rights were.

Zierler:

What does “victim agency” mean? What is that, compromised?

Browne:

Yeah, essentially compromised, yeah. One of the things that I could’ve done is I could’ve gone and searched his computer. They never said directly that we could do that. They said, “Stay away from him. Leave him alone. Don’t tip your hand,”. So all of that was all background information.

But we kept pushing them and pushing them. They finally tried to tap his phone, and were denied by the FISA Court because the FISA Court said there wasn’t enough clear-cut evidence to tap his phone. So we asked for more—“You’ve got to give us something to work on. This is an untenable situation.” So then they tried to run what’s called a false flag operation. You know what that is, right?

They also found a notebook that was printed in such fine detail. Every line was printed very finely. And it was information about downloaded files. For every file he downloaded, he had made a hard copy note of it. “This file contains this. It’s this long, etc.”

So you can imagine even though today, computer systems can store everything on a tiny little chip – solid state memory- , in those days, we had these high-density tapes which are about this big, and they could handle a lot of data. Well, what it showed was he had downloaded the entire US nuclear stockpile, the design information, the input data, the dimensions of every US nuclear warhead, and the code—source code for every nuclear design code.

I don’t want to go any further—you can read a lot about the details in many places. Eventually, he gets put into solitary confinement in chains as a flight risk because they thought he would go to China or somewhere else. I don’t know who made that decision, I really don’t.

But that made him a martyr in the eyes of a lot of Asian-American people in this country. And what happens during the trial is the Justice Department and the DOE are not going to reveal all the classified information in the public. But they have to if they want make their case. The judge says, “You have to reveal everything into the open.” And DOE and the Justice Department made the decision they’re not going to do that.

The Justice Dept did a plea deal down with Lee pleading guilty to one count of illegally downloading classified information, and the judge gives him time served as his penalty. The judge then apologizes to him for the poor treatment he received in jail. There were a lot of congressional hearings after this trying to figure out why did this judge apologize?

Because even all of the congressmen who were on either side of the fence those days said—they look at evidence and said, “This was a terrible security violation, whether or not he gave the information to China or somebody else. This was a terrible security violation, and it should’ve been punishable by jail. You don’t apologize to people who download classified information.” It was the worst security violation that I had seen in my 30 plus years at Livermore and Los Alamos.

So it was a frustrating time because at that time, the Asian-American community focused their anger on Los Alamos. We were the symbol; not the FBI, right. It was Los Alamos was the symbol. It was presumed that we treated Wen Ho Lee badly, even though, all we did was fire him for a security violation. The FBI and the Justice Dept were responsible for all the legal actions in his case.

Well, I spent two-plus years of my life going around the country talking to the Asian-American community, and there are a lot of Asian-American societies in our country filled with very outstanding and powerful men and women. And I went to their meetings, and took a lot of crap from them about what we personally did, and how we personally discriminated against Asian-Americans. I tried to convince them that was not the case. So it was a very, very difficult period.

Zierler:

Now, what was the impact on morale at Los Alamos?

Browne:

Oh, horrible, absolutely horrible. And we were really worried about losing people. Some people left over it. They didn’t want to work there anymore. My deputy at that time was Bill Press, who I think you know Bill.

Zierler:

Sure.

Browne:

I was thinking of, the Aum Shinrikyo people in Japan who put in sarin gas into their subway. I said, “I’m going to walk back to the DOE Forrestal Building.” [laugh] And I did. And unfortunately, along the way, I could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon, and that was a really sad day.

Anyway, John Gordon was the head of the NNSA at the time. And I went up to see John, and we sat down and started to talk about what we need to do in case this is a broad attack; not just a one-day attack but a broad attack. And we talked about where the nuclear weapons storage was, the nuclear materials stored, etc. And we started to work. We put a plan together. Then John called in experts from each of the labs.

And I called back to the lab and put us up on the highest security alert and to, ensure all of our nuclear materials in particular and our fences were secure, etc. After that, a lot of our people and the other labs who worked in our nonproliferation program flew sensors on satellites and airplanes. And they actually wound up going up and looking at the plumes over New York City.

And some of the pictures you’ve seen of plumes coming out of the buildings and what’s in the plume, that was done with various sensors from the labs, all of the three weapons labs’ programs. The other thing our weapon designers got very heavily involved in was the analysis of potential improvised nuclear devices that a terrorist might be able to create. What kinds of things should we be worried about coming out of Al-Qaeda?

Or maybe Al-Qaeda steals something that they need to do something else. Something they could make it into an explosive device. So we had people working that problem really hard. We also had people working the anthrax problem because the bioscientists, understood how to kill anthrax. And I think they were the ones that suggested irradiating all the mail going into the Senate Office buildings.

And I think that was the model that Domenici was looking for was an independent agency, even if it’s in part of DOE. But DOE—as a matter of fact, Bill Richardson didn’t want that. Bill Richardson wanted responsibility for the programs in NNSA.

So it got muddy. I mean, it just got murkier. It didn’t really improve anything, in my opinion. And the lab directors worked closely with John Gordon and his people to try to make it work. A lot of good people have led that organization now, and they’ve done a better job than we did in the beginning, I would say. But it’s still a little murky.

Zierler:

So, John, I have to ask, by the end of 2002, first of all, what’s your reaction to news reports that say you resigned under fire? Do you agree with that assessment? Is that a fair way of looking at the circumstances under which you left?

Browne:

Yeah, I think it was—there was a lot of political pressure on the University of California about this. There was never any statement that anything my deputy, Joe Salgado, or I did that was illegal. We were, as you might imagine, put under the microscope every email we wrote, every report, every letter, every phone call. We were investigated by the DOE IG, the Congressional Oversight Committees, etc.

The main error we made, in my opinion, was firing the 2 whistleblowers, Walp and Doran. But at that time we didn’t know they were whistleblowers. We fired them on the basis of their performance. What the Secretary of Energy at the time, Spencer Abraham, said to the University of California was, “There’s too much pressure on me in Washington. You’ve got to make a change or I’m going to have to take the contract away from you.” That was the ultimate threat for UC: the Secretary of Energy had already asked another entity if they would step in and run Los Alamos. And the University of California clearly didn’t want that to happen.

Right. [laugh] So this is just—I’m just asking for your personal opinion. But do you think that the threat to take away the contract, that was real?

Browne:

Yeah, I do. There was a lot of support for that over 20 years in Congress. They thought UC was arrogant. A lot of congressmen thought UC was arrogant. And they probably are to some extent. I mean, UC’s a prestigious school and system, right? And sometimes they would stand up to the government and say, “No, we’re not going to do that.” To me that was their responsibility as part of a GOCO system.

And I actually thought they also did the right thing by standing up for some really important things during my tenure too. During the Comprehensive Test-Ban hearings, we were being pressured to change our testimony to Congress to say that we guaranteed stockpile stewardship without nuclear testing would work.

And I said, “I won’t say that.” I said, “I think it’s a good bet, and we’re confident that we can make it work. But we don’t have all the tools. We don’t have everything we need to say we can certify the stockpile without testing it indefinitely.” And they wanted us to say that, and we refused to say it.

I’m back in the saddle, not quite as good as I was [laugh. But technology changes, and I had to relearn a lot of stuff. But I felt comfortable I could do it.

And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, we want you to go to one of the campuses for a couple of years.” And I said, “What do you mean, like?” “Well, UC Irvine, or UC Riverside.” “Go away.” I said, “Why do I need to go away?” He said, “Well, one of the UC Regents thinks you shouldn’t be here.”

And I said, “Why does that Regent think that”—because in his world, when you get rid of somebody, you get rid of them. In the UC world, they don’t do that either. UC does not. If they fire a chancellor, the chancellor goes off to another job, perhaps back to a professorship or a different administrative position.

So UC was really sheepish [laugh] about this because I don’t think they wanted me to have to go on sabbatical but they were being pressured by a particular Regent. And I didn’t even know this Regent. I mean, I knew a lot of the Regents but I did not know this Regent. But they made it very clear that I was going to have to go leave.

Well, our youngest daughter was a junior in high school. [laugh] And I did not want to have to pick her up several times and go to her senior year somewhere else, and then come back to Los Alamos. So my wife and I talked about this, and she said, “You know, you could go consult for anybody you wanted in this country.” [laugh]

[laugh] Or just do it over Zoom, yeah. So it’s worked out really fine for me- I stayed on a lot of national committees. I was on the Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Advisory Committee for about six years. I was on POPA, the APS Panel on Public Affairs, and wrote what I thought was a really great paper with the AAAS and CSIS that got into the Obama transition team on nuclear weapons thinking in 2009.

Browne:

Yeah, that’s a really good question, and I know a lot of them are thinking about that all of the time. And I think that they understand that their value is really the quality of the people they get, right. And most of them focus on maintaining quality, and letting the quality of the people kind of lead then toward where the exciting science and the applications might be, rather than to say, “Here’s this master plan, and we pick quantum computing” .

What I always found is when you have good people, those are the ones who come up with the ideas that actually lead to redirection of the laboratory toward the important problems. I would bet on people any time over any big national strategic Soviet plan [laugh] or whatever you want to call it. And I think the labs that have done the best have that done well, Of course lab leadership does have the job of culling the wheat from the chaff.

The labs have tended to have a few things that they really were good at, and then allow themselves to morph out from that, and take on other issues. Oak Ridge and Argonne, for example, in computing. You would’ve thought 30 years ago, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia would’ve dominated, exascale computing, but they don’t, right. These other labs saw that as an opportunity - hey, we’re really good at this. It’s a science problem; it’s not just a weapons problem. And then we’re going to maintain that capability and build it.

And they’ve done a wonderful job on that, I think. And they now have to just look at what are the problems the country’s going to face 10, 15 years down the road, and what are we doing about it, to help look at that? And some of these are longer than 10 or 20 years. Yeah, one of the things I was really proud of was to fund some bright young guys back in the late ‘80s, when I was doing the defense research job, to do an experiment on quantum cryptography.