Jay Davis

Zierler:

Okay. This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is November 13th, 2020. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Jay Davis. Jay, it's good to see you. Thank you so much for being here.

Davis:

I'm delighted to be here.

Zierler:

All right, so to start, would you please tell me your current or most recent title and institutional affiliation?

Davis:

Well, actually, that's interesting. That's changed in the last month, because I'm now president and chairman of the board of the Livermore Class Action Settlement and Education Fund, which is the nonprofit that grew out of the ten-year lawsuit of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory retirees against the university over our healthcare.

Zierler:

Wow.

Davis:

We spent ten years suing the University for changes they made to retiree health insurance, and won, which is hard to do. The university had not before run into 9,000 angry old people who knew how to raise money and organize a campaign.

Zierler:

(laughs)

Davis:

After a decade, they agreed to an $85 million settlement. Now I discover I am the head of the organization that will oversee that settlement. Not run it, but oversee law firms and the settlement contractor, and a trustee who's the investment agent, so I've backed myself into another job. I guess before that, my last title was President Emeritus of the Hertz Foundation, which I ran for five years after retirement from LLNL.

Zierler:

Where do you see this current work headed? What's the ultimate goal in terms of the healthcare lawsuit?

Davis:

Well, the university handed management of the lab over to a consortium of companies. They broke a promise to provide us lifetime medical care, and the consortium began giving us poorer choices and making it more expensive. The settlement, which will run for 20 years, will provide supplemental payments to all the members of the class who were damaged by this. Here I am at 78, building an organization with a 20-year lifetime. As you might imagine, succession planning is on the first page of the task list (both laugh) to the startlement of my fellow board members, who are all my age. I have to build an organization that will oversee the firms doing the investment and disbursement of $85M over 20 years. And David, the astonishing thing is that there are something like 7,200 of us that are still alive, we average age 78, and the actuarial projection is that 1,000 will be alive in 20 years.

Zierler:

Wow. Wow.

Davis:

So, 1,000 of us will survive to 98, if you can believe the actuary.

Zierler:

I hope so.

Davis:

Well, it's an interesting task. Yeah, it's fun, it's fun. It's fun.

Zierler:

Well, Jay, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. I want to start first with your parents. Tell me a little bit about them and where they're from.

Davis:

Both of my parents were from a little county out in West Texas called Haskell. It's about 50 miles north of Abilene, below the Texas panhandle. My father was an attorney, my mother was a school teacher. I was born out there in 1942, and then in '43, my dad, who was the County Judge, moved to Austin to join the Attorney General's office of the State of Texas. He spent his entire legal career in the Attorney General's office. My mother had two more boys. She kept hoping for a girl, but it didn't work out, so she raised three boys, and we grew up in Austin. Met my wife in high school there. We married at age 20. We both were out of the University of Texas. High school sweethearts. We went from Texas to Wisconsin, where I got my PhD. Stayed there for a couple of years as a postdoc, and then came to Livermore, where I've been very happy ever since. I did take a three-year departure from Livermore at the end of my career to go to Washington, to join the Pentagon and build the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. I had multiple project building experiences at Livermore, and organization-building there. It was a large organizational building job at the Pentagon, merging three agencies and leading 1000 civilians and 1000 uniformed military, with the protocol status of a Lieutenant General or Vice Admiral. We then came home and I happily retired.

Zierler:

Jay, I'm not sure if you've been to Austin recently, but I'm sure it's something that you wouldn't recognize from your childhood today.

Davis:

We still have relatives and friends there. We go about once a year. My mentor Hans Mark, who was chancellor of the University of Texas, is still there. We last went a year ago in March, and in fact, were going to go this last April for our 60th high school reunion. Those occur at ten year intervals, and we had made every one, but that one of course collapsed with COVID. So, we don't know when we'll go to Austin, but yes, you're quite right. It's a charming town. It's probably six times bigger than it was when Mary and I left in 1964. Still has the same horrible traffic problems. But my mother always to the end of her days kept saying, "When are you coming back?" (both laugh) I just say, "Well, there's no 'back' there for me." But it's a fun place. We're proud of it.

Zierler:

Jay, did you go to public schools throughout your childhood?

Davis:

Yes, I did. I went to public schools, as did Mary. I met Mary in Austin High School. We had a sophomore biology class together, a dangerous thing. And things clicked thereafter. And then Texas and then Wisconsin, so I'm--

Zierler:

When did you start to get interested in science?

Davis:

Probably as a junior high school kid, I was very interested in math, and so I was good at that. Liked it. And then in high school, the sequence of science courses was very interesting, but my sophomore year in high school was 1957, and that's when the Russians put the first satellite up. And I got very interested in that business at that point. You know, move towards hard science. So that was, it probably convinced me I wanted to do that. Although, to the frustration of my science teachers, I put all my free time into the drama club. Because I enjoyed acting, and I enjoyed putting productions on. The technical work of productions. It was much more interesting to me than doing the sort of science project I could do as a high school student. God knows that it paid dividends for me —

Zierler:

Jay, did you have a good physics teacher in high school?

Davis:

Yes, I had a very excellent physics teacher. I was very lucky, David. We had very good teachers. I have made myself unpopular with my female friends by pointing out the reason we had such good teachers is because they were mostly women, and they were discriminated against. The women who would have been attorneys, or who would have been PhDs, were teaching high school chemistry, biology. My physics teacher was a male, but I had women teach me that now are, you know, at Google and places like that. It's sort of a haunting memory.

Zierler:

When you got to the University of Texas, was the plan from the beginning to pursue a degree in physics?

Davis:

Oh yes. Very much. I went in as a physics major, and that was my first experience that, you know, I wasn't a very good physicist. I walked into the classroom and discovered a lot of these guys are better than I am. (laughs) Which is useful and humbling. I went through Texas in three years. Stayed for a Master’s degree, but Mary's father was a university professor, so she was used to moving around the country, so we very much wanted to go somewhere else for a PhD. And Wisconsin accepted me, and it was a perfect match. Because, David, I describe myself as not a very good physicist, but a very good technologist. And the technology of low-energy nuclear physics and Van de Graaff accelerators required that you had to start at the last valve on the beam line and build all of your equipment going out really taught me to design and build and make things run. Wisconsin was absolutely a perfect match for me. I would have been a terrible particle physicist, you know, or a terrible computational physicist, but in a lab where I could put my hands-on stuff and it ran, which the Wisconsin lab did 24 hours a day, 362 days a year. Maintained by the graduate students and postdocs. We had no professional staff. It was wonderful training to build, so I stayed there for a couple years as a postdoc, did a couple of good experiments, but then 1969-71, the Vietnamese War had sort of eaten research funding in the United States, and no universities were hiring, and Livermore offered me a job to come help finish an accelerator they were building, so it was a perfect match.

Zierler:

Jay, by the time you finished your undergraduate degree, you knew that you wanted to go into experimentation? Theory was never for you?

Davis:

Absolutely. Absolutely, you know yourself, you know what you can do, and it's important to know what you can't do. I was not going to be a theorist. Although the most wonderful physics class I ever had was taught by Roger Penrose,

Zierler:

Oh wow.

Davis:

who came to Texas as a visiting professor one year. And the class was Classical Mechanics. And he was a wonderful teacher. And I still remember him saying as we went through Hamiltonian mechanics, he said "I want you to do all this. I want you to do these equations and love this, because this is the last time you will fully understand what you're doing." (both laugh) He said, "When you step into Quantum Mechanics, it's not going to be that way." He was really a superb teacher.

Zierler:

Was the motivation at Wisconsin to work with a specific professor, or by reputation, it was the best program for the field you wanted to pursue?

Davis:

I worked with Heinz Barschall, who was a wonderful professor and a wonderful teacher. Interesting person. They used to have an evening seminar for new students, and you got to walk around at night with the faculty and look at the hardware. And I walked through the nuclear physics lab, and I fell in love with the Tandem Van de Graaff. It's not a very big machine, but I fell in love with the lab, and when I was going to take qualifying exams the end of my first year, I walked down the hall and walked into Heinz's office, and said, "If I pass the exam, can I work for you?" And he said, "Yes, let's see how you do." And to my astonishment, David, I did very well on the exam. I was the second-highest scorer on the exam, which I had not been on anything in a long time. And I ran into Heinz about a week later, and he said, "Well, you passed the exam very well." I said, "Yes, I think I did." And he said, "Yes, except for my problem." (laughs) Which was typical of Heinz. He had a wonderful, dry sense of humor, you know. It was some damn problem on Bose–Einstein statistics, which I completely punted. But that summer I started working for him and just fell in love with it. I got to do all kinds of neutron physics experiments.

Zierler:

Did you cross paths with Willy Haeberli at all?

Davis:

Oh yes, Willy taught my first nuclear physics class at Wisconsin. In fact, Willy and I email to each other probably five times a week.

Zierler:

Oh yeah?

Davis:

He's the last of the great giants there. Willy is 95. A couple of years ago, Tom Clegg from UNC and I went and spent several days with him. Stayed at his house. He's amazing. He's one of the few people I described as both a superb theorist and a superb experimentalist. And a wonderful, funny teacher. I love Willy. He's sadly the last of the giants that where there. Heinz is gone, Hugh Richards is gone. Ray Herb is gone. Bob Borchers died a couple years ago. And Willy is the last one left, but he's as sharp as ever.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah. You were saying the sad thing was-- I missed that, what were you saying about that?

Davis:

Oh, oh the sad thing is, the late 60s were the last really exciting bloom of low energy nuclear physics. You know, when polarized ion sources came along with Willy's help. I did experiments in which we looked at neutron reactions of polarized beams, for heaven's sakes. We had enough current to do that. But that field pretty much died very quickly thereafter. I mean, there are a few low-energy physics experiments around, but there's this totalitarianism in physics that energy always moves up. There probably were 30 nuclear physics labs in the United States when I finished my PhD, and there are probably three now. Maybe? I mean, North Carolina, Berkeley still has the cyclotron running, I'm not sure what else runs, but so... I trained in a field in which the technology was very important, and that led me to building accelerators, and then building accelerators led to building organizations. And then in a place like the lab, one of the very dangerous things is if you're a good project manager, then they give you the projects that are broken. I spent two cycles fixing bad projects. Decided I was not interested in big physics anymore. I had this really sarcastic expression, David, in things like magnetic fusion, laser fusion, I described as the "dreams of old men." You know, where it's... my ugly metaphor for that is, if you're the seventh Hebrew slave working on the ninth level of the pyramid, you're not going to rise to become Project Manager of the pyramid, okay? That job is taken. So, I retreated from laser isotope separation. I turned down the job to build the Ten-Meter Telescope originally. I just wasn't interested in a job like that. I chose not to apply for the job to build the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. And went back to Livermore where I was building what became the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, where we used the low energy nuclear physics tools I understood to work in archeology, biomedicine, climate change, both nuclear forensics and human forensics. The wonderful thing about accelerator mass spectrometry is when you can detect these tiny amounts of rare isotopes, it is as if you had reinvented radiation. And anywhere you ever used an isotopic tag in biomedicine or the earth sciences or climate work, you now need to go back and say, "Should I try this tool on that problem?" And since you typically can pick up six orders of magnitude in sensitivity compared to decay counting of isotopes, it's worth asking. I was lucky enough to start a program in biomedicine. Our initial publication was in toxicology. It's pretty hilarious to think of a nuclear physicist being on a paper in toxicology. And out of that has grown a serious biomed program with the clinical applications and a proliferation of small accelerator mass spectrometry machines in biomed. In the pharmaceutical companies. Where they're used for drug screening. That was a pleasant late-career experience. And then a totally different branch, which we'll come to, I stepped sideways into arms control and nuclear inspections and did my gig in Iraq in '91, and ended up seven years later as the founding director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon. As I always put it, I had a career I could not have imagined.

Zierler:

Right. Jay, what was Heinz Barschall working on when you met him, got to know him?

Davis:

Well, he was the senior nuclear physicist there. Heinz has an interesting past, which you probably know at APS. He was a refugee from the Nazis. One of seven Germans to become a US citizen in World War II. The day they swore him in as a citizen, they put him on the train to New Mexico, and he ended up 48 hours later inside the fence at Los Alamos, where his famous comment was, "Oh, that's why the FBI came up to me at a meeting in 1940 and asked me not to give that talk." Which was on cross-sections of neutron scattering from carbon and iron and things like that. Heinz was part of the team that measured the yield of the Trinity test. Spent another year at Los Alamos and then went to Wisconsin in '46. His hire was quite controversial, because the older faculty were saying, "What are we doing, hiring someone with tenure?" You know, they'd never hired an associate professor before. But he had a very distinguished career, lots of good students, and by the time I was there, he was not doing physics so much as helping students pick experiments and do the experiments and see that the lab ran. It ran so smoothly we were unaware that it was unique. You know, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week didn't seem hard for us. And people will sometimes ask me how come the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Livermore runs so well. I say, it's very simple. It runs on the Wisconsin rules. Everyone takes responsibility for the accelerator. Everyone is expected to be able to run it, at least if not repair it, run it. And understand what it can and cannot do. Heinz was a great mentor. He used to say, classically Heinz, you could do any experiment you wanted as long as it was a neutron in or a neutron out. I don't know, I probably built or did 10 or 15 separate experiments while I was at Wisconsin. He was... the German word stur is the same as our word for "dour." The experience of being a refugee from his own country, of being rejected was very painful. The story was the day he was to enroll at the university in Berlin, the Nazis decreed he was a Jew. He didn't know he was a Jew. His Austrian grandmother was Jewish by their rules, and he didn't know that, so he left as a refugee, spent a year at the Sorbonne, came back and famously told his father, "Those French can't do quantum mechanics worth anything." He spent a year at Marburg and then his father said, "Okay, this is bad enough. Get out of here." And it got him to Princeton, where he... His English was good, but uncertain, so he was allowed to take the entrance exam with an English-German dictionary. And made the highest grade on it… (laughs) to the consternation of the physics faculty. But he was a wonderful but very reserved person. He would not speak German. My minor was, so help me God, German literature and linguistics, because I had to have something other than physics. My German was and is very good, but Heinz just would not speak German as a matter of principle, and I rue that my six years with him, I didn't get the chance to migrate my German from very good school German taught by Berliners into his Berlin German, which would have been wonderful to have. And we stayed close until he died.

Zierler:

How did you go about developing your dissertation topic?

Davis:

In typical fashion, Heinz assigned me a problem. He said, "One of my previous graduate students has found an anomaly in neutron cross-sections. In just total cross-sections of simple measurement. If you do the cross-sections with neutrons from the T(p,n) , which is one source, and do them with neutrons from the D(d,n) reaction, which is another source the cross-sections are off-set by 20 kilovolts. They're the same cross-sections, but they don't line up. Go look into that." That was a typical Heinz assignment, and so I discovered that the calibration constant for the analyzing magnet on the tandem was not fixed, was not a constant. The calibration changed with as the magnetic field increased. Well I think probably because the pole pieces were bowing, and so as you went up in magnetic field, maybe they got closer together, so it the field was higher than you would predict done with a calibration using one reaction of known energy, the standard calibration technique. I sorted that out, and that involved running, I don't know, a dozen or more reactions to calibrate it and doing repeat cross-section measurements so we knew what we were doing. I just sort of backed into an experiment. It certainly was not deep nuclear physics. But it was understanding how to precisely measure or predict the energy of the neutrons you were using. Then as a postdoc, I used that skill to field an experiment at Argonne where we did the most precise ever measurement of the total neutron cross-section of hydrogen. We measured the hydrogen total cross-section for neutrons to 1/10th of a percent measurement at 2.5 MeV using a very clever technique to know the energy. At the end of a long trail, working a technical problem produced a very interesting physics result.

Zierler:

Which was what?

Davis:

It was hardly...Well, which is, you knew two of the fundamental constants of the nuclear force you derived from the neutron-proton cross-section. The scattering length and the effective range. None of this is cosmic nuclear physics, but it's tidiness.

Zierler:

Jay, who else was on your thesis committee, besides Heinz?

Davis:

Oh dear, that's a 52-year-old question you're asking. I'm sure John Anderegg, who was a biophysicist at Wisconsin. It would be hard to imagine that Willy wasn't. Willy must have been on the thesis committee, I just don't remember. I could... Well wait a minute. Let me walk across the room and see if I can find some signatures, since we have a moment. The thesis isn't where I thought I left it.

Zierler:

That's all right.

Davis:

But it's typical Heinz fashion. You know, it's typical Heinz fashion. Did you ever meet John Anderegg?

Zierler:

No.

Davis:

Hmm?

Zierler:

No.

Davis:

He was a great big man. Big man, biophysics. Very much overweight. And my oral exam was in the afternoon. And Heinz, in typical fashion, came to me in the morning and he said, "Now, Jay, your exam starts at 1:30." He said, "John will have eaten too much at lunch. And during your exam, he will go to sleep." He says, "It's okay, don't panic. He will wake up. You don't have to try to wake him up. Just keep talking and he will--" That's the wonderful kind of thing that Heinz did. You know, you had to love a guy, who cold and formal as he was, would share a thing like that with you. Which of course, had I not know, it would utterly have freaked me out. You can see just standing there and thinking, "My God, did I just kill a full professor? Was the thesis that bad?"

Zierler:

Jay, on the social side of things, being in Madison in the late 1960s, for better or worse, there was a lot of tumult on campus. What was your perspective on the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's liberation movement? Were you involved in any of those things?

Davis:

(laughs) Well, David, when our lab was blown up, I was one of the first people to crawl through the lab at 5am that morning. I got a phone call saying, "The lab has been blown up, you better get down here." So I went in, and crawled through, shut down stuff, made sure that nobody else was buried in the building. We can come to why that bombing happened in a minute, which is an interesting story. The only demonstrations we really saw were the anti-war demonstrations. Women's stuff, civil rights stuff, didn't impact physics per se. You know. Occasionally demonstrators would run through our building and throw fire extinguishers through office doors, things like that. The reason the lab was blown up is that we were on the basement and first floor of a wing of the physics building whose second and third floors had the Army Math Research Center. Okay? Which is a closed, locked facility. And it had its own entrance and its own sign at the end of the building. And then the next two floors above that were astronomy. And this was in the 70s, when research was winding down and the Congress was very focused on, "Is research money helping with the Vietnam War?" And the director of the Army Math Research Center was in a terrible bind. Because their work wasn't classified. It wasn't a classified facility, but it was a locked facility that people could not go into. And he couldn't very well say at a press conference, "Well, we don't do any classified work," because his budget probably would have disappeared in ten days. And he did the thing that most... If you wanted to inflame passions, you couldn't do better than that. He scheduled two successive press conferences and then didn't show up for them. So we were left hanging in midair. I mean, I hate to sound like a vindictive person, but when the dust cleared the morning of the explosion, about 10 o'clock, I got a hacksaw and I went out and I cut their name off the building.

Zierler:

Wow.

Davis:

I don't know where they went. They moved somewhere else on campus. But they weren't there when we rebuilt.

Zierler:

Did you develop at that point any strongly-held ideas about the way physics should or should not be used for national security purposes?

Davis:

I don't think it affected my ideas about physics. Heinz had been part of the Manhattan Project. Ray Herb's accelerators had gone to Los Alamos and then come back, or one came back. Hugh Richards had worked on the Manhattan Project. You know, I'm one of the ones that rationalizes the use of the nuclear weapons to end the war. If you've ever read the book called Downfall on the planning for the American invasion of Japan, you’ll find it frightening, because the Japanese exactly figured out how we would invade Kyushu. And it would have been a disaster to invade. I can rationalize those deaths as a way to end the war. I'm comfortable with classified weapons things as long as they're compartmentalized, as long as you don't compromise people in the other world. And you have to accept the fact, which at Livermore we do, that the people in the other world do peer-reviewed stuff, which is subject to a quality of review some of our stuff doesn't get, because they're not a very big peer community. I will certainly tell you, David, one thing that the bombing did to me is it put me pretty hard over on being willing to be an operative in counter-terrorism. Which is why I volunteered for things like the Nuclear Emergency Search Team at the Lab, which is part of what put me on the train that eventually ended up with me going to Iraq on four days' notice. I was glad to participate in arms control. Most of the people at Livermore are very proud of what they did, and they're very proud that those weapons were never used. You know, at Livermore, and Edward Teller gets credit for this, Edward's statement that the lab could build a small nuclear weapon that would fit on a ballistic missile in a submarine was the most stabilizing development of the Cold War. And we backed away from huge bomber fleets. We backed away from huge land-based missile fleets at that point. And that I think, those of us that are a little more are very proud of that.

Zierler:

Jay, when you defended, did--

Davis:

I never worked in the weapons program. Just didn’t have the skills they wanted.

Zierler:

Did you have, was Livermore all set up for you, or were there a variety of postdocs and other opportunities that you were considering?

Davis:

No, I was hired to do a specific job. I was very lucky, David. I was hired in the interim between Livermore's two layoffs. They had a layoff in 1970 and a layoff in 1972, but I was hired in to do a specific task. There were generic postdocs that were hired, but I wasn't. The fellow in charge of the accelerator project, John Anderson, had in fact done a sabbatical in Livermore in '67. He had seen me work in the lab. And sometimes worked with me in the lab at night. I was a very known product to John. I have no idea what Heinz's discussions with him were, but they certainly were positive, so in the spring of, oh, I can't remember. I may have even turned down a job at Livermore before that. I can't remember. But anyway, in the spring of '71, I called John up and said, "You know, is that job out there still open?" And he said, "Yeah, please get on an airplane." I went out in March and showed up at the lab at the end of May or the first of June in '71. And stepped right into a job that fit me like a glove, which is "turn this thing on and make it work." It was fun.

Zierler:

Who was your immediate supervisor when you got to Livermore?

Davis:

John Anderson, who eventually became Associate Director for Physics. John along with someone whose name I should remember at the University of Florida were the two guys that get credit for isobaric analog states. It was a fun group. It was a bit of shock to not be in a university lab, because the technicians and engineers were kind of freaked out that I would keep running into the machine shop and building stuff, you. I think I was the only physicist who had a tool box. I would take my little tool box and rip things apart. And then to their real shock, and this is the difference between a professionally-run lab and a university lab, I would have to explain to them that five o'clock Friday night and eight o'clock Monday morning are not the same time. And you will come in with me on Saturday and we will fix something so the machine can run at eight o'clock on Monday morning. You know, not sit there until noon. And that was an interesting shock for them. They once teased that they were going to make a rubber stamp for the log book that would say, "At Wisconsin, we…" (laughs) Which was how I tended to start a lot of sentences. But you know, I fit that culture very well. It was fun to have access to engineers who could do things I could not imagine. And that improved the level at which I could play the game. Once I learned how to negotiate with those guys and properly couple physics uncertainty into engineering design, we did a lot of neat stuff. They once gave me an honorary engineer's badge.

Zierler:

Was the clearance process for you, was that pretty smooth?

Davis:

Yeah. I arrived without a clearance in June, I think I got my clearance in November. Which is, these days, rocket-fast.

Zierler:

Right.

Davis:

No special effort, that was just sort of the normal time. There's a funny story about it, though. I was nervous about it because the first year I was a postdoc at Wisconsin, I had an Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellowship. And a condition of the fellowship was you had to fill out clearance forms. The Atomic Energy Commission had discovered it was funding people who were members of the Communist Party, unknowing and inadvertently. Thus, you had to fill out clearance forms. I filled them out and they went away. And when I came to Livermore, of course, one of the questions was, "Have you ever applied for a clearance?" And my answer was, "Yes." "Did you get it?" "I don't know." I was worried that was an open loop that I would trip over. I didn't, but in bureaucracies, you worry about things like that.

Zierler:

Was your initial title, were you a postdoc, or was this a career position from the beginning?

Davis:

It was a term position. You were a term appointee for two years, because the Lab was still worrying about, were they going to lay people off or not? And I remember one day as Mary and I were going to buy our first house, John Anderson came and said, "Have you bought that house yet?" I said, "No." And he came back two days later and says, "It's okay. You can sign the papers." (both laugh) But the lab had never had a layoff, and it was a real wrenching of the social fabric when it did. And so, it's always shied away from one ever since.

Zierler:

Jay, what was your next job as you worked up in leadership at Livermore?

Davis:

Well, when the Cyclograaff accelerator ran really well, Heinz who was there, he joined Livermore staff for two years, Heinz and John Anderson came to me and said, "Well, we need to have you build this 14-MEV neutron source." Which was called the Rotating Target Neutron Source. "It'll be the most intense neutron source in the world for materials damage." And I said, "Oh?" And they said, "By the way, we've already promised the performance, and schedule. Would you get to it?" (laughs) So I had to put together an engineering team and another physicist, and go through a design sequence to build. They built two accelerators. 400 kilovolt... God, 400 milliamp accelerators, for God's sake. Huge DC accelerators. A tritium target containing 10,000 curies of tritium that rotated at 5,000 RPM on a differentially-pumped air bearing. And we went through a development process to make sure the parts would work, put it together. It came up slowly to spec. It ran for nine years, and then the fusion program shut it down. By that time, I had moved on to the magnetic fusion program itself, beginning to fix broken projects. Did that for a few years, got tired of fixing broken projects because I went to the head of the program and said, "You know, you have me fixing technical problems, but in fact your problems are management problems. And you're probably not going to let me fix those, are you?" And he said, "That's right." And I said, "Well good, this is an exit interview. I have a few other things to tell you." (laughs) Which I did. Went to take a staff job on the lab's long-range planning committee, and that lasted only six months. And I was then asked to go be a project manager in laser isotope separation. And help build stuff, originally to do plutonium laser isotope separation and the thrust of the program switched to uranium. And I just was not a good match to the program. I was used to open peer review and critical designs, and the people in the program had come from laser industries and places like Hughes, and just had a different operational mindset. And so I describe it as the only big failure in my life. I just couldn't succeed in their culture. I went back to Physics and eventually became the Nuclear Physics Division Leader. And then shut down my own accelerator. The Cyclograaff, after a 15-year run, and built the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry using used parts. And that was kind of fun, because the tandem came from the University of Washington. We harvested huge used magnets from Berkeley and Stanford to build a beam handling system that no one could ever afford on a small accelerator before. Went to full-up computer control, which I'd learned how to do in the magnetic fusion program, so I was stealing technical bits from where I'd been at the lab. And stealing people, too, by the way. Good technicians liked to work for me. And so, we built an accelerator that's really not an accelerator, it's a spectrometer. And that's a big intellectual step. It's a big difference. As one of my Australian friends said, "You didn't build this to just hose the target," which is an expression I love. To hose the target. You count atoms one at a time and you do unique stuff. I spent, oh Lord, how long did I spend? Three or four very happy years doing that, and then got asked to go to Iraq, loaned out to the United Nations. Spent a good part of the summer of '91 doing that. By the time I came back, I never got to put my hands on the accelerator controls again. The young people had pushed me to the side, which was appropriate. And then eventually, Bruce Tarter, the Director of the Lab, asked me to become the Associate Director for Environmental Programs. In a typical Lab fashion, I stepped sideways being in charge of earth scientists, atmospheric scientists, biological scientists. Did that for four years and then my mentor, Hans Mark, came to see me and said, "Well, I'm going to go back into the administration. I can't tell you that, but I'll be Director of Defense Research and Engineering." We were drinking bourbon in the living room, and he said, "You know, you've never heard of this thing called DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, but you were bred to do that."

Zierler:

Ah-ha.

Davis:

And from the kitchen, I could hear Mary's soft little voice say, "Oh shit." (both laugh) And so that was March of '98, and by June of '98, we were resident in Washington. And I was Director Designate of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Zierler:

Before 1998, did you have any entree or sense of national policy? Were you ever in a position at Livermore where you were part of the policy process coming out of the White House or the Pentagon?

Davis:

Probably, David, only in a small sense, because I had sort of gotten near the national security business by trying to develop detector systems for treaty verification. You know, for counting nuclear weapons in a non-obtrusive way. And, that's a real problem. One needs to measure it well enough to know it's a nuclear weapon, but not well enough to infer design techniques. That's a, "how smart can you be without being too smart?" problem. It's a fun problem. I certainly had a connection to arms control issues, arms control policy. That eventually required intelligence clearances, which I got, to know what the other guys could do or what we could do at an intelligence clearance level. But not any huge policy things. Not like, how many war heads should we have? Or, should we negotiate a treaty? That's very much up there. Even at the Pentagon, I was – you're going to love this – as a civilian, I had the protocol rank equivalent to a three-star general, and was treated like one, because they have to know where you fit. They have to know what color monkey you are to know where to put your name tag at the table, for God's sake, it's just hilarious. And policy is reserved for four-star and up. The next level above me were political appointees or Senate-confirmed. Those are the only people that get to speak on policy matters. Thus, I was below the salt at the table. Now, I got to be in lots of fun meetings at DTRA. We did a nuclear counter-terrorism study at the president's request. And this is where you have to admire Bill Clinton. He said, "Everybody worries about a nuclear weapon going off. They worry about New York and they worry about Washington, and they'll probably cheer." He said, "I'm worried about something that is as terrifying as the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City. It was a totally unexpected place." He said, "So you guys model the nuclear weapons going off in Cincinnati. Why Cincinnati? Surprise." Thus, we did a ten-kiloton weapon going off on the bridge across the Ohio River in Cincinnati between Ohio and Kentucky, did the study. I took it to John Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and he said, "Oh my God, get the view graphs and come with me." I said, "Where are we going?" He said, "We're going to see Janet Reno." Okay. So we go over to the Department of Justice, and there in this-- You ever been in Justice?

Zierler:

I have not.

Davis:

It's a beautiful 1930s building, just a gorgeous building. A walking tour of the old federal buildings would be a dream. Huge conference rooms, Janet Reno, Deputy Attorney General's and lawyers on both sides of the table. Attorneys, my God, more suits than I've ever seen. And John says, "I want Doctor Davis--" I get called Doctor in those environments. "--to take you through this briefing, and you decide what we're going to do about nuclear terrorism." And I took her through it, and she turned to me. And she's a wonderful and gracious person. And she said, "Well, Doctor Davis. I have one question for you. If you had to get a nuclear weapon into the United States, how would you do it?" And I said, "Madame Attorney General, I'm going to apologize for this, but I will give you the physicist's reply. I will put it in a bale of marijuana. How many do you want?" I thought all of the attorneys at the table and the FBI guys were going to die. And she laughed. And I thought, "Okay, I survived that one. All right, I can get along now. I survived." And we went from there. We then ran the Saturday session in the Secretary of Defense's conference room at the Pentagon. She brought her peers from other departments, or their deputies, and we played out the scenario and went around the table. If we have to respond to this, what are your resources? What are your obligations? How would you respond? What do you need from the government? What should you have had before? It was a very, very good study. Well, I have to tell you, it ended in a heart-stopping way for me, because as we're summing up at the end of the day, she says, "Well, I don't know about the rest of you people, but I just want you to know, if this bad thing ever happens and I'm standing up in front of the press, Doctor Davis will be standing next to me." And I thought, "Oh shit!" (both laugh) It never happened. But I'm, you know, you've now learned I'm glib, and I'm good at some of these things, and I would have been proud to serve. She was a wonderful person.

Zierler:

Jay, when did you first get involved in UN weapons inspections in Iraq? How did that come together?

Davis:

Well, I had been, as I said to you, part of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team. It was called NEST in those days. It has a different name now. And we trained with the FBI and the Army to go out and deal with an improvised nuclear weapon, or one scenario you always worry about is a US nuclear weapon that's been misplaced in some way. Because you treat that as though it's an improvised weapon. Just because it's ours, you don't know that it's safe. You don't know anything about it. And I was on that list. But the first nuclear inspection of Iraq in May had turned up signs that the Iraqis were using electromagnetic isotope separation. Which is, of course, a mass spectrometer technique. It's what we built massively in Oak Ridge during World War II. And so the bells rang in Washington, and they said, "Okay, for the second inspection, we need to get a guy trained to work in the field who has intelligence clearances who's a mass spectrometer expert. Does anybody have one?" Well, I was at the top of that list. I was sitting in the office of the Associate Director for Biomedicine on a Friday, planning AMS experiments in biology, and his phone rang, and he got a funny look on his face, and he said, "For some reason, lab security wants to talk to you." And I picked up the phone, and I was switched over to my friend Bill Nelson who ran the NEST Program, and he said, "Jay, you've come up to the top of the list, we're going to do an inspection. Can you be in Washington on Tuesday so you can be in Bagdad on Thursday or Friday?" He said, "Don't even bother coming by your office. Just go out of the Lab. Go buy anything you think you need to outfit yourself, and throw the receipts through the door." So literally on short notice like that. Then I had to go home and explain to Mary, "Oh, there's some details I haven't told you." But yeah, so very short notice, in and out, I was in Iraq within a week of the phone call.

Zierler:

Where did you go next? Did you know that you were headed to Iraq?

Davis:

Yes. I knew we were headed to Iraq. That was a given. It was explicitly, "You will be the physicist on the second inspection team that looks to decide could they have built these facilities, and if they did, what could they do?" I did one inspection when we found the evidence of it, and then the teams rotate in and out. I rotated out, another team rotated in to exploit what we'd found. And then I went back one more time to complete the assessment. And at that point, we properly had used up, you know, my technical expertise. We knew what they had done, we knew what they could do, we could infer their schedule for making a weapon. The guys had had enough looking at the other parts of the weapons program to know where it was going. After that, there was no reason for me to go back again. I would have loved to, but I also had pretty much pissed the Iraqis off. But David, the set of wild experiences-- I think they're in those notes I sent you-- as I was ready to leave the second time that the deputy head of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission came up to me, and he said, "Well, you know, you're an interesting guy, Davis." He said, "When you first came, we just thought you were some kind of CIA goon, because you pushed people around and you were tough." He said, "but while you were going, we found your resume. And you've done some really interesting things." So he said, you're going to love this, "When this all blows over, why don't you take a sabbatical, and you and your wife come back here for a year and help us design facilities?" (both laugh) Credit him with optimism, he thought it was going to blow over. I wish you could have seen Mary's reaction to that offer. It was quite spectacular.

Zierler:

Now Jay, when you were working with NEST, were you on leave from Livermore, or were you permanently a government employee at this point?

Davis:

No, we were detailed from the Lab to the United Nations. In fact, we were given United Nations identity cards, not passports, so we did not show our US passports in Iraq, although they obviously knew who we were. Because we went under our real names. I'm easily findable, even then. But we were on loan to the United Nations Special Commission, thus I was officially a special technical expert for the UN Special Commission.

Zierler:

And where were you in the chain of command? In other words, who did you report to, and who reported to you?

Davis:

David Kay was the head of the inspection team. I reported to David Kay, who was the chief inspector. He had operational control of the team in Iraq, okay? The teams were typically 24 people, half technical, scientists, and engineers. And then half supporting staff. So, explosive ordnance disposal people, to keep us from getting blown up, you. Physicists always want to pick shiny things off the ground, so they have to be stopped from picking shiny things off the ground. There were also accompanying medical transportation, communication, and interpreters. And I learned some wonderful lessons from the interpreters. When I got there the first day, we staged out of Bahrain and the interpreter came up to me and he said, "Look, I'm a Palestinian. I'm a United Nations interpreter. I mostly do politics and economics. I don't have your vocabulary. I'm going to die." He said, "What do I do?" And I said, "I've got an idea." And I had a little book on electromagnetic isotope separation. And I gave him the book. I said, "This is a physics students' trick the night before the exam. Learn the vocabulary in the figure captions. Don't read the book. Learn the vocabulary in the figure captions. That will tell you everything you need to know." And he came down for breakfast the next morning and he threw his arms around me and he said, "I can do it! I can do it! I've got it." But the dividend of that is the way you use these people. You don't force them to be the interpreter, because if I'm interpreting for you, and I can do this in German, even these days, when I listen to you, I'm you, and then when I speak to the other guy, I'm you, and when he speaks to me, I invert that. I'm not part of it, and I have to totally focus on the language. The interpreter said, "90% of these guys speak English, the other 10% speak German. You do both. Make them work in those languages. And I can listen to the side conversations in Arabic. I can listen to the guy over here tell the guy over there, 'Lie to him about that,' or, 'That's not what we told them yesterday.'" And so those guys were vacuum cleaners of the Arabic conversations around us. It was a great lesson to learn. And I had fun because the ones that spoke German were flattered.

Zierler:

Jay, I wonder if you could talk more about the way you used physics to do your job? In other words, what would you use in terms of your background to complete your mission for the UN?

Davis:

You'd look at the hardware you could find, and the Iraqis had stripped out a lot of the hardware. For example, although this stuff was computer-controlled, the computers and the electronics were gone. And they said in one facility, "Well, all these transformers are there because build transformers here." And I stepped into the next room, and there was a gigantic UPS, an uninterruptible power supply. I said, "Wait a minute, that's for running computers and control systems. You don't have those in a manufacturing plant." So that's physics intuition. The other is, the parts you could find, you'd say, "What does this look like?" You know, have I seen something like this in my life? And I'd never handled electromagnetic isotope separation hardware. I'd looked at it in books. But the parts were huge. The place I used physics and I was happiest with is in my second trip, they were at Tarmiyah, which was their production facility that had gone online. Tarmiyah was bombed by us during the war. All the magnets were gone, all the computers were gone, all the small stuff was gone. The big power supplies were there. I was the physics lead and there was a chemistry lead. And she decided to take the chemists away, and for some strange and very lucky reason, all the keepers, all the Iraqi security people went with her. I admit that she was lots better looking. And another guy and I are left alone with the physicists and engineers who worked on the separators. And I said, "Okay, you know me. I've been badgering you to answer questions. We're going to do this differently. I'm going to go to the blackboard like a student, and I will draw what I think you built. And you will correct my lecture." And they opened up like flowers, David. They were so proud to say what they built. I would say, "Yes, this--" and they would interrupt and say "Oh, no, no, no, that's not how we did it. This is how we did it. This is what the current was." My peer, who was a good arms control guy, said, "I saw the Non-Proliferation Treaty violated thirty times in one hour during your talk.” I said, "But I didn't violate it." "No, but they did!" So you know, that's a way to use the physics. You go be the dumb student. And they were so proud of what they'd done. I mean, I have... I can send you one of my talks, one of the slides I show is the hand-drawn picture drawn in my inspection notebook made by the chief mechanical engineer of the program, because he was so proud to show me the details of how they had designed these very, very clever magnets. And the return yoke for the magnets. They had done it, David, so it was inverse salami slicing. You've seen the race tracks at Oak Ridge. You have to build that all and put it together. The Iraqis build these in a linear array, so they could just keep adding at the end as you added more and more separators. They were very proud of what they had done and that we verified that for them. And they were very damn good. I came home, and I said, "You know, I met 3,000 men and women whom I'd hire. But there will be a problem with their clearances."

Zierler:

Jay, to what extent did the UN Security Council resolutions serve as a blueprint for the job that you had to do?

Davis:

Well, it was superb because it was a blueprint of what to do and it authorized our abilities. So we could say, "You have to show us. You have to let us go in there. You must." And David, we were going on places that no regular Iraqi citizen had ever been, much less foreigners carrying cameras and video machines. I mean, I must say, the one hardware wish I wish I had is what the police wear now. I wish I had had a damn body cam so I could simply have had something on my chest with a red light, that says you're on the camera for intimidation. I spent time rotating between a still camera, a video camera, and a primitive digital camera. I am still amazed at the things that I didn't photograph when I came back and looked, because I was so busy shuffling shit. If I'd had a camera on a harness, it would have been golden. The UN rules and authority just let us lean on them, lean on them, lean on them, and say, "Well, you know, we'll stand here. We can stand here." And we would, until some poor guy from their Atomic Energy Commission or their Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or God help us a poor Iraqi Army colonel, would come along and let us get what we wanted.

Zierler:

What are some examples of the ways in which the Iraqis were operating in good faith, and some examples in which they were operating in bad faith? Insofar as what you were there to do.

Davis:

Well, my first inspection in June, they were still hiding stuff. They were bulldozing buildings. They would have a building that was visited by the First Inspection in May, we would come to the site, and the building would be gone, the rubble would have been taken away, and fresh dirt would have been bulldozed over it. So they were still hiding stuff. We chased them with 100 truck convoy of stuff they were trying to hide from us. And that's the one famous time inspectors got shot at, when a couple of our guys got shot at, while photographing the convoy. They were still hiding stuff. That confrontation produced a briefing at the United Nations, which I gave, for God's sake. A physicist talking to the Security Council in executive session, and I gave a standard lab view-graph briefing, you know, to the Security Council. And the UN said to them, "You know, we can restart this war. The troops are there, the planes are there. This is not a problem. We can turn this war back on, whenever you'd like to have it turned back on." And then they decided to divulge the program, and in the third inspection, which I was not on, they began briefing on the program. And brought forward Doctor Jabar, who was the head of the program. Jabar was a nuclear physicist, trained at the University of Birmingham in England. Went back to Iraq for a visit, and his British wife and sons were sent home. They were given a cash settlement and the government of Iraq basically said, "Well, if you need a wife, we'll give you a wife." It's like the Marine Corps. If you needed a wife, the Marine Corps would give you a wife. And so, he briefed us on the program. He was the father of the electro-magnetic program. But it was clear his power was expanding regularly, because he was successful. I'm sure he would have been in charge of their missiles, I'm sure he was in charge of the design of the weapon. On the fourth inspection, they divulged the details of their centrifuge program, which we didn't even know they had. If you look at the cover of Physics Today, in July of '92 you'll find me standing there holding a carbon fiber rotor from a centrifuge. We didn't know they had that stuff. They had the fiber, they had the winding machines, they had the balancing tools, they had the motors and the lubricants. They were well on their way. But we could calculate how far they had come with electromagnetic separation. They'd made a few tens of grams of uranium rich to about 5%, which is sort of the threshold. They were on the learning curve we were on in World War II in the Manhattan Project, so we could predict that in 18 to 24 months, they'd have the material for a weapon, and they certainly would have had the design by then. So, they finally cooperated in that. They gave us log books, they gave us details. Then the sixth inspection, which my friend Cal Wood was on, is the famous one where they found at Iraqi security an aluminum case full of documents from what was called PC3 for Petro Chemical 3, their cover name for the Iraqi nuclear weapons design program. These documents had their designs and test results. That inspection produced the famous four-day hostage situation in the parking lot, where finally the inspectors were allowed to copy the documents but actually took the real documents out of the country. That data proved the second violation of the Non-Proliferation treaty. One is enrichment, the other is a design program. And then the third is a weaponization program, where you're actually doing the high explosive implosion experiments, working on fusing and firing hardware. Thus, the enrichment facilities were found, their firing tables and bunkers for doing explosive experiments were found, and their designs were found by the end of the fifth inspection. Then the subsequent inspections were just destruction of material.

Zierler:

When did you leave? When was your work wrapped up?

Davis:

My work was wrapped up, probably the end of the first week of August in 1991. And I came back for good.

Zierler:

And who were you reporting your findings to?

Davis:

The reports went directly to the UN in Vienna, because that's where the International Atomic Energy Agency is. We wrote, even while on the ground in Iraq, we wrote reports that went to the UN in Vienna. When we came back, I obviously reported at the lab on what I found. And one of the difficulties was some of the stuff, which was carried out of Iraq, was probably by our definition classified, but it was not in my hands, so it was not my problem. David Kay and his people took that to the UN, and that was their problem, not our problem. And I'm not sure, I never went to the IAEA in Vienna again. I'm not sure what compartment they keep that in.

Zierler:

Where you operating in a strictly classified environment? Were you able to talk to the press at all?

Davis:

We let David [Kay] talk to the press. You do this so you speak with one voice. The inspection team leader will say, "This is what we went out today, this is what we inspected." At his or her discretion, he will say, "This is what we found." In response to a question he might say “This is what we might do tomorrow." The rest of us just stand there and smile and maybe if we're asked by him a technical question, we answer to him. I gave that briefing at the United Nations because I was picked as the guy who was likely to give the best brief. Afterwards, we're sitting in the room with about 300 press people and one of the Special Commission people gets a question he can't answer, and he says, "Well, I can't answer this, but Doctor Davis back there at the back of the room can answer that." I stand up and 300 cameras swing around like this and go click... At that point, I was identified as an inspector. And at that point, it was okay for me to talk to the press. And so, I cheerfully gave more colloquia on university campuses than you can imagine. Heinz, of course, instantly summoned me to Wisconsin to give a colloquium. The typical scenario was I would give a colloquium and then after it, there'd be some guy from the press there to ask an interview. I would answer truthfully and properly, staying away from things I thought were classified or comment on future inspections. Or I knew were classified, let's put it that way. But part of that is, you don't compromise future activities by making predictions. You can say what we found and what it means, but you don't say what we might do next. But I was effectively out of the game in autumn of 1991.

Zierler:

It was out of your purview, of course, to consider the political ramifications of your findings, but what do you think your findings contributed overall in terms of the viability of Saddam Hussein's regime, or the likelihood that the Gulf War would not erupt into additional conflicts?

Davis:

Well, you've asked a question that I'm very sensitive about. We destroyed their nuclear program. We wiped out their ability to restart it, okay? The biological and chemical guys who we've talked about did their job. They destroyed production facilities, they destroyed stocks to precursor chemicals. Didn't have much of a biological program. Wiped that out. Our government persisted, particularly as we got close to the Bush administration, in the notion that the Iraqis could restart the program. And David, my frustration is they never asked any of us who had been on the ground what our opinion was. And so there were all these fantasies, you know. There's a centrifuge hidden in a rose garden. Big damn deal, okay? Big damn deal. They have underground facilities. Big damn deal. We look at the country so carefully that was not possible. They never asked any of us if it could be restarted. Did we think it was credible it'd be restarted? Now, I will have to tell you, Nice Mr. Hussein, as we called him, Nice Mr. Hussein's dilemma is that in a police state that's run that way, lying to the boss is a core competency. Your survival depends upon a convincing lie to the boss. You might ask yourself if that goes on in the White House today as we speak, okay? But that poor bugger may have thought he had a nascent program. He may have. Because there were people around him whose lives and fortunes probably depended upon saying, "Oh yeah, we've got that hidden where the Yankees can never find it again." It's like my friend at the Atomic Energy Commission said to me. "When this all blows over, we can restart it." They could never have restarted that program. Ever. The one place I was wrong, I was asked what might inspectors find when they went back in? And I said, "They'll find no nuclear program. They'll find no biological program." I said, "They might find a chemical program." And what I had forgotten was that only the United States, Russia, Japan, and Nazi Germany successfully made persistent chemical agents. Agents you could load into a shell and leave there for years. All the other agents are binary. And thus, they have a shelf life. The Chemical Inspections had destroyed their stock of precursor chemicals, tons of them. So, if you want to have that weapons program, you have to continuously be churning through tons of chemicals. You have to be buying them, you have to be handling them. And I'm a physicist. I'm not a chemist. I overlooked that. So they had no chemical program either. I mean, there may have been ten moldy old shells somewhere, but they're all past the use-by date. And the story from my chemical friends is that the program was horribly dangerous. They said they'd go somewhere there'd be guys with mangled hands and burned ears, saying, "Please take this stuff away." (laughs) "Get all this crap out of here, would you?" Because it's just dangerous stuff to work with. So I am... "distraught" is too strong a word…but I'm certainly irritated that in the run-up to the Second Gulf War, none of us were called back for an opinion. And the Bush II Administration, or its war hawks just, I suspect, didn't want to hear those voices.

Zierler:

Jay, was Iran a factor at all? Were you thinking about Iran and its own nascent ambitions to achieve a nuclear capacity?

Davis:

No. No, we were totally, properly focused on the job in front of us. We knew the Iraqis had capabilities. We had access. We had to get at them, find them out, and destroy them. We didn't have any access to Iran. Every now and then over the years, somebody in Washington will call me up and say, you know, "If we had to do inspections again, could you advise us on how to restart them?" And usually I can. People who have forgotten what we learned. I can tell you a little bit. I got one call to say, "We think we do inspections in Korea. How would we do them?" And my first question was, "Well, how many native Korean speakers are you going to have on the teams?" And the answer is, "Oh, we won't have any. The North Koreans won’t allow them." I said, "Oh really? Well will they give you blindfolds too? You don't understand our lessons, you know. You don't understand the tools of the trade."

Zierler:

Right.

Davis:

I said, "Who's going to back stop the inspectors?" Because we had people here at the States, a very good friend of mine, call Mary once a day and said, "This is where Jay was yesterday. This is how things are going." When we got shot at, out at Fallujah, she was headed across the kitchen at 6AM to turn the radio on and listen to the BBC. And the phone rang, and it was a UN officer from New York, and he said, "I just want you to know, you'll hear on the news that they were shot at out at Fallujah today. Jay is just fine. We've talked to him. He will send you a message within a few hours. It'll come to the Lab by fax. They'll deliver it to you." But he said, "Everything's okay." The message was duly delivered to our house. A couple of years later, we were at an APS meeting in New York, and she discovered he was in the hotel. Mary insisted that I find him, bring him downstairs, and buy him a drink. (laughs) To thank him. So we were well taken care of in the fold, as were those at home. And we appreciated that. That's why when you talk about new inspections, you say, "Who's going to do that?" There's sadly not much collective memory of how to do this.

Zierler:

What was David Kay like to work with? What was he like as a person?

Davis:

Oh, David's a lot of fun. He's a Texan too. So we got along on that score. He’s assertive and demanding. He's harder-edge than I am about saying, "Oh, they're lying to you, Jay. Don't pay attention to that lie, they're lying to you again. You're not being tough enough." After it was all over, David and I disagreed some on the extent at which we should keep poking at them, you know. I think he thought they might be cheating, I didn't think they were cheating. But he was a charmer to work with. I mean, I'd follow the guy anywhere. I said that to people. I sometimes disagree with him, but if he wants me to boot up and head for the field, I'll boot up and head for the field in a minute. Very good background for that. I think he was an undergraduate physicist who got a law degree. So he's a good mix of skill. Hell of a negotiator. Hell of a hard-ass negotiator, which was essential. When the other guys have guns and you don't, you've got to use whatever edge you can get.

Zierler:

A retrospective question: over all of your decades at Livermore, what was the training that you got there that was most useful to you in Iraq?

Davis:

One thing I did at Livermore was take on lots of other duties as assigned. And probably the one thing that was extremely useful to me was that for about six years, I was one of the lab's, "Laboratory Emergency Duty Officers" or LEDOs. We had an earthquake out here in 1980, and things fell over and got hurt, and we didn't manage the press very well. You know, an earthquake at a nuclear weapons lab, you can imagine the press coverage. And the Lab decided they needed to do better, and they needed to have a system that could handle it if the director wasn't there or as was likely, the director was not somebody who could stand in front of 100 reporters well. No harm, no foul. So, they picked mid-level managers and delegated the Director’s authority to them. These were engineers or scientists who were technically knowledgeable about a wide spectrum of lab programs so we could speak of them to the media or outside agencies. We were trained to manage lab fire and security in an earthquake or a terrorist event. We had an emergency command center. We would practice with security and fire forces enough so they would accept our direction, not at the nitty-gritty of their jobs but at the cosmic direction of, "Make sure you've got people on all the perimeters." You know, stuff like that. And a ton of media training. A ton of media training. Thus, you could stand in front of the media and not be surprised, not get flustered. So that was immensely valuable to me. I was already pretty good at it. When I was at DTRA, my interpreter, who was my Russian and Ukrainian interpreter, she said, "You know, you're really easy to interpret for. You speak in sound bites. Why is that?" And I said, "Well, two reasons. One, I've had a ton of media training. So I'll answer a question and I'll shut up. I also said, "The other is I used to be able to interpret myself. I could do English-German, German-English pretty well. I was very proud of that. I know what your job is like. I know how to make your job easier." She said, "Oh, thank you." The media skill is just immensely useful. That, and to go back where I started, having been an actor in high school helped too.

Zierler:

(laughs) Jay, were there any dicey situations where you legitimately feared for your life in Iraq?

Davis:

I think only that day out at Fallujah where they started shooting, and you weren't sure what that would mean. And I had to, having worked with the military, I have a good sense of what you can and can't do. Normally David [Kay] or I would be the person doing confrontation. But I would say, "Look, understand this rule. You can insult a major or a colonel. You can get in his face. I wouldn't touch him, but you can get in his face, because he understands that you're a political threat." I said, "If you slap a sergeant or a corporal, he's likely to drop that weapon and put four bullets in you. Because that's what he's trained to do. So, hands to yourself, three-year olds. And don't threaten casually." The story I was going to tell you, which you'd like, the Iraqis liked. One day we kept having doors that were locked, and they said, "We can't find the keys, we can't find the keys." So that night, I went over to the UN warehouse, and I got a big fire axe. And I came out the next morning with a fire axe strapped to the back of my pack. And my personal escort said, "What is that?" And I said, "That's the key." Doors opened thereafter.

Zierler:

(laughs)

Davis:

Never took it off the pack, David. But I think they also didn't doubt that I would take it off the pack.

Zierler:

Jay, if there are sensitive details that you can't talk about still, I certainly understand, but I'm curious the extent to which you worked with intelligence agencies. The extent to which the CIA or the DIA was part of your day-to-day.

Davis:

Well, we obviously had overhead photographs. That you don't usually see-- well, these days, you could get them, for God's sake, from Google. But in the early 1990s, we were given them, and this is the interesting split. When we were in the States, we were allowed to look at the ultimate high-resolution photographs of places we would be. Of, you know, the targets of the inspection or what had been there before we got there. Stuff like that. We carried into the country sometimes degraded photographs. So, if we lost one, they wouldn't have compromised ability. But we certainly had discussions with the intelligence community as American citizens who were going to be part of a multinational team. You've got to understand, the information didn't percolate beyond us in some cases. But as American citizens who were part of a multi-national team, but that's when I learned one of the real dangers of being with the intelligence people is, they don't like to brief you on what they don't understand. They're not good at that. Tell me what part of your job, David, you can't do. They don't like that discussion. And so one of my greatest frustrations is when we were looking for the coil winder. The coils for the magnetic separators were five meters in diameter. They were huge buggers. And so there had to be a coil winder somewhere. And I couldn't find it and I couldn't find it. And I finally got into a building three times the size of a garage, and the building was empty, but on the floor in the dust were five footprints. in a circular array. And I said, "Dammit, that was where the coil winder was. That was what was in here." So I come back, I'm at the Department of Energy down in the basement in the SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility], and we're giving a briefing on what we found. And I said, "You know my frustration is I found the building, here's the building," and I lay down everything, "but I can't find the coil winder." And this little [guy] gets up and he says, "Oh, I wonder if that's what we call the ship's wheel." And he runs out of the room, and he runs back, and he puts on the projector a goddamn satellite photo that shows the coil winder sitting outside the same building. Because he didn't understand what it was, he didn't show it to us. And a Special Forces colonel had to pull me off of him. I had him, and I was headed for the wall. I was going to bounce him off the wall. And I said, "You dumb son of a bitch, I put men and women out in a place they could have gotten shot at, and you're not smart enough to have shown that to us, because you won't tell us what you don't know." I taught them a pretty good lesson that day. But that recurred. Even when I was at DTRA, you’d have conversations with the intelligence guys and you're never sure you've seen everything. Because they have this tendency to hold back the 10% they don't understand, and they don't want you doing their job. A similar weakness of some of the inspectors, and a frustrating weakness, is since they had had an intelligence briefing, they viewed their job in Iraq as to validate that briefing, you know? Find what they told me. Well, what they told you turns out not to be right. I had a couple guys who kept looking for, you know, some phantom tetrode that didn't exist, and they didn't know it. And they were sure if they'd found that, they would have found "the" proof. And knowing how power supplies were built, there was no way I could convince them that they weren't going to find what they were looking for. So, the frustration cuts both ways. You've got to be jaundiced about what they told you, and then you've got to be a little jaundiced about your belief in it.

Zierler:

Jay, given the massive bureaucracy and inherent complexity of the UN as an organization, in what ways was the UN a liability for your work, and in what ways was it an asset?

Davis:

Oh, I think for us it was an asset, David. Because they created a Special Commission. They didn't try to run this out of an office in Vienna where the IAEA did non-proliferation inspections. They understood this was not a non-proliferation inspection of the sort they do, you know, to verify that the reactor is okay and to verify that, you know, the enrichment facility is not diverting stuff. That this was an adversarial, challenging thing. No criticism to the IAEA, but their inspections are sort of like National Science Foundation site visits. You know, you go, you look at it, yeah, it's okay. Check off the boxes. And David would criticize the inspectors if they acted that way. This is very much, I'm there to challenge you. I don't have to obey the nice diplomatic rules. I'm not here under a treaty, by the way. We were there under a cease-fire resolution, and our rules were set up by a cease-fire resolution, which is a very different cat. Every now and then, the military would put on a display for us, and it was wonderful. On the second inspection, we were up outside of Mosul looking for stuff, and the Australians have a wonderful word. Are you familiar with the word "stroppy"?

Zierler:

No.

Davis:

It means to be cheeky. The Iraqis were just pushing back, pushing back, pushing back, kind of getting in our faces, and I don't know how it was done. I wasn't the member that had access, but one of the members somehow arranged a demonstration. We're out in the open field, way the hell out in the desert, and suddenly you hear this warm sound. It's the warm sound of General Electric jet engines. And two F-16s at about 1000 feet come over us, and go past us to the horizon. They make a chandelle turn where they turn into each other, and then they come back at us at 500 feet. And as they come back and get right over us, they turn straight up and light the afterburners. There is a gigantic “kaboom,” and they're gone out of sight. The Iraqis were very well-behaved after that. They had seen all of that they ever wanted to see. And the hint that it was available on request was fairly intimidating. When people asked me, "Did you have guns?" I would answer nah, didn't want guns, didn't want to have a gun. Guns would cause a mistake, you know? It's better that you not have a gun, let the other guy be burdened with his gun. But two F-16s were sure nice.

Zierler:

(laughs) Jay, what were your impressions of Hans Blix? Was he the right man for the job?

Davis:

No. Hans led the first inspection. He was a... the IAEA sometimes suffers what was called "clientitus." They become captive to the client. He was very resistant to the notion that the Iraqis had violated the Non-Proliferation treaty. Because he was the guardian of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So after the event at Fallujah when we got photographs of the hardware, he and, oh, his Egyptian... oh God, I can't remember his name. He ran for president of Egypt. He was the IAEA Chief Counsel. They actually flew in on a charter jet, and we briefed them in Iraq, and Hans was very unhappy with what we'd discovered. When David Kay left the Special Commission and took his job at the Uranium Institute in London, David conducted a guerrilla war against Hans Blix for some time. But Hans was just not helpful. The man that replaced him is another Swede, another past Foreign Minister. Much more successful. But his name is buried in the fog of my mind. Was famously described as a man with a whim of iron. Which I just love. I'll scream his name out at 3am but I don't have it right now.

Zierler:

What about Mohamed ElBaradei?

Davis:

Oh that was the attorney. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the Chief Counsel, and much more reasonable, much more reasonable. I would say he was embarrassed by what we found, as opposed to being resistant to it, and he may have been the one that said, "You know, I can't get over the fact that these people lied to me. They lied to me. They are my friends. There's a fair, fair problem with violation of trust." By the way, you had asked about the Iranians. One thing that puzzled us is that despite having fought a war and having had a fair number of cohorts inside the country, the Iranians never found this program. The Israelis never found this program. Or if they did, they certainly never admitted it. A good example, the facility at Tarmiyah, which had a quarter of a gigawatt of power pulled into it, was hard to find because the power feed terminated 15 miles away and then came underground, for God's sake. And the security fences were miles outside the perimeter. It was just, you know, big damned industrial complex sitting out in the middle of nothing. Having said that, we bombed it all to hell in one night. We certainly must have had some good photo analysts who had been watching it. But again, I have no view into how that process worked, but it all went away in one night. In fact, one of the Iraqi engineers lived in the village 15 kilometers away, and he said, "You know, even 15 kilometers away, a B-52 raid is a pretty terrifying thing.”

Zierler:

(laughs) Sure.

Davis:

He said, "There were people in my village that didn't quit screaming until hours after the planes went away."

Zierler:

Jay, who were some of your key partners in the Bush administration? Like Thomas Pickering, for example. How closely did you work with Pickering?

Davis:

Oh, I never worked with Pickering. He was the US ambassador to the UN in the Clinton administration when I gave my briefing to the Security Council. And if you read that brief, I screwed up on the view graphs. The projector couldn't project my pictures of the trucks in the field, and I wasn't smart enough to hand them out. And the Russian ambassador said, "You know, I hope the UN buys better cameras the next time." I just flubbed completely. I don't remember, I flubbed completely. But at the end of my briefing, Ambassador Pickering looked at me and he gave a thumbs-up hand motion (laughs) Which made me feel an awful lot better, a thumbs-up. I thanked him for that, and I ran into him, God, at the Cosmos Club in Washington years later, and identified myself. And he said, "Oh, yeah, I remember you." And I said, "I just want you know that I appreciated that." But David, you do the job, you go away. I'm 2,500 miles from him. I don't see him anymore. It's been five years since I was in Washington. I have no plans to go back to Washington, so you accept it and you move on. I mean, in the interim, I've been president of the Hertz Foundation. I now have a job running a non-profit. So, that part of my life is gone. Turned in my security clearances, turned in my intelligence clearances, don't even go to the lab anymore.

Zierler:

Jay, did you ever feel any dual or divided loyalties in terms of the mandate that you had from the UN? And being an American citizen?

Davis:

I didn't. I had to work on some of the inspectors who kept saying things like, "Well, it's important to find this for my lab." Or, "Aren't you concerned that you find it so your lab will get the credit?" And I said, "Excuse me. Pull the ID card you have in your pocket out and look at it. You're not here for your lab. You're not here for the United States. You're here to do this to the UN." So I was the enforcer of that. I had no problem. Now, I think David, it would have been hard for me to be put in the situation where it would come up. You know, the utterly wild hypothetical would be, what if we had discovered a purloined American classified document? That’s far-fetched, but what would I have done if I had found something I recognized as coming from Livermore or Los Alamos? And that's the kind of thing that would have put you in that situation. But no, no problem for me.

Zierler:

And what did you do when you came back? When you wrapped up the report, what was your next move?

Davis:

Went back to the Lab, went back to my job, started working with the kids doing AMS work. You know, every now and then, I'd get a phone call and asked a question. In '92, when the South Koreans thought they were going to sign an arms control treaty with North Korea, you've heard this story before? So that's only 28 years ago. The State Department summoned me back for a two-day session when they were briefing South Korean military on, you know, what the inspector's role would be, how to behave this as an inspector. I think that may have been my last overt connection with our government and the inspection business. I mean, when I was at DTRA, we had inspection teams that were still in Iraq and they were my guys. They were my military. But I wasn't part of picking the missions. My job was to see they had boots and food and transportation and interpreters and stuff like that.

Zierler:

Did you have any idea--

Davis:

I didn't play a role. Wouldn't have wanted to.

Zierler:

Did you have any idea when you got back from Iraq that something like the directorship of DTRA was on your horizon in the near future?

Davis:

Not at all. Never imagined it in the World.

Zierler:

You thought you were out?

Davis:

But I was again sort of the right guy at the right time. I had credibility with the military, because I'd worked with them. I'd been an inspector. I'd been out there at the point of the spear, and they respect that. You know, the fact that you went without a gun and the other guys have guns. You guys got shot at, the military respects that. I certainly had the administrative skills to indicate I could run a merger and build an organization, and that was a good part of it, because I had to put three separate things together. Two agencies in one office to build a new organization, and that's like helping a cow give birth to a calf, you know? Mergers were tricky because everybody thinks, "I've lost my seal and my flag and they're taking my resources, you know, and I'm going to have to move out of my building eventually." So quite apart from the mission, an enormous number of bureaucratic hurts that have to be healed, to help to have a guy from 2,500 miles away come in. It also helped that I have good social skills, David. I didn't make a classic Lab mistake, which is you go back to Washington and you take your administrator and your secretary. No. Only Mary went with me and when I walked in the door I picked my secretary from the crew there, and, the military gave me my administrative staff. I got a dream. My Chief of Staff was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force with a PhD in computational fluid dynamics, how can you be better off than that? And a military aide who was a former ground launch cruise missile squadron commander, a bright young lieutenant colonel who'd actually had physical possessions of nuclear weapons. They could sit me down with the door closed, and I would say, "Okay, quick, teach me etiquette. Simple things like inside this office, I can call you Tom and Mike and you can call me Jay. But outside, I assume it's got to be Colonel Hopkins, Lieutenant Colonel Slifka and Doctor Davis. Is that right?" And they said, "Yeah, sir, you've got the lessons right." If you do stuff like that and you don't screw up.

Zierler:

In terms of understanding where DTRA sits in the overall national security organization, as director, who do you report to?

Davis:

Well, the organization chart has changed, but at the time, I reported to Jacques Gansler, who was the Deputy Associate Secretary for Technology, Acquisition, and Logistics. Okay, so I was under an Associate Secretary, but Hans Mark was down the hall as DDR&E, so Hans could kind of jerk me around if he wanted to, although he didn't. My day-to-day report was to Jacques Gansler's deputy, a retired admiral upper half, David Oliver, who was an attack boat skipper. An absolute charmer of a guy. A tough bugger. If you've ever read the book, Blind Man's Bluff, you should if you haven't. It's about the attack sub that put recorders on Soviet cables. That's David. He won't tell you that. But the Pentagon will. David commanded that sub when they did those missions. He's an absolute charmer, just tough as nails. And fun to work with.

Zierler:

What were some of the most urgent issues that were confronting you when you assumed the directorship of DTRA?

Davis:

Well, integration of the organization. You know, just what the military calls, "Roads and Commodes," David. I mean, making the pieces work. It's a $2 billion budget. You're not sure in a merger that the books will work until you close them at the end of the first year, so you better have a good chief financial officer. I had a wonderful one. It was easier than -- managing $2 billion at the Pentagon was a lot easier than managing $20 million or $40 million at the Laboratory. Much easier. Trying to understand the role of nuclear weapons going forward, because I inherited what was called the Special Weapons Agency, which had been the Defense Nuclear Weapons Agency, which was still struggling with the end of testing. And not being the biggest dog on the walk. And having to listen to statements like, "Well, you know, the comprehensive weapons treaty in Europe is maybe as important as what you do." That would shock them, you know, that it was not a nuclear agency. And that was a shock, that it was part of an agency that did other things. But simple things like housekeeping. We were originally in one of the black cubes at Dulles. God knows you've seen those a thousand times going in and out of the airport. We had no security that mattered, but we were on the airport perimeter, we couldn't put security around it. I went to John Hamre, and I said, "John, I'm not a fearful guy, but I'm the only person on your staff who's had his lab blown up by terrorists, okay?" I said, "I've got people in a building that two teenagers in a pickup truck could drive through the front door and embarrass us politically if my lobby got blown up by a 100 pounds of explosive it's an embarrassment." I said, "I've got to get out of there." And John said, "Oops, yeah, I guess you're right. We'd better get you a building." That was kind of fun. The DOD can give you a $60 million building. We looked for some vacant ones, there weren't any, so we went to Fort Belvoir and put a wing on a building at Fort Belvoir. So we knew we were going there, and typical Pentagon fashion, they had no problem tossing up a two-story trailer complex on the other side of the Fort Belvoir parking lot for temporary use. This is why I love the military. They like pranks. I come in the first day, and there's this giant banner across the front of it that says, "Welcome to Camp Davis." (laughs) Okay? They gave it to me to bring home when I left. I have it, I think it's up at our cabin. I have it somewhere. The military are wonderful to work with. And you learn useful lessons for a physicist. I say to people, the military are into training, not education. They train you. They can train you better than anybody in the world, but when they train you, they are not looking for creativity. I want you to fight your tank next like we learned to fight tanks at Fort Hood. Now, and this is what you learn, creativity comes when I say to you, "Major, we're going to send you war college. And at war college, you get to be creative. You get to write a thesis and challenge all our doctrines and tell us we're doing it wrong." And I would explain to them, the lieutenant colonel that writes a thesis on tank warfare that pisses off the lieutenant general in charge of tanks, is the guy that someday will be the next lieutenant general in charge of tanks. That's how they find him. But they carefully separate education and creativity from training, and for those that are lucky enough to step to the education side, they do a wonderful job. And we used to always laugh about, the Hell you have an Air Force General with a Master’s degree in economics from Wharton? Well, my first deputy was an Air Force Major General, who was a missile officer with an MBA from Wharton. And pretty quickly, you learn, that's a good thing to have. That's a very good thing to have. So they're really good at that. Since they change their careers regularly, they'd better be good with change.

Zierler:

To what extent were you focused on Al-Qaeda when you became director of DTRA?

Davis:

Didn't know it existed. Didn't cross my horizon as a threat, although we were supposed to worry about terrorism, and there's some embarrassment about 9/11. Because I was Director of DTRA when the USS Cole was bombed. And I said, "Okay, I understand how to work a sequence. The sequence is: car bombs, they've done car bombs. Next, boat bombs. The next thing will be airplanes." But I thought of airplanes as the target, not as the weapon. And so we forget, an airplane is 100 tons of explosives when it's fueled. I was worried about a military transport that takes off from somewhere in Africa, and over the mid-Atlantic, a canister of Sarin in it opens. And the terrorists bring a plane down with 200 people by poisoning everybody in the airplane. That was the threat I was worried about. I wasn't smart enough to think of the plane as the weapon. I think I had even burdened my successor at DTRA with this particular scenario. I had the right idea, but I was profoundly wrong, David. And you learn a fair amount of humility, and again, to come back to the intelligence guys, that's part of their problem. They've got to guess the next step. It's not easy. In fact, I got so far-- you'll love this one-- I got so far as shutting down US air transport. And the way I was going to do it, this is being over-clever. This a physicist. At 9 o'clock in the morning, two pounds of high explosives will go off between the front tires of a plane at Dulles. At 9:05, two pounds of explosives will go off between the front tires of two planes at Chicago. At 9:10, two pounds of high explosives will go off between the front tires of three planes at Denver and Salt Lake. And at 9:20, two planes at SFO, two planes at LAX. Easy to do, and it shuts all of our transport down while we check every plane and perimeter. Wrong target. Wrong target, you know? An interesting economic result, but wrong target. So I'm not a bad terrorist, but I'm not a good terrorist, David. (laughs) Maybe I should be proud of that. (both laugh)

Zierler:

Given the tensions that were brewing in Iraq in the late 1990s, I wonder if your experience early in that decade gave you any special insight as to what was happening there and where things were headed with the [second] Bush administration?

Davis:

I don't think so. I mean, the Bush administration brought in a cast of characters that were worse than I imagined. I'll tell you just one cameo of it. While I was still-- I carried over for six months. I wasn't a political appointee, so I could stay out my three-year career of duty. Which ended in late May of 2001. And a problem popped up, a nuclear weapons-related problem popped up, after we'd changed administrations. And the Pentagon did as it often did. They said, "Well, Davis, you're our pet nuclear physicist. Would you please get up to the Secretary's Office and brief Secretary Rumsfeld on this? Do you think this is a real threat, is this a real problem?" Only time I ever saw Rumsfeld. It was a very good briefing, you know. Very good briefing. He understood that it might be a threat. And had some clever ideas for how to deal with it. But in the room is Paul Wolfowitz, his Deputy, who's running in hysterical circles in the room, blaming this bad thing on some arms control policy decision made in the Carter administration. Okay? I mean the guy was manifestly unfit for the job he was in. His whole thing was to find how to lay political blame for it, and Rumsfeld is very quietly and calmly solving the problem. And then I only met -- They replaced the head of policy, whose name I don't remember, with a guy named Douglas Feith. Who was supposed to meet me, but he came and his cell phone went off, and he said, "Well, I don't have time for you now." And he left, so he left. He was famously described by a four-star general as the dumbest fucking son of a bitch in the US government. So they brought in to the Pentagon some real second-raters, okay? They brought back some paranoids from the Reagan administration. Oh, who was my good friend that writes for the Washington Times? Frank Gaffney. Frank Gaffney had been in policy in the Reagan administration. They brought Gaffney back. Gaffney, when I gave a briefing one time, once accused me of being a communist agent because I hadn't found the nuclear weapons that he knew Iraq was hiding. So obviously I was a communist dupe. I mentioned to General Scowcroft I almost reached over the table, grabbed him by the tie, and crushed his nose. And Scowcroft said, "Oh, what a tragedy that you didn't."

Zierler:

Where did you go after you stepped down from DTRA?

Davis:

Back home to Livermore. I was 59 that summer. When you work for the University of California, age 60 is sort of an intelligence test. If you retired before age 60, you fail the test. If you work after age 60, you fail the test. I had been an Associate Director at the lab. You can't leave and re-enter those jobs. Because it's not like being dean. The Dean can step down and teach junior level quantum mechanics for a couple years, while he intellectually rehabs. I couldn't in good conscience go back to the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, because then they’ve got an old guy sitting over in the corner trying to get up to speed with the young men and women. And by the way, he's costing what four or five postdocs would cost. So that's irresponsible. So I asked Ron Layman to give me a one-year appointment in his policy shop, The Center for Global Security Research. I said I can help you. I can wind down. You know, I can be on call for the government if need be. And then I at the end of a year, I'll happily take myself out, in fact, as a gift to him. So Mary and I could practice to live on my pension, I turned my appointment to an 80% time appointment, because I was going out on an 80% pension. I said, what the hell, we'll learn to do that. And we had Fridays off. It turned out, I didn't get many of those Fridays off, but that was the plan. I did that for a year and responsibly retired. We have two children and four grandchildren and a ski cabin in the Sierras, although we don't go there anymore. We finally looked at ourselves about a year ago and said, "What the hell are two people in their late 70s doing 18 miles from any medical care, up a road that isn't plowed in the winter?" It's a true back country cabin. I have atrial fibrillation and I'm on Warfarin, which is a proper punishment for a Wisconsin graduate student. If I fall on skis or fall on my bike even with a helmet on, it's an instant trip to the hospital for a CAT scan to make sure you're not bleeding inside the skull. The cabin belongs to our kids and grandkids now. We might have the courage to drive up some nice September day, but we haven't been in about a year and a half. We're quite happy in Livermore. We have two acres of land with a one acre vineyard, and we grow grapes and Mary gardens. It will not surprise you that our Pinot Surah is marketed under my Lab nickname, Talking Bull. One of the interesting results of the coronavirus is that we withdrew from our tennis club, where we'd been members for four decades, because Mary didn't want to go to the workout rooms anymore. As I'm nursing a hip towards replacement surgery at some point. I added a tiny mini bike that I do 40 minutes on in the morning while watching CNN and the local news. Then I put in a good German weight station in the garage, so I go out and do another 40 minutes of weight work. I'm down 30 pounds and carrying more muscle than I did in my 40s when I could do a triathlon. There have been some benefits for me. We're getting a little cabin-weary here at the house, but it's okay.

Zierler:

(laughs) Jay, what were some of the major advances of the AMS Laboratory since you had been gone?

Davis:

We, i.e. my successors, brought to maturity the biomedical AMS program. We started with a machine that occupied 7,000 square feet, which terrified biologists. The bio program has progressed through two successions of smaller and smaller machines. These smaller spectrometers have been supported by the NIH as national user facilities for over two decades, a not bad accomplishment for a weapons lab. AMS has now stepped away from accelerator technology to laser technology. Now there's a tabletop machine that uses a ring down laser, that you can do AMS work with on biological samples. It doesn't have the sensitivity for archaeology, but you can do biological work on a thing that costs $150,000 and fits on the standard lab bench. To my pleasure the progression of hardware has been very exciting. The big machine still gets used. It gets used for precision measurements in the geosciences. It has grown to have plutonium and uranium capability across all isotopes. It can be used for nuclear forensics and the arms control/intelligence community understands what it is to have hardware on a retainer basis. It runs short notice challenge unknowns every now and then, so against the day someone comes tearing in through the door and says, "We need these samples analyzed right now." It can be done. There's some social successes in moving into the biosciences, and some great social successes at getting some communities to understand what a retainer business model is. I'm very proud. The staff is 35 or 40 young people now. I don't know most of them. It's got a budget of probably $15-20 million a year. It's on its fifth five-year contract running a dedicated facility for the National Institutes of Health. I thought it was kind of fun to bring an NIH facility into a weapons lab. Socially very successful, and you'd like this. Because when we set it up, the Regents of the University put money into it. They gave us a quarter million dollars. In exchange for that, I got the Lab to sign a Memorandum of Understanding. Not a Memorandum of Agreement. Look up the difference. A memorandum of understanding with the University that said the university students and staff would be guaranteed access to the facility. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So when all the hysteria about Chinese nationals erupted, CAMS could hold up the paper and say, "See this paper you signed with the Regents? You really don't want to irritate the Regents, do you?" So the Deputy Director of the Lab at the time, Jack Kahn who left the lab to become President of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, laughed all the way through the signing, because Jack knew exactly what we were doing. The Lab never saw it coming. And DOE never saw it coming.

Zierler:

I want to ask, obviously you didn't pursue an academic path for your career, but I wonder what opportunities you've seen to serve in a mentor capacity to younger scientists?

Davis:

Well, as far as I'm concerned, I did that with CAMS primarily, because you know, I would never have gotten tenure at a university, David. I'm not a guy that would publish enough tiresome papers that he would get by a tenure committee. I'm always looking for the next piece of hardware to build, and building hardware is rewarded at a national lab. It's not so much rewarded at universities. I've mentored postdocs. I have coupled young people, men and women who come from an academic environment, with a national lab environment, and taught them how to swim in that water. Over 300 students have taken their thesis or postdoc data at CAMS, which world not be shabby for a university laboratory. I've raised their game by making them think bigger. Our first non-physicist staff member, whom I dearly love, was Sue Trumbore, who for ten years now has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. Sue had done wonderful work for Wally Broker, and then done work at ETH Zurich as a postdoc and then came here. Sue was the first earth scientist who realized what it meant to do a suite of 1,000 measurements or 5,000 measurements instead of 10 or 15 to try to understand the carbon cycle. Sue's career just exploded. She very quickly became a tenured professor at UC Irvine, and got her own the accelerator there. She still has a legacy appointment at Irvine, and when she gets tired of Max Planck, she can come back to Irvine. Sue was an example of someone who I mentored or enabled her by giving her a tool that other people didn't have access to. That was usually my pitch. When you come here, this is a tool no one else has, or interestingly, no one else has used this way. We were the lab that pushed productivity, productivity, productivity. If you go to the university AMS lab, it's usually dedicated to measuring the Herr Doctor Professor's samples. And it doesn't strive to do things beyond that. The head of a British lab once said to me, "Davis, you have brought an ungentlemanly air of competition to this business." And I said, "Well, I'm not a university. If I do it just as well as you do, the Laboratory should say, 'Shouldn't we shut you down?'" You know, this is no place for an academic institute. "I have to do something at industrial level that enables people inside the lab and outside the lab." I'm very proud that lots of samples come from industry. Lots of samples come from other universities. We used to call that Dates for Dollars in the (laughs) geosciences game or archaeology game. But people still come here because they can get 200 samples done in one run on the accelerator, or two runs on the accelerator, rather than over six or eight months and worry, gee, are the April samples the same as the November samples? I think creating a tool and then teaching young people to use it -- But sadly I wouldn't know the names of the postdocs now if I were given an exam, and as I said, I don't have a badge. I am thinking of getting them to give me a visitor badge, so I can just go look at the hardware occasionally.

Zierler:

Jay, on the question of competition, I wonder if you can reflect at all about the legendary competition between Livermore and Los Alamos, and how that may have influenced your career at all?

Davis:

Oh, actually, this will amuse you. When I was at Wisconsin, we saw Los Alamos as our competitor in low energy nuclear physics. Livermore didn't exist. Los Alamos loomed large on the horizon. Partly because after the war, Los Alamos stayed open to the academic community. When Livermore opened it was closed to the larger academic community. Willy Haeberli is a good example. When I first came to the lab, I wanted Willy to visit but he was still a Swiss citizen. To get permission for a foreign national to come then in took 60 days advanced approval. And Willy said, "Screw that, that's humiliating." Because Willy could go to Los Alamos any time. Livermore chose to wall itself off from the national nuclear physics community. I used Willy as a mentor in the middle 80s when I went back to run the nuclear physics division the Nuclear Sciences Advisory Committee (NSAC), had 100 MEV variable energy neutron physics facility on its wish list. It was priority number three. And this is funny because it's the origin of CAMS. I realized, I can take the spare Van de Graaff at Washington, and put a superconducting post-accelerator on it. And here's a typical Davis trick. To make neutrons, I will run a tritium beam into a liquid deuterium target. Nobody cares if you blow up a liquid deuterium target. If you blow up a liquid tritium target, it's the end of the Goddamn world, okay? But then I have a zero to 100 MEV neutron physics facility. So Ivan Proctor, my deputy, and I priced the thing out. We put a marker down at Washington to get the accelerator, costed out the linac and put together about a $25 million project proposal. I had built some stuff by then, so had a good proposal. But I thought, "Okay, the way to check this out is have Willy look at it." So I flew to Madison. I said, "Willy, here,” dropping it on his desk He said, "What's that?" I said, "It's a project proposal." He said, "Go get a cup of coffee." I did and sat there at Willy's desk. Then Willy spends, I don't know, 35, 45 minutes going through it. And he turns and he closes it. And he looks at me and he says, "Jay, we're so proud of you. You've grown up to be everything we hoped." He said, "Here, take this home and throw it away." (both laugh) And I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, it's the right proposal, but you've missed two things. One, it's number three on the priority list. Number three never gets built. It was put there as a space holder. Forget it." He said, "And the other is you're at Livermore. You are not part of the peer-reviewed national nuclear physics community. Your facilities and your program do not get zero-summed with the rest of us. Like it or not, you've been funded by money from the weapons program. We sort of resent that, or we're envious of it, depending upon which day. But you have not been part of us, and to be very blunt, we wouldn't trust you to run a national facility. Because we think something goofy would happen." And Livermore had done that before I got there. Livermore was going to build a 100 MEV electron Linac at the same time that the Orella Linac was proposed at Oak Ridge. And the national community proposed that it just build one at Livermore, and then it could be a shared facility. But the deputy director of Livermore, who I'll not identify, said, "Oh no. We would never touch that. It will be a weapons facility and we have to be able to preempt it at any time." So that message was heard loud and clear. So as far as competition between the labs, there wasn't competition. I took the accelerator that did not become the injector for a linac and said, "Well, what else can I do?" And designed an AMS lab, which originally was called the Multi User Tandem Facility, to be used for ion beam analysis and other stuff, you now. Not nuclear physics. And then got UC to be a partner, and therein the door opened to the academic community. Sandia and one Lab division joined as partners as well.

Los Alamos did not go into that game. Chose not to go there. And there was no competition between us at all. Their earth sciences program did not go in a direction that needed us to measure samples. I'm sort of unaware if we've done anything for Los Alamos. No harm no foul, just a different kind of program. Then we just ground down the university labs. An exciting year for them was to do 1500 to 2500 samples, and I think we did 10,000 our first year. One year when we stressed the machine, we might have done 35,000 samples. Simply because we were delivering an intellectually-different activity.

Zierler:

Jay, how did you get involved with the Hertz Foundation and what were some of your achievements with that affiliation?

Davis:

Oh, Hans Mark again, who like Heinz Barschall, always appears in my life, had been on the Board of the Hertz Foundation for a long time. And he came to me and he said, "You know, our Board's getting kind of old and fixed in its ways and needs a wild man, and would you mind joining the Board of the Hertz Foundation?" This was about '92, I think. And I said sure. I vaguely knew about Hertz because Hertz Hall was at Livermore. I knew Edward Teller was involved with it. So I just sat on the board like a potato for 10 or 12 years. And finally, as happens with all small foundations, you notice they're beginning to run out of money. I said to the other directors very bluntly, "This has been a fantastic 40-year run, but you have one of two choices. You either can commit to fundraising, or you can write a termination plan. And it's okay to wrap it up because a 40-year run producing all these bright young men and women is wonderful." We didn't have Nobel laureates then, but we knew they were coming. And I forgot to watch my mouth, because a couple years later, the chairman of the board and one of the senior guys called me aside and said, "Well, okay, you shot your mouth off. Would you take the Foundation over and run it? Because it's in both financial and administrate trouble. Would you take it over and run it?" I agreed to sign on, gifted them by taking no salary for the first six months while I figured out what the problems were. Changed out some of the staff that had the sort of problems you expect in a small foundation. I won't go into them. Made a plan to move its offices out of a shabby business park near the Lab to nice space downtown, so we weren't an embarrassment in front of the community, and had a place where we could have a cocktail party and bring donors to without embarrassment. And it was a very happy five years, raising money for it, making it run smoothly, and meeting fatuously intelligent and motivated young people who are now part of our lives. But if you are smart you know your limits. In 2014 we did a very good strategic plan, with a very good consultant, and when the President David Galas and I shook hands as the consultant left, and I said, "By the way, David, there's one more thing." And he said, "What?" And I said, "Well, that's a five-year plan and I'm 72. You don't do five year plans with a 72-year-old. You've now got your notice. I'm going to give you a year." And David's tough, he was a fighter pilot before he was a physicist, before he became a great bio scientist, he said, "Okay, I was hoping for a longer runway on that, but okay. We can live with that." I spent a final year, and then very happily handed it off to Robbee Kosak, who has done splendidly. But again, having never had graduate students or postdocs, it was fun to get to meet the brightest graduate students in the world and to mentor them a bit, which I've done somewhat successfully. To watch them grow up and marry, sometimes marry each other, and have children. It's a good end of career feeling. I'm glad to have done it, and thought I was done, and so help me God, here I have a non-profit to run.

Zierler:

(laughs)

Davis:

The only good news is that's two Zoom calls.

Zierler:

Not so much a question, but an observation. Now I know that there is an elite club of two retired physicists who run small wineries. I'm not sure if you know Pier Oddone? He's the former chief of Fermilab.

Davis:

Of course. Oh, I know Pier quite well. I knew him when he was at Berkeley... No, well I don't have a winery. I just have a vineyard. I describe myself as the chief share cropper, David. I'm very good at growing grapes. If I made wine, I would kill people. So we get, oh depending upon how hard we run, we get two to three tons of grapes a year and they're taken out to the winery. Then three years later, I get ten or twelve cases of wine back, and that works fine. Do you ever get out here?

Zierler:

Not as often as I'd like.

Davis:

Should I pour you some wine some day?

Zierler:

I would love it. I would love it.

Davis:

Well, if you come out here, come see us. We'll show you what we call the Physics Farm, in fact.

Zierler:

There you go. There you go.

Davis:

So is Pier actually making wine?

Zierler:

He makes wine, yeah.

Davis:

Where is he physically? Up near Napa?

Zierler:

I think he's in Sonoma.

Davis:

Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay, well close enough, yeah. All right. Well good, I'm glad to hear that. He was always a charmer.

Zierler:

Well, Jay, on that note, I'm absolutely thrilled that we connected through John Brown, and it's been an absolute delight spending this time with you. I really want to thank you for doing this.

Davis:

Well, I'm glad to do it. As I say, people sometimes ask me why don't I write a book about Iraq? And I say, look, there's no book there. But there's a heck of a good collection of bar stories.

Zierler:

There you go.

Davis:

So I'd be glad to sit with you in a bar and tell you bar stories, but there's no book.

Zierler:

That's great.

Davis:

It was a pleasure meeting you. I don't envy you shoveling this mass into a pile, but good luck.

Zierler:

No, no, no. Not at all.

Addendum, December 6, 2020:

I would like to add one last story. It is an AMS story and a Heinz Barschall story, showing that the bond to one’s major professor lasts forever.

It was self-evident from the early days of AMS that this was a tool obviously well-suited to use in biology. Any time you can pick up orders of magnitude in the detection of isotopes used in the biosciences as tracers, it is just compulsory. Yet the early AMS practitioners shied away from even trying because of the history of contamination accidents in counting laboratories in archaeology and the geosciences. Our attitude was a bit different. In typical arrogant physicist fashion, I figured that with 14C one could access 90% of interesting biological processes and with tritium another 2-3%.

We went to our bioscience division at the Lab and explained what we could do. They chose to take a risk and put together an experiment to measure the binding of the metabolites of one of the compounds from cooking beef to gut cells of mice. It is a heterocyclic amine identified as a cause of stomach cancer in the western diet. A courageous young postdoc in toxicology agreed to risk his career with these crazy people and prepared the doses, dose the mice, and extract the DNA from the gut cells. We built a small sample prep lab in the bioscience area to make sure nothing could contaminate our sample prep labs. The prepared graphite was loaded into sample holders there and then brought to the accelerator.

The highest dose given was right at the lower level of detection by scintillation counting. The doses ranged down by dilution in powers of ten until a dose at which no effect could be expected to be seen because it was at the natural abundance 14C in living animals. The experiment was a ROARING SUCCESS. We got a beautiful five-decade long dose response curve that was straight as a string from the highest dose to the natural threshold! We physicists learned a humbling biology lesson from the data. As the mice were all genetically identical, all the data points from the five mice at each dose fell right on top of each other! I had predicted “biological noise” and a spread. Our biology colleagues were greatly amused.

Now where to publish? This was not suitable for a physics journal, nor a toxicology journal. We had opened the door to a new research field and wanted a splash. Maybe if we got lucky a journal cover. The obvious choice was Science. We wrote a nice tight the postdoc was properly the lead author. I as the greybeard claimed last place. We sent it off and waited anxiously.

Submissions to Science and Nature get two reviewers. A negative comment by ether reviewer kills consideration of the article. There is no iteration with the authors or second chance; one strike and you are out. The referee’s reply produced a burst of outrage you cannot imagine. It was:

“This is wonderful work, but I do not believe it.”

After some serious group beer drinking, I came up with Plan B. I still wanted a journal that would be seen by a broad range of scientists, not something that would bury the paper. I remembered the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, admirably suitable. In those days, papers were not submitted directly to PNAS. They had to be submitted and endorsed by a Member of the National Academy. Solution: HEINZ!

I called Heinz and said “Uh, Heinz, I need a favor.” He agreed to consider the paper, so I sent it along. Remember, this was pre-email days so we waited anxiously. Or maybe we used a fax, I forget. He actually was very happy with it, but having been a journal editor himself, objected to some standard bioscience vocabulary as jargon. I calmed my bioscience colleagues down and eventually he agreed to send it in with other less painful modifications. It was duly published, we filed our patents, and the rest is history.

Oh yeah, that young postdoc? He became the head of the bioscience program at Livermore.

The lesson is: never give up and never think you have outgrown your mentors.