C. Paul Robinson

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ORAL HISTORIES

Credit: Sandia National Laboratories

Interviewed by

David Zierler

Interview date

March 26, 2021

Location

Video conference

See catalog record for this interview.

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Interview of C. Paul Robinson by David Zierler on March 26, 2021,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47085

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Well, I had worked at Sandia for fifteen years, ten of those as President and Laboratories Director, one of the longest stints in modern times for a Sandia president. It was the best period of my work life; even though I was on call 24/7 for that decade of service. I still always attend Sandia’s Emeritus Lectures (annually, except for this year’s cancellation because of COVID). I also participate in some in-depth conversations with the Sandia current President, along with several other past Presidents, to discuss the Future of the Lab. I also have lectured at their Senior Management Training courses, to be sure they know the legacy of this great Lab. I also passed along that we must always give full attention to Sandia’s highest goal of “Providing Exceptional Service in the National Interest.”

Two rivers flow nearby to the Detroit area. Since you can easily reach both the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, with the U.S. largest industrial factories concentrated in Michigan, they started running the large forges day and night to make a variety of parts for the war effort. They then put them onto barges to be assembled into the war-time hardware at sites much further south, within the U.S.A. The process to assemble those parts into trucks, tanks, guns, etc. to support the war effort began as these key decision makers rode down each river, making a list of the size of the labor pools at each town or city they encountered along the river. They then determined what size factory would be needed for each of these and each site was assigned the tasks to establishing factories and workers for the assigned roles. Detroit was to immediately begin sending parts to be unloaded at each site: “That one will be a jeep manufacturer,” “This one a tank manufacturer” etc. One great achievement is that in one area where there was a quite large labor pool, they built a very large factory for building fighter airplanes, with the parts to be unloaded at the river’s edge, and then a major assembly facility. And, on the far side of the plant they constructed an airstrip. Remarkably, the first airplane was assembled there, and then flown off to join the war in northern Europe all in less than 8 months.

Dad was still working for Fisher Body in Detroit at that time, and he volunteered to move down-river to set up a very large airplane-assembly plant in Memphis, Tennessee. He soon became a key supervisor for this operation in Memphis, which had a huge labor pool there. He stayed there throughout the war, and then returned to Detroit, where my mother had remained, along with my brother and me, for the entire time. He only had one visit during those war years. But after he came home for two very cold winters, with the third winter being especially horrible. He said, “You know, Mom, you wouldn’t believe how nice the weather is down there in Memphis,” (laughter) and so he packed up the family, and we all moved to Memphis. I was a Yankee in the South, which I have since claimed that’s where I got my first diplomatic training.

Zierler:

When I had first written to Dr. Davis, I told him, “I already know all of the nuclear counters. I taught the labs the last two years here, and I’ll be ready to do research day one.” He said, “Why don’t you come early for the summer trimester as well? Don’t wait till the fall.” So, I spent my first summer doing research in the FSU Tandem Van de Graaff labs.

At the end of that summer, a marvelous thing happened. He noted my involvement with trying to get the whole thing running and run well, which I think probably came from, if not only from my dad, but having taught labs. You learn how to push people to do things right, and how to keep them moving ahead. You’re unhappy if people are moving too slow. One of the things that he noticed and asked- and this is a total problem and it’s human nature, when he said “It bothers me that people don’t volunteer as much as they should, right? It’s like pulling teeth to get volunteers to staff all the shifts for our allotted times (which always required 24/7 full staffing coverage, of course). The Van de Graaff always must run 24/7, seven days a week, right, and so everybody must balance their lives, lectures, studies, test, etc. and the experimental program demands your total attention when you are running it or using it. The team that’s working on their own experiment must be there, but for the other members required to serve shifts, it was always harder to convince them to accept assignments for overnight shifts, especially. So, at the planning meetings it was always difficult to fill out the schedule to make sure you had each of the positions filled, in fact, it was “like pulling teeth” (laughter).

You will love this. Within my first year there, Dr. Davis asked if I would also take over the responsibility for staffing coverage of the Van de Graaff for our allotted days. He said, it’s the worst task I have, and if you’ve been used to motivating and directing undergraduates, you might have a better idea as to how motivate our team to be more flexible in filling out the full coverage we must have, with the right people. Remarkably, I was able to do so. Let me tell you that I thought it was fairly simple, and an obvious way to fix the problems our group was facing. But later on, I learned that my solution became a huge and important practice world-wide for running twentyp-four-hour experiments!

So, I did experiments there, and along the way, the group leader said, “Hey, if you really want to know how to do anything around here, why don’t you join the control room for a time? Then you study everything to understand their inter-workings.” I said, “Sure, I’ll do it,” so I was first assigned to be the Cool-Down Operator on nuclear rocket tests. People trained me day and night; to be sure I wasn’t going to screw it up, but after several reactor tests that we did; one of the top guys, above me, experienced a heart attack during a test -very likely due to the high stress of his responsibilities.

Harold had come to Los Alamos along with his major professor from the University of Chicago: the eminent Enrico Fermi. Harold was a get-things-done Experimental Physicist, and he said, “You know, this is going to be terrible for us not to be able to test because you can’t really do new things without it.” Early-on after becoming the Lab Director, Harold had decided to create what he called the “Advanced Concepts Group”, and I was asked to join it. It was originally staffed by twelve people, and you’ll love this: No two of them were experts in the same field. They were to work with within many other fields, to move rapidly in creating new programs. and in answering challenges that were plaguing the ongoing work. In the end our tasks were to examine and recommend new Advanced Concepts for the future of the Lab.

Here’s how it worked: You would look at the possibilities that could come down the line that might really make huge differences, both scientifically for the first time, but also with the potential to make important contributions to our work and to the world. When you got sufficiently able to elucidate key proposals that the scientists in a part, or parts, of the Lab would get excited about their possible futures; it was expected that at point you would then leave the Advanced Concepts Group to pursue those ideas and proposals. You, and the others who were involved with you, would be assigned to go with you (of course, if they wanted to, it was all voluntary.) We together were expected to then go out into the lab and set up a new organization and start pursuing these new things.

At the time we started, the idea of inertial fusion began to gain a lot of interest. Originally the emphasis was on igniting thermonuclear fusion, not by x-rays (as is done within “a hydrogen bomb”); but instead to ignite the fusion of deuterium/ tritium mixtures using high powered focused pulses of laser light to compress and heat until the fusion components would ignite. There were many challenges! E.g., how could we get extremely high energies into a laser pulse short enough in a short-enough time and very focused into small spots to compress pellets of deuterium-tritium. We began by examining the possibilities for the best ways to create very powerful laser light pulses. I don’t know whether it was the longest straw or the shortest straw, but I drew the creation of chemical lasers as my first item to investigate; and you can likely guess what types of chemistry we began to look at in our earliest attempts to harness the chemical reactions to produce other effects. If you guessed “Explosives” you would be right. And I learned enormous amounts about new technologies, very rapidly. At Los Alamos, we likely had the world’s best explosives chemists including some “true geniuses” about explosives, and this changed me in my next job, as you’ll learn in a minute because I became the first to successfully construct an explosive-powered laser, followed by a lot of others along the line. We started with some chemical lasers which took advantage of the new modeling codes being developed in the Lab’s Theoretical Division, as well as by the explosive experts continuing work to construct new, powerful, and safer explosives for nuclear weapons use, including one where we did a construct such a device and got lots of laser light. We even investigated a miniature underground “nuclear flashlamp,” to detonate a chemical laser mix in an underground-cavity.

Our new partners in these tasks were just great guys. We had a lot of former Caltech folks who had become the leaders of the conventional explosives group. They were brilliant, and they worked with me to do both theory and calculations of the chemistry of a great many explosives to try and get “a laser mix” in the explosive products. It involved a lot of theory development and calculational development along the way. It was exciting, and as well, we were always plowing new ground.

Regarding myself, I think maybe this was where I showed that I really was starting to become even more and more into a “multidisciplined” scientist. I woke up one night saying, “Wow, this is so hard.” But soon an idea came to me that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves only to using chemistry to make laser light. The thought appeared as to what would happen if we turned these two ideas around? That is, instead of using mostly Bunsen burners to make chemistry happen, what if we did the opposite? What if we used lasers to make the chemistry happen? Could we get large volumes of energetic gases or liquids to ignite and produce higher inverted energy states that could be swept by other short pulse lasers; tuned to the dominant light emission levels, and we thereby might create laser amplifiers!” We brought in experts for each of the relevant technology pieces to evaluate and study the possibilities of realizing such laser-controlled chemical laser devices. We started talking with experts for all of the various technologies and science needed. And I had theorists who worked with me and joined our team, and one of my theorists got really into it, saying “Wow, now you’re talking!” But others said, “Look, what’s really wrong with chemistry?” The answer: When you go through chemistry training, you have only one main tool? The answer was the same: A Bunsen burner.

Zierler:

Right.

Robinson:

So, what happens when you slowly heat something up? Answer: It’s always in thermodynamic equilibrium. That very unlikely to achieve population inversions that would enable light amplification (i.e., prevent lasing from happening). You’ve got to get a population inversion, right? We said, but what would happen if we turned it around, and we could tune in many smaller lasers (in short pulses) to rapidly invert the populations of higher energy states in laser media, and then, apply other frequencies to extract and amplify the most favorable laser levels from that energized states, by extracting energy put there by very many smaller lasers?

We also looked at throwing out the use of the Bunsen burners and, instead, start doing chemistry that way. It was an idea that picked up steam, and that’s where we started to collect a lot of patents. I don’t know exactly how many patents, we generated, but around 180 patents, and they’re everything from soup to nuts and multi-authored, because we usually teamed up on these. [Note that, within the National Labs, the government owns the patents, which is a defensive act to avoid the government having to pay others for ideas developed through government funding!]

But first we also looked at the obvious issue of what if we used laser-induced chemistry for purifying substances. It was a hit overnight! When you start looking at this concept, the first problem is matching a laser frequency to the absorbing molecule. That is achievable using tunable laser techniques, which were already appearing. We rapidly became the world center for tunable lasers, capable of trying out such ideas early-on at small scale, to prove its feasibility. We got funding to start developing a “stable of tunable lasers” so we could rapidly map the absorption features to tailor and control the subsequent chemical reactions. We called that Lab the LASL-squared Facility, as the first LASL was the original acronym for the “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory,” with the second LASL to denote the “Laser Applied Spectroscopy Laboratory.” Once you start with a new idea, others get interested in joining in with you, and many successfully jumped in with ideas as to how to improve it. I traveled the world giving talks about new lasers and tried to spread the ideas for the new possibilities we were exploring, and to seek their help in “finding new ways to make chemistry happen in very controlled and unique ways.” The key thesis was that “if one can tune lasers to excite only certain species within complex mixtures, then you open up many possibilities to control the subsequent chemistry that will happen!”

We started sponsoring joint research between ourselves and universities from all around the country to build, invent, and devise tunable lasers until, finally, we were able to tune laser light from the far-infrared through the near-infrared, and all the way through the visible and as far as we could get into the UV. We had the world’s greatest stable of lasers to ever perform chemical studies of new processes. I mean, talk about a heyday! Interested people would come from all over to learn of these techniques and to do joint work with us. People from MIT and Stanford set up groups there with us. It was a great time in the lives of those researchers. That was the period when many of my own patents blossomed.

The first major application to be realized was purification. If we had undesirable impurities, that interfered with what we were trying to do, by “just zapping them with tuned laser light” and we could chemically react them out of the mixture. Soon that idea led immediately to the feasibility of one of the most powerful applications: Laser Isotope Separation. That idea was so inviting, that our effort was escalated to create a separate division of the Lab, AP Division. I was suddenly named as a division leader at Los Alamos, and we started to grow into a large division, all organized around the use of lasers light to purify a great many chemicals and to separate isotopes of many elements. Many other new and exciting possibilities of Applied Photochemistry (using lasers) and controlled chemistry in general began to blossom.

Zierler:

Paul, the laser work, did you see this as part of the larger national security program?

Robinson:

I never looked only at security. We tried to look widely at first, then narrow our focus to advantageous targets. However, I have always been a great believer in National Security because if you’re fighting wars, progress stops! All new thinking comes to a halt, and developments that would benefit people’s lives on earth get stopped or postponed, while the fighting leads only to a great many human lives being lost. The extra security, readily available at Los Alamos, was never real difficulty to doing our research.

But in our heyday of exploring laser-induced chemistry, many new ideas were being produced, and new products and applications were coming to the forefront. I could sit with you all day and tell you how these interesting ideas would bounce into our hopper, and the decision would be: “That’s it. Let’s get to work on that!” Laser purification was just one small example. The new ability to tune in and eliminate, through controlled chemistry, any and all of the impurities was very powerful. People were just beginning to use solid state radiation detectors with germanium and germanium silicon detectors, cryogenic cooled, etc., but their performance was often limited because of impurities. We said, “You know, we’ll just zap out the impurities,” and so we looked at what the chemistry was, what the chemicals were that we could start with. Within a single month you could make a major breakthrough just by applying this new science using tunable lasers. We had quickly made the world’s purest germanium, and the purest silicon ever, and where do you think that moved?

Zierler:

The weapons.

Robinson:

No! But into every electronic solid-state semiconductor application world-wide circuit in the world! It was a key advance that enabled “Moore’s law” to be continued, to allow the fabrication of functional solid-state electronics at smaller and smaller size-scales, once the impurities could be removed from the base materials.

Zierler:

Oh, I see. I see.

Robinson:

We revolutionized the electronics industry and started things that allowed the creation of the very tiniest sizes, because no longer were the impurities interfering with their performance. I mean, it was just another heyday. And, of course, that adage (from Arthur C. Clarke) that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” brought many other amazing minds to visit with us so they could fully understand and help us further advance these new technologies. Some of the great names from that period are Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Dick Garwin, along with a many young scientists from far and wide.

Hans Bethe, in my view, was one of the greatest theoretical physicists ever. He had led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos all during the World War II years and was the first of the truly great notables to take an interest in our work. He was fascinated with the work and his understanding and suggestions were of great value to us, as were Teller’s and Garwin’s. I’ll cover them in the reverse order because I have a quite amazing story about Hans Bethe that I want to save for last.

Dick Garwin was one of the physicists who Harold Agnew had suggested should learn about what we were up to, and who could provide sound advice to us. The two of them were both graduate students together working under Professor Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, when the Manhattan project swallowed up all three of them to come to Los Alamos, where they worked on the Atomic Bomb project. All three of them had made major, but different contributions its success.

On a visit to Los Alamos, Harold Agnew asked Teller if he would visit with my team and me, to hear of the new possibilities we were exploring. After our first discussion, he became sufficiently interested, that he asked me if I would come to Livermore periodically to keep him up to speed on the work, as his ability to travel was limiting his coming at the frequency he would like to hear about our progress. I usually took one of our Theoretical Division physicists with me on my visits with Edward, which was a way for me to truly personally “reward them” for the amazing theoretical foundation they were building for our work. Teller continued to take a great interest in the work I’m telling you about, and he would also come to Los Alamos and spend time in the summers to collect the new results and any new thinking on what we were doing.

Now for the greatest Hans Bethe story, which I saved until now-

Zierler:

Oh, good!

Robinson:

Have you ever been to Los Alamos?

Zierler:

I have not, no.

Robinson:

Okay. At the time I traveled to debate Dick Garwin in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and it was televised across the nation. Dick invited me to spend the weekend with him and his wife, Lois; and they included their very close friend: Freeman Dyson. That’s the first time I really got to know him. I’d seen him at meetings, and we’d talked a lot (laughter). I also got to know another guy I hope you know, Will Happer from Princeton, a brilliant and thoughtful human being, who was also a good friend of Freeman’s.

Zierler:

Sure! Yeah. Sure.

Robinson:

They were very close. I also got to know Will through the JASONs. I was also invited to the JASON’s meetings, until I found just too little time in my schedule. They would still invite me to be an occasional speaker and to participate in their discussions. I always tried my best to clear my schedule for their meetings. Along the way when I started my visits to STRATCOM, where I was asked to chair the policy committee of U.S. Strategic Command which I did for twelve years, I really got into thinking thru various “psy-ops” regarding how we go about making vital decisions, and what the right decisions should be. And deterrence was critically a part of my portfolio, and it all too soon it occupied a lot of my time, which it still does. When I took on the leadership of Los Alamos’ nuclear weapons efforts, I observed how amazing it is, that the currents of society constantly move in and out. Another movement started up in the early seventies “to ban the bomb,” in what became known as the Nuclear Freeze proposals. Later on, it involved, rather than getting rid of all nuclear weapons, the question moderated to “Maybe we should just keep a very smaller number of them?” I was asked to join in the debates. I’d fly out anywhere, if I could spare the time to try and convince them that, “No, these are good things we’re doing. We’re not just trying to kill people, but quite the opposite, we’re trying to prevent wars and their destruction!” Freeman Dyson also made many contributions in such areas and came up with some new ideas. We all agreed that as Americans, we of course believe that our country is wonderful, a country that is built to fit the human condition. We naturally abhor war, preferring live Americans over any number of dead Russians or dead Chinese. Right?

Zierler:

That’s right. Right.

Robinson:

But we kept saying that, while we do keep an arsenal of such weapons, we most strongly disagreed with the phrase that their purpose is for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). [What a vapid useless phrase!] None of us ever embraced that; and I can’t believe how it ever came to be a popular notion! We prefer a world where everyone can enjoy their lives in safety and security, thus we should make our earth into a world where we never directly target human lives. If we all believe and can agree that human life is the most important commodity on this globe, we ought to do everything we can do, and go as far as we can, to preserve it! MAD was a phrase a former U.S. Secretary of Defense used to say, which just made me shudder when I heard it. We are not trying to just to kill people. The right answer is to protect every life as sacred! I can’t believe that true Americans would ever want less. We would like to end any senseless loss of lives uselessly taken in wars of aggression!

First, the U.S. refuses to say that we would never adopt a policy, or a posture, that would prevent us from employing a first strike with nuclear weapons. We reserve the right to do so, because we are all too aware that some nations, even after they signed the United Nations treaty banning both biological and chemical weapons from being used in warfare, they are not living up to that obligation. They instead maintain large factories to manufacture such weapons and have secret stores of such biological and chemical armaments, (even though all nations claim that they adhere to the United Nations Global Ban on any such weapons.) Should any such nation start to use such illegal weapons against us, in strikes on Americans, and if it appeared that lives could still be saved from retaliating with nuclear weapons; that is exactly what the U.S. would intend to do in that eventuality.

Okay. Electric Bond and Share Corporation was Edison’s original company, and it was the largest purveyor of electricity for the world. They were broken up in an antitrust suit, on allegations that they were simply too powerful. Our government (then) couldn’t let any company be that powerful again, so they had split it up into a holding company, an electric utility, and EBASCO (who was the engineering/design co. and provided all the technical aspects of electricity). This fellow also ran the advanced concepts portion of the company. Remember what had projected my career forward the most was when I joined the Advanced Concepts group had been started at Los Alamos by Harold Agnew. This fellow would contact me from time to time. Suddenly one day, he called to say, “I understand there are problems going on at Los Alamos, and with the university and all.” He also told me that Don Kerr was leaving Los Alamos to take an industrial post at EG&G. He further said “It’s timely because when I met you and heard your talks, I had a different purpose in mind. I knew I was going to retire in a few years, but I said I want somebody that I’d be proud to have replace me. I thought you would be ideal to do that! If they don’t keep making you happy, why don’t you come and join us? At least come and interview and look at our kingdom.” His news about our Director’s departure, further fueled my pessimism, that Los Alamos would be sure to lose control over its own destiny.

Now this really gets crazy. Guess where they were located?

Zierler:

Where?

Robinson:

No one on our side had ever heard what they had shared with us, but even that far ahead they were looking at a probable dissolution of the then “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. It was an incredible admission. My own State Department chief representative, who was a bright guy, then shoved a note to me under the table. He’s not a technical guy at all, and his note said, “The hell with nuclear testing. This was far from being a casual mistake? Can you find out what they’re really talking about!” (laughter) Right? I winked back at him, and said to the assembled attendees, “Well, why would you be thinking about doing such a reorganization of your country now?”

Yeah. “We can’t in real honesty not let this go on unnoticed. The agreement banning all development and stockpiling of biological weapons and chemical weapons is a United Nations treaty that everybody else has signed and, yet, the Soviet Union and Russia have still been doing it for years, while we’ve been trying to wipe it out everywhere. Plus, theirs is a huge program! The Russians had started up, and pursued it for several decades in Secret, and they even have such weapons carried on missiles, to deliver of their stuff.

So, here I was heading up all this Geneva negotiation, with all these people who were very loyal and who had literally worked day and night to achieve our two agreements. They’d been working there with me all those years, with its one-hundred-hour work weeks. And it appeared that with this revelation, it was all going to be suddenly shut down and abandoned. So, what did I do? First, as it was Thursday, I stopped all our work, and encouraged everyone to take a three-day weekend off (something I had never done before!) What happened over that weekend is that a U.S. and Russian summit took place between the heads of State, which was not announced (at the time). They met on a small island off Sweden, Gorbachev and his top three with President George H W Bush with a similar three from our side. They’d spent that three-day weekend figuring what to do. The Russians promised to shut down all of that and open it up for U.S. inspection. [It still hasn’t been totally shut down!] I’m still not satisfied with what was in fact done, but anyway, relations between the States continued. And what have I done about it since? Only when I later arrived at Sandia Labs, could I really address that issue, and begin to make a difference in solving the problem.

Let me first go back in time to give you the background of how I ended up next at Sandia. When I had taken the job to be an executive in New York working out of the World Trade Center, Los Alamos made a press release that I was leaving Los Alamos to join a company in New York city. I had received a call from George Dacey (then the President of Sandia) who said, “Oh my, Paul. I’m so shocked by this. You’re going to leave, I know, because you and I have talked about the troubles with the hierarchy at UC really making it hard to do your job, but this is just terrible. I have so much confidence in you. Sandia, and Los Alamos, and then Livermore, are supposed to be teaming together, but the teaming has become strained of late.” [And this next part comes across too good to be true, but it is!] The next words that George said to me were amazing, in retrospect! Again, this took place five and a half years before I’d became Ambassador! In that call he said, “I’m so sorry to see you leave, we needed you.” He said, “I know you’ll enjoy industry. I’ve worked in industry and it’s very different, but I loved it the very same. I know you’re going to be successful in it, too. But I always had this inkling of what needed to be done. Things have gotten so bad in this teaming relationship between our lab and certainly with Livermore, but also with you guys at Los Alamos. We are not the team we should be. What we need to do is negotiate a peace treaty between the labs.” Then he said, “I thought it could only be done from Sandia, and you were the only guy capable of doing that.”

Using just a small battery which provided 16 volts across the two ends of a capillary tube, which was made of semiconductor material (and closed off with a pressure gauge at one end). The amazing result was that the pressure went up at first to hundreds of psi; and it climbed up to thousands of psi! It was the most amazing result. As a result, we now use quite small batteries within the Lab on a Chip to move our fluids around. Turning the voltage on and off, we can drive fluid samples all the way, in separate movements, through our “miniature lab.” So even though you can’t see it, this thing moves fluid here and there, adds this solvents or indicators, and gets the answers out, as it moves through. In the process, it was so unbelievably effective with a battery, small battery, and by going to a small scale, we learned that you can also develop thousands of psi, enough to steer rockets around, with an array of these small actuators. I mean, that’s magic, right? Once again Arthur C. Clarke’s statement, re advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, was proven to be true. That same phenomenon has now been harnessed into many other similar uses, e.g., it allows you to build small rockets which you can maneuver in flight within the air, or even in space, with low voltages, by using just such small capillaries to drive its small guidance fins. Amazing!

Well, that’s one that happened on my watch. None of us could believe it. So, it’s known it’s important to the satellite business and all sorts of stuff that you may need to maneuver. And the reason why it’s so good, like flying rockets, where you’ve can use such actuators and fins, to rapidly steer them. And, when you have a huge array of these capillaries built into an actuator block, the rapid response of changes in electricity allows you to fly it perfectly with only a battery’s worth of voltage.

Zierler:

Paul, on the topic of cutting-edge technologies, who put together intellectually that supercomputing could be applied toward the all-important endeavor of the United States attaining energy self-sufficiency?

Robinson:

Oh, let me tell you how proud I am. I should mention here one of the things that I am probably as close as anybody who can take some credit for technology transfer. I realized when I arrived at Sandia and discovered that we had developed so many great things that our nation could use, as well as the entire world, to great advantage, but which no one was aware of. We then set up a program to provide a way to advertise successful Sandia inventions and new technologies. We petitioned DOE to create a means by which we could advertise such advances to U.S. companies; so, they would always be the first-in-line to learn of them, and to be able to bid to license the Sandia patents for commercial uses. In my comments much earlier, re the emphasis on obtaining the intellectual property rights through filing patents at Los Alamos by creating a close partnership between the Los Alamos Patent Office and our Advanced Concepts Group which we did. All American National Labs need to embrace those same goals and always be ready to raise the level of science and technology capabilities and spread those science and technologies for use and for profit to U.S. companies. When I had first started leading the work in laser chemistry, at every one of our group meetings, they would have people from the patent office sitting in the room to keep up with us in writing patents for all this stuff. We do that at Sandia now, too. But one of the problems that was on the table, (and this would make a great story to write regarding the fact that the rest of the U.S. national labs also perform a great deal of leading-edge science and technology science in general. We need to ensure that the same mechanisms and policies make their way to all the U.S. national labs to be certain that we provide maximum benefit in return to boost our national security, as well as our national prosperity. We need to continue to bring the U.S. national labs into the realization of the great importance to allow U.S. companies to be the first in line to benefit from such government-sponsored R&D.

One rule of life seems to be whenever a new idea is born, you’ve got to leave your current focus, and begin to think more broadly how best to ensure our world continues without major or world wars occurring. I’ve spent my life devoted to that purpose. When a major threat arises, then you must recalibrate your perspectives, and develop new concepts and ideas once again. We must create some very significant tools that can be used to blunt whatever new threats have arisen to threaten our nation, people, and world. Until we can see way clear to achieve such goals, we all must not rest.

There is no doubt that the decision to trust me to find the best ideas within the very rich holdings of the Los Alamos Report Library, was a personal turning point for me. The task I was given and the richest and diversity of its scientific and technical content was new, even broader education in advanced science than anyone could have guessed.

Zierler:

Yeah. Well, Paul, this has been an absolute pleasure spending this time with you. I’m so grateful that you were able to share your perspective. All of your contributions and your answers through and through were phenomenal, and they’ll be a historical treasure, so thank you so much for doing this.

Robinson:

Well, thank you.