William Happer

Riordan:

Let me begin by asking you what your perceptions of the SSC were before you came to Washington. After all, you were a member of the Princeton Physics Department, and a colleague of Phil Anderson, and a member of a parallel scientific community which did not always have the greatest things to say about the Super Collider. If you can separate your view at that time from your later views of the Super Collider, I’d like to find out what that was.

Happer:

I would say that I had a neutral opinion of it. I certainly wasn’t as hostile as Phil was. I didn’t want it to flourish at the expense of all of the rest of science, but I thought reading the papers that there was a promise to provide extra money, and if that was the case then I thought it was a good thing.

Riordan:

When you joined the Department of Energy, you essentially came into a situation in which many of the structures and ground rules were already set down. It was not a situation where you had to build much of the infrastructure that you would eventually have to deal with. Did your perception of the Super Collider at that point change? Did the ongoing work of the Department impact how you personally felt about the Super Collider?

Happer:

No, I don’t think so. I always felt that if we could get the additional funds from the Congress to build this thing ― and I continued to think that when I was in Washington ― then we should go ahead and do it. When things got tight there was some pressure on me to shave other parts of our research budget to take up the slack for the SSC ...

Riordan:

No pun intended there.

Happer:

That’s right, not that SLAC [ed. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]. But I decided I certainly wasn’t going to take it out of the Human Genome Project or other things ― like condensed matter. I thought if there was going to have to be some belt tightening then it would have to come out of the high-energy physics community. And if they really wanted it badly enough and could reach a consensus, they’d have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. And I guess I was surprised at the feeding frenzy that was going on when I got there. That this community would say, "We’ll support the SSC but only if you build RHIC, and only if you build the new neutron reactor at Oak Ridge, and only if you do this and do that," and the science advisor said only if you build KAON. So everywhere I turned people were holding the SSC hostage to this construction project or that construction project.

[ed. RHIC is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab; the reactor at Oak Ridge was the proposed Advanced Neutron Source; KAON was a proposed kaon factory at Canada’s TRIUMF accelerator center. The president’s science advisor was Allan Bromley. On Bromley’s support for KAON, see Douglas Powell, “Will Canada Build on Earlier TRIUMF?” Science 251 (Jan. 4, 1991): 26. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.251.4989.26]

Riordan:

And so the community was very partial in the support of the SSC — the broad physics community, including nuclear physicists and basic-energy scientists?

Happer:

Yes, the usual reaction was, "OK, if they’re getting a lot of additional money we should get our cut too." So that was the fundamental attitude that I saw.

Riordan:

Just focusing within the high-energy physics community, did you see this particularly within that community itself?

Happer:

Yes, and I thought that it was particularly difficult to deal with this: electron high-energy physicists and proton high-energy physicists. I thought of the SSC as a proton machine, with all of the plusses and minuses that went with that. And I thought, well, if things have to get tight within the high-energy community, it would be nice to keep some balance between electrons and protons. Electrons have this beautiful cleanliness to the way the experiments go. But what I found when I turned to the high-energy physics community for advice — since there were four proton physicists for every electron physicist — then I would typically be advised to keep Fermilab going, upgrade Fermilab, and make sure nothing happens to the SSC, and by the way if there’s anything left, take care of SLAC.

[ed. Happer’s time at DOE coincided with the origins of the proposal to build the “B-Factory” upgrade at SLAC’s electron-positron collider.]

Riordan:

Did it strike you as somewhat odd that the community was moving in a direction where we would have three laboratories devoted to doing proton physics, namely Brookhaven, Fermilab, and the SSC, whereas SLAC itself was threatened with threats to its survival?

Happer:

Yes, it seemed extremely odd. I felt that we had agreement that with the Brookhaven effort winding down... But I wasn’t sure whether anyone would ever honor that. It was always very far in the future, not this year, maybe next year. Yes, that worried me a lot and that was one of the reasons I formed the Townes panel, was that I wanted some advice from people outside of the sociology of high-energy physics. People that I thought were fair-minded and had the intellectual background to form a judgement, a real scientific judgement. So I found them very helpful. Even there though, since I had people representing condensed matter and many other fields, they were helpful to the extent that, "OK we would like the SSC to go forward, but only if this facility or that in some other field gets built."

[ed. In September 1991, DOE convened a task force on energy research priorities, chaired by Charles Townes.]

Riordan:

So you got the same reply from the Townes panel, only... ?

Happer:

It was more muted, and I think more statesmanlike, but the message was still there.

Riordan:

Do you feel that that would have helped? Let us say the high-energy physics community came back and ordered the Townes panel to come back with a plan that we are going to make the transition to doing nuclear physics at Brookhaven ― which by the way they still do not seem to be committed to doing ― and that we are going to have Fermilab, we’ll have a muted program at SLAC focused on B physics, and the SSC. Do you think that would have helped at all in the sequence of events that transpired?

Happer:

It might have helped a little bit. There was a lot of bad luck involved in all of this, because we were trying to sell this stock just when the budget crunch was hitting, just when Ross Perot was making hay with the budget deficit, and both parties were beginning to realize that they had to do something about spending. And the SSC was just such a symbol, even the name — “super” this, “super” that, super spending. So I don’t know that sacrifices would have helped a lot. I think that the end result would have been the same.

Riordan:

I guess what I’m getting at is if the high-energy physics community could have presented a picture of itself that recognized the budgetary exigencies, and was tightening its own belt, could that have helped?

Happer:

There’s no question it would have helped. What I’m saying is that I’m not sure whether it would have helped enough to keep it from being canceled eventually, because they needed a symbol, something to sacrifice in the Congress.

Riordan:

It was probably the easiest scalp to take.

Happer:

Yes. The last few months I was there under [President Bill] Clinton, I was extremely disappointed when the space station came up and the Clinton people fanned out through Congress, saying this is a key vote, the President would like you to vote with him on this one, and in return you can vote your conscience on the SSC.

Riordan:

They actually said that?

Happer:

Yes.

Riordan:

That’s the first time I’ve heard that. So why don’t I establish exactly the time. You weren’t there at the time of the final vote on the SSC.

Happer:

No, that’s right.

Riordan:

When did you leave?

Happer:

I was there at the time of the vote for the space station though, and of course we were worried that both the space station and the SSC were under attack, and the administration had promised it would support both of them.

Riordan:

This would be June of 1993?

Happer:

This would have been like April, I think, as I recall the space station vote.

Riordan:

So you left before the first House vote, the 1993 House vote on the Super Collider?

Happer:

Oh, for the Super Collider, that’s correct, yes. It was still alive but very sick when I left.

Riordan:

Ok. Let me change the subject a bit to the organizational structure you stepped into. Namely the fact that Joe Cipriano was already in his position and essentially in his office down at the Super Collider, and had direct reporting to Admiral Watkins. How did you feel about that?

[ed. Retired Adm. James Watkins was Energy Secretary during the George H. W. Bush administration. Watkins had appointed Cipriano, who had a Defense Department background, as DOE’s project director for the SSC. Cipriano reported directly to Watkins as well as to the leadership of the Office of Energy Research.]

Happer:

Well, I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as some of the people who had to actually live with Joe down in Texas did. I felt Joe tried hard to be helpful. It certainly helped the Admiral to feel that he was in control; the Admiral was very nervous about the whole thing. I think the big problem came when the magnet core had to be opened up and the cost went up and the Admiral sensed at that point that he was about to lose the project. [ed. The “magnet core” was the beam tube diameter, which increased from 4 cm to 5 cm in 1989–1990, with attendant cost increases of about a billion dollars.]

Riordan:

This was before you came over?

Happer:

That was before I came aboard, that’s right. And so he was still reacting to that, and he felt that he just could not tolerate any further increases in the cost, so he wanted Joe to go down [to Texas].

Riordan:

So you feel he was justified. Basically, what he did was to set up a structure that bypassed Energy Research. It bypassed all of the project oversight mechanisms that had been put in place over a period of twenty or thirty years, dating back to the Atomic Energy Commission. There may or may not be justification for this, and the justification I’m sure the Admiral would give — maybe that one example you gave me — was the fact that this project was simply too big for the normal mechanisms of the Energy Research office. Could you comment on that?

Happer:

Well, the Admiral often said that it was a unique project, and he didn’t believe that they [ed. the high-energy physicists involved in the SSC project] were capable of handling it. The other thing was that he didn’t trust the DOE bureaucracy very much. He did trust his former comrades from the Navy, of which Joe Cipriano was one. I think bypassing it may actually have helped, because the regular bureaucracy at DOE is pretty cumbersome, and I would say it might have made it even more sticky if we’d have had to operate through that — through the regular bureaucracy.

Riordan:

I think ― I talk from the perspective of the high-energy physicists — the Temple reviews ― which I forget who the successor to that was, Lehman? — were regarded as part of the long-standing process by which high-energy physics had, prior to the SSC, been able to build virtually all of its projects either on budget or close to budget, and on schedule. That that was an effective review process, and that part of the DOE bureaucracy had been in part responsible for those successes.

Happer:

Well, it had failed an important test when the costs suddenly ballooned after this change in magnet design. And that was the point at which the Admiral decided it wasn’t working anymore. That was before I came aboard so there was nothing I could do about it. And it’s a big deal, if some small project doubles in cost it doesn’t matter much. OK, it didn’t double in cost, but you really noticed how much additional billions were added [ed. about $2 billion], you know you’re adding billions as a result of that. And he just felt he could not afford another nasty surprise like that, where another billion or two was tacked onto the SSC cost. And then he was upset by the cost accounting, exactly where things like detectors were charged. You know they weren’t really in there, and yet there was a lot of money required for detectors.

Riordan:

What were your feelings on that? You’ve given me what you think the Admiral thought of that attempt to bypass ER.

Happer:

Well, I did not regard it as an attempt to bypass ER, because ER already had its hands full with the things that it was already supervising in the high-energy physics section. And had the Admiral not done that, they would have had to staff up additional people, and it seemed to me you might as well do that fresh and in situ down there [in Texas]. So, my feeling was that it wasn’t the most desirable outcome, but that it was far from the biggest threat to the survival of the SSC. ln fact, I regarded it as a help. I frequently went to these congressional hearings, [Michigan Congressman John] Dingell’s people and... I can tell you that the best defenses we got were coming from Joe Cipriano and his people. They weren’t adequate, but I shudder to think what would have happened if we hadn’t had that, someone on-site, who knew what was happening, spoke their language. He was used to selling big things like aircraft carriers [to Congress]. So, I think, on balance, they did the best they could and probably had some positive impact.

Riordan:

If you talk with the physicists who were down there... I think [Stanford University physicist] Dave Ritson did an article in Nature or Science shortly after the demise of the SSC in which he attacked this aspect, and also the need ― not the need but the fact — that there was so much of the military-industrial culture that had been made part of the SSC, as being a primary factor in the reason for the failure.

Happer:

Well, I think the high-energy community completely misread how they were perceived by the rest of the world. They had always thought of themselves as really a gift to the world; thank God for high-energy physicists. And that was not how they were perceived; there was tremendous hostility to high-energy physicists in the Congress, in the DOE, and a lot of this second-guessing of Cipriano and the Admiral is under the assumption that if we could just have exposed ourselves a little better to the congressmen they would have loved us, and they would have taken care of us. And in fact, in my judgement, it would have been even worse. The Congress felt — if you talk to these people — that the guys were completely out of control down there. It wasn’t like Fermilab, it wasn’t that you were on budget and things were going pretty well; they were way out of kilter. And it was big bucks, it was a lot of money. And the Congress was being criticized for spending extravagantly.

Riordan:

And you would point to that one step function in the cost [ed. $2 billion] as having started that?

Happer:

Yes, yes.

Riordan:

And I’ve heard people say that even before that, the Admiral didn’t trust the physicists to manage a billion-dollar contract, and that those wheels were turning. You can’t testify to that?

Happer:

It was before my time.

Riordan:

But that the search for people to fill this position [of SSC project manager] that had been created so this thing would be managed... At first there was a position that it was going to be managed outside of high-energy physics. And there were high-energy physicists like Paul Reardon who had been considered for that position and rejected by the Admiral on the basis that they just did not have billion-dollar project experience. And there already was a mistrust of the ability of the community that preexisted before he learned — I guess it was in December of 1989 — that there was going to be this $1.8 billion cost increase.

Happer:

Well, it was not unusual to have a separate office for a big project; for example, they were about to build a new production reactor for tritium at the time. The Admiral set up a separate office. We already had a nuclear energy division of the Department of Energy; there was an assistant secretary who handled that, but he set up a separate bureaucratic structure to work that problem. And it would have been a comparable cost; you’re talking about several billions of dollars to build that new reactor. So, he felt that was the right way to approach big projects. I don’t know that that was right. I don’t know that it was wrong.

Riordan:

What did the role of ER become, given that project oversight was really being done by Cipriano’s office. What would you say during the time you were at ER was the primary role of ER with regard to the Super Collider?

Happer:

We handled as best we could the constant attacks from the Congress. Hardly a week would pass that Cipriano or Roy Schwitters would [not] come up to face some congressional staff or another, or even a congressional committee. We had to try to coordinate that, and so, the mail, they would demand huge volumes of material which we had to put together very quickly, most of it. Meaningless exercises. And most of that material, since it had to do with the collider had to come from the site, there wasn’t an easy way to get it quickly at DOE. I don’t know that it would have been a whole lot different if there were no Cipriano. We probably would have picked some people that we could spare from Germantown and sent them down there anyway. [ed. DOE’s program office for high-energy physics is located in Germantown, Maryland.] The net result would have looked very similar except it wouldn’t have been a Navy person running it. But you can’t run a thing like that from Washington, you have to have someone on site.

Riordan:

Did you personally ever testify before Congress on the SSC?

Happer:

Yes.

Riordan:

Can you remind me what instance that was?

Happer:

I would have to check but it’s in the Congressional Record. It’s not something I remember.

Riordan:

Didn’t the ER also become heavily involved in the attempt to obtain international collaboration in the building of the Super Collider? Wasn’t that one of their responsibilities? Can you address that at all?

Happer:

Well, yes we did the very best we could, and we had a hard time, again because the high-energy physics community had somehow managed to tremendously irritate both the European and the Japanese ― that’s where all the money would have had to come from ― and so by the time I got there, we had essentially written off Europe. And I think that was the correct decision; they were not going to play ball. And so the only hope was Japan, and I think we were pretty close with Japan, we really worked that very hard. I made several trips to Japan; Bromley made some trips to Japan; the Admiral made trips to Japan.

Riordan:

Let’s back up a little in time. There was a certain expectation that something like one-third of the cost of the SSC would come from non-federal sources. That was I think built into the House authorization bill of 1989 when the price tag was set at something like $5.9 billion. And it struck me that... As far as we can dig, we’re trying to find the origins of that expectation. It seems to have emerged as if by magic from the Office of Management and Budget. At the time at which the Reagan Administration signed onto the project, there was some dichotomy within the Reagan Administration itself.

Happer:

Yes, Miller was furious about the SSC, it was the last thing he wanted in his budget, and all of a sudden there it was. And so, his parting shot was to engineer this language that one-third would be non-federal. That’s the story I’ve heard. Again, it was before my time, but people who were there tell me that’s what happened. You ought to talk to Miller, have you talked to him?

[ed. James C. Miller III was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 1984 to 1988.]

Riordan:

I think Steve Weiss did talk to him. And I think we’re going to be talking to Judy Bostock too, who [worked in OMB and] might have been the agent of that requirement. What I’m getting at is there seems to have been a ― and correct me if this is not your perspective ― a dichotomy of expectations between those people who were political appointees in the Department of Energy and those people at the lower levels ― I’m talking about people in Germantown ― who had gone out and made reports as to what we could realistically expect in terms of international contributions. And so I’ve talked to people ― I don’t want to name any names ― who were involved in the attempts to evaluate prospects for international contributions, and they said they were shaking their heads, that they didn’t think any more than 10-20 percent [foreign contributions] was possible as early as 1990. And in fact, I saw a document that was circulated supposedly ― it wasn’t classified but it wasn’t supposed to be circulated as wide as my eyes ― in early 1991 from some level of the Department of Energy that was rather gloomy on the prospects of international collaboration. And yet you still heard these claims on high, mainly coming from Henson Moore, that they fully expected to reach this one-third requirement.

[ed. Henson Moore was a Republican politician and Deputy Secretary of Energy from 1989 to 1992.]

Happer:

Well, I think that Henson’s view was that there was no way that we were going to get this from Monbusho or the regular channels for international scientific collaboration. It was too much money; it would bankrupt Japanese science. And he felt it was possible to take this as a deal at a very high political level. That the Japanese government could be persuaded that this was a symbolic thing like collaborating with the space station or like providing money for the Gulf War. And it was completely detached from the scientific community. So, he didn’t pay much attention to these Germantown studies because of this view he had, which I think could have been right.

[ed. Monbusho was the abbreviated term for the Japanese ministry for science and culture.]

Riordan:

OK, that makes a lot of sense, that the people in Germantown were just talking to their corresponding officials…

Happer:

Sure, and I think both were right. The Germantown people were right that things were pretty impoverished in Japan at the time, they were coming through a recession and universities were in shambles, it was pathetic.

Riordan:

I’ve seen the University of Tokyo.

Happer:

That’s been corrected. They’re rolling in money this year. And Henson used to like to talk about the bulls, the bulls of the LDP will get together and make this decision and we’ll get the money. And it was a very high-level trade-off ― in fact, I think we were very close to getting the money. It was to be worked out during the trip where Mr. Bush threw up on the Prime Minister. He was primed to ask for the money.

[ed. The LDP is Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. President Bush threw up on Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s shoes and then fainted during a banquet on Jan. 8, 1992.]

Riordan:

I was involved with that because they used my book, or the Japanese version, as one of the gifts that the Admiral gave around when he went to Japan. So I saw from a distance through a filter, from hearing about it from Ezra Heitowit and John Toll at URA, but my perception was that the question of the SSC had been moved up on a level of talking points to sixth on the President’s list of talking points. And that it would have come up had he not had his unfortunate circumstance at the banquet table.

[ed. URA is Universities Research Association, a consortium of some 80 universities that served as the SSC management and operations contractor.]

Happer:

I’ve heard a similar story, I don’t know exactly what the rank was. But you know something like that is very hard to orchestrate because there were many things we wanted from the Japanese that were more important to President Bush than the SSC. For example, purchase of more auto parts was a big deal. That buys electoral votes and is very visible. So, we were in there fighting the auto parts lobby, and in spite of that I think the President was prepared to push this. I think the Japanese were hoping very much that he would ask for the SSC rather than auto parts because that would have been much cheaper for them.

Riordan:

That opportunity was essentially missed, and it would be January of 1992 when this occurred. After that there was a second phase, am I not correct, where the working group was established. And I have heard wildly conflicting opinions about that, depending on whom I talk to. That this was another in the many polite ways the Japanese have to say no. Was it a real possibility after that?

[ed. This was the US-Japan working group on the SSC, which formed in early 1992 and finished its efforts about a year later, working out the details of possible Japanese participation in the project.]

Happer:

Well, I thought that it was a treading-water action while the Japanese tried to decide what the Bush Administration really wanted. And they were also keeping an eye on the polls for the upcoming election. So yes, they didn’t want to say no immediately, and they didn’t think they had to say yes; they had to do something, so they formed this group.

Riordan:

Were there real substantive issues that needed to be worked out?

Happer:

Well, there were interesting issues, but I think none of them were make-or-break issues; the real issue was the political one, which was whether the bulls, as Henson Moore used to say, of both parties, the US and Japan, decided that this was a trade they wanted to make. It was a non-scientific issue. We were prepared if that decision were made to see to it that lots of industrial contracts went to Japanese magnet manufacturers, for example.

Riordan:

That’s what I was going to get at. That was the really substantial one: should they sign a check or should they...?

Happer:

Well, that cost us a lot, too, because that would cost us internal support in the United States from U.S. manufacturers. For example, that was something that Bennett Johnston was very much opposed to. He said, “Let’s build it all here, use our own industry.” Of course, he didn’t have the muscle to make it happen. So that hampered our attempts to try and work something out with the Japanese while really not giving us the possibility of keeping it alive here because he could not deliver the votes.

[ed. Sen. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana, was a major supporter of the SSC.]

Riordan:

What about the issue also of the Japanese role in the management of the SSC?

Happer:

Of course, they would have liked to manage it with us. I don’t think that was a crucial issue in any way. That could have been worked out without any problem. The Japanese regarded it with some bemusement, as did President Bush. The few times I was with him personally, [he] seemed genuinely puzzled about what this thing was and why we were working so hard to get it. I remember we met with him after a bunch of Nobel laureates and other physics luminaries testified in favor of the SSC. We went over to the Oval Office, and we sat around for twenty minutes, and Mr. Bush asked “Now I really don’t understand, what is this thing? You’ve got this fifty-mile tunnel, good grief, why do you want to do that?’” “When it’s all said and done, what do we get out of it?” He genuinely seemed extremely puzzled.

Riordan:

Bush? I thought he was very pro-SSC.

Happer:

In public he was, but in his mind, he never understood what it was for.

Riordan:

In fact, wasn’t there a Texas billionaire connection through James Baker, and that was really one of the powerful forces that kept him solidly behind the SSC as I understand it. Peter O’Donnell and James Baker.

[ed. Baker was Bush’s Secretary of State. O’Donnell was a wealthy Texas businessman and philanthropist.]

Happer:

He was behind it. I don’t know how accurate “solidly” is; I’m not sure how solid it was.

Riordan:

From the perspective of somebody who had come from SLAC and was working for URA, it struck me... Going into these HEPAP or SEAB meetings, the Admiral would say, “Now this is a presidential project and we are not going to touch the SSC, and we’re therefore going to have to find out where we’re going to make the cuts in the rest of the ER budget.” It really struck me that this really had the President’s active and continuing support.

[ed. HEPAP is the Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel and SEAB is the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board.]

Happer:

Well, it was the biggest scientific thing the Admiral had. And he liked big projects, that was something he really liked and believed in, he sincerely believed it would be a useful project. And so it was to his interest, too, to DOE’s interest, to remind everyone in the hearing that it was a presidential project and therefore had to be treated very carefully. He was even more emphatic when he would talk to OMB for example.

Riordan:

Getting back to the Japanese then, were they, at the end of the Bush Administration... I have heard from certain sources, from URA, that any remaining difficulties had been worked out by the working group ? which I understand you were a member of?

Happer:

Yes, I was the U.S. head of it.

Riordan:

The problems with what the constitution of the contribution would be. That issues like Japanese participation in the management had been worked out, and the Japanese were indeed ready to contribute something on the order of a billion dollars.

Happer:

Yes, I think realistically it would’ve been $900 million, maybe a billion. We were trying to squeeze two billion out of them.

Riordan:

That would have been a coup.

Happer:

And so they were going to compromise at about half of what we were asking.

Riordan:

But that essentially had approval at the highest levels of the Japanese government, that all that was required was a request from Clinton that they make that contribution. Do you have any insight as to why that request was not made?

Happer:

Well, I think Clinton faced the same trade-offs that Bush did. You have a lot of things you want to ask the Japanese, ranging from the SSC to auto parts, to come back to my favorite example. And I would guess that for Clinton, things like auto parts weighed more heavily, because they lead to many more jobs than the SSC. But not being Clinton’s appointee, I wasn’t nearly as well plugged-in to what was going on there. I know that Hazel [O’Leary] was extremely cautious about the SSC when she came in; she wasn’t sure whether this was something for which she ought to cut her losses right away, or whether it was worth defending, and in the end, she did give some support to it. But I think she was waiting for instructions from the White House as to how she should treat it.

[ed. President Bill Clinton’s first Energy Secretary was Hazel O’Leary.]

Riordan:

I’ve heard that her enthusiasm for the Super Collider was markedly heightened after a dinner meeting with Bennett Johnston.

Happer:

It’s quite possible. Well, for example, she was very concerned about minority participation in the SSC, so we had a number of meetings with people that she knew from the minority community in Dallas/Ft. Worth, and that was complex and difficult because the SSC had been working that problem very hard, and already had a lot of minority participation, but it wasn’t the same cast of characters that she knew.

Riordan:

So, would it be accurate to say that from the very beginning the Clinton administration, including Clinton on down to Hazel, was quite lukewarm about the SSC?

Happer:

Oh yes.

Riordan:

Would you consider that a major factor in its eventual demise?

Happer:

Yes, I think so. If they had decided to make this an issue, they could have kept it, just as they kept the space station. They have a lot of similarities. I think I mentioned earlier, they decided early on they were not going to fall on their swords for the SSC and they didn’t.

Riordan:

We can easily roll history back and imagine a different scenario where Bush wins the election, and an entirely different set of sequences then transpires, where Bush accepts the Japanese contribution to the SSC, jawbones on behalf of the SSC, and it makes it through that crucial year.

Happer:

Yes, I think that could have easily happened; it could easily have been saved. I’m not sure it would have been a good thing for physics.

Riordan:

Oh, why would you say that?

Happer:

Well, the costs would certainly have continued to be a problem, and the budget crunch that we’re facing now would still be there. We already see that the high-energy physics budget, as the rest of the ER budget, has been constrained, and it would have been an even more difficult problem to handle if we’d had the SSC still under construction. It’s hard to talk about something hypothetical like this, but my guess is it might have been even worse had we kept it going.

Riordan:

Well, do you think if it had made it through that crucial year of 1993, the first Congress after the new administration had come in, that it could have survived?

Happer:

Oh, we could easily have canceled it again after two or three years if things started getting very tight. That’s frequently been done; the breeder reactor was kept alive in Tennessee by basically the force of personality of one senator, Mr. Baker. And we spent a lot more money on that than we ever did on the SSC, and yet it collapsed eventually.

[ed. Sen. Howard Henry Baker Jr., a Republican from Tennessee, was a major proponent of the planned Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, which was terminated in 1983.]

Riordan:

I thought that was $2 billion. Of course that was $2 billion in ...

Happer:

Well yes, you have to add in inflation, that’s right, and you also have to count the supporting research. There was the Fast Flux Test Reactor up in Hanford, Washington; there were things in Idaho. If you add all that up, it was quite comparable to what we spent [on the SSC]. I don’t know what the total budget was on synfuels, but I think it was close to $20 billion. And we let that go. So there’s no point at which these things are completely safe even if they’re built and turned on. Sometimes they get turned off right away.

Riordan:

Do you feel this is an indictment of the US approach to doing large physics projects, as opposed to, for example, the European approach, where in general things, when they’re committed to — I’m thinking mainly of CERN. The money is there, and it’ll be there until the end of the project.

[ed. CERN is the European Center for High-Energy Physics, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.]

Happer:

Well, I don’t know how stable CERN is going to be. They’re having plenty of problems of their own now. They had to pull in their horns.

Riordan:

But at least, to some extent the funding stream is insulated from the political processes that go on in the various capitals, that’s what I’m getting at.

Happer:

Yes, but less every year. The European scene is getting much more like ours. I don’t know whether to call it an indictment; I think you have to remember it wasn’t just the SSC that went down. There was the new fusion machine, BPX; the new neutron research reactor at Oak Ridge went down. So, SSC came along at a time in which there weren’t going to be big new facilities built. It was the first, but it wasn’t the only one. It wouldn’t surprise me if the space station collapses in another two or three years. It’s not science but...

[Part II (Tape One, Side B)]

Riordan:

Is there a better way of doing major projects, given that in many fields of science we are now to the point where we need to spend billions of dollars to advance?

Happer:

Well, since I’m no longer a DOE official, I can speak my own mind. I’m not sure it’s worth it for high­-energy physics. You can do interesting stuff with what we’ve got. [Princeton University physicist] Jim Cronin is putting together, resurrecting a cosmic-ray program, that gets to even higher energies than we can dream of with accelerators. I don’t know that I care about the things that are coming down the road in high-energy physics that much, that it’s worth bankrupting the rest of science for them. And there are lots of things that you don’t need all that money for. The huge revolution in biotechnology, that’s quite manageable. You can support a lot of biophysics, get a lot of things that really make a difference to humankind out of that. I wonder about things that get so big that they’re these juggernauts. ―It worries me for example when I look at the students going into high-energy physics, I get the perception that, while there still are some exceptional people going into it, there are less than I think I remember.

Riordan:

The field doesn’t have much of a future at least in the United States. Doing work at the B-Factory and maybe follow-up work at Fermilab on the top quark, but that doesn’t get perceived as frontier work in the field, as much as the LHC [ed. Large Hadron Collider at CERN] for example. But can’t you conceive of projects in, say, atomic and condensed-matter physics, where large facilities are necessary? Let’s take the Advanced Neutron Source as one example. That was a couple billion-dollar project, as I recall. Let’s accept the fact that those are necessary in order to advance the field. Is there a better way of doing it?

Happer:

Well, why should we accept the fact that they’re necessary? I never really understood how to make an honest argument that the neutron source was necessary.

Riordan:

OK, I haven’t really looked at that in any great detail, so I’m not going to come up with much ...

Happer:

It was pitched as something that was absolutely essential for US competitiveness. We would lose the chip market to the Japanese or God knows what if we didn’t build this source. And yet when I struggled to understand what made a difference to Intel and US industry, I could never find the fingerprints of neutron sources in the history of things that were making money for them.

Riordan:

So, to summarize then, you’re questioning whether these billion-dollar or multibillion-dollar projects are really necessary for the advancement of science in the first place?

Happer:

Well, they’re necessary for certain types of science. I think it’s true for high-energy physics, that it’s a hard life trying to make progress with cosmic rays. That’s very slow, very uncontrolled. I think high-­energy physics is unique though. I can’t think of any other field that really is at the mercy of [the need for] such big facilities.

Riordan:

I think we’re at the point where we are not going to discover the Higgs boson without a billion-dollar facility, whether it’s upgrading LEP to make LHC or whether it’s building the Super Collider. Or let’s not limit it to the Higgs boson, it’s finding the origins of mass; it is more general ...

Happer:

Well, what’s the hurry? Why is it so important that we do it in our lifetimes? I can understand the urgency of curing AIDS in my lifetime; my friend might get AIDS, and it’s something I really understand. But something like the Higgs? People have been advancing science for millennia. It’s been a long time since the Pythagorean theorem, and I’m glad it was discovered in the time of Pythagoras rather than now. But the fact that it’s taken that length of time to get to where we are now, what real difference had that made? So, I think if you rack up the urgency of science, I would put biologically related things right at the top. And I think you get more bang for your buck by far there than anything else now; it’s a real revolution. It’s like the days of quantum mechanics in the twenties. There you should have put your money in physics, and now you should put your money in biology. There are lots of things for physicists to do there. It was [Francis] Crick the physicist who showed the double helix structure of DNA.

Riordan:

I think a number have made that cross-over. Seymour Benzer is another one.

Happer:

Right, right. So, I don’t think it’s essential that the Higgs boson be discovered next year or even the next decade. I would like it to happen. And you can say, well maybe these guys will get smarter. Perhaps SLAC will figure out how to increase the [accelerating] gradient so you don’t have to have such a giant machine. Or maybe some of this fluff about laser accelerators, maybe there’s a germ of truth somewhere in there. So, if you let people struggle for ten years, if they’re doing something useful, or twenty years, there may be a better device out there. I think that’s the problem that fusion is facing now, that no one sees the urgency of having controlled fusion, so I think they’re going to have a very hard time selling this international machine, ITER, for much the same reasons as the SSC. People will look at the cost, see it’s a ten-billion class machine and decide, is it really that urgent or should we go back to basics and see if we can’t make a machine that’s only going to cost one billion and performs better?

Riordan:

So, it’s really a question of urgency, and one question that occurred to me as you were talking about that is, do you think the end of the Cold War has had any impact on this sense of urgency?

Happer:

Yes, I think it has made it a little harder to sell things like this, because when the Russians were our competitors, it was definitely easier to get support for American science. There’s never been anything like the reaction to Sputnik, that was a tremendous boon to our community. If you look out there now, it’s hard to see something that would galvanize us the way that did. I don’t think though that... Well yes, for example, during the Cold War we didn’t much care that we ran up deficits, and with the Cold War over people began to think we shouldn’t be doing that.

Riordan:

There’s an interesting parallel with the end of World War II, in which we of course ran up deficits to win the war, and then immediately thereafter was a time when we had a Republican Congress and balancing the budget again was a priority. And I think that same mentality is coming ...

Happer:

Well, there’s a big difference. At the end of World War II, we didn’t have these huge entitlement programs. And that’s the 800-pound gorilla we can’t quite figure out how to handle. I think when that gets sorted out, it will be a lot easier to rationalize support of science.

Riordan:

One other issue that comes to me is that, especially within the physics community but also without it, I hear a lot of charges leveled against the SSC management — that Roy Schwitters, in particular, was too weak a manager, as compared to a Panofsky or a Wilson.

[ed. Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky was the founding director of SLAC and Robert R. Wilson was the founding director of Fermilab]

Happer:

Panofsky comes from a different era. He was lucky when he came along; the bloom was still on the rose, and on the World War II scientist heroes, and so Panofsky matured just at that time. And he doesn’t understand the reception of scientists in Washington now. Panofsky had lots of friends he didn’t even know about.

Riordan:

He’s not making this charge. He was the one who pushed so hard for Roy Schwitters to be ...

Happer:

Right. Let me just say, whoever’s making these charges in comparing Panofsky to Roy ― I love Pief ― I want to say this, the difference was in World War II, they developed this fraternity of people who had won the war. They were all in the military together: scientists, future politicians, future business leaders, military people. And when the war was over this fraternity stuck together for a long time — right up through the fifties and early sixties. So in the fifties when there was some problem with science, guys like [Columbia University physicist I. I.] Rabi could call up his old friend Dwight Eisenhower, and it would get fixed. And even through [John F.] Kennedy, it was possible for his friends from Cambridge to call directly to the President and get some help. Because Kennedy too had gone through World War II, and there was this bonding that had developed. And that began to erode. It has completely eroded now, so that we are a different little society now in science from the rest of America. And so that’s what makes it so hard. We’re under very intense scrutiny, and not just us, the medical profession too, doctors used to be gods, and now there are a lot of problems. They’re unionizing. So, there have been enormous changes and that’s much more the cause of the difficulties of the SSC than weak management. So I think that Roy’s not a superman, like all humans he had some faults. He had things to cope with that... If you’d had a stronger person in there, the only thing you could have done would have been to resign if you took a strong enough view. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Roy didn’t do that. I think he was just constantly harassed and ankle-bit and things like this that he, every now and then, let slip things that are true but shouldn’t be said. Like “the revenge of the C students”― he shouldn’t have said it, but you have to sympathize with all of the provocation he was under.

Riordan:

It also strikes me that the polarization that developed between him and Cipriano in the later stages of the SSC, where they essentially weren’t talking to one another, couldn’t have been very helpful when it came to defending the project before Congress.

Happer:

Well, I can tell you it didn’t show when they were testifying together. They seemed like the best of friends in public. I don’t remember any congressional testimony where they were able to drive a wedge between them.

Riordan:

I was only there during 1991 so I didn’t see anything that occurred thereafter. In 1991 the bloom was still pretty much on the rose. That was prior to the first congressional vote to kill the SSC, which was overturned, but the reports I heard were that, after about 1992, Roy really left most of the congressional testimony to Ed Siskin. It was Siskin who, when somebody from the SSC had to appear before Congress, would go there and give the testimony. And that Roy really from that point on focused his energies into developing a good experimental program. That he really let Siskin be the one in charge of getting the machine built and took over what is really the responsibilities of the director of research. The other issue there, and this I’ve heard from [Burton] Richter, is that the director of the laboratory has got to have his hands on what the actual cost is―but that Roy pretty much delegated that to an assistant and did not really understand what had been spent and what the projected dollar costs really were.

[ed. Ed Siskin was the DOE-appointed general manager of the SSC project. Physicist Burton Richter was director of SLAC from 1984 to 1999.]

Happer:

I think that’s a little too harsh. He certainly knew as much as Siskin what the costs, at least what their best estimates, were. There were tremendous fights about the meaning of contingency funds, and the meaning of the director’s reserve; there were all sorts of funny little pots of money that you had on the spreadsheet. So, any time you started spending contingency money — which was a big chunk of what you were budgeted ― there would be a huge flap: "You’re spending contingency money." Well, that’s what it’s for, it’s to be spent. Then that would leak its way back to Washington, to staffers, and then there’d be yet another investigation. But another thing that these earlier machines did not have were these avenging angels like Sherry Boehlert who’d stand up and lie to the American public on prime­time news. It was something that no other construction project had yet faced.

[ed. Representative Sherwood Boehlert, from New York, was a member of the Republican minority on the House Science Committee during the early 1990s and emerged as a key opponent of the SSC.]

Riordan:

Do you think it was simply a factor of its size, or was it just a different time, or both?

Happer:

Well, I think that so many expectations were raised when they had this [SSC site] competition, and so many hopes were dashed when it was over, that they just created a lot of enemies, including one or two that just wouldn’t give up. That was part of Boehlert’s life, seeing to it that the SSC came down. So he was after it for personal reasons, he hated the SSC because of frustration and disappointment at having been stiff-armed in the competition.

Riordan:

Well, as I recall, New York withdrew itself from the competition. Cuomo, reacting to local unrest in the Rochester area, essentially said that, “We’re taking our site off of the best eight.”

[ed. Mario Cuomo was governor of New York from 1984 to 1994.]

Happer:

It’s quite possible. Again, this was long before I paid a lot of attention to it, but if you read about Boehlert’s statements, he certainly continues to bring that up. So anyway, I can’t think of previous projects that have had that type of vengeful pursuit; they just don’t give up, don’t give up. And then of course, as we discussed earlier, it was the symbolism of bloated government, out-of-control costs, so the budget hawks went after it. I remember [John] Kasich was no great fan of it, but he at least didn’t malign it. He said, “We can’t afford this thing, the costs have gotten out of control, we have to cancel it. I’m sorry.” It’s like The Godfather; it’s strictly business.

[ed. John Kasich, at that time was a Republican representative from Ohio.]

Riordan:

Well, I think you’re getting at a point I’ve heard in other circles, that it was the perception of the costs — and it strikes me that nobody, or very few people, really knew what the cost was going to be. And we were interviewing Dan Pearson, who was Sherry Boehlert’s right-hand man in this whole effort, and also Steve Weiss has interviewed [congressional staff member Robert L.] Roach. But Pearson, we asked him the point-blank question: “In 1993, if the Department of Energy could have convinced the Congress that the costs would have remained under $10 billion, do you think you could have killed it?” And he thought for about ten or twenty seconds, he said, "Nope, couldn’t have done it." So, to me it was the perception of the costs that was a crucial factor at that stage. There were many problems along the way, like this failure to get Japanese participation, which was just the luck of the draw and luck of the election. But even in 1993 the perception of the costs was the problem. And to me that is a combination of the efforts of the Dingell people to obfuscate what the costs were, but also inability of ― I don’t know whether it’s the SSC or the DOE ― to give a clear and reliable picture of what those costs were going to be.

[House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, was a major opponent of the SSC.]

Happer:

Well, if you’ve never had to deal with Dingell or his hired character assassins, the GAO ― you know, they lie, they cheat, they steal. And as Hitler said, you tell a lie enough times, people believe it. This government agency, why not?

[GAO is the General Accounting Office, a Legislative Branch agency now called the Government Accountability Office, which performs audits and investigations in support of congressional oversight of the federal government.]

Riordan:

So you actually think the GAO was producing reports that simply reflected what Dingell wanted to be presented, rather than objective reality?

Happer:

Absolutely. Look, there’s a structural problem with GAO, and it is that if you do a study in GAO, you have to get money from the person who commissions the study, that pays your salary. It shouldn’t be that way; that’s a crazy thing.

Riordan:

GAO does not have its own independence?

Happer:

No.

Riordan:

Where does that money come from?

Happer:

It comes from the committee, the congressional committee. So if you’re going to run the study, you go and you negotiate with the committee chairman; the chairman says, “This is what I’d like done,” and you say, “Well, OK, it’ll cost thus and so.” And the chairman says, “Well, when will it be ready?” “Well, when would you like it ready? We can work harder or less.” “Well, I’d like it in such and such a month,” usually thinking about the next election. “Alright, here’s what it’ll be; here’s your check.”

Riordan:

OK. I was under the impression that it had its own independent...

Happer:

Well, go check. This one I know.

Riordan:

That certainly makes a lot of sense. I had some interaction with the GAO, when I was there for various HEPAP meetings. There was a Victor Rezendes who would simply not talk to me.

Happer:

I’ll tell you, I ran into him after I was in private life again, and he was all smiles; he says, "How nice to see you again, Will." And I said, "Well, I don’t shake hands with you.” He says, “Well, I hear you were trying to start a little company; you know we may want to look into that." So, he threatened me. And I wasn’t particularly worried, because I knew no one would pay him to do it.

Riordan:

That’s interesting, because he wouldn’t shake hands with me when I tried to talk at a HEPAP meeting. Well, that’s a very interesting point. What you’re saying is that the GAO was crucial in this atmosphere that they created.

Happer:

Absolutely. They would have one of these reports hit the press at crucial times; the timing was prearranged. And if you talk to the underlings in the GAO, the people who are actually down there, some of them were actually a little embarrassed by the way it was going.

Riordan:

And it could be portrayed in the press as an objective, arms-length study?

Happer:

Every time I see a GAO study now, I think twice about it. I see a lot in the newspapers. They look very professional, and I can’t remember what the most recent ones are, but I’m extremely suspicious of them. I think twice now ― who would have wanted that study? What answer would he have wanted? I think they have a severely tarnished reputation in that. It’s not just us in the scientific community who recognize that. It needs to be fixed. The GAO needs to be given its own budget, and they have to be able to do their studies, in which you let the chips fall as they may. They used to be that way; I don’t remember when they changed. Which is a predictable result.

Riordan:

Would you fault the press on this in that they would simply take things that were being fed them by Dingell and by the GAO without much criticism?

Happer:

I do fault them a little bit. Not much, I mean, I’ve never expected much of the press, so they don’t have time to do a whole lot of digging. Most of them, are verbal people who got bad grades in science and math, and grudgingly took it. They don’t have any natural affection... I don’t think they’re hostile, but we’re not their favorite community.

Riordan:

I think what’s most interesting in what you’ve said is the declining impact of the scientific community within Washington circles over the years, since say Sputnik and the 1960s. I don’t know if you’d care to comment on that at any greater length, but...

Happer:

Well, I already made the comment which I think is true, that there was this fraternity that helped us tremendously after World War II, and it was terrible to lose that. I’ve wondered whether there’s some way to do something like that again. To some extent, you get a little of that through the university system, the students that go to universities together have some shared experiences, and with luck there are ties that remain through the lives of all the students.

Riordan:

There’s nothing like a war to bring you together. Even if you look back at the history of the Manhattan Project, there were these same kinds of conflicts between the physicists and the military and the industrial managers like the DuPonts that managed, what was it, Oak Ridge. But they were solved because there was a gun at our head. It strikes me that, in this particular instance, the SSC was forced into a position where it had to justify itself on a very public platform. That was not the case for Fermilab or SLAC. Maybe there was some debate up to the point where the funds were committed.

[ed. Dupont managed Hanford Labs, not Oak Ridge, during World War II.]

Happer:

Well, they weren’t as expensive, even with inflation taken into account. It was still during the Cold War, as we discussed. There was a fair amount of confusion in the public mind about exactly what our bomb was. I think most people thought an atom-smasher had something to do with a bomb. At least there was this subliminal feeling that somehow the high-energy physicists were helping with US security. And people have gotten more sophisticated since then, and I think they would recognize that it’s basic research. It’s a hard thing to explain, if you compare it to, say, astronomy. People are fascinated by astronomy. You know the song in "Carousel" when the roustabout tells his girlfriend, “Look at those stars.” It’s just something that has always sold people. The Psalmists talk about the stars, they don’t talk about the more abstract things we like. There’s no psalm to the Pythagorean theorem, right? And it’s easy to sell biophysics. NIH is doing OK. Condensed matter used to... Even condensed matter has a little bit easier time because people know it has something to do with prosperity and jobs.

[ed. NIH is the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD, just outside DC.]

Riordan:

National competitiveness.

Happer:

That’s right. So high-energy physics, it’s in a hard spot, because it’s difficult to communicate what it’s about. It’s very expensive as we discussed before.

Riordan:

If you wanted to go to the high-energy frontier. There are other frontiers that are less expensive.

Happer:

Well, you can go to very high energies with cosmic rays. We talked about Jim Cronin’s Pierre Auger project, and after all, the positron was discovered in cosmic rays; the muon I think was [discovered in] cosmic rays; I don’t remember, but I think it was. So, you can make a little progress that way.

Riordan:

But I don’t think we’re going to discover the Higgs particle in cosmic rays.

Happer:

No, I don’t think so.

Riordan:

So we’ve come to a point, and I think personally we’re going to face it again when Mr. Richter finally gives the green light to the next linear collider, which is again going to be a multibillion-dollar machine. But at the high-energy frontier, we’re at a point where we need to justify these projects that are incredibly difficult to explain to those people who are in Washington and the general public exactly why we want it, and how it’s going to affect their lives.

Happer:

Yes, I used to listen to Burt explain the B-Factory because he was in the sell most of the time. He would end up his speech by explaining that “This is why you and I are here, because of B physics,” and “We’ll understand why there’s more matter than anti-matter.” And I would look around the room, and these politicians’ eyes would be rolling.

Riordan:

Well somehow, he managed to sell that to Clinton, although I think that’s because Clinton wanted to reward the state of California. Well, that’s about all I have.

[End of Interview]