Christopher Llewellyn Smith

[Editor’s note. In keeping with the standard practices of oral history, Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith was given the opportunity to review this transcript prior to its publication in 2024. He offered edits to improve readability and accuracy and to clarify his meaning; added annotations, which are indicated by his initials, CLS; and redacted sections that he wished not to make public (mainly concerning private discussions surrounding the succession of Directors-General of CERN).]

Riordan:

This is Michael Riordan interviewing Chris Llewellyn Smith. We’re at SLAC, at Stanford University, California, on the 18th of February 2010. And to begin, I’d like to get a little bit of your background. I realize you were here as a post-doc in the early 1970s, and the Llewellyn Smith Sum Rule came out of that time, I believe…

Llewellyn Smith:

Earlier.

Riordan:

Earlier? Okay. Well, I’m unfamiliar with the period between about 1975 and 1985. What were you doing at that time?

Llewellyn Smith:

Well, I left SLAC. I turned down an offer of tenure at SLAC and went to CERN, where I was a staff member on a fixed-term contract, from 1972 to 1974, when I went to Oxford. And from 1974 until I went back to CERN to be Director-General, in 1993, I held various posts, teaching posts, in Oxford. Ultimately, I was the head of the department of physics. In fact, I created it. I merged five physics departments into one.

Riordan:

Five physics departments? I thought we were overdoing it here.

Llewellyn Smith:

Oxford was certainly overdoing it. There were actually four physics departments and a department of astronomy. There was the Clarendon Lab, which housed atomic and condensed-matter physics. There was a separate nuclear physics department, which included high-energy physics. There was a separate theoretical physics department. And there was a rather good atmospheric physics department. The ozone layer was discovered at Oxford in the 1930s.

Riordan:

Would you say your CERN experience… I wasn’t unaware of that. Was that valuable in your later years?

Llewellyn Smith:

Oh, I was there before. I was at CERN as a fellow, from 1968 to 1970, before I came to SLAC. And then I was back as a staff member, from 1972 to 1974.

Riordan:

Okay. So, you have pretty deep CERN roots, before you…

Llewellyn Smith:

Well, my really deep knowledge of CERN came from later. First, you probably know that in 1984 the British set up an inquiry on whether or not to leave CERN.

Riordan:

Okay, I was going to ask you about that, the Kendrew commission.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, the Kendrew inquiry, which, by the way, colored my view of the SSC very much, as I will explain. [The term “commission” was not used to describe the inquiry —CLS.]

Riordan:

I’d be interested in hearing that.

Llewellyn Smith:

The outcome of the Kendrew inquiry was that Britain should stay in CERN, but the cost should be brought down. In the cabinet sub-committee meeting that decided that Britain should not leave, Ministers around the table said what they thought the Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher, wanted to hear: “Well, really, this is a waste of money.” And then she, at the end, said, “You’re all wrong, gentlemen, how can we possibly not be involved in this? We’re staying in.”

Riordan:

Well, let’s back up a little bit, then.

Llewellyn Smith:

But just a minute to finish that, because you’re asking me about my experience. One of the British requirements for staying in was that there should be a management review of CERN, the so-called Abragam inquiry. Anatole Abragam, who led the inquiry, is a scientist, but the members included senior industrialists — the director of Norsk Hydro, the director of Olivetti, which was just expanding and taking over companies. There was also the head of a Spanish bank, and so on. They decided they should have a scientific advisor, and Anatole turned to his friends at Oxford, because he’d been a post-doc there, who said, “Well, why not take Chris?” I’d done it for the Kendrew inquiry. So, my real knowledge of CERN comes from that period. During the inquiry, Wolfgang Paul, who was a member of the committee, who was the only person close to the field [of high-energy physics] on the committee, had a heart attack; he’s a Nobel Laureate. I became, therefore, not just a scientific advisor, but effectively a member of the Abragam committee. So, I sat for two years with a lot of big-business guys, and they had a Swiss management consultant, looking at the structure of CERN, and how it was managed. We analyzed every organization that every Director-General had organized, so I had a tremendously good knowledge of the way CERN worked, although I’d never managed anything at that point. And it stood me in tremendously good stead when I became Director-General.

Riordan:

Okay. Well, let’s back up. I want to get the background to the Kendrew commission. As I understand things, and correct me if I’m wrong, all of the science funding in Britain is in one pot, — or at least the physics funding — so that an expanding CERN program, which was the case during the LEP [Large Electron-Positron collider] years, is going to press and squeeze out the other sciences that fall under that umbrella. Is that correct?

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes and no. It’s true that at that time, leaving out medical research, the Science and Engineering Research Council controlled one big pot of money. And therefore the opportunity cost for the CERN budget, if it went up or down, was hitting the other sciences. So, they were not sympathetic to CERN. It’s not true, though, that the CERN budget was going up much in the 1980s. The CERN budget was at its peak, corrected for inflation, in 1972, when Mrs. Thatcher was the Minister of Science. When she complained to me about the CERN budget, I pointed this out to her. I always call it "the Thatcher peak." That was during the construction of the SPS [ed. the Super Proton Synchrotron, a 400 GeV proton accelerator built at CERN during the mid-1970s], which was very well funded. It came in under budget. It had spare money at the end because it was costed very conservatively by John Adams [Adams built CERN’s original Proton Synchrotron, was brought back to CERN as Director of the SPS, and then became joint Director-General of the whole organization —CLS]. He got away with a conservative costing and a lot of contingency, which was not allowed for subsequent projects. But it was true, however, that CERN took up a very large part of the British science pot, and the other scientists… There was pressure on the science budget, and the Conservative government was trying to reduce science funding, so the pot was going down and the CERN budget was staying fixed.

Riordan:

So that’s the pressure that was driving the Kendrew commission.

Llewellyn Smith:

That was the pressure. So, the Kendrew inquiry was set up and asked, “Should we stay in CERN?” Now, it turns out I knew John Kendrew, but it was not the reason I was invited to advise the inquiry. What happened — this will amuse you because your chapter refers to the Lausanne meeting — [is that] I was the theoretical rapporteur at the first LHC [Large Hadron Collider] workshop. I gave the summary talk on the theoretical case for the LHC. In Lausanne, I had a call from Kendrew, saying that they were setting up this inquiry — it was news to me — and would I act as the scientific advisor? I said, “No, you want an experimenter, somebody that knows a little bit about how CERN is organized. I’m just a theorist, sitting in my office, playing around.”

Riordan:

So, this is March 1984.

Llewellyn Smith:

This is March 1984. And John said to me, “In that case, we will have to go ahead without an advisor, because the government is announcing this inquiry this afternoon, in the House of Commons. And they want to announce — in order to reassure people — that there’s going to be a science advisor with a name. You’re the only candidate, and if you don’t say yes, we’re going to go ahead without a science advisor.” I thought, I can’t let them start an inquiry into belonging to CERN with no science advisor, so I said yes. And one of the consequences of that, after the announcement, was that they called a town meeting where the people who had set up the inquiry explained to a very angry particle-physics community why this inquiry was happening. I thought I should attend. We were in Lausanne for, I’ve forgotten, four days or something, it must be in the proceedings, and then there was a two-day open meeting at CERN. I was supposed to be the first speaker, but I was in London at the town meeting. I came back, so my talk was actually at the end (although in the proceedings it appears in the beginning) because I’d been in London. I had the biggest laugh I’ve ever received in the CERN auditorium, because I remember beginning the talk, saying, “I’m sorry I wasn’t [present] at the beginning. I think you know the reason. And I can only tell you one good thing about this, that John Ellis has told me that if it’s necessary to save CERN, he’s prepared to cut his hair.” Which brought the house down.

Riordan:

That’s a drastic move.

Llewellyn Smith:

I was invited to the ICFA [ed. International Committee on Future Accelerators] meeting in May 1984, in KEK [ed. the Japanese National Laboratory for High Energy Physics], because I was involved in the Kendrew inquiry, although I was a young, junior person in the system. Well, not quite, I had just become a Fellow of the Royal Society, but nevertheless, not in the hierarchy of the people controlling the funds and the experimental stuff.

Riordan:

Was there a kind of “hurry up” here because the SSC was now on the table and you had to make some definite plans about the LHC?

Llewellyn Smith:

Right, of course there was, of course there was. But the Kendrew inquiry said, “At one of our meetings, can you give a report on your crystal ball of where we’re going in twenty years?” So, I said, “If I’m going to do that, I’d better go to the ICFA seminar.” They said, “Fine, we’ll put up the travel money.” So, that’s why I was at the meeting, and I wouldn’t have been at that meeting in KEK otherwise, because it was mainly lab directors and senior folk in the business. The Lausanne Workshop and the subsequent discussions at KEK were the result of the recommendations of the group that was set up to look at Isabelle [ed. the HEPAP subpanel chaired by Stanford physicist Stanley Wojcicki in 1983] — and as you well know, it went beyond its terms of reference and said, “We should go for a 20 TeV machine…

Riordan:

I think that’s what …

Llewellyn Smith:

… to a 40 TeV machine.” I happened to be at Brookhaven and having breakfast with Herwig Schopper [ed. Director-General of CERN, 1981-1989, when LEP was under construction] the day after the news came out. And you got it right. This was what we’d always planned to do [i.e., build a large hadron collider following LEP —CLS]. There was always a feeling in Europe that the energy of the SSC was deliberately chosen to be something which was impossible in the LEP tunnel. I don’t know if it’s true or not. There was a certain point in the SSC development, that there was a panel set up, chaired by Sidney Drell of SLAC — and [Columbia University theorist] T. D. Lee was on it, and other people, I don’t remember when — which was asked, “Is it an option to descope the energy?”

Riordan:

That’s right. This would be the first Drell Panel, about 1990.

Llewellyn Smith:

They claimed there’s something magic about the SSC energy, which we didn’t see. We couldn’t see that there was any threshold which implied “it’s got to be this [energy].” And the feeling was (I don’t know, I haven’t ever asked Sid this, actually, about sticking to that energy [ed. 40 Tev]), if it became too close to what you could do in the LEP tunnel, it would become very hard to defend [the SSC]. So, there was a feeling that the [SSC] energy was set by political considerations, to make it impossible for CERN to compete and not on a good physics basis, except that higher energy was better — that was obvious.

Riordan:

Getting back to the 1984 ICFA meeting, do you think that there was a missed opportunity there, where the United States and Europe could have come together?

Llewellyn Smith:

I think it would have been… yes. What happened…

Riordan:

As they did twelve years, thirteen years later?

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes. Well, I can tell you something about what happened when they came together later, too, because I was involved in that, very directly. So, at that meeting, the Japanese… I sent you [University of Tokyo physicist Yoshio] Yamaguchi’s email.

Riordan:

And I’ve heard stories about Yamaguchi.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yamaguchi was absolutely incensed, and the Japanese generally said that this should be a joint project. And the American attitude was, as Yamaguchi says in his email to me… Actually, the report doesn’t bear a relation to… It was heavily smoothed, I’d say.

Riordan:

Censored.

Llewellyn Smith:

Censored. So, there was a moment where [University of Tokyo physicist Masatoshi] Koshiba stood up and said, “I am ashamed of my old American friends, for building this unimaginative dinosaur. Why can’t we do something more…” You know, it’s a technological dinosaur, to build something gigantic with a more-or-less state-of-the-art [technology], why isn’t it something more imaginative?

Riordan:

Do you recall a Yamaguchi outburst of that nature?

Llewellyn Smith:

I know Yoshio very well, but I don’t remember what he actually said, or when he stood up and said it, and quite what he said, but I know his attitude was, “This is terrible! We’d been working…” By the way, back in the 1960s, there was a lot of talk of a world machine, in the late 1950s already, and whether the Fermilab accelerator and the SPS should be a world machine. And there was a joint study set up, a big proton-synchrotron study between the U.S. and Russia, actually, in 1959. And there was a backing off on that. I know that because I’ve just been rereading the CERN history for various reasons. You know there’s an official history of CERN, three volumes?

Riordan:

Sure. John Krige [ed. one of the authors of the CERN history] is on our board.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right. And they claimed that there was an [informal] agreement, actually: the world machine will be for above 1 TeV. Up to 1 TeV, we’ll go it alone, but when we come back to 1 TeV, we’ll get together. And there was a series of conferences. There was the New Orleans workshop in the 1970s [ed. in 1975] on this, and various things.

Riordan:

I should send you Lillian’s earlier article on this very subject.

Llewellyn Smith:

Oh, okay.

Riordan:

The dream of a world accelerator. [ed. Adrienne Kolb and Lillian Hoddeson, "The Mirage of the ‘World Accelerator for World Peace’ and the Origins of the SSC, 1953-1983," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 24/1 (1993): 101-124 https://doi.org/10.2307/27757713]

Llewellyn Smith:

So, there’d been talk of a world accelerator, and this looked like it. You know, you [the USA] was really going for the sort of biggest thing you could imagine. If you’re ever going to do it, why not now? So, Yamaguchi, in particular, personally felt this [SSC project] was a terrible thing. The American attitude — and I cannot remember how explicitly it was expressed — was about restoring national leadership, and that’s indeed the way [Jay] Keyworth [science advisor to Ronald Reagan] saw it. And the famous New York Times headline, that was what it was all about. And as I said to you in the other interview, Pief [ed. Wolfgang Panfosky, the founding director of SLAC] told me, it’s a theorem, there’s no point in having a world machine. And I remember sitting on the bus with Pief, going to a banquet, and Pief telling me that, and I said, “Pief, why is this accelerator not being opened up to the world?” And Pief said, “There’s no point.” And I said…

Riordan:

I’ve heard his argument.

Llewellyn Smith:

“What do you mean?” His argument was that you can get a factor of three [in funding], but then it’s two because of bureaucratic friction [between nations], and we can double the budget in the U.S. anyway. And I was, as the British would say, gobsmacked, because I’d come from the first meeting of the Kendrew inquiry. I could see that the wind was changing for high-energy physics, and I could not believe that the SSC was going to get approved with doubling the budget. I just came in there thinking, “This is extraordinary, this idea, and if you’re going to try to double the budget, we’d better make it a world machine.” I didn’t care where it was at that time.

Riordan:

So, going back to the Kendrew commission, the perspective you got there was how high-energy physics was impinging on other sciences.

Llewellyn Smith:

And the pressures of the era. Pief was from the era when budgets were just going up, right? And he hadn’t realized things had changed. High-energy physics budgets were going to saturate at some point. So, I felt, "This is unrealistic." So, from the point of view of practicality, to get it [the SSC] approved, it had better be a world machine, and anyway, what’s wrong with a world machine? I also felt that, because I'd spent, by that time, four years at CERN, it’s a waste… You cannot do as well, but you can do something in the LEP tunnel. If you’d think of a world pot [of funding] – of course, it wasn’t under one control – if there was a world pot of high-energy physics funds, it’s crazy not to do the LHC and keep the rest to do something else. Of course, we were wrongly encouraged by Burt [Richter, SLAC director, 1984-2002] giving everyone the impression that in three years, he could build a 1 TeV linear collider. And like fusion always being so far ahead — I shouldn’t say that, as somebody in fusion — that’s been true of the linear collider, of course. And now the energy’s backed off. But at that time, the SLC [ed. The Stanford Linear Collider, a 90 GeV electron-positron collider at SLAC] was being designed. CERN had an inquiry, chaired by Carlo [Rubbia], [studying whether] should we be going for a linear collider or the LHC. And people thought of that as a realistic choice, between a 2 TeV linear collider and the LHC.

Riordan:

Yes, and look where we are now.

Llewellyn Smith:

It just wasn’t possible, technically. At that time, I knew very little about accelerator physics. Funnily enough, later that year for spurious reasons, I learned a lot of accelerator physics.

Riordan:

What year was that?

Llewellyn Smith:

1984.

Riordan:

Okay, the Kendrew year.

Llewellyn Smith:

And yes, for different reasons. But at that time, I thought [a linear collider] was a real competitor, I was young and politically naive, but it seemed to me that if there’s a fixed pot of money in the world, we should be saying, "Let’s do the LHC, and the U.S. should be getting on with the linear collider."

Riordan:

In 1984 or 1985, could CERN have opened up to the United States, if we could have gotten over this problem, which is really the "damaged US science" sensitivity?

Llewellyn Smith:

I think the answer is probably no, but you can ask Schopper. I don’t know if you’ve spoken or plan to speak to Schopper, but…

Riordan:

Not in a formal interview, but he did come to a session at the APS meeting…

Llewellyn Smith:

So, Schopper’s answer to that is: “If I could have said that the CERN Council has agreed that after LEP we’re going to build the LHC, I could have gone to the U.S. Congress and the U.S. community saying, what about joining?” Because the strategy was always, it’s going to be open, and we’ll be looking for people [partners and users]. It [the LHC] was never conceived as a purely European project. John Adams — who was the person who said, “Keep the diameter of the tunnel big enough with LEP” — was always in favor of a world machine, at some point. So, that was in people’s minds. But Schopper said, “I couldn’t do that, because we’d only just got LEP approved. We’re starting to build it. There was no way…”

Riordan:

In 1983.

Llewellyn Smith:

“…having made this big commitment to LEP, that we could have gone to the CERN Council and said, ‘And please now write us a check [for the LHC].’” And the British were talking of walking. Imagine, with one of our major member states talking of pulling out? And I go and ask the Council to make a commitment that, in twenty years time, after LEP’s finished, we make another big project, cost unknown? He said that was impossible. But I felt, why was Europe not — again, I was young and naive — saying, “Look, we’re going to do this anyway, and you can come in?” I thought we should do it, but Schopper was probably right. I could say as a scientist, “We’re going to do it, you can come in,” but as a director, he couldn’t make that offer.

Riordan:

Okay. So, during the Schopper and the Rubbia eras, what status did the LHC have to take, as a potential project, if the SSC didn’t go forward? [ed. Carlo Rubbia was Director-General of CERN, 1989-1994.]

Llewellyn Smith:

The idea of the LHC appears first in John Adams’s notebook in 1976, I think.

Riordan:

Was it?

Llewellyn Smith:

There is a biography of John Adams written by Michael Crowley-Milling, and you will find in there that he says that John Adams wrote in his notebook… John didn’t like electron machines, but he said, if you’re going to build LEP, make sure the tunnel is wide enough [to house a proton machine later]. It’s ambiguous in which year he wrote that note, but I think it’s 1976. I first heard about the LHC idea just after that. And in fact, as well as being the first theoretical rapporteur at a major workshop on LHC, I was for LEP, also. There was an LEP summer study in 1978, up in the Alps, for two weeks, and I gave the theoretical summary. And I remember presenting this idea to the CERN scientific policy committee, and arguing, “Don’t piddle around compromising the length of the tunnel,” because there were some people — Carlo was one of them — who were arguing, why build this 27-kilometer ring? Why don’t you just build a Z factory? Much smaller. I can remember saying [with the LHC in mind], “You’ve got to go for the big LEP. You’re not going to build a bigger tunnel than this [later], so don’t compromise” (I’m speaking as a scientist, here). “Keep it big.” So, I knew about the LHC all along; it had always been in people’s minds. But what you say in your chapter is completely correct. CERN had not begun any serious work on it. And it was after the announcement of the SSC proposal in the summer of 1983 that CERN set up a working group on the LHC in the autumn, or sometime before Christmas, which came with its report to the… And you’re probably right, when you say that whatever Schopper showed that summer was “back of the envelope.” No serious work …

Riordan:

The drawing is there because… [ed. the drawing on page 30 of Tunnel Visions]

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, no serious work had been done. It was just known that, yes, we’ve made the tunnel big enough, and it’s obvious you can do something, but the SSC was the trigger to have a serious study. So, a lot of work was done to be in time for the ICFA seminar, and that’s why the Lausanne workshop was the first opportunity to try and get the community on board and get everybody in.

Riordan:

Do you recall any figures — and I haven’t read the whole thing, I’ve read the executive summary and the conclusions — but did anybody put down an estimated cost for widening the experimental areas?

Llewellyn Smith:

I don’t know the answer to that.

Riordan:

Okay, well, I’ll dig in, but [CERN accelerator physicist/engineer Giorgio] Brianti was throwing around numbers in the hundreds of millions.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, well…

Riordan:

They’re in the footnotes to that report.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right, I saw that. I was very surprised it was such a small number, because that was absurd. The cost of the areas was one of the big things we got wrong. As a matter of fact, in the original [detailed] costing, we underestimated the experimental areas, partly because the costing, which we made in 1994, was before the Americans were coming in, and there were not going to be so sophisticated detectors. The big impact of the SSC closure was…

Riordan:

Yes, one of these big overruns was in the detector area, I think…

Llewellyn Smith:

That’s true, yes. Well, I don’t remember where we put the excavation of the halls. We moved it around, to disguise what was going on, in fact. But one of the difficulties I had, and I can find you chapter and verse on this, was that Carlo — keeping alive the idea of the LHC in the face of the SSC — was telling people ridiculous things, and he was telling people… I remember, I was chairing the CERN scientific policy committee… By the way, I joined the CERN scientific policy committee in 1986, just before I got into the Abragham committee. In the last years of Carlo’s director-generalship, I was chairman — it's very difficult to chair an advisory committee to Carlo, he didn’t want advice — but Carlo was telling the Council, “I can have LHC running, finished, in 1997, and operating in parallel with LEP,” and giving costs. And I had the difficulty that when Brianti came up with a serious cost, [it was much larger].

[Redacted section]

Usually the Director-General of CERN is nominated a year in advance. I was actually appointed a year and a quarter in advance [in September 1992, for reasons that I could only describe off the record —CLS]. It was a good thing, because at that point, it had been agreed that in December 1993, CERN would present the complete LHC project, and a complete long-term plan for CERN -— how the LHC would be embedded with LEP, the fixed-target program, the personnel costs, and so on. The LHC workshops were just on the accelerator; they weren’t on the whole plan for CERN. In May [1993], eight months before I took over from Carlo, we had a meeting with Lyn [Evans, CERN accelerator physicist who became project manager of the LHC], who I’d already decided would be the project leader, and Brianti [who was due to retire —CLS], who came in with a revised cost. And Carlo said, “This cost, it’s never going to be approved at this level. I don’t want to be responsible. Chris, you can present this.” So, although I was not Director-General in December of 1993, I presented the CERN long-term plan, and in fact I wrote it. And I worked with Horst Wenninger and Lyn Evans and all the planning team from May to December of 1993, working out the CERN long-term plan. And one of the difficulties we had was Brianti had come in for the machine and experimental areas with something like 2.8 billion. And Carlo …

Riordan:

2.8 billion dollars?

Llewellyn Smith:

[Swiss Francs, about $2 billion dollars at that time —CLS]. And Carlo had told the Council that he could build it for something like 1.9 billion Swiss Francs only a year before. So, if the cost was 2.8 billion Swiss Francs, I thought Carlo is right, we’re not going to be approved. We’ve got to get it down, and how can we get it down and make it look compatible with 1.9 billion Swiss Francs, which was impossible? So, Lyn went away and took a couple hundred million off the machine. We did a lot of things. We changed the transfer lines from being superconducting in Brianti's plan to being normal conducting. There was no reason for them to be superconducting. Lyn redesigned the machine, basically, on his kitchen table at home, he told me.

Riordan:

I think that was in your article [ed. "How the LHC Came to Be," Nature, 18 July 2007 https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06076].

Llewellyn Smith:

He took a lot of money out of the machine, and then we got arguments why the 1.9 billion Swiss Francs should be inflated differently, and I’ve forgotten… I think we put the machine and areas at 2.4 billion Swiss Francs, and then claimed that wasn’t so bad, compared to 1.9 billion or something like that. But there was severe pressure because Carlo had given these very low costs, and because we thought we couldn’t get 2.8 billion, and we didn’t want to or undermine the whole credibility.

Riordan:

So, we’ve now gone to December of 1993, which was post-SSC, and are focusing on the LHC. I’d like to move it back. How did people think before October 1993. Was it conceivable that CERN would build the LHC, even if the SSC had gone forward?

Llewellyn Smith:

Carlo somehow managed to convince people that it was. I didn’t believe it myself, that it could ever happen [before the SSC started to get into financial difficulties in 1990 —CLS].

Riordan:

That’s like an argument to continue building Isabelle [ed. a canceled proton collider at Brookhaven] after the W and Z bosons had been discovered [ed. at CERN in 1982 and 1983].

Llewellyn Smith:

Carlo had said a lot of stuff about how higher luminosity would compensate for lower energy, which was interesting because I clearly remember Carlo, in KEK in 1984, saying to me, “These guys are crazy, sitting up in Snowmass, saying they can build machines at 10³². I’m the only guy in the world with a [hadron] collider. It's almost impossible at 10²⁸ [luminosity].” And people like John Ellis and I were pushing the luminosity curves — I think it’s in John’s talk in KEK, and there are a lot in my Lausanne talk, showing that, in principle (of course you didn’t know how to do the experiment) you could get higher up the quark [energy] distributions; you can push to higher quark energies by getting to higher luminosity. But the experiments get harder. And of course at that time, the reaction from the SSC was: "That’s just crazy, you can never do those experiments." Now everybody agrees you can, but it was a leap of faith.

Riordan:

But what was the general sense on the streets of CERN, that if the SSC indeed went forward, then we’re going to have to abandon this LHC project?

Llewellyn Smith:

I think that Carlo had somehow mesmerized most people into thinking it might go ahead.

[Redacted section]

By March 1992, when it was pretty clear that [Pierre] Darriulat and I were likely to be the front runners to become the next Director-General of CERN, there was an LHC workshop in Evian, France. You’ve probably seen the proceedings of that.

Riordan:

No, I haven’t seen the proceedings.

Llewellyn Smith:

Well, there was a big workshop, and I gave one of the summary talks there. And on the way back, I went to visit Herwig Schopper. He drove me back from Evian. He lives somewhere on the road back towards CERN, on that side of Geneva. And discussing it with him, I said, “Look, this is the moment of truth. The Scientific Policy Committee hasn’t gone to the Council [with a short list of candidates to become Director-General] yet, and I don’t know if I want to do this job. What do you think? And I’ve never run anything [like CERN]… and I don’t know if I want to be a candidate.” And also, I said, “Look, if the SSC…” The SSC had already been canceled once at this stage. We’re talking about March 1992.

Riordan:

There was a House vote against it that June, but it was rescued in the Senate [ed. in 1992].

Llewellyn Smith:

That’s right. So, I said, “Look, I don’t know what the future of CERN is [if the SSC is built], but we’ve committed.” Carlo had jumped the Council into saying “LHC is the right machine.” There’s a December 1991 resolution of the Council saying it’s the right machine for particle physics and for the future of CERN, which should come up with a complete proposal by December 1993. And I said, “Okay, we’re going to have to go with a proposal. It’s going to fail if the SSC looks to be going ahead, but it’s just been voted down once.” Herwig said to me, “I’ve never believed it would survive.”

Riordan:

I was going to come to that.

Llewellyn Smith:

I said, “Well, I thought that it would never be approved, but it was approved. On the other hand, it’s wobbling now.”

Riordan:

So, this was in December 1992?

Llewellyn Smith:

No, this was March 1992.

Riordan:

Okay, March 1992.

Llewellyn Smith:

On the way from Evian. It’s March 1992. So, Herwig convinced me…

Riordan:

That’s before the first big vote.

Llewellyn Smith:

Was it before the vote?

Riordan:

Yes, that was in June 1992. [ed. when the House first voted to terminate the SSC project]

Llewellyn Smith:

It was June 1992? Before June 1992 I was not fully committed, but I then thought, Herwig is right, and in June 1992, when the Council meeting occurred, my name went in as a candidate, and I said, “I’m prepared to have the British government nominate me.” Herwig had convinced me that quite likely it [the SSC] wouldn’t happen, and I thought, well, anyway…

Riordan:

Can you recall the nature of his argument?

Llewellyn Smith:

Ah… no, not really. You’ve got to remember, there was… Phil Anderson… It [the SSC] wasn’t exactly popular in the U.S., among the scientific community. You know the situation.

Riordan:

But part of that… It had survived, fairly comfortably, votes in the Senate and House, in 1991, which was when I was in Washington with URA [ed. Universities Research Association, the management and operations contractor for the SSC].

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes. But people were pretty worried. I’d been on sabbatical at Berkeley, just before I went to Evian, and people were very worried, already, then there were worrying signs. I can’t remember what, but Herwig convinced me that the whole thing was doomed. The cost was going up too fast. We knew the cost was going up, [the DOE was] failing to get the Japanese on board, and the Congress, as you know, was totally schizophrenic. Is it a national project, or an international project? And so on. And Herwig said to me, “I think it’s going to fail.” So, I thought, “Okay. It’s going to be a different job if there’s no LHC, and as Director-General I would find it very difficult to defend the LHC if the SSC was being built, but I can have the job of looking for something else, although I don’t know what that is.” Carlo kept on saying, “This is the only thing to do.” Anyway, I then became a candidate to be Director-General.

Riordan:

Okay. Well, let’s change gears here, because what I would like to get out of this interview, and not just focus on the SSC…

Llewellyn Smith:

But just on that, there’s an interesting question that Burt [Richter] asked me. He said, “How did Carlo manage to prevent many Europeans signing up for the SSC?” Some did, a British group did, but not many, in fact.

Riordan:

Okay. Do you have any reflection?

Llewellyn Smith:

I don’t know the answer to that, I think it’s just Carlo’s… People are frightened of Carlo, and he’s a dominant personality. He stood up and made this speech, saying, “I can have the LHC running in parallel with LEP in 1997.” In 1990 he said that, and that was bullshit, and somehow people didn’t stand up and say the emperor has no clothes.

Riordan:

Okay, well, I’ll have to look into that. I’ll let you know that we’ve re-contacted Alvin Trivelpiece [DOE Office of Energy Research Director, 1981-1987], and in one of his emails to Lillian he said, “Oh, by the way, we had a billion-dollar commitment from Andreotti” [ed. Giulio Andreotti, then Italian Foreign Minister].

Llewellyn Smith:

Okay.

Riordan:

Now, that’s not necessarily a commitment of the Italian government.

Llewellyn Smith:

Oh, by the way, I thought in your paper, that thing that was… You said at the point of [Congressional SSC] approval it looked like there was a billion coming from around the world. I don’t remember seeing a billion. The only ones really signed up were the Indians, if I remember.

Riordan:

No, what I’m reporting to you, what you read, was what the President’s science advisor at that time, William Graham, had sent a memo to President Reagan…

Llewellyn Smith:

That’s what the President thought, okay.

Riordan:

… saying that there’s five hundred million from Japan, two hundred million from Europe, maybe one hundred million from Canada, but there weren’t really any commitments.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

Okay, we really need to get to Trivelpiece on this and…

Llewellyn Smith:

But one of the difficulties over the Japanese is that they had been told “get lost” at KEK [ed. at the 1984 ICFA meeting at KEK], so it was obvious they were being retrofitted into this project, as people to put money in. So, they were not in a very good mood, to be coming in as partners. The design was made, it had been approved, but they’d offered to come in earlier.

Riordan:

They were participating in the R&D under the U.S.-Japan agreement, but not much else.

Llewellyn Smith:

Obviously a very small number of people involved.

Riordan:

Oh, six, I think. Six to ten.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes. But they managed to talk it up to a hundred physicists at a certain point. And I can remember arriving in Washington and, after the [ed. 1994] Drell panel, saying that the U.S. should join the LHC, that Sid [Drell] said the total amount was four hundred million for the detector and the machines. It's very difficult to get more when a committee of physicists have put a cap on it. Okay? But there were over five hundred Americans signed up. There seemed to be…

Riordan:

This is for LHC?

Llewellyn Smith:

…for the LHC, rather small. So, I asked for a billion dollars, and the Americans said that’s outrageous. And I said, “Come on, you asked for two billion, for a hundred Japanese. And I’m asking for one billion, for five hundred. What argument did you use?” And there was a guy from the State department who said, “Oh, well, the argument was clear. The Japanese have been ripping off our fundamental research ever since the war. They owed us a couple of billion.”

Riordan:

That argument was used, effectively, by [President George H. W. Bush’s science advisor Allan] Bromley.

Llewellyn Smith:

It was used? It was actually used?

Riordan:

Yes.

Llewellyn Smith:

This was a guy who’d been the science advisor in the American embassy in Tokyo, who told me that. Was the argument actually used face-to-face with the Japanese? Because the Japanese are never… Psychologically, that’s a hopeless argument.

Riordan:

I think that’s what [was being asked in late] 1991, preceding Bush’s visit where he got sick and barfed on [Prime Minister Kiichi] Miyazawa’s shoes. That was a strong argument that was being made, why Japan had to come up with a billion dollars. And it seemed…

Llewellyn Smith:

That argument was actually being used?

Riordan:

And it seems to have succeeded. But we’re getting a little off the subject.

Llewellyn Smith:

I think that was political pressure. Come on, that is psychologically the worst possible argument, “You guys owe us some money.”

Riordan:

Well, we have to understand the special relationship between the United States and Japan going back to Admiral Perry’s visit [ed. in 1853, which forcibly opened Japan to trade].

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, but you’ve got to remember, I actually did get some money out of the Japanese, and I talked to them, and they were not pleased about that sort of argument. And what [Wataru] Mori [who led the Japanese Association of Medical Sciences and was a member of the Science Council of Japan] said to me… what had happened is that the Japanese prime minister said to him, “The Americans have asked for two billion. Please go around the entire scientific community — biologists, chemists, so on, and say, should we be taking two billion out of the Japanese science budget to put in this project in Texas?” And Mori said, “I can tell you the answer immediately. It’s no.” And he said the prime minister said to him — a very Japanese answer — “In that case, do it very slowly.”

Riordan:

Okay.

Llewellyn Smith:

So, I have always felt the Japanese never intended to put money [into the SSC]. Burt tells me I’m wrong, and that if Bush’s meeting after this famous banquet had been on the agenda… It wouldn’t have been on the agenda unless the sherpas had agreed the day before, but it might have been a billion, and not two billion.

Riordan:

Yes. That’s my… I don’t think it was two billion, but I think one billion was the number that was really on the table.

Llewellyn Smith:

And I can remember saying to Roy [Schwitters, the SSC Lab Director], after it [the SSC] was canceled, “Why didn’t you back off and ask for a billion? And then it would have been very difficult to cancel, if you'd got a billion, and Japanese commitment.” And Roy said, “Why would we have backed off? It was clear they were on the point of giving us two billion.”

Riordan:

Let me give you a little bit of insight on that, and then I’d like to go on to CERN management, because we’ve only got about twenty-five more minutes. The upshot was that the Japanese, at the very highest levels — we’re now well beyond the scientific community — were looking for the United States to go soft on a policy of putting quotas on [imported] auto parts. And Bush would have been willing to do that, okay? The Bush administration would have been willing to do that. Then the Clinton administration came in, and Mickey Kantor became the trade representative, and the Clinton administration was not willing to go soft on quotas for auto parts. And had Clinton been willing to do so in April 1993, when Miyazawa came to Washington, there would have been the golden handshake [ed. on Japanese partnership in the SSC]. [I have other information, as I once explained, but I’m not prepared to put it in the public domain at present —CLS.]

Llewellyn Smith:

Is this all going to be in your book, by the way?

Riordan:

Yes.

Llewellyn Smith:

Good.

Riordan:

Okay. But you can see how high-level things had become.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right, right. I can imagine that, under sufficient American pressure, they’d have put in a billion.

Riordan:

Yes, that was the number in my mind.

Llewellyn Smith:

But two billion…

Riordan:

No, that was not.

Llewellyn Smith:

No, and the Japanese were stalling in various ways. I picked up the aftermath of that, and also the aftermath of Carlo trying to get money for the LHC. Carlo’s very strong push made a bad impression, but he convinced the Japanese “they’re going to have to put money in the LHC, but never as long as Carlo’s Director-General.” So, it made my life relatively easy.

Riordan:

Actually Lyn Evans, in that article, mentions a trip to Japan, cajoling the Japanese, and it strikes me that he’s — just looking at his temperament versus Carlo’s — the much better person to be talking to the Japanese.

Llewellyn Smith:

But it wasn’t Lyn, it was me.

Riordan:

Oh.

Llewellyn Smith:

Lyn was with me.

Riordan:

Yes, okay.

Llewellyn Smith:

It’s very interesting, we were driving through Tokyo, and I was preparing for our first meeting in the morning in a taxi, and Lyn was reading the Herald Tribune, and the headline was about this guy in Barings Bank who’d lost a couple of billion and broke the bank with a rogue trade, do you remember that?

Riordan:

Yes.

Llewellyn Smith:

And I remember, Lyn said to me, with his Welsh accent, “Oh, I’d hate to be in a position to lose a billion dollars.” And I said, “Two billion dollars. Lyn, I only know one person in the world who’s in a position to lose two billion dollars.” And Lyn said, “Who the hell is that?” I said, “It’s you, Lyn, if the LHC doesn’t work.” And Lyn, I can wind him up, still now that the LHC is not fully working, to this day. You just say “Barings Bank” to Lyn, and you will wind him up.

Riordan:

No, the temperament of that guy is just fabulous, and maybe we’ll get to project management, so I think I want to pull this interview over into CERN management. It strikes me that CERN has this remarkable asset in that it has the CERN Council, which acts as a buffer between the political process and the management of physics projects.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

In other words — and you don’t have this at ITER [ed. the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor fusion facility; Llewellyn Smith chaired its governing body, the ITER Council, from 2003 to 2008] — people put in money, and then the physicists decide how to spend that, of course conditioned by satisfying the CERN Council. I wonder if you could reflect on that, the value of that institution.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right. It was certainly true in the early days of CERN, and in fact there’s a chapter in one of — I think it’s volume three of the CERN history — where it talks about the change of relationship between the CERN Council and the members. In the very beginning, CERN was the only intergovernmental science organization, and the idea was supported by some rather high-level diplomats, science administrators, and scientists who became the first Council. This was their project, and they were working for CERN against their governments, if you like, and selling CERN. But there was a bit of a phase transition already around the late 1960s, where much more it came to be that the governments were trying to control CERN, rather than the CERN Council trying to control their governments. And it got worse, but it’s still better than with ITER, that’s for sure. But nevertheless, there were hard-nosed guys in there from the German and the British governments who were seeing the effect on the rest of their science budgets. So, I wouldn’t have too rosy a view of the CERN Council as the defender of science.

Riordan:

Okay, but from the perspective of the United States, if somebody in the German government — or the British government — is upset about the way things are being managed on a particular project, they can’t drag Lyn Evans before Parliament and dress him down.

Llewellyn Smith:

They cannot. They can drag him before the CERN Council, where, if he’s lucky, he’ll have some defenders from the other countries.

Riordan:

And the CERN Council has got its accounts… There are two CERN councils, right? There’s a council of ministers and a council of scientists, aren’t there?

Llewellyn Smith:

No, no, no.

Riordan:

No?

Llewellyn Smith:

No, no. There’s a Scientific Policy Committee, which is ad hominem, although you’ve got to have a few Brits and a few French and so on, so those are just supposed to be good scientists. Originally it was [Patrick] Blackett and [Niels] Bohr and [Werner] Heisenberg, and so on. So, that’s independent, it just advises the Council and the lab on the science policy. The Council is one body, in which every country has two delegates. And typically, they bring one person who’s a scientist or sometimes an ex-scientist — such as the chairman of one of the big research councils who’s been a scientist all his life but moved to the national side — and the other is a politician.

Riordan:

So, you’ve got a science minister, perhaps?

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, a science minister [perhaps —CLS].

Riordan:

And a chief scientist.

Llewellyn Smith:

Or something like that. It’s not always at that level, and the level has gone down over the years. One of the difficulties that CERN has had from the early days was — as there are more and more European organizations — that it has become a job being delegated to European organizations, [this is] especially true at the level of the finance committee. So, instead of having these rather high-level people, who could overrule national interest to look at the interest of the organization and see the big picture, you’ve got career people, whose job, as they see, is to get the best value or deal for their country and their promotion back home. So, it’s hard for them to take off their hats and say, “This isn’t in the UK’s interest, but it’s in the interest of CERN, so we’ll go along with it,” because — at least at the level of the finance committee— there are annual promotions, which depend on getting a good deal. Although in principle Europe is unifying, in fact there’s a tendency, more and more, of everybody looking after getting their quota of things [ed. for example, industrial contracts]. So, it’s got worse.

Riordan:

Yes, but at least you have this buffer.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

Like I said, they can’t drag Lyn Evans before Parliament.

Llewellyn Smith:

No, absolutely not.

Riordan:

They have to work through a problem. If a particular government is upset, they can leave in five years, or they can try to deal…

Llewellyn Smith:

One year.

Riordan:

One year? Oh, I thought it took five years to withdraw.

Llewellyn Smith:

No, you have to give notice before the end of this year to leave at the end of next year.

Riordan:

Oh. That’s more short-circuited. Okay. But still, it means that a project manager is dealing with people who are fairly familiar with CERN, and a consistent set of people, year after year.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, that’s right.

Riordan:

Okay.

Llewellyn Smith:

There’s memory in the system.

Riordan:

And opposed to, like in ITER member states are putting in money that is then managed by this organization. ITER members are putting in in-kind contributions that somehow have to be coordinated.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, that’s right. That’s a different story.

Riordan:

Okay. That’s a whole different ball of wax. And there’s nothing like that in the United States. If a particular congressman, like Chairman John Dingell [of the House Energy and Commerce Committee], became upset with what’s happening, he could drag Roy Schwitters before a committee of Congress and dress him down.

Llewellyn Smith:

You’re right, you’re right. That’s a strength.

Riordan:

But that, to me, really means that the control of a project — and this is crucial, I’ll send you a paper I’ve written [ed. Michael Riordan, “A Tale of Two Cultures: Building the Superconducting Super Collider, 1988-1993,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32/1 (2001): 125-144 https://doi.org/10.1525/hsps.2001.32.1.125] — the control of the scientific workplace has been left in the hands of scientists.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, that’s correct.

Riordan:

Building the scientific workplace.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

And this is crucial. Pief Panofsky talked about this a lot in coaching Roy, that you’ve got to allow scientists to build this machine, because you are establishing a culture, a laboratory culture, which will be different if industry builds it.

Llewellyn Smith:

During the Abragam committee, the group of senior industrialists looked at the question “is CERN well or badly managed?” And they explicitly answered a question they’d posed themselves: “Will it be better to have a manager as the Director-General? What should be the criteria for the Director-General?” And they came to the conclusion (I expect it’s written in the Abragam report, but I don’t remember how it’s written down) that if you had somebody with — some professional manager, whatever that means, but not a high-energy physicist necessarily — you would end up with a laboratory that was very well managed and probably intellectually dead. So, they said, you want to get a really inspiring, great scientist as CERN Director-General, and if he’s got good administrative experience, that’s great. And give him support, but don’t try to put somebody as manager in there. That’s not the way to do science. And this was industrial guys talking. This is one of the things that encouraged me.

[Side B of tape begins]

Llewellyn Smith:

So that was an encouragement to me, to think that, having managed very little, I might be able to be a Director-General of CERN.

Riordan:

The example is Oppenheimer in Los Alamos. Okay? And behind him stands General Groves, building everything in sight.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right.

Riordan:

But, interacting with the scientists and creating the laboratory culture is Oppenheimer.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes. There are different ways of doing that, of course. You see, [Robert] Aymar [ed. CERN Director-General, 2004-2008] was brought in from outside the field.

Riordan:

Who’s that?

Llewellyn Smith:

After [Luciano] Maiani, the Director-General of CERN was Robert Aymar.

Riordan:

Yes, okay. And he was more of a manager.

Llewellyn Smith:

More of a manager, from a different field. And I personally think that was a mistake. It may have been right, at a period when — it depends on whether you think he did a good job or not, and I don’t want to get into that — the only job was to finish building the LHC. But you can’t do it too often. You see, I was director of the British fusion program for five years, from outside fusion, and there was a good reason to bring me in, which was that fusion is dominated by plasma physicists, and the time came when it had to be much broader, looking at the engineering and material sciences, design, and so on. And the whole program had become very isolated from the scientific community, so they wanted somebody who could come in and connect it back to the universities, the whole rest of the scientific community. That was my job. And to publicize it, build up public support, which we did. We had public support for fusion in the UK. When I left, my colleagues said “Oh, that was good, let’s look for a clone of you.” And I said, “That’s a big mistake. You can have somebody outside the field for five years, but you’d better not do it for ten years. You need somebody who can come in on Monday morning, saying, ‘I have a new scientific idea of how we’re going to run this thing,’ that everybody will respect scientifically.” So, I think the CERN idea that you should go for someone in the field is correct. Aymar: you can do it once, but you shouldn’t do it twice running.

Riordan:

Good point. Especially, do it once, in response to management and budgetary lapses.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

Okay. So, we’re in agreement that…

Llewellyn Smith:

But not everybody agrees, by the way…

Riordan:

And CERN, because it has this buffer called the CERN Council, is a particularly special organization in being able to maintain that laboratory culture.

[Redacted section]

Riordan:

Let’s move on to the final area, which is the value of a strong project manager, and the obvious example is Lyn Evans, in your case. But there are others like Bjorn Wiik. We just heard [German accelerator physicist] Gus Voss stand up and it really struck me that we have examples like Robert Wilson and Pief Panofsky, here in the United States. I believe that person might have been Maury Tigner, in the United States, but, that person was certainly lacking in the case of the SSC. I’d like any reflections you have on…

Llewellyn Smith:

Absolutely vital, and you can’t mix the jobs. By the way, the Groves/Oppenheimer analogy is an interesting one. When I got into fusion, I didn’t know even what was the structure of the divisions. Why is there a heating and fueling division? It’s a different… It’s not accelerators, although the technology is rather similar. I had a chief operating officer, and I was the director, so I was responsible for all the external relations, raising funds, raising the profile of the lab, and setting the trend. And people reported to me scientifically, but I was not the manager of the lab. And this is exactly like Oppenheimer and Groves, as I understand it, and that works.

Riordan:

Except that Oppenheimer worked for Groves.

Llewellyn Smith:

Ah, in some sense, yes. Right. But that is the absolutely key post. And there are two posts there.

Riordan:

And the project manager doesn’t have to be the number one position. In fact, it’s…

Llewellyn Smith:

No, no, it’s a mistake, and if you look at ITER, there really are two jobs there. Norbert Holtkamp — I don’t know if you know Norbert, who is the project manager — he was effectively trying to fill a bit of a vacuum and trying to do both jobs. They cannot be combined. There’s a job of sitting at home, building the project. There’s another of going around talking to the Koreans, the Americans, the Congress, whoever it is, keeping everything together, and the technical director should be telling the truth to the Director-General. It’s then for him to decide, “How am I going to gloss this over?” I remember at CERN directorate meetings, when somebody was saying something which was a little bit of bullshit, Lyn saying, “Come on, guys, the door’s closed. Inside this room,we don’t lie to each other. We’ve got to have the straight technical facts and the risks. And then it’s Chris’s job, with our advice, to decide what we will say to the Council and the rest of the world.” Those are separate jobs, and if you start mixing them up there isn’t time for the project leader to do his job. The SSC was a national project, so it’s a little bit different, but it wasn’t, really, because it required managing the Congress [which should be the Director’s job —CLS].

Riordan:

Yes. And that was supposed to have been Roy’s job. I think the people that named him hoped that Maury could work for Roy.

Llewellyn Smith:

Right. And there’s also another job, you’ve got to realize, if you start from a green field, which ITER is, also. It’s not just building the SSC, it’s setting up the administration. You’ve got to hire administrators, set up a system, build a scientific culture, start preparing the experimental system. If I had been in Roy’s job, I would have wanted somebody like Maury who’s the project leader, his job is to build the SSC. And I make the ultimate decisions, but on the whole, until … If I don’t lose confidence, I will accept what you say, and meanwhile, I deal with the Congress, and I know enough technically to go and talk to the Congress, about whether we can get however many Teslas or whatever. And I’m trying to establish a scientific culture, I’ve got a scientific director who’s not under your control, Mr. Project Leader, who’s starting to design the experiments, although he works closely with you. We’re starting to get proposals; I’m setting up an administration… You can’t do both those jobs at once. There’s no way.

Riordan:

And would you agree there was a glaring lack, or glaring hole in the SSC management structure?

Llewellyn Smith:

I couldn’t go there closely enough. I only went down there twice, to see. But just on paper, that was not the right way to go. That’s clear to me.

Riordan:

Okay.

Llewellyn Smith:

Well, that’s the way I would have done it, and that’s the way I actually advised in setting up the structure of ITER. It’s supposed to be like that, where the Director-General has the administration, and the science reported to him, the safety, and so on, and then there’s a project leader. And that was my relationship with Lyn, except it was embedded in all the rest of CERN, so it was a bit complicated. And Lyn would come to me, saying, “I’ve got to decide, are we going to switch from steel to aluminum for the [magnet] collars? We can save 50 million, but it’s going to be more risky, and I think we should do this, but ultimately it’s your decision.” And after arguing I would always agree with him. One day Lyn came and said, “I’ve got one decision I’m going to let you take.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “The color of the dipoles.” So that dark blue, that’s what’s called Oxford blue, as opposed to Cambridge blue, which is light blue, and I chose that color. It’s the only design decision I took. Lyn talked to me, he liked to have somebody he could bounce [ideas off] when he was waking up at night, worrying about whether to cut this, but you know, he made the decisions. If I had lost confidence in him, it would have been fatal, of course.

Riordan:

Okay. I guess the final area, and we’ve only got about five more minutes …

Llewellyn Smith:

But by the way, I have to say, Lyn was not a project manager. In retrospect, maybe we should have brought in somebody who had modern professional project-management skills and got into value management and stuff near the beginning. Lyn argues this is true, but the other people would never have accepted it. I thought John Adams was a manager. There’s a team that built LEP. He [Lyn] inherited them. These are some of the best project managers in the world. And back in the 1970s, they actually developed some of the modern management techniques. But project management had moved on, meanwhile.

Riordan:

Yes. And it’s a particular skill, expertise, but in the case of CERN, it’s all embedded in an existing infrastructure that has many levels of management skills that know how to work together.

Llewellyn Smith:

That’s right, and that’s the other problem with greenfield projects. I always say about the SSC, it’s not that it costs more in Texas. After all, the Texans were supposed to put money in. And it’s not even the lack of the physical infrastructure. It’s the lack of intellectual infrastructure. Cooking up a team from scratch is very difficult. At Fermilab, all those skills were there, I assume, though I don’t know Fermilab well.

Riordan:

Yes. And people who like each other and know how to work together.

Llewellyn Smith:

Exactly.

Riordan:

And know who can do what well and what they can do poorly.

Llewellyn Smith:

Exactly. One of the problems with why ITER has been so slow is that people grossly underestimated [the time needed to build mutual confidence —CLS]. When you bring together people, here’s the team, and you’ve got to discover, this guy’s good, and this guy is a bullshitter. That takes you six months, especially when they speak a different language.

Riordan:

And that actually has a cost.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, it does.

Riordan:

You have to fire that person and find somebody else, and you’ve spent money that you…

Llewellyn Smith:

That’s right, that’s right. So, the Fermilab site would have been… All those problems wouldn’t have been there.

Riordan:

So, that would be the reason for putting a billion-dollar-scale value on the Fermilab infrastructure.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes.

Riordan:

There’s no way to cost it out, but would you agree with a range of one to three billion?

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, something like that. But even if you’d said you could move the Fermilab team and start again in Texas, that would have been better than…

Riordan:

Well, they did move a portion of it, like [accelerator physicist] Helen Edwards, for example.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, that’s true.

Riordan:

And her husband [ed. Don Edwards], but not too many of them actually went there.

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes, that’s right. Hotshots didn’t want to go to Texas.

Riordan:

Yes.

Llewellyn Smith:

Especially the ones here.

Riordan:

SLAC actually sent down a lot of people. [Stanford experimental physicist David] Ritson went down there. Accelerator physicist John Rees — who I have yet to fully interview, and became the project manager who began to succeed — came from SLAC. He had built PEP [the SLAC Positron-Electron Project], and before that, he had done the SPEAR [electron-positron collider].

Llewellyn Smith:

Yes. I was on the PEP advisory committee, so I know about that.

Riordan:

He was beginning to get control of the SSC project when they killed it.

Llewellyn Smith:

Okay, so it’s been fun.

Riordan:

Okay, let’s go have some lunch. This Michael Riordan interviewing Chris Llewellyn Smith, and we are ending the interview at about two minutes to noon.

[END]