James D. Watkins

Watkins:

… and it needed to be aired, because it is a very big deal, because [the SSC] got to be so bad-mouthed by the scientists who have great political power on Capitol Hill. In other words, they wanted to change the [magnet] aperture from A to B. Nobody did the cost analysis, and I said, I am not going to approve a change in aperture [until you] show both scientific justification for the change in aperture and the cost. … You want to just change it? Because the scientists love that. We’re dealing with billions of dollars here. We are not dealing with $100 million or some lower level, and so I said no. I demanded that we get program management there, because now we were building stuff. We were building a piece of the runway and all that kind of stuff. So, it is very important that you listen to his side. Now that doesn’t mean that he’s all right, and that [Joe] Cipriano [ed. who came in from the Defense Department to lead the DOE Office of the SSC] is the best in the world. I don’t say that, but they needed programmatic discipline as they moved out of research into application, which scientists are not good at, in my opinion. I work with them all the time, thousands of them in my oceanographic work. And they are terrific scientists, and some of them are terrible program managers. They mean well, but they don’t know all of the bureaucratic crap you have to go through to kick ass and take names with contractors. And when you have contractors building something big like that, you cannot afford to be casual about field changes to anything. I grew up in the world that takes everything from research into application in the military, and program management was established thirty years ago because we couldn’t do a good job. It was always huge cost overruns. So, the SSC had been costed out at $4.5 billion or something, which was phony. It wasn’t even close, and we put a cost analysis on it that brought it up to $9-some billion. And then got bitched at because we had a big cost overrun. No! The initial cost was never accurate — never. You know, it was a [inaudible] at it.

[Editor’s note. Watkins is referring here to program management in the context of the Defense Department’s Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, which it established during the Kennedy administration under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to structure its acquisition programs. In the Department of Energy context, the equivalent concept is project management. Watkins’ remarks about his work with oceanographers refer to his leadership of the Joint Oceanographic Institutions and then the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, which followed his service as Secretary of Energy.]

Riordan:

We’d like to go into those questions. I think Steve particularly wants to go back, and we’d also like to tape record this.

Watkins:

Oh sure.

Weiss:

Where I would like to start is your experience with program management and how you came into becoming Secretary of Energy.

Watkins:

I became Secretary of Energy because the governor of Texas didn’t like [the first Secretary of Energy under President Carter, James] Schlesinger. It’s that complicated.

Weiss:

The governor of Texas being Ann Richards then?

Watkins:

No, no. This was the former Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Riordan:

William Clements.

Watkins:

Clements. Schlesinger was going to be brought back by [President George H. W.] Bush because Bush knew it was a mess, the DOE. … He asked me to come in and “clean up a mess.” And it was a mess in every aspect. They had a reactor shut down for safety. They were exceeding limits for nuclear trash in Colorado. They were violating agreements with the governor of Washington, and on and on and on. So, the mess was a management mess, a total management mess, and I’ve documented all this, and I don’t want to go through all that. Let’s just stick to the SSC, but you have to recognize that you are dealing with an organization that had no discipline in it.

Weiss:

The DOE?

Watkins:

The DOE. It had orders, and nobody complied with them. The policies were great. The execution was terrible. There was no link between headquarters and field activities. None. Field [offices] were allowed to do their own thing. The whole thing needed program management, just like Defense had to shift to 30 years ago when McNamara came in. And so the DOE hadn’t gotten into (you might call it) operational system management before. It was involved in research. Research they were great at. The Nova laser, accelerators, Brookhaven, and SLAC, and all that is fine. That is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about moving [a project] out of research into an operational system that had to be architecturally engineered. [The SSC would have been the] biggest cryogenic system in the world, going for something that was beyond the top quark. I mean this is really big stuff. This is really more exciting to me than the Hubble telescope, than anything in space ― trying to coordinate what we were seeing in space with Hubble to the origin of life, the origin of the world. It was incredible, but we couldn’t pull it off.

Weiss:

You’re talking about the systems management approach that McNamara brought to the DOD, right?

Watkins:

Exactly. That did not exist in the DOE, and DOE didn’t have the experience to build huge operational systems. They had the ability to build the detectors, to do all that stuff, to scope out the science that was needed and so forth, but not go build it. Who was your contractor? URA [Universities Research Association]? Alone? And who was taking care of the subcontractors who were actually building the section of the circle down there? Who are they? Well, I don’t know. … Well, somebody has to be riding herd on those contracts: how they are done, quality assurance, quality oversight. And frankly, when I saw the aperture change request … Oh, let’s change the aperture from 4.5 to 4.75 …

Weiss:

It was [from] 4 to 5 [centimeters].

Watkins:

Whatever it was. And I asked, why do you need to do it? And the answer turned out, no, we don’t really have to do it. We’d like to have additional flexibility and that, for another billion or two dollars. Come on guys, do you need it or not? The answer turned out to be that they probably didn’t need it.

Riordan:

Would you say that that was the question that really triggered…

Watkins:

My strong belief was that we needed [good] program management in addition to the scientific management, which is typical in defense [projects]. You have both, and they must work together as a team. You cannot make scientific decisions casually at that point. I mean, I didn’t come there to start the SSC. I came down there to hopefully bring it online with terrific political pros and cons. The fact that it wasn’t sited in Illinois was probably its defeat. If we had put the SSC in Illinois, it would probably have made it.

Weiss:

Do you think so?

Watkins:

It’s the political aspects of this… Once Texas went Republican, who cared? You had a Democratic leadership on the Hill, so it fell on the rocks and shoals of political considerations, and then they used things like Cipriano’s program management: “They are just cost overrunning it. We can’t trust anybody at DOE anyway.” So, it was a huge loss for research, much bigger than the SSC. And I used to tell researchers that. I’d say, "You guys who aren’t physicists, high-energy physicists, and are sitting over here bad-mouthing this project are doing great damage to basic research." If it is peer-reviewed, good stuff … [Fermilab Director] Leon Lederman and all those guys testifying on the Hill, Nobel laureates in physics… You ought to talk to Leon about it. It’s preposterous having one of the most exciting scientific events within grasp, and we threw it away, talking about CERN and all that other nonsense. Everybody said you had to get the [beam] energy up to 20 TeV, or you weren’t going to get the events that you needed to look at the make-up of matter, get to the 10^-23 second of time. I am not a scientist, but I love science, and I love scientific transfer into useful systems that can give you some exciting outcomes. That is what I do all the time. And that’s why I thought I could go into the DOE and get them going, and then they put that fool after me who tore down everything and didn’t know anything about science, didn’t care about education.

Weiss:

This is [Secretary of Energy] Hazel O’Leary that you are talking about?

Watkins:

Yes.

Riordan:

Was it more broadly based, the responsibility of the Clinton Administration, rather than Ms. O’Leary that was a lukewarm supporter?

Watkins:

Of course, but she was the person they put in there for diversity. I myself tell people that biodiversity [sic] is the buzzword now, biodiversity is the way they select cabinet members. I mean it is so stupid, for her to walk into Los Alamos and walk out because there are not enough blacks and Hispanics sitting there among the top scientists in the world — that's her fault, not their fault. Why do you have to yell at the scientists for God’s sake? It’s that kind of attitude. She could have cared less. She wouldn’t have cared about the SSC. I cared a lot about it. I thought it was a great loss when I was there, for mankind, because we were on the verge… And the best people said that. But who cares? You don’t get elected on that basis. Texas loved it. The Democrats in Texas thought it was great. Ann Richards thought it was great. And we were having education things connected with it. That was the beauty. We had K–12 kinds of things going on, built up front. Texas was going to put it in the school, and the international collaboration with kids coming in and working with the scientists. It would have been a fabulous place. And it was so big, such a perfect place to do international collaboration and to integrate education with science, just like it is with the genome project up at UW and a few other places, and we just blew it all.

Weiss:

Did you have any discussions early on with President Bush about the SSC?

Watkins:

Yes.

Weiss:

What was his [take on it]?

Watkins:

He was strongly supportive. In fact, he was the one that authorized the Secretary of State to bring it up at one of the conferences in Japan [ed. probably during the preparations for Bush's January 1992 summit meeting with Japanese Premier Kiichi Miyazawa]. I’m going around after the fact trying to get dough when Japan should have been involved at the front end of the research package, engaged from the very outset. It is a huge problem in this country — science, technology, and foreign affairs. It is nonexistent in the State Department. I don’t care what they say. It is nonexistent. I am talking about big stuff, where you want to get G-7 nations involved up front on major projects like I am doing right now on science, technology, and the oceans — and its impact on mankind over the next 50 years, when the population goes up by 50 percent. They [the State Department] are not in it. The SSC [project leaders] should have been engaging the European Science Foundation and the government of Japan up front, and it wasn’t, so I was going in after the fact holding up my little can and pencils, asking for a $2 billion contribution.

Riordan:

Actually, that was one of the questions I had thought to ask. You were handed a bill of goods, five years’ worth of work on the SSC, how did you view the work that had been done by [the previous Energy Secretary John] Herrington and by others on such as…

Watkins:

I don’t know about Herrington, but work on the SSC was great. But we were getting down to the point where you are wrapping it up in dollars. We were getting out of research, all the research phase, setting the parameters, proving the magnets, and all that was underway. And there weren’t any technical obstacles. The magnets had been proven. [ed. When Watkins stepped in in 1989, the prototype superconducting magnets were not performing up to design projections.] The Russian magnets were the best, coming out of their Kurchatov and other institutes, their bomb-building research centers. They were terrific. They outperformed all the specs that were set on them. There weren’t any technical obstacles. This was the beauty… and we thought our $9.5 billion was an accurate and reasonable [estimate for such a] large research project. One of the great ones of the century ― or would have been, in my opinion.

Riordan:

Yes, but coming in, some groundwork had been laid in the foreign contributions area by Herrington and others. What did you think about that?

Watkins:

Very little. A lot of [jaw?] and talk.

Riordan:

I mean, Herrington would say that they were much more extensive.

Watkins:

Well, look for the documents on that. I didn’t find it that extensive. We analyzed all that, it wasn’t that extensive. I don’t know where he got that. Did he show you the data on it?

Riordan:

I haven’t talked to him, but I have seen comments made by him that there was likely to be 30 to 50 percent foreign participation.

Watkins:

Add up the dollars and see what you get. Participation in what?

Riordan:

I think it was very soft myself, but I was looking for your opinion.

Watkins:

Yeah, very soft, so soft we had to have [Deputy Secretary of Energy] Henson Moore and others who were engaged in trying to find out what were the facts. And the answer was that there weren’t many dollars there. There might have been a little bit. We are talking about $50 million maybe, or something like that. We’re not talking about big dollars. Now, the dollars on investing in the research magnets from the Italians and the Russians and others, U.S. included, at that end, yeah, that was something. So, there was some collaboration, there’s no question about it. But not big collaboration, not from the outset — [the United States] saying we want to engage you at the front end, and if we can prove these technologies and assemble them in an architectural design, [asking them], “Are you willing to commit to that ramp?” Nobody had ever addressed that, as far as I know of, all geared to $4.5 billion or whatever the cost was.

Weiss:

When you came on in 1989, how did you view the situation?

Watkins:

I didn’t know anything about the Super Collider.

Weiss:

You didn’t know anything about the SSC?

Watkins:

No.

Weiss:

So, that was part of your pre-congressional briefings, your briefings before your…

Watkins:

Are you kidding? What briefings?

Weiss:

You didn’t have any…

Watkins:

No. There weren’t any briefings.

Weiss:

You just went before Congress for the…?

Watkins:

Oh, I read some stuff, yes, but it wasn’t anything like briefings, because the briefings to me were very shallow, very superficial — particularly in the area of research, which I consider to be the strength and the crown jewel of the DOE, the 16,000 scientists and engineers. That is the real power of that organization. What have we done? We’ve put in a Coca-Cola salesman, a dental surgeon, a prosecuting attorney from Oakland, a mayor, a biodiversity woman ― Oprah Winfrey’s nuclear waste. We put in a congressman. Come on, at least the DOE started out with Schlesinger, who knew what he was talking about from a scientific-technical point of view, having been the director of a lab. And they put in me, who at least came up the technical route, nuclear training and so forth. I had a lot of other stuff, but I didn’t know about the SSC. I mean, I got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, whatever physics was connected to that, and I was a nuclear-trained operator, that kind of thing, so I had enough physics to know what a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor were. But I didn’t know anything about the SSC until I was briefed after I took over by [Princeton physicist] Will Happer [ed. who became the Director of the Office of Energy Research in 1991] and [Deputy Director of the Office of Energy Research] Jim Decker and others, and I said, my God, how are we managing this? Who is managing it? Who is responsible here in the department? How are we budgeting for this thing? How close have we overseen the milestones and the plan, in a programmatic sense? When I started [pulling?] the programmatic [change?], not only there but everywhere, it was nonexistent.

Riordan:

Who did you rely on for your reliable information about the SSC and high-energy physics in general?

Watkins:

Will Happer.

Riordan:

That was after 1991. He came in in 1991, I think.

Watkins:

What was his predecessor’s name, who was not as good?

Riordan:

Robert Hunter.

Watkins:

Yes.

Weiss:

And then there was a gap when Jim Decker sat in [as acting director].

Watkins:

Yes, but Jim Decker was always there [ed. as a career official]. Hunter was not that good. Happer was terrific, I thought. He really knew what he was talking about. Obviously, he still had the plasma-physics experimentation going on at Princeton. [ed. Happer's scientific focus was on atomic and molecular physics.]

Riordan:

I think the first sign of, let’s say “serious,” disagreements between the physicists and the DOE came under Hunter’s tenure when he was trying to manage [the project] more closely.

Watkins:

Yes, but Hunter wanted to manage it all from Washington. He wanted to add 200 billets in Washington, at headquarters, and I didn’t want to do that. I said, you don’t do it that way. You get them in the field, and you have a team here that knows what they are listening to. You have your people on the site. You are out there, and you have a parallel management responsibility to URA. URA leans on you for contractors, for meeting specs, for all the other things, and you have to take care of sexual attacks in the workspace. Get the scientists the hell out of that. They are not good at it. And to do the tough things you’ve got to do to manage contractors — that was the idea. And of course, I got the idea, because I said I want to know what this thing is going to cost. My predecessors did not sit in on budget hearings the way I did. I had a budget on every single line item over on the Hill. That is the way we did it over at the DOD. Everybody — researchers, operators, clean-up people, environment, safety and health people, new construction [inaudible] — all those people were all briefed in their budget context, and I just hammered away on it. How do we know that the cost [estimate] is any good? The Hill was asking that question, too. Where are we going with the cost on this thing? I said I don’t have any good cost analysis; I have the first cut on this thing from years ago. We went back and took a look. We had to make a report and the report was frightening. It went to 9-plus billion dollars. It doubled, which is not atypical, but I’m sitting there taking the heat for doubling the budget, saying there is a cost overrun on my watch. B.S., the cost overrun came on prior watches, whatever they were.

Weiss:

Or cost underrun.

Watkins:

Cost underrun. They’d buy in, a quick buy-in.

Riordan:

From the documents I have seen, it looked like initially, during Hunter’s tenure, you at first supported the physicists [acting as project] managers. Or at least that’s the way URA interpreted it, because Hunter…

Watkins:

You don’t want to come rocking in like that and just… I had a lot of other problems than the SSC. The SSC wasn’t even close to being on the agenda, high priority. There was a reactor shutdown at the Savannah River Site for safety, and we needed the tritium [which it was producing for nuclear weapons]. That was before the START II [nuclear weapons treaty]. We had huge problems with the states. We had lawsuits all over. We were losing every single court case. We had just settled one for $73 million at Fernald [the Feed Materials Production Center in Ohio]. The Super Collider? It was not a problem for me [at first], so don’t take it as a conscious decision that I knew all about URA and the SSC. I was in there flapping with real issues. The SSC just came to the fore as I calmed down these other things and I came in to focus on it. … Hey, I have a budget here and you find your projection is way up there. What is all that? How did you get there? Show me the document. And it all fell apart.

Riordan:

What percentage of your time would you say the SSC took up?

Watkins:

It went up in parallel with the curve of cost. It went up much more in 1991, 1992. I was in the middle of it because I was trying to defend it. We were up testifying on the Hill. You can get the testimony.

Weiss:

We have that.

Watkins:

I was [testifying before] the committees.

Riordan:

Was it at the 5 to 10 percent level?

Watkins:

Probably 10 percent.

Riordan:

And going up?

Watkins:

And going up. But this was 1991, 1992, not in 1989, when it was barely on the horizon. It was there, but I was relying on the people who were there and Hunter and those people to tell me what was going on. There wasn’t any big demand put on me for cost escalation and construction of the first section of the ring. It was moving along, so I figured, well, it’s been going on for a number of years programmatically. We had a lot of programs other than the SSC, and I wasn’t getting any bleeps out of anybody at that point. But once you start accelerating the operational construction of something that is very expensive, you get into real money. You’re not into tens of millions of dollars now, you’re into hundreds of millions, a $700 million-a-year kind of thing. That’s big stuff, and you better know what you’re doing when you go up on the Hill and defend that. You’ve got every guru in town overseeing you.

Weiss:

So, it sounds like you first really came to pay close attention to the SSC at the end of 1989 when there was this infamous redesign that came up from the physicists.

Watkins:

That’s when it started. That was the trigger mechanism to get me focused on the SSC issue. It was probably the first time I had been able to get my head above ground level, what with all the other things that were going on. The new culture in DOE, the establishment of new lines of accountability and responsibility from the headquarters on down. All that was essential. I went from $800 million a year for clean-up to $6 billion by the time I left. Getting that out of defense [ed. the defense portion of the DOE budget; DOE established its dedicated Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management in 1989]. I was fighting in the cabinet meetings with the Secretary of Defense and everybody else, OMB Director. You know, so the SSC didn’t come into view until I began to look at its cost. What the hell? What about the foreign involvement? Well, it turned out to be very, I would say, fluffy, way down in the grass. And then I was going to Japan to ask for $2 billion from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, who asked me, “What’s the product?” I said, “Mr. Minister, the very fact you ask me what is the product shows the complete mismatch between the U.S. and Japan on the worth of basic research for producing knowledge.” You see, their research infrastructure over there was terrible. It was all oriented toward business and industry. You know that. They are quasi-government-owned. Now they are getting a little bit out of that, but this was a big deal. We don’t get $2 billion handed to us like that over a five-year period. But for the first time they were asked to give something like this, and only because Bush got involved in it did they even listen to the request. And I kept trying to get the SSC on every G-7 agenda, and I couldn’t do it. Bush wanted it in the worst way, he really did. He told me that, and the [U.S. national energy policy] is what he wanted me to do besides clean up this reactor mess. So, I was able to get the energy strategy done, and this had nothing to do with the SSC. It was energy-related, but obviously it was not the kind of energy we were talking about there. But he was always supportive, and the fact that the SSC was in Texas obviously made it very politically attractive for him. He liked that a lot. It was the right place to put it despite the fire ants or whatever.

Riordan:

There was an extensive effort in the fall of 1991 to really try to secure major Japanese participation in the SSC. I recall that you went over at the very end of that, in December of 1991. Did you see any indication at that point that they were ready to come on board?

Watkins:

I think that if Bush had been reelected and had asked for $1 billion, we would have gotten $1 billion. Bush had a very good relationship with the then-Prime Minister [Kiichi Miyazawa], and he personally asked the Prime Minister to hear me out on this and to give me his support, to come in and join us. But I think it was too late. I think partnerships start at the front end of a big research project, not at the midway point, when you are then … It’s just a lousy approach. And so I don’t know what Herrington says, but the facts that I sought when I reviewed international participation — and you can get probably Happer and some others to validate this ― if you get the real budget dollars in there, there wasn’t much, not against $9.5 billion and not even against $4.5 billion. Fluffy dollars.

Riordan:

What I am trying to ascertain is whether there were certain times when it looked like the Japanese might have been almost ready to come in.

Watkins:

Yes. And they indicated that they were very interested. I thought it was exciting. It just needed that continuing push. But as the election year [of 1992] opened up and began to go south, nobody devoted any attention to it. You couldn’t get the Secretary of State’s [James Baker’s] attention. He was hauled over to be Chief of Staff, and Bush was on the stump. It would take that kind of push, a head-of-state push for those kinds of dollars. So, the SSC was an unfortunate victim of politics, all the way across the board.

Riordan:

When I talked to him last week, Joe Cipriano said he had just come back from Japan in June. Actually, I gave him a tour of SLAC at that time.

Watkins:

This is 1991?

Riordan:

This is 1992. He said that Henson Moore and he had gone over to Japan with [SSC Director Roy] Schwitters and that they had ascertained that the Japanese were ready to come on board. They needed to be asked. And then you had the first [successful] House vote to kill the SSC. Do you recall, can you confirm or deny that?

Watkins:

I think their assessment was what they reported to me, and I was encouraged by it. And there were some exchanges between me and the White House on the SSC, with Baker. I don’t have copies of that. There was correspondence on the SSC and my continuing plea to keep it on the agenda. I had to get Bush … The Prime Minister is coming for a visit, make sure the SSC is discussed. It wasn’t. Those are the kinds of things. I was trying to grasp this thing and get it going, but I was just one loose straw. There were just little bits and pieces. I just couldn’t grab it.

Riordan:

I think I have a document that might help restore your memory. Here it is. That’s the President’s hand on it. [Riordan shows Watkins a copy of his June 1992 letter to Bush on the SSC.]

Watkins:

Yes, yes.

Riordan:

This is after the first House vote to kill the SSC, late June 1992.

Watkins:

I had support from the Senate but couldn’t get much in the House. Remember, as I recall, the Speaker of the House was an Illinois congressman [ed. The Speaker in 1992 was Tom Foley of Washington, who lost his seat in the November elections], and the loss of the SSC in the site-selection process — I wasn’t there at the time — was a huge loss to Illinois, a huge loss of congressional support on the House side in particular. They just lost interest. And obviously they had Fermilab and so forth out there. They were searching for the top quark, and they had a long history of very heavy engagement with education and science. Fermilab was great. Argonne [National Laboratory, then operated by the] University of Chicago. So, you have terrific political strength there from that whole region, and we didn’t have the same thing from Texas. It just didn’t happen, and so the House was pretty critical, and I also went before those committees. There was a lot of opposition. God, we could give this money to the poor, or we could do a lot of things with this money. What the hell is it all this about? For the lack of understanding of the potential excitement of the outcome, there is nothing like this to determine the makeup of matter and the makeup of the universe and the origin of life and how the Big Bang gives us planets. And here was an opportunity, and no matter what we said… We had great testimony before the committees, but [it was] mostly on the Senate side. The House didn’t get that interested. I think you’ll find very limited support in the House.

Riordan:

The SSC had a real champion on the Senate side [Louisiana Senator J. Bennett Johnston].

Watkins:

We had a real champion.

Riordan:

One thing that still continues to puzzle me is this reversal of the House in 1992. In 1991 the exact same members of Congress, or almost the exact same members, voted in favor of the SSC quite resoundingly, but they reversed themselves in 1992.

Watkins:

I’m telling you it’s political. If you think it has a rationale other than that, you are going to waste a lot of time on investigation. It is a simple process in this town, a very simple process.

Riordan:

Let me throw out one hypothesis…

Watkins:

You name me one champion of the SSC in the House, except for maybe a couple of people from Texas.

Weiss:

[Texas congressman from the Ennis/Waxahachie district] Joe Barton.

Watkins:

Joe Barton, certainly, who was a great friend, and I worked with him all the time, but Joe couldn’t carry the whole thing.

Riordan:

[California congressman George] Brown was a pretty good…

Watkins:

George Brown was good. He was chair of the Science Committee then, which was very helpful, but again, you’ve got to look at who is on the Appropriations subcommittee. This is big dough. Now we are wrapping up the $700 million we want next year. That is when it failed. If you look at the budget submission, and this was probably the FY93 budget submission, I’m not really sure…

Weiss:

Yes.

Watkins:

You’ll see it wrapped up. Okay, they don’t like that necessarily. When the Democrats want to put those dollars somewhere else, they don’t care what George Brown or the authorizers say. So, you can’t just listen to authorizers. You’ve got to find out whether anybody else was in there. I forget who chaired the Appropriations [Energy and Water] Subcommittee.

Weiss:

[Alabama congressman] Tom Bevill.

Watkins:

Yeah, Tom was a wonderful guy, but he wanted to re-route the Tombigbee River every year with the Army Corps of Engineers. That is where he wanted the money spent. Tom Bevill is a wonderful guy, a very good friend of mine, but Tom was no zealot for things such as basic research. He wanted to do things homestyle, down home. He’s got the Bevill This and the Bevill That, and the river has been re-routed many times.

Riordan:

It seems like the appropriators were behind it. The opposition came out of the Science committee and out of the Energy and Commerce committee under [Michigan congressman John] Dingell. The appropriators until the very last minute seemed to be behind the SSC. And that is one of the puzzling things about this.

Watkins:

The Democrats were leading… Bennett Johnson is my kind of Democrat. He ain’t no left-wing radical. He was a Southern Democrat in the old style. He and [South Carolina Senator Ernest] Hollings and all that gang. They were all for it. They got it. And also Bennett’s committee staff director was a physicist, and he is a terrific guy, and so they were together. They had a very good grasp of the [science]… and they would hold a hearing, a positive-setting hearing.

Riordan:

You are talking about Proctor Jones? [ed. Proctor Jones was the clerk of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee when Johnson chaired it at the same time as he chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee].

Watkins:

No, Proctor Jones was on Appropriations, but he was also helpful. He worked for Bennett. I am talking about…

Weiss:

On the authorization committee then? The Energy and Natural Resources Committee?

Watkins:

No, it was on Energy. … He was staff director for the Energy Committee, for Bennett. Ben Cooper. You ought to talk to Ben about it. Talk to Ben because he is a very balanced, sensible, down-to-earth, quiet kind of a guy. He isn’t a radical, wild guy, but he knew a lot about the political ramifications of this thing.

Weiss:

How closely did you work the Hill?

Watkins:

I worked very hard.

Weiss:

So, who…

Watkins:

Joe Barton was the only guy in the House that cared about the SSC. I did work with George Brown. He was a good friend of mine because I was very much connected with science education with him. He was always a good friend before he passed away. So, there was not a problem with George Brown, but he had a hard time with the other committee members. If the House had pushed the SSC, we would have probably made it. The Senate would have gone with it.

Riordan:

Do you think George Brown ruled his committee with a rather loose hand?

Watkins:

I don’t know about that.

Riordan:

[I ask that] because it was in the investigation subcommittee that [New York congressman Sherwood] Boehlert and [Michigan congressman Howard] Wolpe, served as a focus of the SSC opposition. It really began within the subcommittee.

Watkins:

The arguments that they used were to me so disingenuous that it was really sad to watch it. And we had some others who were [inaudible] enough. I forget whether Boehlert was in it or not. I can’t remember the details. I’d have to go back and look at those committee memberships and the votes to recall all of the political ramifications. I was in the middle of the Super Collider [fight] up to my eyeballs right at that time — that is, probably much more than 10 percent then. It was probably more like 30 to 35 percent of my time at that particular moment.

Weiss:

By 1992?

Watkins:

Yes. I’m talking about 10 percent as an average. That was a lot. That was Super Collider, Super Collider, Super Collider. I’ve got my own board of advisers. I set up the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. I had people on there, high-energy physicists… They were some of the top people in the world. And I told them they had to help me out on this thing, get the right people on the Hill, get the right witnesses up there. I don’t want to stack the deck. I don’t care if we have opposition from Carl Sagan or anybody else. Get a cross-section of scientists who are primarily high-energy physicists who know what they are talking about and have some stature in the world. And we were getting bad-mouthed from ― who is the Italian who ran CERN, who was bad-mouthing the SSC?

Riordan:

Rubbia.

Watkins:

Carlo Rubbia. Bad-mouthing it left, right, and left, and that didn’t help any. “We can do it for less. We can do it at 7 TeV [per beam]. We don’t need all that crap.” So, he was a thorn in the international side of this thing.

Riordan:

Weren’t the physicists from other communities, such as solid-state physics, also a thorn in the side of the SSC, like [Princeton University physicist and Nobel laureate] Philip Anderson and James Krumhansl [of Cornell University]?

Watkins:

Yes, sure. They saw big dollars being stolen from their projects. Look, you’re a researcher or you’re a scientist, you know. But when you get loving, tree-hugging scientists together they love each other. When you compete for the same dollars for the research grants, they hate each other. “My research is better than that. What the hell would they ever fund that for?” Look, I could use those $4 billion in this range of core subjects across the research base, and look what I could do. I could double the NSF budget. Think about that.

Weiss:

But that is a misunderstanding of how the congressional committees work, because Super Collider money isn’t …

Watkins:

When it went, it went from the research base. That was the end of it.

Weiss:

If there are so many angles to get that money…

Watkins:

You’re going to lose it. It’s like an aircraft carrier. If you don’t get the aircraft carrier, you don’t give that money to the poor. It goes into the swamp. You don’t know where it goes. It goes everywhere. It’s all fungible stuff at that point, because it is all obligational authority. It is an outlay at that point.

Weiss:

In 1992, how much help were you getting from the White House, not just the President but the other staff?

Watkins:

As 1992 went on, less and less. They were focused too much on the reelection campaign.

Weiss:

So, they sort of lost…

Watkins:

Were they interested? Yes. Well, I’ll be glad to do this…

Riordan:

I think Bush actually went down to the SSC and did some politicking with Roy Schwitters.

Watkins:

If I had any help, it was from George Bush himself. Nobody else. His Chief of Staff could not have cared less.

Weiss:

So, the Congressional Liaison Office over there wasn’t helping press the buttons?

Watkins:

On this issue? Well, they helped as best they could. They’d send memos and stuff.

Riordan:

What about when Henson Moore went over there?

Watkins:

Henson went late. He went over in 1992. He went over in the last-ditch effort after they got rid of [John] Sununu [who had been serving as White House Chief of Staff until late 1991], and they didn’t give Henson the time of day over there.

Riordan:

What about [Presidential science advisor Allan] Bromley, was he much of an influence in the White House?

Watkins:

Bromley was very supportive. He would do anything I asked him to do, but Bromley was… The science advisor to the President is notoriously pulled out of the closet when you need him and thrown back into the closet. I don’t know if this rings a bell with you.

Weiss:

Yes. They don’t really have a portfolio.

Watkins:

He had no portfolio. He had no money. OMB [the White House Office of Management and Budget] has the money. So, you have a lot of people within the administration itself who would love to get ahold of that money. That $700 million was coming out of the overall President’s budget hide, so OMB can grab $700 million. That’s worthy of their attention ― barely worthy of their attention, but reasonably worthy. They can put it elsewhere. So, unless you have real push, it isn’t going to happen. And we were coming in late asking for Japan, particularly, preferentially, to belly up to the bar here for a large amount of money without giving them the opportunity to be a major participant early in the project. That is a big mistake when you get into large-scale research-to-application devices, which is why I have been testifying on the lack of attention to the real science, technology, and foreign-policy issues, and why this whole section in the State Department does no goddamn thing. We don’t have an S&T [inaudible] moving along with advocacy. So, we have a Global Climate Change Conference, two of them now, that had no mention of science and technology as a set of objectives in the five-year program that we can upgrade as move together internationally in collaborative R&D on real issues that affect climate, like the oceans and atmosphere. So, when you get into large scientific projects, there is nothing that helps one politically. I’ve never heard of any politician ever getting into office because they are great on R&D. They may mention it in a speech, but it is never an issue. So, you have to appeal to a handful of people on the Hill who get it. Bennett Johnston got it. Joe Barton, you have to say, well, he’s from Texas. I would rather have Joe Barton coming from Pennsylvania, but he wasn’t. I have Curt Weldon from Pennsylvania; that’s an ocean-bounded state. He’s the number-one advocate for what I’m doing in ocean science and technology, to bring oceans back…

Weiss:

So, that gives it a dignity of purpose that transcends the parochial nature [of the support] that Barton brought to bear [on the SSC issue].

Watkins:

Remember this: when the SSC site went to Texas, immediately the enthusiasm in the Congress dissipated after years of going through the site-selection process and watching it. Who was interested in it now besides Texas?

Weiss:

I didn’t see any three-day hearings with everyone coming out and spilling their guts for joy over the SSC after 1988.

Watkins:

No. That part of the history is very germane, to answer your question on politics. It just wasn’t there, and here we were making this huge investment in one state that isn’t all that attractive to most on the Hill. Texas is a unique state, but Illinois is very well liked by a lot of adjacent states. New York is liked by Massachusetts and Connecticut and all of New England. They all kind of stick together. Texas is all by itself. You can probably get a Southeast coalition going pretty well. And you can get a California consortium going, and you can get Midwest and Northeast and you can get the Northwest. You get Texas, and that’s it. But that is the way it goes.

Riordan:

In Illinois, one also had the benefit of an existing infrastructure and didn’t have to build the SSC in the middle of the desert. And I don’t think that the cost of actually doing that …

Watkins:

Nobody has ever thought that the greatest minds in our country have come from Texas. I’m talking about scientific-intellectual contributions to the world. It doesn’t seem to come out of there. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I don’t know. Give me some examples.

Riordan:

Steven Weinberg’s there but he went there from Harvard. Getting back to that 1992 vote, I’m going to try the hypothesis that I am working on, because I looked at patterns of those who were vote-switchers from 1991, where the equivalent measure to kill the SSC was defeated by about 250 to 160. There was a big switch, and a lot of the switchers came from California, New York, and Illinois, which says to me these are the high-energy-physics states. So, the hypothesis I’ve come up with is that as the SSC began to climb up the curve of the cost, it really began to press on, or was perceived to be pressing on, the other high-energy physics labs.

Watkins:

If you think [SLAC Director] Burton Richter was a great supporter of the SSC, I didn’t see it publicly. He wanted his [B Factory] project out at SLAC. They wanted more money at Fermilab. They wanted more money at Argonne [National Laboratory]. They saw the SSC as money drained from them, potentially, because they didn’t really understand the political process here in this town. The reason I am here, to set up this ocean-research consortium with 60 institutions is because they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground on where their own money comes from! They think it comes from some kind of research tree or something. You’ve got to fight for it, guys. You’re sitting out there living with what you’ve got. Well, you know, I’ve got this, and I want to hold on. Come on! Who is a science advocate in this country? Go fight for dollars. So, I got them dollars, and I am going to get them some more, but don’t badmouth the process. It’s the only one in the world that works, and you guys just do good research. If you do good research, I’ll go get the money. But don’t badmouth each other, because we have interdisciplinary… Oceanography is made up of geologists and biologists and chemists and all these other things, and so they cut across all lines and they don’t like each other. They just don’t like each other when it comes to competitive research dollars. The geologists like rocks; kids like bugs. I’m telling my guy for God’s sake get into marine biology. That’s life, that’s human life, that’s original life. Don’t you get it? So, I’m bringing in NIH for the first time as a key component for the future of ocean science and technology. Why? Not just because of pharmaceuticals. They’ll do it anyway, because they make money off it. I’m talking human health and the ocean, the transmission of viruses that somehow are linked with ocean temperature rise. Say, for example, cholera off Bangladesh. We don’t know there is a linear linkage between cholera ashore and the ocean surface temperature at sea in the adjacent areas. It might have to do with the [?] plankton, who knows? I don’t know what it is, and we don’t know yet. So, I like those things. Why? Because we trick the illiterate society into thinking that maybe we’ve got the key to longevity and so they get interested in health. That’s why we put $12 billion into NIH and a trivial little $3-4 billion in NSF, because it is health. It is self-interest.

Riordan:

But that is the problem with high-energy physics, that it doesn’t have any immediate benefit to society like the ones you can get from the sea.

Watkins:

No. The Minister of Finance in Japan asks, “What’s the product, Admiral?”

Riordan:

It is much easier to sell something that has, say, a five-year payback.

Watkins:

I used to say, “Tell me how much you would pay for the top quark.”

[Audio cut]

Watkins:

I would have liked to have gotten in at the ground level and started up with it. Coming in at the midpoint with very poor ground-laying having been done, in my opinion… I don’t say that people didn’t try. I just don’t think they had a visceral feeling for what is required to go from a research project to a major-system construction of this magnitude. I don’t think DOE knew how to do that. The Manhattan Project allowed them to do a lot of things. That was the driver and they got away with mistakes, they got away with overruns, they got away with a lot of things. It was a race against the Russians. Okay, that was a different driver. You’re now driving for knowledge. How much are you willing to spend for the knowledge that the best scientists in the world might get from this Super Collider project?

Weiss:

I don’t know.

Watkins:

Not a sexy item politically.

Weiss:

Did you get any input or help from Alvin Trivelpiece, who played a very prominent role in its earlier… [ed. Trivelpiece served as Director of the DOE Office of Energy Research from 1981 to 1987, during the early phases of the SSC project, and was director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1989 to 2000.]

Watkins:

I got support from all the lab people, as far as I know the lab directors.

Weiss:

But he didn’t…

Watkins:

No. He wasn’t high enough level. He didn’t have the political impact.

Weiss:

He didn’t have the pull?

Watkins:

No. I knew that my director at Argonne was very much behind it. The director of Fermilab wasn’t badmouthing it. They would have loved to have the SSC there for the very reason you bring up. They had the infrastructure and capability there. It probably would have been better. I wasn’t involved in the site-selection process, so I don’t know what went on there, but my guess is that it could have gone to Illinois. I don’t know anything about the terrain in Illinois. I don’t know what we are talking about there as opposed to the chalk in Texas. I don’t know if it rose and fell on that issue or not, whether it was just impossible to put that kind of a ring somewhere in Illinois because of geological problems. I don’t know.

Riordan:

How important do you think that this issue of having to create a completely new lab was? Because of the SSC’s expanding budget, I think it was inevitable that it was going to press on the other labs at some point. Maybe the other labs should have started thinking that we’ve asked for this very important multibillion dollar project, maybe we ought to trim our other activities down and focus our energies on this new lab.

Watkins:

My feeling is that that’s another White House OMB issue. If OMB, rather than giving lip service to the President’s interest in the SSC, would have said that it is going to come out of the “peace dividend”… Remember, the Cold War is now over. And not to invest in this, not to take it out of a $300 billion-plus defense budget… We’re not talking about $9 billion in one year anyway. We’re talking about $700 million nominally a year, then it ran to, I think, $2 billion at the tail end of the project and went on a year. It would have been an easy transition for us to make, to say we are going to shift gears and put emphasis on the long-range projects of the U.S. We are at our best at R&D. That’s how we beat the Russians, with our moving toward strategic defense. They saw they couldn’t win the race and they couldn’t win the other race, because they had too much information on us, and we had [information] on them that they couldn’t beat us. And that was S&T that did it. So, that would have been a very logical thing, to say let’s start moving now into the long-range areas where we do our best and keep the lead in the world in all of these areas of knowledge.

Weiss:

Now does OMB think in that way, at that larger level?

Watkins:

Are you kidding?

Weiss:

It seems to me that it is balkanized right along the lines of the appropriation sub-committees.

Watkins:

They are because…

Weiss:

Because that’s the way they have to function.

Watkins:

But the President can overcome that. When the DOE went to $6 billion a year from $800 million a year on waste clean-up, that was Bush’s decision to tell OMB, do it. And it comes out of Defense’s hide, the old [?] account, which the Secretary of Defense did not like at all.

Riordan:

Did you ever have any discussions with him about the similar measures for the SSC: “Listen, we better bring some money over from the peace dividend?”

Watkins:

Are you kidding? That’s a non-starter. He would never do that. Defense doesn’t give up any dollars. They’re always underfunded, according to them. Always.

Riordan:

But somewhere… I think the intention was initially, at least in the Reagan administration, that the SSC was going to be funded by new money. There’s a run on the Bush administration, and political reality began to set in. It began to appear, especially to the opponents, that the SSC funding was going to be taken from other science, just as the Space Station was perceived as taking from NASA’s science money.

Watkins:

When you write this thing, look at where did the R&D dollars for the SSC, how well did they migrate into other research?

Riordan:

No, I know. They disappeared.

Watkins:

They disappeared. And somehow the message has got to get to scientists, you ought to be careful about that. If you are a scientist over in another discipline and you start bad-mouthing good, peer-reviewed science over here, you are doing a terrible thing. You ought to support it, so that as long as you went through the process that we didn’t go through on the cold-fusion thing, as long as you go through the process, I support your research and I am not going to try to compare my discipline with yours. If you only could convert the culture of scientists today to say that, as long as you have gone through the process of open, shared research data and you’ve done peer-review work, I’m supporting you. I’m a biologist and I think you high-energy physicists did great. Then we’d get the research base of this country up to where it should be. It’s way too low, way too low. It’s not the D [in R&D], the D is high because of defense, it’s the R that is low. Compared with our multi-trillion dollar budget? We have this pathetic little research base. I mean, it is the biggest in the world, but it’s still not commensurate with our GDP. It ought to be growing, not just poking around at some 2.5 percent rate. We ought to be boosting it right now as part of the peace dividend, to say we are going to be ready for China twenty years from now — China or anybody else.

Weiss:

I’d like to spend a little bit more time with the redesign [of the SSC] at the end of 1989 because that is such a key event. The way the story comes down, it fell to you to make the final decision about whether to say go forward or stop.

Watkins:

I could not get anybody to tell me, was it essential for the proper operation of the collider? And I never got an answer that it was. In fact, I finally got an answer that it probably was not.

Weiss:

How were you getting information then?

Watkins:

I got it from both sides, both URA and Cipriano’s people.

Weiss:

This was before he was there.

Watkins:

Who kept probing, asking why did we have to do this? Is it because you have some slop in your system, in your calculations? What is it? Can you make adjustments on this aperture by other techniques? Why do you need this? You didn’t need it before; why do you need it now? And we never got any good answers.

Weiss:

What was your sense of why they needed it now? Did you have a guess?

Watkins:

I’m not a scientist. I can’t give you that. I remember… I mean, this was one briefing. We had a lot of pressure on that and a lot of pressure on Happer at that time. [ed. Happer arrived in 1991.] I said I’ve got to understand this. You’re asking for a huge change, a field change. We’ve done everything. We’ve proven that the existing magnets for the particular aperture… We’ve done all of these things. Why are we doing this now? And they never could come up with a rationale other than, I guess, it would give them some kind of additional flexibility in the beam. I don’t know, to work the beam, or it’s too close.

Riordan:

I think it was a more conservative design that had less risk.

Watkins:

But are you willing to pay the additional billions for reducing the risk? See, I have to do that. It was great for the science. Give us less risk and just put another…

Riordan:

There was a point by 1990 where you signed on to the larger aperture, the bigger conductor, and the whole bill of goods costing about $2 billion. Can you recall what it was that made you climb over that?

Watkins:

When we started doing the… It was still in the middle of the cost estimates, the initial cost estimate versus what I would call the legitimate cost estimate. I can’t remember when we first alerted everybody, because I don’t remember the timing. We’re talking ten years ago now, and I can’t remember that. I can remember when we started and when we finally got an answer for the existing aperture, and it was over $9 billion. And now I was in the middle of being asked to approve something that came up from the scientists, not from the DOE program manager. The program manager I didn’t start until later. I forget when Cipriano went down. I think he didn’t go down there until…

Riordan:

June 1990.

Watkins:

Okay, 1990. And I sent him down there because I was worried to death about the program management inadequacy of URA. I didn’t think they had the capability to separate it from the science, because a scientist was in charge. That’s fine up to a point, and then one has to have, I think, coequals and say, yes, for science you are in charge. Program management, to manage this thing, to raise questions, and to probe and see what it was going to cost, that is my business. And the Secretary wants to know why you have to do this. I was getting beaten over the head and shoulders on the Hill, so I had to push harder into the SSC. Then I kept revealing frankly that we didn’t have a good handle on cost from the very outset. There were flaws in the initial estimate. It was too casual.

Riordan:

Was [electrical engineer] Ed Siskin going down to Texas also a part of that effort to get control of the SSC?

Watkins:

Yes.

Riordan:

I believe you or somebody in the…

Watkins:

I brought Siskin in. I can’t remember what Siskin…

Riordan:

He became the General Manager [of the SSC Laboratory].

Watkins:

Yes, he became the General Manager.

Riordan:

Right under [Laboratory Director] Roy Schwitters.

[End of tape, side one]

Riordan:

Having mentioned Roy, what do you think of his abilities as a manager?

Watkins:

I’d give him a C+.

Weiss:

That fits very nicely with his statement about C students on the Hill, making all these problems for the SSC.

Riordan:

Roy’s comment was on “the revenge of the C students.” He is quoted as saying that in the New York Times. What were his strengths and weaknesses?

Watkins:

I would not have remembered the name if you hadn’t raised the name, but when you raised the name, it began to come back. I’d have to go back and recall a lot of stuff.

Riordan:

Didn’t you have a number of meetings directly with him?

Watkins:

[Inaudible]. I never thought he was a [inaudible]. So, we had some management problems that were real, and of course what happens when you have those problems is that you get internecine battles going on that go up to feed those on the Hill who would love to get that money. In other words, if they don’t think something is well managed, and it is going up with this new cost estimate that we had, that will be used as their rationale. It no longer becomes the best interest of mankind to do this. [Instead,] it is poorly managed. It has all these problems associated with it. We’ve got this cost overrun. We’ve got all that. So, it becomes a license then [for them] to grab that money and put it elsewhere into pork. You can’t track it because it is all…

Weiss:

Water projects.

Watkins:

Whatever.

Weiss:

You’ve offered a great deal of skepticism about the change of aperture and the rise in the price that went along with it. What I don’t yet understand …

Watkins:

It wasn’t just that which made me begin to distrust the whole cost-estimation process. It was more than just the aperture. That was just the trigger mechanism because it was so expensive to back at that point. So, that was just a major vector, but it was not the only vector. I couldn’t get a lot of answers [to questions] I was asking at these briefings. I was not hearing from people, the engineers, on this. I was not even hearing from the other side about what these costs are going to be. There was still a question as to whether or not… By 1992 we had gone through the first tests on the ring, and it was all good. Everything worked. The aperture was okay. [Editor's note: In 1992, magnets with 5 cm apertures were proving successful.]

Weiss:

Still in 1989 did you seriously consider abandoning the project?

Watkins:

Never. Never considered abandoning it.

Weiss:

Just straighten it out and make it go.

Watkins:

Right. And I wouldn’t have known enough to abandon it. I mean, I am such a proponent of good research leading to useful technology and application that I wouldn’t do that. I thought it was exciting in concept, so I let it alone. It was going okay. I wasn’t hearing a lot of opposition about it. There was some mumbling about it going to Texas, but that was pretty much behind us. That wasn’t my decision anyway. It was bubbling along. As I say, there were so many other things of higher priority that came in at that point because the annual budget for the SSC was less than $100 million a year. I don’t even know what it was, maybe $75 million a year. [ed. the Fiscal Year 1990 appropriation budget for the SSC was $225 million.]

Weiss:

About that, and then the following year it went up…

Watkins:

And we could stand that in a department that has $6 billion worth of research going on. We could handle something like that. So, that was not a huge issue until I began to see the out-year projections and to say, "Okay guys, you are projecting stuff that is way beyond anything we have ever told the Congress or the White House or anybody else, and we better come clean on it."

Riordan:

Why did you choose Joe Cipriano to come in and manage this project?

Watkins:

I was given great kudos on Joe’s program management performance at the DOD, within the Navy.

Riordan:

Had you had any interaction with him when you were the Chief of Naval Operations?

Watkins:

Never. I didn’t know him from Adam [inaudible]. I heard it from all people that I relied on. [Inaudible] duty officers, naval officers, people… his program over there that said the guy really knows what he is doing at program management. And he volunteered to go down there and do this. I didn’t know Joe Cipriano, but I knew a lot of engineers who did, and they thought that he was good. And I still think he was good, and I think the fact that he maybe couldn’t get along with the leadership down there is not all Joe’s fault, but he took a lot of hits on this thing.

Weiss:

When Joe went down to Texas, he sat in [a position on] the organizational chart in a very new sort of way. Can you say a little bit about how that evolved or how much you knew about…

Watkins:

He was to go down there and be generally a coequal with the scientific leadership within URA and balance it out from a programmatic viewpoint: “Stay out of the science, it’s not your business, Joe. Your business is to run the program for the science, to get this thing online, to bring it online.” Program management is almost uniquely DOD in terms of the [inaudible]. They have courses in it. They train people. They become designated as materiel managers, or whatever they are called now. All that is done in a very formal way because they have tremendous responsibility on any one of those weapons systems, multibillion-dollar weapons systems, and they don’t like cost overruns either. So sure, Defense gets nailed for fraud, waste, and abuse all the time, but they are dealing with $270 billion and the DOD is jobs, and the DOD is political. So, when they have a cost overrun on the cruise missile, the cruise-missile program manager takes it in the ear, and it doesn’t make any difference how good he is. He eats it. The next thing they do is fire the program manager. So, it is a tremendous responsibility. There are pluses and minuses. And Cipriano came in with high credentials with program management. So, the boxes were set up in such a way as that which belongs to Joe belongs to Joe, and what belongs to Roy Schwitters belongs to him, and you guys work it out. We do it in the military all the time. Do it. Between say the Chief of Naval Research and the oceanographer in my area, they work it out all the time. They talk to each other a lot so that the transition out of research into useful things like the [big sonar arrays?] that track all the Soviet submarines is a useful outcome.

Riordan:

Would you characterize this as trying to combine a scientific function with an engineering function?

Watkins:

Yes.

Riordan:

One of the things that I am impressed with looking back at the Manhattan Project is that General [Leslie] Groves provided the engineering function.

Watkins:

Remember the labs themselves. The nuclear labs themselves were production facilities under the Manhattan Project. They were production facilities, not just research. So, they were pretty darn good.

Riordan:

Groves had to get Hanford built, and he had to get Oak Ridge built. He also had to get a framework in the place at Los Alamos. The scientists couldn’t do that. So, what I am thinking in this case is that initially at least there was an engineering function [at the SSC] that was weak.

Watkins:

Yes, that is exactly correct.

Riordan:

And needed to be strengthened.

Watkins:

Right. It’s the engineering function. That is program management. But it is sensitivity to the science, because the science is the key to success. Obviously, you’d have good science. You don’t want to build a big thing and not have it perform, but it is getting the thing to perform to the specs set by the scientists that needs another kind of a skill that scientists generally don’t have. It isn’t in their bag, except on small projects where they have to actually build the detector or something to pick up the particles. But that’s a laboratory piece of equipment. That isn’t what you might call a commercial magnet. They tell you what they want in the electromagnetic field, but somebody else has to build that thing.

Riordan:

I think the physicists would have preferred to have that function down there under their control. For example, Tom Bush, the head of the Magnet Division, was an engineering physicist from the Navy, the Naval Postgraduate School. That was the kind of relationship they would have preferred to have, with the scientists on top and engineering reports to science. And I think you were talking about them as parallel.

Watkins:

I don’t know. I can’t remember the diagram. I don’t know if parallel is the right word. I’d have to look and see what the structure was, but it was to best of my knowledge delineated. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. And if that wasn’t done, then it was not done right.

Weiss:

Did you speak with Cipriano or have communication with Cipriano on a regular basis?

Watkins:

Sure. Both of them [Cipriano and Siskin] would come in. I don’t know if it was on a regular basis. Mostly it was with Happer, because you don’t bring these people [up to Washington] all the time. I’d say once a quarter they came, or something like that. What was the other guy’s name again?

Riordan:

Roy Schwitters. The director.

Watkins:

[inaudible]

Weiss:

Did you interact with the URA Washington staff very much?

Watkins:

Never.

Weiss:

They never came over?

Watkins:

They never came over. I don’t know if they didn’t come over to see our people, but they never came to see me that I can recall.

Weiss:

So, there was never any top-level coordination between the two organizations?

Watkins:

I wouldn’t even know who… I know who the URA guy is now because he was in the Office of Science and Technology, he was the acting director of NSF and so forth, but he wasn’t there at the time. It was his predecessor, and I don’t know who it was. [ed. the URA president in the early 1990s was John Toll.]

Weiss:

There’s one other…

Watkins:

Hunter wanted 200 people to run it from headquarters, and I said I am not going to do it. I want a program management on site. I want the team out there, whatever we have to have to get it out there. We’re now building something. I can’t imagine them being in Washington. I said I want liaisons here, but I hope that the Director of Energy Research can provide that. Whatever is necessary here for a small cadre is fine, but I want the field activity, as it is in the military, to be on site. The program manager needs to have a close coordination — obviously with budget preparation and so forth — has to be very much in tune with our staff. There’s a lot of people in DOE that had to handle that, but I wanted the real work to be done in the field, in the vicinity of the scientists.

Weiss:

One other thing I want to bring up is that in May 1990 the House passed an authorization bill for the SSC. I don’t know if you recall that or not?

Watkins:

Yes, generally.

Weiss:

One of the things that seems to be the case is that there were several amendments that laid down benchmarks for international collaboration.

Watkins:

Yes, there were. They said we must fund X percent of the SSC internationally; those benchmarks led to the $2 billion [sought from] Japan and — I forget what it was — the European Community or whatever. It made a significant difference to set those benchmarks. If you want to kill something, you do it that way; that’s a wonderful way to do it. It sounds very logical. If you just get international cooperation now and get the cost down, get the cost to be shared, we’d like that. So, as this thing goes on, let’s get the [foreign] share up. Those are good conditions. It was hard for me to object to it, but [now we’re] starting in 1990, not in 1985. It makes a difference to the other side, which asks, “Where were we when you started this [project]? What did you do to try to get us in on the front end? Do we share in the benefits of this somehow, in the construction of the SSC? Do we get some benefits out of it so that our investment has some returns, either on-site or in Japan or in Europe? Or is this all going to benefit the United States?” Those things had not been worked out very well. The whole agreement was flimsy, and it should have been worked out early. They have to get benefits. It is just like in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor [ITER]. I told them, “I don’t give a damn about the science now. You better sit down now — this is 1990 — and you better work out the protocol for benefits commensurate with investment, and it can be done.”

Weiss:

For each nation?

Watkins:

For each nation that wants to participate. If [a nation] wants to participate in 10 percent of the funding, it gets 10 percent of the benefits; we work those out, and here they are conceptually. This is what we’re willing to do. We’re all willing to do this. If [another nation wants to contribute 30 percent of the funding, it] gets 30 percent of the benefits. If the U.S. contributes 50 percent, which is typical, then it gets 50 percent of [the benefits]. We don’t come in with [California Governor] Pete Wilson demanding that the thermonuclear experimental reactor be put in San Diego next to General Atomics. You want to kill it? That’s the way to kill it. So, everybody has got to get in there to decide what the protocol is. I could not get that going. Nobody gave a damn about it. I had conferences, meetings. I met with the Italians. I met with a lot of people. Everybody would nod and say, “That is a real good idea,” and we never could do it. It just was impossible, because people are self-interested. They would rather fight to get [the project built] in Germany, or rather fight to get it in California, or fight to get it in Tokyo, or someplace else. [ed. At the time of the interview, the U.S. had withdrawn from participating in the ITER project.]

Riordan:

You’re talking about ITER?

Watkins:

That’s right. That’s what you deal with on these things, so you have… At least we started early with ITER. At least there was some discussion early. I don’t know what [early] discussions went on with the Super Collider. I didn’t get the feeling that any of these nations felt they had a significant financial commitment beyond whatever they were asked to do, such as compete for the magnets, for example.

Riordan:

It does seem like the Japanese were on the verge of contributing. Do you think that if they had come in for $1-2 billion …

Watkins:

It would have made a big difference.

Riordan:

This seems to be the greatest complaint that the Congress had, that the United States was being asked to fund the whole thing and that the costs were rising.

Watkins:

The U.S. hadn’t laid the groundwork to do anything else, in my opinion.

Riordan:

But if the Japanese had come in for…

Watkins:

I think it would have made a huge difference. [inaudible] all information on the Hill, and that’s why we spent so much time. We had [many] teams going over [to Japan]. I went over there twice. And I had a good reputation in Japan because I have a background in Japan. I took the first nuclear-powered submarine into Japan — 300,000 demonstrators, 8,000 police, huge press, and all that other stuff, and I calmed it down. A long track record. My mother established the Japan-American society in Los Angeles and got an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan. This was all in the press. They knew me over there. The Japanese are interesting people. I didn’t ask [inaudible] my background. They put in [inaudible]. So, they knew who I was, and I went around with the U.S. ambassador [ed. Michael Armacost, in December 1991]. Excellent! They were very supportive, and their technology person was very good. We had a good relationship with the science and technology agency.

Riordan:

Exactly to whom did you talk on your visits?

Watkins:

The Minister of Finance, and I can’t remember who else.

Riordan:

Kiichi Miazawa, the Prime Minister?

Watkins:

There was a call to the Prime Minister, I think, but I didn’t meet with the Prime Minister on the SSC. It was a courtesy call. I’d have to go back and look at the actual schedule, which I don’t have. DOE would have it. I know I talked to the Minister of Finance, and if somebody mentioned his name, I would say, yes, that’s the minister.

Riordan:

The Foreign Minister? Did you talk to the Foreign Minister, too?

Watkins:

I don’t remember, but I think the answer is yes.

Riordan:

So, essentially you spoke to people at the cabinet level?

Watkins:

I was given an opening by the President through the Secretary of State for that particular visit. And as I recall, I made a courtesy call on the Prime Minister and had a detailed discussion with the Minister of Finance, because the Minister of Finance owns all the science and technology agencies in Japan. They so control it that they sit there… We’re building a big ship now called [inaudible] vessels, $500 million, that Japan has built. That is done by the Minister of Finance in Japan, with support coming up from the technical agencies, but he’s the guy that holds the reins. So, he’s the OMB Director kind of the person for the Prime Minister.

Weiss:

What is the feeling of a meeting with a minister of Japan? These aren’t roll-up-your-sleeves working meetings, are they?

Watkins:

He knew I was coming there, because I saw the message that was sent from the State Department that we were interested. They were obviously careful not to set a number, but they talked about the project as important and a significant partnership that we sought. But they knew [inaudible]. Everybody told them [inaudible].

Weiss:

Was this a 15-minute meeting where there were pleasantries and then …

Watkins:

Probably closer to half an hour.

Weiss:

And you made the official request?

Watkins:

I made the official request. They knew I was coming.

Weiss:

And they smiled and nodded and said they would consider it very seriously, or something like that?

Watkins:

Something like that, but as I told you, the Minister of Finance asked me, “What is the product?” And that’s when I told him, “Mr. Minister, there is a significant gap between the worth the United States places on basic research and that which Japan does.” That’s all I could say. “What’s the product?” The product is knowledge. I said the product is knowledge, and we have a lot of trust and faith that technology will bring new things for mankind. We wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.

Riordan:

But you didn't come out of this meeting with any sense that Japan would do anything more than set up this committee to study [the possibility of contributing $1-2 billion to the SSC]?

Watkins:

No, and you never do, really. You’re not going to get a commitment for that amount of money without the Minister of Finance going back to the Prime Minister, and then they decide, “Is this the burning issue for the U.S. with Japan? Is our relationship going to be tarnished by us not doing this?” And if that pressure isn’t kept on at a very high level right through to the bitter end… You’re pushing this ball up the mountain, and if you don’t keep pushing and sustaining that drive, it is going to fall back on you every time. Because they want to hear that. They want to know, “This is a big deal for us, Japan. Is it a big deal for us? And how much time are we willing to put in?” If we’re willing to put in the time, put the pressure on and then they say, “Okay, we’ll give it to you instead of that,” then we get it.

Riordan:

They were also looking for the United States to go easy on certain issues, such as trade quotas.

Watkins:

That I was not involved in. It’s quite possible. I don’t know what the other side of this is. You’d have to get that from a person like Baker, who might know something about it, because being from Texas and being the Secretary of State at the time, he knew about the SSC. So Jim would not be a bad guy to talk to about the U.S. relationship with Japan. He may have some insights he’s never revealed to me.

Riordan:

I think that, from what I have seen in documents and from other people talking about it, this was an issue that Bush was willing to go soft on, but Clinton was not. Trade was too important an issue…

Watkins:

I don’t know, because I’m not privy to all the inner workings of the White House, although George Bush was always very open with me. He personally… He was the only one … If he hadn’t said anything, nothing would have happened in my opinion. Let’s let the Secretary of Energy take the hit on this.

Weiss:

When you finished up in 1992 and early 1993, what kind of package did you pass on to the next administration?

Watkins:

I gave them the most complete package that’s ever been developed in the DOE. I got nothing [when I came in]. My predecessors got nothing. You’re a political appointee. You come in and you do the best you can, particularly when you go across Republican-Democratic lines. Then you have serious problems. Of course, I was never brought up that way. In the Navy, you do the very best you can to make sure your turnover documents are so thorough that the command succeeds. It’s to your benefit to have your successor succeed, not fail. Okay, so I prepared after Bush lost the election. In six weeks, I prepared this thorough turnover note. It was in a book for Hazel O’Leary this thick [JW motions with his thumb and index finger]. There were 32 items. I have copies of the book. Thirty-two items that are key over the next six months and 1-1/2 pages maximum are devoted to each one. That’s for her. Underneath that I had large books prepared on almost every item, depending on the branch — coming out of research, coming out of the classified area, the bombs, and the clean-up, and all that — for her staff. I invited her over on January 6, 1993, to start reviewing these documents. We set up a special briefing room for her and her staff to come and take classified data into that room and study it. It was all laid out with staff ready to do it. She never did that. She wanted me to come over to her hotel room, which I would not do. And then on about the 17th or so, two days before I left, she finally came over. She accepted my invitation to come over, walked into the room, said she’s read all the material and had no questions, which she had not done. All she wanted to do was [inaudible] for general counsel. So, that was the turnover. But I did my work because I believe very strongly… and the President asked us to make sure we made a good turnover to the Democrats. That was in the last Cabinet meeting, and I took that to heart, because I am used to it. And I can’t remember the details of what’s in there, but somebody like Happer, who prepared the research turnover package, would know. And I can’t remember where we were with the SSC at that point, but it was pretty much half dead. [ed. Happer himself stayed on into the Clinton administration before being dismissed early on.]

Weiss:

It was certainly in desperate political straits.

Watkins:

And obviously it had been pushed by a Republican administration. So, what does that mean to the Democratic leadership now? You have a Democrat in the White House, Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress. Kill it! This is a problem in this country. We don’t think in terms of wanting to make our successors or our predecessors look good. We want to make them look bad and prove how bad they were. That’s why we change the names. All the good programs, we always change their names. We call it something else or get a new buzzword going that we’re really going to change. They haven’t changed a goddamn thing. This is the political reality. I’m not a politician, but I understand politics. I hate it, because I don’t like the disingenuousness of it. Not when it comes to things like science and technology. They ought to be off the table. Come on guys, leave them alone.

Riordan:

Is there a way to do multiyear funding?

Watkins:

Yes. It ought to be done.

Riordan:

Do they do that in the DOD?

Watkins:

Read [Michigan congressman] Vern Ehlers’s report to [the then-House Speaker Newt] Gingrich on setting up a national science policy. It’s right in there. And who cares about that report? It’s an excellent report. Vern Ehlers is a physicist, one of the few in Congress that has a Ph.D., knows what he’s talking about. He held the hearings, he wrote a good report, and nobody gives a damn. He’s talking about how to establish a national science policy, and one of those things is to stabilize the research base and demand of all the other agencies a five-year program in research, which we now demand only from the DOD. Now, I understand that the OMB has demanded a five-year program out of NSF. I haven’t seen any results of that. I don’t even know if it's in the [inaudible], but it ought to be, and all agencies should have it. The principal investigators out there, up and down, every year. It’s got to be the most frustrating thing. We misuse them. We use them instead of full-time equivalents. We have the average doctoral degree coming in after seven years because we steal time from these doctoral students.

Riordan:

Are the projects in the DOD multiyear projects?

Watkins:

They all are. All research is five years. You have to have a five-year research plan.

Riordan:

But is the money committed?

Watkins:

No.

Riordan:

It always has to come up year by year?

Watkins:

But your budget, if you don’t have that, and you go to the Hill for authorization, and you have a brand new research thing that was never in your five-year program, you’d better be able to explain it, what it does. While the money may not be there, it is the intent of that department to come up with that kind of research base, and there is justification for it, and it grows at inflation rate, or it can be accelerated in some areas. And every year you get a new five-year program. So, you are always looking out five years, and obviously it changes every year. But there are adjustments on it, and they have to have a rationale for it. But the principal investigator who is working on the project says at least I’m in [conceptually?] for five years. I’ve only got funding for one or two years, sometimes it is two-year funding. Generally, it is two years for that purpose, two years of funding. And I have expectations that [the funding agency is] serious about carrying this on. It’s the outfit that does it. It’s a huge problem for us.

Riordan:

On the SSC didn’t the DOE have projections for a peak of funding in 1996 and then going down?

Watkins:

Yes, of course.

Riordan:

That’s not the equivalent?

Watkins:

That’s research, development, and production. The whole thing, not just the research.

Riordan:

Okay, but I mean they had figures for what the overall impact was going to be.

Watkins:

Defense has an R&D projection, and the D is four-fifths of the R&D budget. The D is big money. That’s political now. I want to build a prototype submarine like the Seawolf. That’s a completely metal one. I want to build an all-electric one. What’s the congressman’s name? I forget his name now. We want to build Narwhal, with a natural-circulation reactor. That was a prototype. I want to build six B-2 bomber prototypes as part of the R&D package. That involves big jobs, big money, a lot of industries in the country. So, D is political, but R is not, and R takes a hit. Invariably, in a fixed R&D account, the D goes up and the R goes down, unless you fight hard for it. If you fight hard for it, you can probably sustain it at a reasonable level. But if you look at the R side of the budget, it’s always in real decline. It may go up from year to year, but if you’re talking about real dollars, with inflation included, the adjusted dollars generally go down unless you fight hard for it. And every once in a while, you’ll see a Secretary of Defense come in and say, “Research, long-range stuff, we are going to boost it up.” And that’s because there has been a big bitch and hue and cry there. Don’t let it go. Don’t just build extra bombers and extra ships and extra tanks if you don’t need it at the front end of this thing. D is early jobs on something that’s not proven yet.

Riordan:

But in a way the SSC had a similar production of magnets, by General Dynamics and Westinghouse.

Watkins:

Exactly.

Riordan:

Those are major industrial companies that could bring in political clout.

Watkins:

Plus, Russia and Italy, and I think maybe Japan, but I’m sure about Japan and magnets. I can’t remember who was in the magnet game. It was the Russian magnets that turned out to be the best. They more than met the specs — way beyond the specs. Heavy stuff but beautifully done. We never had seen products out of their nuclear-weapons labs until we saw those magnets, and they were exquisite. We always think of Russians being kind of… Well, they’ve done stuff that’s rusty after awhile. Not this stuff. This was bomb-factory quality.

Weiss:

You mentioned something in passing about names. Were you involved in the possible naming of the collider laboratory? It’s been rumored that some people wanted to call it the Ronald Reagan National Accelerator Center with a picture with several…

Watkins:

I don’t even remember that issue ever coming up while I was there, not even in rumor.

Riordan:

It might have been before your tenure. It was somewhere in 1989.

Watkins:

I would never get into that game. I wouldn’t give a damn what they named it.

Weiss:

There was a thought that a ribbon-cutting ceremony with five living ex-Presidents would have won the day.

Watkins:

I would have let whatever happened happen there. I would have tried to stay out of that debate. I would have tried to give it to the most prominent scientist that contributed to the concept of it. But see, that wouldn’t have sold because [inaudible]. I would never have named it after a politician.

Weiss:

So, a name more like Fermilab rather than, say, Johnson Space Center?

Watkins:

Exactly.

Weiss:

Trivelpiece said that came up after he had left in 1987.

Watkins:

It didn’t ever come up with me, and I would have thought it was so far down in the grass. I mean let’s build the thing first before we name it.

Riordan:

I think Trivelpiece was saying that it would have been much harder to kill if it had been named the Ronald Reagan National Accelerator Lab.

Watkins:

I think that was superficial. If they wanted to get it, they should have named it the John Dingell Accelerator!

Riordan:

I have one final question. It goes back to Cipriano and something he said when I talked to him. He said that when you first talked to him about the SSC, which would have been early 1990, probably in May, you told him that the chances of it succeeding were less than 50 percent, but that you had to give it your best try, and…

Watkins:

That was because of funding.

Riordan:

…that it couldn’t take one more large cost increase like the one that had just happened.

Watkins:

Right. And that’s one of the reasons we got hard-nosed on the thing. Not [inaudible]. Today’s funding was reasonably casual for those changes. Tomorrow’s funding was significantly different, so one had to be very cautious with… I had to have somebody in there bird-dogging this thing for me, so that I could trust the budget projections coming in for the annual budget drills that I put my department through, which had never been done before.

Riordan:

Would you say his principal role down there was cost control?

Watkins:

No, his principal role down there was program management, which includes cost control. [inaudible] It was managing the contractors to do the work, overseeing them, making sure quality assurance and all the specs were met, doing all the testing, [conceptual?] operations, safety of operations. All those things are program management responsibility, onsite. They know exactly where the problems are. They have daily meetings. They are the on-site monitoring staff. They are worried about contractor performance. That’s [audio cut].

Riordan:

Is there something that we didn’t ask you?

Watkins:

I think it was a great loss for the country. I don’t know if it will ever come back again. I think maybe it will, but it will come back with different technology [inaudible].

Riordan:

And perhaps done as a truly international project.

Watkins:

It would have to be truly international, but I think it ought to be done. I think what we are seeing with Hubble is too exciting not to understand it. I think it is far more important than watching a robot on Mars on TV or whatever.

Weiss:

On July 4th.

Watkins:

On the Fourth of July, and whether we have water on the planet. We don’t know… If we did the research in the ocean that we ought to be doing, we would be able to send somebody up there who would really understand a lot more about the geology of those planets and what we are really looking for. We don’t really do our own work, so we are not ready to do that. Send a little Mickey Mouse thing up there for billions of dollars a launch? Oh my God! I mean, they asked the president of the National Academy in testimony over on the Hill. They said, “Dr. Alberts, would you please tell us what the scientific benefits are of the International Space Station.” He said, “Mr. Chairman, don’t ask me that question. You’ve asked the National Academy that question time and time again, and I have to tell you that you cannot defend the International Space Station on the basis of science. We can do much more with science elsewhere. If you want to do it for national prestige, if you want to do it for a little bit of science, if you want to do it for visibility — we’re in charge of space — then do it, but don’t ask us. We’ve given you study after study that says the science isn’t there.” We can do the science by autonomous vehicles. We can send a lot of satellites. We can launch other probes. We can do all that. We don’t need people up there to do the kind of work we’re talking about. Is it exciting to keep people orbiting around the Earth? Yes, it’s exciting stuff, because that is why we are doing it.

Riordan:

I had lunch with Bruce Alberts, and he had great comments to say about Gordon [Johnston?] for doing that. He had great admiration for him.

Watkins:

Yes, he’s terrific. Well, I worked with him [Alberts] on a Carnegie Foundation study. He was on my education task force for ages 3-10, and he was just terrific. But he’s a wonderful guy and he has a nice perspective on the thing. He’s the first president of the National Academy who really had this interest in K–12 science education. He’s a nut on it because he ran a program at UC San Francisco and he taught at… He came into science education as a mechanism to teach kids how to read, write, and communicate, using science. So, his schools, his project out in San Francisco, they are incredible. And the little lab that they run for little school kids [inaudible] at the Berkeley lab out there up on the hill.

Weiss:

The Lawrence Hall of Science?

Watkins:

They have their logo on the side of the little kits they have in the room. It’s just terrific. He’s really a visionary. He’s a fabulous guy. We put great weight on the National Academy studies. We take them and do something with them. We don’t just let them sit there on the shelf. We say look, that is what the National Academy of Sciences said, oceanography in the next decade. We ought to be in partnership, we ought to be doing these things, and we did it. And he really likes that.

Riordan:

My wife [Donna Gerardi Riordan] works pretty closely with him. She runs the Academy’s Office of Public Understanding of Science. They put out the Beyond Discovery series.

Watkins:

American illiterates don’t read. This is a problem. Good people read, but so many people don’t. They don’t understand how the understanding of science as a basic fundamental principle is so necessary for decision-making today. Tell me something that is going on in the world that doesn’t have a scientific component. I don’t know what it is. And the explosion of population is not a condom issue, it is a scientific issue of great magnitude. What do we do? How do we survive? Why do over half of the people on Earth live on 1.75 percent of the land? Well, there is a good reason for that. There is a scientific justification, both in biology and geology, anthropology... It’s all there. So, don’t say there is not enough land for people to be. There is plenty of land. So, that is a scientific thing. If the population doubles, we don’t want Mrs. Clinton to go to Beijing and talk about women’s rights and reproduction rights and so forth. I don’t mind that, but for God’s sake, do we have anybody interested at all in looking at what the scientific solutions might be fifty years from now to deal with the doubling of the world’s population by the end of the century? That’s a major task for the United States to lead the world in — sensible, long term, continuous research work. What do we do not to change nature but to understand nature and to optimize it? The magnets and that are coming up for re-work. Okay, is the best science available? Wow! What does that mean? It means one thing to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, and to a scientist it means something different. They know what the best science available is, but that doesn’t help very much because we don’t know the whole system surrounding fisheries. We don’t know how they survive. We don’t know when the predators take over. We don’t know what the total environment is. That takes years of research with all new sensors and systems and all sources integrated through new databases. Those are things that we ought to be talking about at a high level, and that is expensive stuff. And that’s why I put the SSC in that category, or it could have been, where we know we are going to have a multibillion-dollar investment downstream to actually build something, but we want tens of millions that are going to be shared up front, and the benefits will be shared downstream, and looking ahead to ascertain how to make this attractive to all the nations that are participating. That was never done.

Riordan:

Very good.