Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–116
And that, of course, showed up in the LIGO project. Robbie Vogt guided LIGO through
building a very successful prototype and achieving a design, but it was Barry Barish who carried
the project through to completion. The whole LIGO story, again, shows how important it is that
you have a project director who has, first, the vision to know you need something extra and the
will to change the project’s course and change the people running it when you have to.
Now, there’s another interesting Oppenheimer story about another little Los Alamos
project that started on almost day one. He had Edward Teller—a group of one, because Edward
couldn’t work with anybody else—who was very interested in fusion bombs. As I said in
something I wrote, it didn’t pay off at the time, but you might say it represented a move in the
direction of a totally new product line that had considerable significance in its own right. It’s a
bit pedantic to say it that way, but it was true. Out of that little one-person wild-card project
grew a whole other direction in nuclear weapons. I think that booting Teller out of the fissionweapons
group, while keeping him on and keeping him thinking about this, shows
Oppenheimer’s wisdom, too. Someday somebody is going to write a book about Oppenheimer
as a project manager. I tried to convince Jeremy Bernstein to do it.
ASPATURIAN: Jeremy Bernstein being The New Yorker writer for physics.
TOMBRELLO: He did write a book about Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma
(2004)] , but he was tantalized by the possible romance between Oppenheimer and Ruth Tolman.
Jeremy and I were corresponding, because he wanted me to find out, Was it true? Some other
author had published a book with that in it. I said, “Well, I’ll look into it.” So I talked to Margie
Lauritsen [widow of Tommy Lauritsen]. And Margie’s first reaction was, “Nothing to it. I knew
Ruth very well. Never happened.” So I got back to Jeremy and said, “This is what I learned, but
you have to be careful. Everyone adored Ruth Tolman and would probably do anything to
protect her reputation.” But with Kitty Oppenheimer, they didn’t care, and she didn’t have any
reputation as far as they were concerned. I said, “You don’t have very much information about
the Ruth Tolman thing. You have a somewhat ambiguous, flowery letter she wrote to
Oppenheimer. You also have to fold in the fact that people tended to write a lot of letters in
those days, and the style of writing them could be a little bit over the top by present standards.
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