Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–149
I believe he had a vision for various parts of the fields. He had a vision for biology and a vision
for quantum computation, both of which, I think, were successful. He had a vision with me for
the telescopes of astronomy. He had started, and I helped him carry through successfully, the
ASCI Program [now known as ASC, the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program—ed.].
We’re going to skip ahead for a minute, and then we’ll pick this up when we talk about
Livermore and my consulting on weapons [Session 7]. Back in the middle-to-late nineties, we
realized we were never going to test nuclear weapons again. Some of us picked this up much
earlier than others. I remember having to tell George Miller—the guy who is now the director of
Livermore, when he was just further down the pack—that he was never going to test a weapon
again. I said, “It’s not something I completely agree with, either, George. But, it ain’t going to
happen.”
ASPATURIAN: So the question became, What are you going to do now?
TOMBRELLO: What are you going to do now? That’s when Vic [Victor H.] Reis in Washington
came up with the idea of a stockpile stewardship. How much could we turn this into an
engineering problem of predicting the way weapons aged in the stockpile? They threw open the
idea of this ASCI program, which was kind of thinly disguised weapons research but had nothing
classified in it. So you could have your postdocs from China working on it. They threw it out to
the universities, and Koonin made sure we got a piece of that. I helped Koonin structure the part
of the project for Caltech, because I knew how the damn things worked, and I knew where the
boundaries of classification were and also where some of the potential problems were. But the
way I set it up, there was nothing you couldn’t just talk about in meetings and have your foreign
grad students work on, and this was tricky. It was not entirely popular with people like Roger
Blandford, who wanted to work on something that was, let’s say, borderline fusion, because it fit
beautifully in with the astrophysics.
ASPATURIAN: He was still here at that time?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I felt that left room for too much mischief. I wanted to keep it clear of what
I consider proprietary technology, thermonuclear weapons technology. I wanted to keep it sort
of at the fission-trigger level. I kept the geometries away from spherical and made sure they
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