Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–176
TOMBRELLO: Yes, it was an interesting challenge. But it was different. At first the committees
did not have to be completely cleared for security. The lab declassified the stuff we were
looking at. We were looking at the plutonium facility. We were looking at the tritium facility.
We were looking at a bunch of things and setting up a committee to try to comment mostly on
science—the quality of the science; not its applications. It was as if you’ve got an iceberg and
you’re only looking at the part above water, which is about 10 percent. The committees were
slightly frustrated by it.
ASPATURIAN: Was Livermore at that time still mostly in the weapons business?
TOMBRELLO: They have always mostly been in the national security business. But there is a
veneer of science. There is an underpinning of science as it applies to the weapons stuff, but
some of the frustration of those first committees had to do with the fact that you were seeing only
the tip of the iceberg, even though you knew there had to be some reason they were doing the
science. Those of us with Q clearances—we knew, and we could find out. But some fraction of
the committee wasn’t cleared, and so they weren’t informed. But OK. We did this. We began
to write systematic reports. In the process of all of this [in 1988], Roger Batzel had stepped
down as director and John Nuckolls had become director. Nuckolls—to put it in perspective—
had been head of the laser division, and almost the day after the invention of the laser was
announced, he had basically proposed that you could potentially use lasers to implode a fusion
capsule and make energy. Laser-driven inertial fusion. To show that’s still around, I’m on a
National Academy [of Sciences] committee right now, which has just met once—I met for
sixteen hours on the telephone from Kauai, rather than fly to Washington in a blizzard—to look
into what we are doing to push this forward for energy.
ASPATURIAN: Laser-induced fusion.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. And the person who is paying for this is the undersecretary of energy for
science, a former undergrad of mine named Steven Elliot Koonin. He put me on the committee,
I think, with malice, saying, “Well, we have to have somebody who’s a fan but who is a very
critical fan.” As you noticed in these interviews, I can be very critical. I can also be a fan, and I
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