Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
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<strong>Tombrello</strong>–178<br />
<strong>with</strong>out crossing anything that was trouble, although I realized that the streets perpendicular to<br />
the ones I was on were totally blocked. It was an interesting experience.<br />
But the committees moved along, and I’m going to telescope it all, because, you know,<br />
the details don’t matter too much. The lab continued to evolve, and I kept evolving the<br />
committee. The only thing that didn’t change was that I continued to chair both of them.<br />
Associate directors that ran that directorate changed, and the nature of the committees changed.<br />
At one point, the chemistry committee had to pick up nuclear chemistry, and you couldn’t really<br />
do nuclear chemistry unless you dealt <strong>with</strong> the classified issues. The nuclear chemistry group<br />
basically was the group that did what were called secondary diagnostics. I guess it’s no big<br />
secret that a thermonuclear weapon is a primary fission weapon that then detonates the<br />
secondary, which is the fusion weapon. I won’t go any further, because you can find all kinds of<br />
crap on the Web, and I can’t even comment on the accuracy of the stuff on the Web about it. But<br />
the secondary diagnostics mean you’re looking at radioactive materials from both the bomb itself<br />
and from little markers you put in there to tell you what’s actually going on in this explosion. A<br />
subset of the committee had to be cleared, and we separately wrote a report about that, which<br />
then went through the declassification process and was incorporated into the main report. So that<br />
was the beginning of the fact that the committee was going to deal <strong>with</strong> classified material. As<br />
things continued, it got more and more important that the other 90 percent of the iceberg get<br />
looked at. The committees had to be completely cleared for security. Eventually, it became<br />
slightly embarrassing that I had been doing this for not quite twenty years, and so I stepped off<br />
the stage.<br />
ASPATURIAN: What year would this have been?<br />
TOMBRELLO: 2006, 2007, somewhere in there. I still was on some other committees and got<br />
pulled in on a lot of ad-hoc committees. Ad-hoc committees plus red teams. Red teams are an<br />
interesting exercise. I’ve done that for JPL, and I’ve done it for Livermore. It’s usually when<br />
you want to find out why something went wrong that you form these committees, and I believe<br />
JPL calls them tiger teams. At Livermore they’re red teams—no political connotation. You’re<br />
supposed to meet as an ad-hoc committee, come to a conclusion, and write a report, which is<br />
handed to somebody farther up the line. In the summer of 2008, I was chair of a red team on<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T