Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–179
nuclear counterterrorism. It was a very good committee, including a former director of
Livermore named Bruce Tarter.
ASPATURIAN: Was this a Livermore-based team?
TOMBRELLO: The people were mostly from outside. There were two people basically from the
lab. One was Tarter, who had retired as director some years before. And one was General John
Gordon, who had been associated with the University of California and was director of
Homeland Security for a while. It was interesting.
ASPATURIAN: Was this committee under the umbrella of Homeland Security?
TOMBRELLO: No. It was under the umbrella of the lab.
ASPATURIAN: OK. So they were the initiating agency.
TOMBRELLO: And I chaired it. The goal of the committee as I enunciated it—because it was my
idea—was not just to write a report but to write a report that would end up on the desk of the
new president. We didn’t know who it was going to be. It could be Obama. It could have been
McCain. But we felt that this was important. Our analysis of it, we started off jokingly, would
be based on this discussion of the 3:00 a.m. phone call. If you remember, that was the Hillary
Clinton campaign ad that asked, Whom do you want in the White House when the emergency
call comes? So we asked, What would be the substance of that 3:00 a.m. phone call? What
would be something so urgent and critical that you would wake up the president for it? We
decided that one of the highest probabilities was that some foreign country or terrorist group,
particularly a terrorist group, had a nuclear weapon or had the materials from which you could
construct one. And probably that truly would be a 3:00 a.m. phone call. We wanted to analyze
this problem from the point of view of how well would the information that we knew about, and
were getting presentations, travel through the system, and how good would be the information on
which the president would have to make a decision? We wanted the new president to see this.
The upshot—to make a long story short—is that Obama has spoken several times in
public about the proliferation issue, the nuclear counterterrorism issue, the stockpile issues; and
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