Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–183
particularly the weapons labs? The weapons program is smaller. A lot of us cheered START
[Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty]. But we think there are still far too many nuclear weapons
out there.
I will use that as a segue into something I’ve been doing in the background, particularly
in the late nineties. We mentioned the ASCI program at Caltech earlier, and how it was
prompted by worry about the reliability and long-term viability of the weapons in the stockpile
that we’re not going to be testing anymore. Could you predict their properties? Could you
figure out a way to diagnose when they were going bad on the shelf? I mean, batteries don’t last
forever, and nuclear weapons are more complicated than batteries. They’re filled with materials
that are at least as active chemically as the stuff in batteries. Some of these weapons have been
there for thirty years. I cannot go into the details of the fact that most of them are still good after
thirty years. It’s a great job of engineering product design. You couldn’t buy an automobile and
put it in the garage and not use it for thirty years and expect it to work. But you can reasonably
expect most nuclear weapons to work after thirty years. And so, which ones are going bad?
What are the things you need to do to retrofit the stockpile—the so-called life-extension
programs? And then, you have the thornier question of the so-called RRW—the Robust Reliable
Warheads, something like that. People like Senator [Jon] Kyl—not one of my favorites—
ASPATURIAN: He’s the Republican from Arizona?
TOMBRELLO: I dislike Senator Kyl because he brings up reasons for not doing the START treaty
that can be answered only by dealing with details that are classified. I feel that this behavior is
underhanded. He knows perfectly well that answers to some of his questions involve material
that you cannot talk about. And I consider that grossly unfair. He knows the answers to these
questions, and he’s raising them because he knows nobody can answer them. The public at large
has every reason to believe that the things he is saying are important things. We have to deal
with that, too. But I think we all agree that a much smaller stockpile of weapons that you know
work provides a credible deterrent where you’re still involved in mutually assured destruction.
It’s a dangerous world out there. The United States and the Soviet Union need to reduce the size
of the arsenals—sorry, not the Soviet Union, Russia.
ASPATURIAN: Yes. Former Soviet Union.
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