Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–184
TOMBRELLO: I’ll have to tell a story in that regard. I told it in public when I interviewed Charlie
Munger for the DuBridge Lecture a few years ago. Years earlier, I was at Los Alamos for the
summer. A friend and I were bicycling up in the Jemez Mountains. We were talking as we
gritted our teeth and climbed this particular hill. He was talking about competition, worrying
about the competition getting ahead. I realized there was some kind of disconnect, and I said,
“Jim, you can’t be talking about Soviet Union.” He said, “Of course I’m not talking about the
Soviet Union. I’m talking about those guys at Livermore. We just can’t let those guys get ahead
of us.” And I thought, “We’re paying taxpayer money to compete with ourselves, and the people
who are doing it have written off the Russians as being hopelessly clunky.” [Laughter] A very
interesting phenomenon.
It was deliberately set up that way by [Edward] Teller to motivate technological advances
in the field, but it became an end in itself. Our national labs compete with one another, and
we’re going to have to get around that. There have got to be, in my opinion, a few hundred
weapons in the stockpile rather than thousands. They still have not addressed the problem of the
so-called tactical weapons, the small weapons, most of which are probably useless in any
conceivable conflict.
ASPATURIAN: Are you talking now about this country or also about—?
TOMBRELLO: We’re also talking about tactical weapons that are abroad, because they’re not
covered by START or SALT. But I think both sides agree that they’re probably not as useful as
one might think and that they are destabilizing. They’re also weapons that could diffuse out of
the system. That’s the other thing about having fewer—you can guard them better.
ASPATURIAN: That’s right. One hopes.
TOMBRELLO: The people who saved us in many respects were Senators [Samuel] Nunn [D.-Ga.],
and [Richard] Lugar [R.-Ind.], with the Nunn-Lugar Act, which, as the Soviet Union came apart,
found U.S. money to move people who were bomb designers into other occupations that paid
them salaries and helped the Russians secure the weapons better. It was a good thing it got
passed—very important. It stabilized a system that was very precarious. The Russians had a
philosophy of worrying about people stealing weapons from the system. They were very poorly
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