Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–185
set up to prevent weapons from being sold by the people inside the system. Nunn–Lugar gave
them a great deal of help in that. The two senators, who were willing to cross the aisle to work
together and both of whom are very interesting people, deserve an enormous amount of credit.
Of course, we’ve also had to deal with secretaries of energy who bordered on the absolute
boundary of flakiness. The worst were in the Clinton administration. Clinton was a wonderful
president, but Hazel O’Leary and the governor of New Mexico—
ASPATURIAN: Bill Richardson?
TOMBRELLO: Richardson, yes. They were the ultimate flakes.
ASPATURIAN: Well, now of course you have Steven Chu in there.
TOMBRELLO: I have a very high opinion of Steven Chu. I’ve known him a long time. I have a
very high opinion of his undersecretary, Steve Koonin. I think we are in pretty good shape.
There are detailed quibbles about Tom [Thomas] D’Agostino, who actually runs the NNSA
[National Nuclear Security Administration], the weapons piece. He’s not a bad person. I just
think they tried awfully hard to find somebody to replace him. He was acting NNSA secretary
when Steve Chu came in. I had several chats with Steve Chu about it. I gave him names. He
told me he tried not only once but twice to hire those names. Some good people just don’t want
to do that particular job.
ASPATURIAN: Are you in contact with Steve Koonin on any of these issues?
TOMBRELLO: Well, he’s a lot busier than I am, but I expect to see him in a few weeks, and I’m
looking forward to it. We did have an interesting evening about a year ago. He convened a
small ad-hoc committee to come back to the DOE for dinner in December—we were lucky; we
got in and out without a blizzard—to talk about “Climategate.” The department was very
interested in our take—there were about half a dozen of us—on those hacked e-mails from the
Hadley Climate Research Unit in England. That was a very interesting meeting. To what extent
did the contents of the letters discredit climate science? And the answer is, They shouldn’t have.
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