Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–191
TOMBRELLO: I know. I’ve noticed that, and I wish them well. Because it would be a good thing
if they were not just parroting the line of the Likud Party, which I feel very uneasy about. That
does not automatically make me a fan of Labor, but I would like to see [Israeli Opposition
Leader Tzipporah] Tzipi Livni move forward. I would like to see her run Israel, just to see what
will happen. Seems like an interesting lady. Once she’s in, I might not like what she does. If I
were in that country, I might well be doing exactly what they’re doing, and I try to temper what I
say. But what they’re doing is not necessarily in the interests of the rest of the world. But then
again, let’s not talk about the Muslim countries, because then I really get concerned: what Iran is
doing; what Iraq was doing. The country I worry about the most of all in the whole world is
Pakistan, and I have worried about them for more than two decades. They have been taking
nuclear weapons technology that they were given by the Chinese and selling them on the street to
all concerned. And this has been going on for a long time. They traded nuclear weapons
technology to North Korea for rocket technology that the Koreans had developed. They were
basically selling to Libya, Iraq, Iran. You name it, they were doing it, and while they may want
to blame it all on Mr. Khan [Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan], I think it was
government policy in Pakistan and may continue to be.
Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world. I’ve said this for many, many years.
There are countries that are, you know, quiescent now. When the ANC [African National
Congress] took over in South Africa, the previous government destroyed the nuclear weapons
they had, and they destroyed the capability of building them, but they did not destroy the ability
to process U-235, nor did they get rid of the fact they have a lot of U-235 that’s perfectly decent
material to make weapons out of. So you might say there is a sleeping giant in the nuclear
business in South Africa. Libya got out of the game as a trade for something else—Lockerbie, I
don’t know.
ASPATURIAN: Maybe Qaddafi just got tired of it.
TOMBRELLO: Or help from the West in producing oil. The whole thing is quite unstable and has
gotten more so. I remember writing a position paper at Livermore—I guess some of it is
classified, but the most of it certainly is not. [Francis] Fukuyama was talking about the end of
history, and my opinion, back at that point in time, was that it was not that way. The Soviet
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