Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–242
ASPATURIAN: What did they want you to talk about?
TOMBRELLO: Applied nuclear physics. Suddenly they had discovered, Hey, the government
wants this nuclear physics stuff to have a payoff. Oh, we were popular! At one place close to
Beijing, we were talking about analyzing materials, and they said, “Do you know what major
important trace elements there are in beer?” I said, “No.” They were clearly in the pocket of
Tsingtao Beer. They wanted to tell me about all their analysis of the beer and about how their
research was really pinning down the good and bad things in it. It was such a total reversal of
what had happened in 1979. By 1982 it was so clear they just wanted to talk about how you use
science to do things that conceivably made money.
We had another interesting experience. We’d been out in west China at Lanzhou, visiting
a research institute out there. I still get their quarterly, or yearly, progress reports. In fact, you
see, a lot of the work at Lanzhou grew out of the fact that they have a big dam, a big
hydroelectric project, out there. And though I never saw any of it, it was a bit like the Tennessee
Valley Authority. You needed a lot of electricity to do isotope separation. Out there, as nearly
as I can tell, that’s where they were doing U-235 production. I remember joking with one of the
lab heads about it, and he said, “Yeah, you work on that kind of stuff, too. We can’t talk about
it, but we have worked on similar things.” I remember flying in there. We’re on some small jet,
probably some ancient Russian jet, ill maintained. We hit the ground and the plane rolls forever.
Everyone says, “What’s going on?” I said, “I think they fly jet interceptors out of here. This
reminds me of landing at one of those dual-use airports, like Albuquerque, that they fly jet
fighters out of.” So as we are taxiing toward the terminal, you can sort of just see, in the early
evening dusk, planes hidden behind camouflage nets. I say, “Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear, that’s
what we’re seeing.” They still had radar installations on the tops of the hills. They still had an
airport with jet interceptors. They were presumably set up to protect the isotope-separation
facility. We never saw any of that. We just saw the university and this research institution.
There’s one more, small story about that visit. China was chaotic. In 1982 they lost our
airline reservations for flying from Lanzhou to Shanghai, so they put us on a train with a guide.
Soft seats. There’s quite a difference between hard seats and soft seats in China. And so we go
across China on the train, which was an adventure in its own right—kind of fun. We stopped in
Xian. So we get to Shanghai very early in the morning. We’re out in the old French section of
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