Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–76
know, those guys really helped us during the war. Charlie worked on the barrage rockets that the
navy used. He helped to solve the torpedo problem, because the U.S. made terrible torpedoes at
the beginning of the war. Charlie did a lot of stuff for us. We figured that we might have
another war sometime. It’d be nice to have all these guys together, so when we needed them we
could collect them all at once. It doesn’t cost us very much to keep them together by funding
their nuclear physics research.” He says, “We don’t really care about the nuclear physics
research. Just having those guys where we can get at them, when we need them, is what’s
important.”
ASPATURIAN: They wanted a brain trust.
TOMBRELLO: They did the same thing at Stanford with the electron accelerators there, which
also had its own fallout in terms of applications to S band, roughly 2 gigahertz (GHz) RF
technology. So we were still riding on the gratitude of the government for what had happened in
World War II. Bob Bacher had run the gadget division at Los Alamos. In some sense, he was
really second in command there to Oppenheimer, and the gadget division, of course, designed
and built the first nuclear weapons. These were the plutonium-implosion device—Bob Christy’s
gadget—and the Little Boy, which was the gun-assembled U-235 bomb. And of course they also
conducted the Alamogordo test.
ASPATURIAN: Did you have many dealings with Christy as a young person here?
TOMBRELLO: Sure. But Christy was moving out of nuclear physics and into developing and
understanding some stellar models. The work on variable stars that he did, which was partly
nuclear physics and partly stellar dynamics, made him even more famous. Of course he was
around, but he was no longer part of the day-to-day operations of Kellogg. He came to seminars.
He asked very insightful, very hard questions. But he was not a house theorist anymore.
Kellogg was operating with Willy as kind of a house theorist in nuclear astrophysics—Willy and
his guests, like Hoyle. In nuclear physics, we had random visits from Aage Bohr and at least one
visit from his father, Niels Bohr, who was still alive.
ASPATURIAN: Do you remember anything about that?
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