A 50-year blast: Sandia celebrates anniversary

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Mar 10, 2006 | by Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

LIVERMORE -- Inside the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, the rivalry between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore weapons labs -- for H- bomb designs, money and prestige -- is legendary.

But a third H-bomb lab, Sandia, operates inside that competition, with branches in California and New Mexico as two houses of defense science divided by geography and assignment if united by a single manager.

What began 50 years ago as a team of ordnance engineers dispatched from New Mexico to help fledgling bomb designers at the University of California Rad Lab became a permanent partner as a full-fledged national security lab called Sandia-California.

Frank Murar was one of the first 16 Sandians to come to California. This week, he and hundreds of other retirees came back for Sandia-California's anniversary and swapped tales from the Cold War arms race.

"We were working with tight time scales in the'50s and the'60s in a race with the Soviet Union," he said Thursday.

Murar helped create the United States' first intercontinental ballistic missile warhead and, after the Soviets broke the 1958- 1962 nuclear testing moratorium, was among U.S. weaponeers who filled the skies over the Pacific with massive detonations to test bomb ideas they had stored up.

"We just had a furious effort," he remembered. "There were just a whole series of designs that people had thought up."

The Rad Lab and the Sandia labs, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M., could hardly have been more different in culture. Lawrence Livermore was full of creative academics, hungry to break Los Alamos' early'50s monopoly on weapons design. Sandia's cultural parentage at Western Electric, then AT&T and now Lockheed Martin filled it with button-down engineers practicing near obsession with detail and procedure.

Those cultures melded in a weapons design partnership team that became the tightest working relationship in the weapons complex.

"We didn't always sing from the same song sheet as the folks in Albuquerque, but we had to get along with the heavy metal folks across East Avenue" at neighboring Lawrence Livermore, Jack Howard, Sandia-California's first director, said in a recorded message for the anniversary.

The California labs produced some of the safest, most compact and innovative H-bombs ever devised. They invented the concepts of insensitive high explosives that merely melt in the presence of flame and permissive action links or coded locks to limit the odds of an unauthorized use of a nuclear bomb.

By the end of the Cold War, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia- California weaponeers succeeded in packing every available safety and security feature into their bombs and warheads.

"Weapons in the stockpile that have been the safest and most secure combinations of components came from these two labs," Lawrence Livermore weapons chief Bruce Goodwin told Sandians Wednesday at their 50th celebration.

For much of the Cold War, Los Alamos physicists tended to hand a canned nuclear explosive design to Sandia-New Mexico to turn into a weapon.

Thomas Cook, who as vice president over Sandia-California from 1968 to 1982 was its longest-serving chief, said the Lawrence- Sandia team conceived of their designs as a single whole.

"In California, the weapons were all integrated," he said. "It saved a lot of weight."

The military, especially the Navy, often ended up choosing less feature-filled designs from a competing Los Alamos/Sandia-New Mexico team for the most numerous weapons in the arsenal. The Californians, in other words, began and ended the Cold War as the underdogs.

"We came in second, so we just have to try harder," said Mim John, chief of Sandia-California.

For two decades, Sandians were forbidden to work on anything but weapons. But with the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, Sandia- California scientists carried the tools and knowledge of fluids that they gained from working with hydrogen in nuclear weapons to studying internal combustion engines. Inside the lab's Combustion Research Facility, they fired lasers through clouds of burning gas and diesel, then used computer simulations to help the automotive industry boost the efficiency of its engines.

After the Cold War, the lab turned more of its staff toward biology, nanotechnology, chem-bio defense and homeland security.

Johnny Foster, a former Livermore lab director and Pentagon testing chief, said Wednesday that Sandia's small California lab was agile and forged ties to universities and Silicon Valley that "attracted an outstanding staff, rich in advanced degrees."

Measured by patents per capita, Foster said, "pound for pound, it has outperformed the other laboratories, perhaps in part because it has always worried that it (along with Livermore Lab) was on the verge of being declared superfluous and shut down."

People in Livermore did not know what to make of the Sandians from New Mexico back in 1956. The town, said Howard, "didn't exactly welcome us with open arms."

But lab staff threw time into a new sewage plant that restarted the flow of federal home loans to Livermore and volunteered in the local schools.