Steven Joel Gitomer, 1943 -2025

Last week I saw an obituary in the New Mexican of someone who made a difference in my life. We were professional colleagues, never close friends. But that difference was consequential beyond me, and I had questions I wanted to ask him. I didn’t realize he had been in town all this time.

In the 1990s, the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) was launched by the United States, the European Union, Norway, and Japan. Its purpose was to find work for weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, so that they would not feel it necessary to sell their nuclear weapons expertise. The countries that had been part of the Soviet Union were unable to pay those scientists. The scientists were asked to propose work to the ISTC, which would then evaluate and, if appropriate, fund the proposals. This also served to help the scientists adjust to the international ways of proposals and funding, which was different from what they were accustomed to.

Steven (Steve) Gitomer was the Los Alamos National Laboratory liaison to the ISTC. He distributed information about the current proposals to those of us who were interested. Many of the proposals were physics-related, studies of semiconductors and stars. But in one group was a proposal from Kazakhstan’s Institute of Nuclear Physics to survey radioactive contamination at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS). It sounded a great deal like what I was doing at Los Alamos, so I asked Steve to send me the proposal.

I reviewed it and sent the review to Steve. It was a good proposal, and the work to be done was a bargain for the money in terms of what it would cost in the US. As the proposal moved toward funding, Steve called me. The ISTC required a partner in one of their countries. Would I be that partner? I wasn’t sure that was appropriate, since I had reviewed the proposal, but Steve said it was all right, that was how things were being done.

The Institute received $1.5 million for the work, maybe a bit more overall. As the ISTC partner, I read and approved their progress reports, which continued the high quality of the proposal. And eventually I got to visit them. The funding had kept them going through a bad time.

The project built a relationship with the Institute that eventually allowed Sig Hecker, who had been the director of Los Alamos and had worked with the Russians in particular, to inquire of his Russian colleagues whether they had, as had been rumored, conducted hydrodynamic nuclear tests in the open, scattering plutonium metal in one part of SNTS. Yes, it turned out they had. The test site was far from secure, and metal scavengers were removing copper wire. Nobody wanted them to get to the plutonium.

Eben Harrell and David Hoffman wrote up the story of how the US, Russia, and Kazakhstan cooperated to remove 100 kg of plutonium metal from SNTS.

Thanks, Steve. It was a great adventure for me and averted some potential disasters.

Steve was a plasma physicist and edited the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science from 1984 to 2024. Liaising with the ISTC was one of many things he did at Los Alamos. He was someone you’ve probably never heard of but who made a difference, like the people Trump and Musk are firing.

In somewhat related news, William Luers has died. Luers, as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, supported Vaclav Havel in 1983, long before Mikhail Gorbachev broke Russia’s grip on its eastern European satellites. Havel later became president of Czechoslovakia.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner