Los Alamos During The Cold War

My friend Alex Wellerstein interviewed me about my experiences at Los Alamos. He did a great job of writing it up, and I love the pictures. The one above is one of my all-time favorites. In order to learn what it is, you’ll have to click over to the interview. One small snippet:

I can remember one colloquium, with one of their famous biology guys on trips to Mars, spaceships to Mars, because that was what the Rover reactors were for. So he’s talking about space flight to Mars and possible radiation doses. And of course, he added, we’d need to have some women along on the trip because ha ha ha ha, you know why. And I wrote a little note to Norris Bradbury about that. He was not pleased. But it was, you know, just really unpleasant and denigrating and kind of indicated a bad attitude.

And then a little later, after Bob Bussard had hired me back in, I was doing these experiments with plutonium and uranium. This was when they still had the DP site plutonium facility. They had only a men’s change room, but they said they were going to have a women’s change room and they were going to have it soon. They were working on it and they were working on it. And I wanted to do the experiment and I would have to of course change and do the experiment in a glove box. And so there was going to be a women’s change room and it just didn’t keep showing up. So I stood outside the men’s change room one day and said, “well, I guess I’m going to have to change in the men’s change room.” And the next day they had a women’s change room set up.