Los Alamos' rival helped ensure quality

Web posted Wednesday, November 8, 2000

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By Brandon Haddock
Staff Writer

Los Alamos National Laboratory was the hypocenter of the Atomic Age, the point from which the United States' vast nuclear-weapons complex originated. But within a decade of its birth, the lab saw a sister and rival rise in a bucolic California ranching town.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as it is now called, owes its existence largely to Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist regarded as ``the father of the hydrogen bomb.''

Dr. Teller, often spurned by his colleagues at Los Alamos for his relentless pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, long had called for the creation of a second nuclear-weapons lab. Dr. Teller argued that a competing lab would be necessary during the inevitable arms race of the Cold War.

``My original intention was to produce competition so that all mistakes would not be committed in one place, and that, by competition and collaboration, the development of technology for future military uses should be better controlled and better balanced,'' Dr. Teller said recently during an interview for the lab's Web site.

In 1951, Dr. Teller convinced the Atomic Energy Commission of his argument, and by September 1952, the nation's second nuclear-weapons lab had opened. It was named after E.O. Lawrence, another Los Alamos physicist and a Nobel Prize winner who previously had founded the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley.

Ensuing years would see the lab become the nation's best source of the thermonuclear weapons Dr. Teller pioneered. Even today, it is tasked with ensuring the viability of the nation's nuclear-weapons stockpile, and also with efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

But like its rival Los Alamos, Livermore also has branched out to research peaceful uses of atomic energy, such as medicine and electricity generation.

A glance at the lab's Web site reveals several recent technological advances developed there, including a green laser; a system that uses gamma rays to protect valuable property from theft; and a new method of printing computer chips using ultraviolet light.

Reach Brandon Haddock at (706) 823-3409.

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