HELEN CALDICOTT interviews HUGH GUSTERSON
Helen Caldicott: Let’s go deeper into what you discovered about these actual bomb designers.
Hugh Gusterson: Since 1992 the United States hasn’t conducted any nuclear tests, something that causes some pain to the nuclear weapons scientists who were practicing a form of science that’s now a forbidden experiment. They can no longer test complete weapons, but they feel some bitterness about that. But back in the old days, up to 1992, life at the lab was structured around the design of new weapons and the testing of new weapons, so the lab produced nuclear tests. What they really lived for was to tweak the design of old weapons to figure out ways of making the weapons smaller and lighter, squeezing more explosive yield out of less plutonium, making them slightly different shapes. Weapons designers would compete with one another, proposing fiendish new design ideas that would be vetted by review committees within the Pentagon. If the designer was lucky enough to have one of the few ideas that made it onto the shot schedule, then they would work quite feverishly, often for months, as the tests neared completion. Particularly in the last weeks before a test, these designers could be working seventy-, even eighty-hour weeks. I would hear stories of people sleeping in cots in their offices in the lab. It culminated with a trip down to the nuclear test site in Nevada where nuclear weapons were tested.
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