Dhahran

This population and also economic centers are also, uh, are all located in some concentrated population centers.

Some concentration cities, a port, the port of Yanbu, places like that, Medina, Medina, Mecca, Riyadh, places like that, Dhahran.

The rest of the country is a wild, vast, open area.

A lot of that wild, vast, open area is to the country's south.

They were only able to do that because I'd had already experience as an ALO before, so I was already pretty much checked out very fast.

And, uh, normally it takes a lot more training, but I had gone through the training previously, so they said, "Okay, you're going." And so on the 3rd of January 1991, I was on an airplane, um, to Dhahran, um, Saudi Arabia, uh, in support of, uh, again, Operation Desert Shield.

And very soon, so, you know, 3 January was only like two weeks before the start of kinetic operations.

Mm.

Uh, we, we stayed in, uh, in Dhahran at, uh, specifically at Khobar Towers, um, for a few days.

Um, [laughs] as part of this, I was, uh, under the very first, uh, SCUD attack of the war from, uh, [sniffs] the, uh, the, the Iraqis, uh, you know, launched, uh, on the first, uh, first night of the, of the war.

Uh, well, actually I should say at, at the time it was really the second night, 'cause we initiated operation on the first night, and then the second night, you know, as a retaliation, uh, they started lobbing SCUDs, um-

The Khobar Towers

Explosions destroy the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, ended up killing 19 American soldiers and wounding 500 others.

Saudi officials later interrogate the suspects and declare them all guilty and immediately execute them without letting the FBI talk to them.

O'Neill was directly involved in the investigation of this terrorist attack, and reportedly told the FBI director at the time that they were blowing smoke up your ass.

Hmm.

Uh, there was a Scud missile heading towards a US base in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, and they had a Patriot system for air defense, but it failed.

It missed.

And, um, the reason it missed was roundoff error.

Who was he and why did you think he deserved a biography?

Well, when I was a young boy at the age of 10 or 11, living in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, where my father, a foreign service officer, was stationed, he was our next-door neighbor.

And I thought he was just another foreign service officer.

And I used to play basketball with him, with the Marine contingent that was defending the consulate, guarding the consulate.

This extends a thread you've heard on this show before.

Aramco already runs a Pascal neutral atom machine in Dhahran, and now it's adding a second quantum vendor to the mix.

Aramco clearly likes optionality.

One neutral atom vendor already running hardware, one trapped ion vendor now in early talks.

The plan is to benchmark Quantinuum's QCCD architecture, quantum charge coupled device, the ion trap design behind its Helios system, plus its Nexus software platform against real energy sector problems: reservoir optimization, molecular simulation, the chemistry Aramco actually needs solved.

It complements what Aramco's already running on-site in Dhahran, a neutral atom system built with Pasqal, and it adds to a string of Gulf State quantum courtships this year.

Riyadh's LEAP conference has become something of a magnet for these deals this year, and Aramco isn't shy about shopping across quantum modalities before committing serious capital to any one of them.

Here's the caveat worth sitting with.

There's another famous and rather tragic example from the Gulf War in 1991.

There was a Scud missile heading towards a U.S. base in Tehran in Saudi Arabia.

And they had a Patriot system.

for air defense, but it failed, it missed.

So another Pan Am experience I had was, uh, about a month after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

We started flying soldiers into Dhahran, which is the east coast of Saudi Arabia.

Um, but you've got to now find a new job.

The, the job with Pan Am is gone.