Norris Bradbury

Los Alamos had been established during the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.

By the late 1940s, it was still a weapons laboratory, directed by Norris Bradbury.

Scientific work there continued after the war, along with security arrangements shaped by the value of the information and materials inside the installation.

Sandia's work had grown from the Los Alamos group called Z Division.

untestable.And underneath all three, there's a fourth thing, which is that the strategic establishment had already decided.

Norris Bradbury, who ran Los Alamos, argued in '54 that the strategic end of the scale was pretty much fleshed out, and all the diversification should happen at the lower end.

Tactical weapons: smaller, more precise, more numerous.

In '54, the same year as the proposal.

And that conference was convened after a series of green fireball sightings over New Mexico's nuclear installations.

The attendees included some of the most prominent scientists in American history, Edward Teller, who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, and Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos.

And these men took the sightings seriously enough to convene a formal classified meeting to discuss them and they could not explain what was being seen.

Now that was back in 1949 and the Pantex incident was in 2015. years apart.

right? So this was even before Harold Agnew.

So it was the second director, Norris Bradbury, who took over from Oppenheimer.

And Bradbury was director for 25 years.

And I came there when Norris Bradbury was director.

And then five years later, actually, Harold Agnew became director.

But Norris Bradbury is actually... very important in my whole nuclear outlook.

Because I remember going to orientation, big auditorium, Harris and Norris Bradley was standing up there in front of all of us and he started out by saying, you know, at Los Alamos, we don't build bombs to kill people.

We build bombs to buy time for our leaders to find other ways to settle their differences.