April 12, 2023
Three-quarters of a century before Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian leader threatened an American president to pull US troops out of Europe or else pay the consequences, including nuclear war. This was a nuclear crisis more serious than the Cuban missile crisis, so serious most of us don’t know about it. In March 1962, President Kennedy visited Berkeley, California to personally thank a small group of physicists for helping the country avert a nuclear war. What had they done to win the president’s gratitude? This lecture will tell their story as related in Tom’s history From Berkeley to Berlin.
For the past few years, physicist Tom Ramos has been conducting research and writing a history of the nuclear weapons program of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Through interviews with weapons designers and extensive research into the Laboratory’s Archives, he has brought out new perspectives on how the national nuclear deterrent strategy had been developed and then accepted by the Kennedy administration. This perspective has been little understood until now and his efforts were rewarded with the publication of his book, From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War.
Tom created several programs in the 1990s that served the Defense Department. Most notable among them, which Tom started with a $200K grant, was the Counterproliferation Analysis and Planning System (CAPS), which served military operators with missions against facilities linked to a hostile country’s manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. CAPS was effectively used in several conflicts including Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. The program grew into a $46M a year enterprise and was declared to be the Defense Department’s premier counterproliferation program by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Another significant program that Tom started was the Homeland Defense Operational Planning System (HOPS), a program like CAPS, but steered towards analyses to protect America’s critical infrastructure.
In the 1980’s Tom was a nuclear weapons designer in the Laboratory’s X-Ray Laser Program, which supported the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the program’s last nuclear test, Tom led a team of physicists who designed the program’s brightest laser.
In 1989 he was assigned to Vic Alessi, director of the Arms Control Branch of the Department of Energy. In that position, he supported activities to support the Scowcroft Commission to establish the US position in START negotiations, and eventually, Tom was asked to prepare a summary sheet for Secretary of Energy Watkins to use at NSC meetings on the resumption of START Talks.
In 1991, Tom was assigned to the Pentagon as a nuclear weapons advisor to the Secretary of Defense, with a primary role to prepare the leaders of the Nuclear Weapons Council (DDR&E Vic Ries, Vice Chairman JCS Admiral Jeremiah, and ATSD(AE) Bob Barker) for Congressional hearings.
Prior to joining the Laboratory, Tom was an associate professor of physics at West Point, New York, where he taught each of the physics department’s core courses, as well as electives in Quantum Mechanics and Nuclear Physics.