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Published February 21, 1991 | public
Journal Article

At the Heart of the Bomb: The Dangerous Allure of Weapons Work [Book Review]

Abstract

The activities that make the American nuclear arsenal are carried out at nine major facilities in the United States, but the key activities - the conception and design of the weapons - are conducted in three places: at the Livermore National Laboratory, in California, and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories, both in New Mexico. Scientists and engineers at Livermore and Los Alamos design the explosive guts of nuclear warheads - called 'physics packages' - and their counterparts at Sandia, which is located inside the Kirtland Air Force Base, convert the packages into weapons, imbedding them in configurations that will deliver and detonate them. Each of the laboratories is a GOCO, a government-owned, contractor-operated enterprise. The American Telephone and Telegraph company runs Sandia for a dollar a year; the University of California manages Livermore and Los Alamos, for some six to seven million dollars a year, a tiny fraction of the university's eight-billion-dollar annual budget. Each laboratory employs 8,000 people, all civilians, all directly or indirectly involved in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

Additional Information

© 1991 Nature Publishing Group. Book review of: At the Heart of the Bomb: The Dangerous Allure of Weapons Work. By Debra Rosenthal. Addison-Wesley: 1990. Pp.244.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024