An outsider’s inside view of Sandia National Laboratories

Nigel Hey first arrived in New Mexico as a weekly newspaper editor in 1965. He subsequently spent most of his career at Sandia National Laboratories, where he wrote about science and engineering and ran a program to keep national media up to date with Sandia’s technical achievements. He left the lab in 2001 to write books and set up a small-business consultancy.

When the great recession almost killed off his consultancy business, Hey set about writing his sixth book, Wonderment: A Love Affair with Adventure, Travel, Writing, Philosophy, and Family Life (Troubador, 2012; available in paperback and ebook formats). As its subtitle suggests, the book covers Hey’s life and work. Among the episodes he recounts are a stint on the staff of the Bermuda News Pictorial, a solo visit to Russia to interview top-level scientists about the Soviet Union’s plans for space-based missile defense, and his near-death brush with near-death meningoencephalitis. The following three excerpts deal with his time at Sandia.

From chapter 12: New Hope for a Family Life, pages 173–175

I began work at Sandia the next day. The Sandia Lab News commemorated the fact with a photo of me collapsed, exhausted, at the airport desk of the New Mexico tourism office. After my ten-year private-company ‘sabbatical,’ I was again a Sandia science writer, with the additional responsibility of managing the lab’s small media relations group. But as a manager I made computerizing the office an early priority too early, by making the change from Selectric typewriters to the soon-outdated DECmate word processor system. It seemed strange that a writer should be taking this initiative in one of America’s leading science and technology laboratories, but I kept this observation mostly to myself.

This time around I thought my super-story would probably be something originally called a strained-layer superlattice (SLS), which had caught the interest of a man who was possibly the smartest scientist on Sandia’s campus, Gordon Osbourn. IBM had worked on the idea and consigned it to the back shelves of their research program. But Gordon was intrigued. He was a mathematician and knew there was something behind the idea. He soon made the first calculations explaining the unique electrical and optical properties of these structures. They showed that new materials could be made from super-thin sandwiches of semiconductor alloy, each of which will conduct electrical energy in a slightly different way. Each layer of the sandwich was a different kind of semiconductor, which meant that their crystal lattices did not line up evenly. The result was that strain occurred as the crystals were forced into place by natural forces. The built- in strain controlled the capability of the material to produce or detect a predictable wavelength of light.

Fortunately we had many brilliant materials researchers on staff, with advanced equipment that was capable of making strained layer structures like the materials Gordon described on paper. Their work led to revolutionary advances in electronics and optoelectronics. Continued advances resulted in the development of a high-efficiency miniature solid-state laser in the mid-1990s, and the use of built-in strain became essential to the development of light- emitting diodes (LEDs), now used in traffic signals and transportation lighting and a range of other devices that run from chemical sensors to flashlights and solar cells. As I write there is a surge of optimism that strained-layer materials will be successful in the design of high-energy sources of white light, rather than the more common red and green light sources.

This was probably the most difficult (and most significant) science story I had ever written, as I delved into the mathematical esoterica of semiconductor physics, preparing to talk with science-writer specialists who, unlike me, were perfectly familiar with the electronic geometry of the Brillouin zone that was so important to the workings of this new material.

Unfortunately, of all the important basic inventions and discoveries that came out of our lab, none bore anything like the legend ‘Sandia Inside,’ for their development into stand-alone devices was soon taken up by private industry.

Less than six months later, Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Cold War anti-ballistic missile program that was caricatured as a political ‘Star Wars.’ Since rejoining Sandia I had made the acquaintance of Gerold Yonas, a super-bright physicist who was overseeing fusion research at the lab. So I bounced into his office the morning after the Reagan speech, brandishing the Albuquerque Journal at him and saying something like, ‘Can you imagine this? They’re planning to put an anti-missile umbrella over the entire United States!’

Back in 1983 I didn’t know that Yonas and his peers met regularly with their Russian counterparts to talk about fusion physics. Each side was well aware that the other was working on fusion weapons, but the discussions were held firmly to the scientific, non-technological, and therefore nonclassified, aspects of fusion as such, in the pure sense. Yonas, who boasted Transylvanian lineage, knew the Russian mind, he had the rare talent of being both outspoken and cautious, and he certainly knew physics and space technology.

I let Yonas know I thought the umbrella idea was ludicrous beyond belief. He didn’t argue the point. But then magically he became the program’s chief scientist, based in Washington, and in the next few years I shepherded eager reporters like the New York Times’s Bill Broad around Sandia as they tried, sometimes successfully, to pry quotable quotes from Yonas, Roger Hagengruber, and others involved in Sandia’s SDI effort. I found the whole story interesting and intriguing. But it wasn’t until 1999 that I decided to write a book about it.

From chapter 12: New Hope for a Family Life, pages 180–181

My re-clearance was processed fairly quickly, so that in September, as part of my induction to the new life, I was able to travel to Tonopah, Nevada, to view Sandia’s large-scale testing area on the northern edge of Nellis Air Force Base. This required that I fly in a government contractor’s DC-9 to a private hangar at Las Vegas’s McCarran Field. This was a mysterious start, especially since the inside of the airliner had partly-removed décor that featured a Chinese motif and some partly obliterated Chinese lettering. Then I joined another group of passengers and boarded an old DC-6 for the hop to Tonopah. The route took us over the Nevada Test Site, so we could peer down and see the great dimples caused by the collapse of cavities caused by underground nuclear explosions. One young physicist added drama by throwing up for much of the flight—airsickness. For me it was an adventure, strapped to one of the seats bolted into what was really an air freighter, with the cargo door open and the mountainsides clearly visible to the left and right, and close, when we flew down the last canyon on the way in.

As we drove to the test site building complex I was advised not to look too closely at a long line of hangars not far from the road. Classified Air Force work, someone murmured. (Later the government acknowledged that they housed test-flight versions of Lockheed Martin’s F-117A ‘Nighthawk,’ the world’s first stealth fighter.) Then I had to sign a document that warned against having personal radios, binoculars, or pets, on the range; to ‘stay away from areas with flashing blue lights (radiation hazards)'; and not to ‘discuss anything you see or hear on TTR with unauthorized persons. Disclosure of sensitive and/or classified information to unauthorized persons is a violation of U.S. Criminal Code Title 18, punishable by fine and/or imprisonment.’

The most out-of-the-ordinary thing I saw at Tonopah was an exercise in which, in the vastness of a huge dry lake, safety personnel with radiation sensors were picking up minute pieces of depleted uranium that had shattered as the result of being blown up with chemical explosives. In this huge landscape the workers looked like foraging ants, inspecting a small plot of ground in a bare and unpopulated region that was the size of Greater London yet one of the most remote places in the United States.

A few months later in Albuquerque, I attended a meeting at which Sandia’s executive vice president took a silver ball, about the size of a croquet ball, from an office drawer and passed it around to illustrate a point. It was unnaturally heavy. What was it? Depleted uranium, he replied calmly.

I wondered what would have happened if citizens had been recruited at random to participate in this. Would there have been cries of horror? A mad dash for doors and windows? Frenzied phone calls to doctors and lawyers? But we held our cool. Depleted uranium is considerably less radioactive than even the natural, unrefined uranium found in Earth’s crust, and in either form it can be dangerous only if swallowed or inhaled—a distinct impossibility in this case. It can be used as a shield against more dangerous radiation, as a counterbalance on aircraft control surfaces, and to add weight to weapons. Our VP placed his silver ball carefully back in the drawer, locked it, and I knew I was again a true Sandian. Who else on my block had handled depleted uranium?

From chapter 13: Jonathan Greets the World, pages 194–196

It had become difficult for me to imagine what it would be like to grow up without a Cold War. Or how my life would have developed without having experienced one. The world had become radically different in the half-century that elapsed between the outbreak of World War II, when I was a small boy, and the fall of the Soviet empire. At the beginning of that period I would go to Saturday movie matinees and watch Flash Gordon zooming around in rocket- ships and zapping bad guys with beams of energy, never even imagining that anything of this sort would be attempted by serious scientists. Those were the times when I tossed in my bed because Britain’s first nuclear test, Hurricane, was about to be held in Australia. Later, as a fledgling UPI reporter, part-timing my senior year in college, I interviewed Edward Teller in a cloud of doubt, wondering if this small, thick, heavily accented man with the rubbery folded face was a great mind or a monster, or both. Was that a Transylvanian accent? A few years later, standing on Bermuda’s North Shore and staring at the weird, vividly red sky to the north, I thought, My God, the Russians must actually have done it. They nuked New York! It turned out to be an aurora, a rare sight so far south. The experiences and impressions went on, cresting, I suppose, when I went to work for Sandia.

None of my children knows much about the Cold War. If, working at my Sandia desk, I heard the news that a Soviet nuclear missile were headed toward the U.S. it would arrive so fast that even if the roads were traffic-free I would not be able to drive home in time to be incinerated along with my wife and family. My family members never felt they had to make such a dreadful calculation, and I pray that they never will.

But the Cold War was part of the real world, and like everyone else I learned to live with it. This part of history is not likely to repeat itself. But something similar could happen again if Russia were to become overly belligerent/defensive, or if some other nuclear power (or group) threatened the West, and thereby the planet, with that degree of devastation.

At some time during this period I was dismayed to discover illustrations of the degree to which politics uses science, including that most terrible of scientific inventions, the nuclear weapon, to further its ends. I was sickened to learn that John F. Kennedy, whom I admired so much during his presidency, actually invented the ‘missile gap’ to strengthen his presidential campaign, and that he launched Project Apollo to outdo the Soviets in international prestige rather than to advance science. And that Ronald Reagan and his cohorts used the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative,’ which never approached the sophistication of the space-lasers defence program portrayed in the media, as a ruse to get the Russians off balance—successfully, as it happened—in their campaign against the Evil Empire.

As the two sides increased their nuclear arsenals in 1950-1980, I had come reluctantly to suspect that my life, my family, and in fact all of Western society depended on something called Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD. If the Russians reduced New York and Washington to piles of radioactive debris, we’d do the same to Moscow and Leningrad, and that was just for starters. I knew it was possible! Some people shook their head and said the scenario was unthinkable. But for me it was very thinkable indeed. It had almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Many analysts quite rationally suspect that the MAD days will someday return, but the opponent may well be some entity other than Russia.

All this, hanging over us! Yet optimism always seemed to keep us mentally and spiritually afloat. And, when I analyze how this is so, it seems that the font of optimism is to be found in family love.