Lessons from Los Alamos

Telling the Great American Story, in Print!

Lessons from Los Alamos

This is Principals, our longform written interview series with a focus on finance, technology, and geopolitics. This weekend, Arena's Carson Becker speaks with the former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. To read more Principals interviews, head to the Arena site.

Dr. Siegfried Hecker is an American nuclear scientist and the former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a role he held from 1986 to 1997. Born in Europe during World War II, he emigrated to the United States in 1956. He earned his PhD in metallurgical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1968, after which he joined Los Alamos as a postdoctoral fellow.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hecker assumed a leadership role in post-Soviet lab-to-lab cooperation between the US and Russia. In the chaos of the 1990s, the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was dangerously uncertain. It is a notable achievement that the vast arsenal of the former USSR, with its 40,000 nuclear weapons and 1 million nuclear personnel, did not find its way into the hands of international terrorists. Hecker documents this period in the book Doomed to Cooperate, which features the perspectives of over 100 Russian and American nuclear scientists.