Lessons from Los Alamos
An interview with the former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory
Arena Magazine <[email protected]>
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Arena Magazine presents an interview with Dr. Siegfried Hecker, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as part of their Principals series. The conversation covers the North Korean nuclear program, nuclear proliferation, and the evolution of nuclear energy. Dr. Hecker shares his experiences and insights gained from his work with the US and Russia, as well as his access to North Korea's nuclear facilities.
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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.
Between 2004 and 2010, Hecker was given access to North Korea’s nuclear weapons facilities in order to confirm the viability of the program. Among other things, he confirmed that North Korea had mastered plutonium production when Dr. Ri Hong Sop, the head of North Korea’s nuclear program, presented him with physical samples.
I sat down with Dr. Hecker to discuss the North Korean nuclear program, the challenge of proliferation, and the evolution of nuclear energy. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.
CB: When I read about your life, it's very clear that one central moment was the Second World War — this terrible disaster that befell Europe and drove you to the United States as a boy, and that also extinguished those little pockets of the German nation throughout Eastern Europe that your family comes from. Do you often reflect on this history?
SH: It certainly shaped my life. I was born during the Second World War, in 1943, while my father was stationed with the German Army in what is now Ukraine. I wound up being born in Poland. Then, of course, for the Germans and German-speaking people, everything went pretty poorly from 1944 on, so my mother had the job of getting our family to someplace where we could live and be reasonably safe. Eventually she took us from Poland through Croatia and Slovenia, back to Austria proper, where I grew up until I was 13. Both the war and the fact that my father never returned from the Russian front — and then growing up without a father, in barracks in Austria with no running water and no central heat the entire time I lived there — certainly shaped the rest of my life.
CB: What do you recall about the deprivations of the postwar era?
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