We interviewed a professor of engineering at a major California university who worked with Bill Wattenburg at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in 1962–63 and at the Livermore National Laboratory for some time after that. Like many of his former scientific colleagues we interviewed, this man has followed Wattenburg’s public career ever since.
His candid recollections give a good picture of Bill Wattenburg’s personality and style as a young scientist. We believe these observations explain a lot about Wattenburg’s public activities and personality in later years, as we have summarized it in the following sections of this report.
These are the professor’s comments taped and included here with his permission:
“Bill Wattenburg’s mind just doesn’t work the same way that everyone else’s does. He is bored to death with complicated solutions to difficult scientific problems. He obviously understands scientific fundamentals as well as any of the rest of us, but he is basically lazy. … He was always looking for the simple solution that everyone else had overlooked. His favorite saying was: ‘A smart cowboy just wouldn’t work this hard to make things so goddamn difficult.’ Then he would throw up his hands and go off to tease the ladies in some local bar down the highway while the rest of us were working our butts off… .
“But, all too often, he would come back to wake us all up in our trailers in the middle of the night and march us into the laboratory to see some Rube Goldberg solution he had discovered, or a clever gadget he had built to do the same thing we had worked months to do… .
“I admired the guy’s genius, but I have to admit that I came to simply dread working with him for the first few months that I knew him. You are always wondering when he is going to make a fool out of you, and do it in some simple way or with some crazy experiment that forces you to stand and applaud your own ignorance… . He was always watching everything what everybody else was doing. He seldom ever criticized, but you always had the feeling that he was seeing something about your work that you didn’t realize yourself. It was very unnerving in the beginning… . But I have to admit that now I try to teach my own graduate students some of the things I learned from him… .
“He was only twenty-five when I began working for him at the Test Site. It was hard to believe that he was a nuclear weapons designer from “A” division. Most of us were ten years older and we were working for him… . The guy never slept… . A tennis game was the only thing that seemed to hold his attention in one place for more than an hour…or maybe a cute cowgirl on a barstool somewhere.
“There was a problem with him on this score. Once in a while they would have to send out the Test Site security guards to scout every country bar within 50 miles of the test site to find him if a problem came up on a weekend. I remember once when they brought him back to the trailers and he had blood all over his shirt. Someone asked him if he had been in an accident. He said, ‘No, some women just like to make their cowboys jealous. I guess it makes him better in bed after she takes him home and patches him up.’
“Once when an underground nuclear test at Mercury was delayed and there was absolutely nothing we could do for two days but catch up on our sleep, he kept busy tuning up every secretary’s car in the parking lot, free of charge of course. We all knew what he was doing…he always found a lady friend out in that god-forsaken desert somewhere who took real good care of him. We would get hamburgers for dinner in the cafeteria and he would get a steak with all the trimmings… .
“He would try any damn thing that popped into his mind—even at the very last minute before a nuclear shot. He was always pushing everybody to try add-on experiments that he cooked up. He was always fooling around with your equipment in the test shack in the middle of the night. You’d come back the next morning and something would be changed. It was hard enough to carry out the main experiments that we were supposed to do. And, he was supposed to be the group leader. But his attitude was that once he showed you how to do something, and he was very good at that, it was all over as far as he was concerned. It was of no interest to him whatsoever after that. I didn’t feel that he was a good manager in that sense, but he made up for it in other ways that I’ll tell you about later… .
“We actually got to the point that we would hide any extra test equipment, like oscilloscopes and cameras, and even dumb things like extra pieces of wire and signal cable. If you didn’t, he would try to use them for some other quirky experiment that could be wired up at the last minute before the shot. He always liked to find things he could add on to other people’s equipments that we had been working on for months to get checked out. Most of the other physicists made jokes about his ideas. But, on one underground nuclear shot in 1962, they all got a real jolt of a different sort.
“One of his ‘midnight’ experiments hit the jackpot. The results shocked all the experts. And it was one that the bosses in ‘L’ division at Livermore had said could not possibly work. I remember that he was really pissed off because they wouldn’t even let him use some spare test equipment from the Livermore shops to do it. How he got permission and the equipment I don’t know. Another physicist from ‘A’ division named Russ Duff worked with him, I recall. Yes, I think it was Russ Duff who was showing everybody the surprising results of Wattenburg’s experiment right after the shot…I mean the pictures from the Polaroid cameras we used in those days to record test results from a shot. They were all gathered around Russ Duff talking about it. Someone asked Wattenburg at dinner that night in the cafeteria what he thought about his experiment and he said something like: ‘Yeah, I thought it would be interesting. Now maybe those assholes will wake up next time.’ I think he was talking about the bosses at ‘L’ division who wouldn’t help him do it.
“What Wattenburg discovered in this experiment really changed the way we instrumented bomb tests after that. The report on his Nevada Test Site experiment was still classified for many years after that for reasons that I never understood. I was going to talk about it in a classified seminar I was going to give to new test engineers in 1975, and I discovered that his report was still classified beyond my need to know, which I thought was fairly high at the time. I told the head of the division that I thought it was a valuable example for new test engineers…which means that I’m a hell of a hypocrite for what I said a while ago about Wattenburg’s crazy ideas. The division head, I’ll leave his name out of this, told me that I shouldn’t discuss his report. He said it was a ‘sensitive matter’ that he didn’t want to have to get into right then. I dropped the subject. …
“A year or so later, I saw Wattenburg and asked him what was the big deal with his report on the 1962 experiment. We all knew that the scheme he discovered—invented would be a better description—was being used by everybody in the nuclear testing business since 1963. He just shrugged his shoulders and muttered something like ‘it looks like everybody but me has made a career out of being the real expert on that subject.’ I sensed that there was some annoyance on his part over it, so I dropped the subject.
“This wasn’t the only startling thing he did when he was at the lab by any means. After I was no longer working with him in Nevada, I heard through the grapevine at the lab that he shook them up a few more times in ‘A’ division, that’s the H-bomb design division. I heard a few of the bomb designers say later that they were happy when he finally went back to teaching at Berkeley… . But if he went back to Berkeley you’d never have known it. I saw him at the lab at night for years after that. I would go in late at night or on weekends to check on one of my experiments or a computer run, and I’d see him in the computer room or in the cafeteria, sometimes at two in the morning… .
“A guy in ‘A’ division told me a story about how Wattenburg learned to deal with the bureaucracy at the Laboratory after his first successful experiment. He said that Wattenburg had another idea and he desperately wanted money to do the experiment. He bragged that this idea was so good that he was going to convince them to give him two hundred thousand dollars to do this experiment. Everyone laughed at him. When he went to see the the bosses, they would only agree to give him twenty thousand. He was happy as a lark when he came back to the physics department. Some thought that he had gotten what he wanted. One of the physicists asked him: ‘Did you get the two-hundred thousand you wanted?’
“He answered: ‘No. I got twice as much as I needed.’ ”
(The professor now talks at length about other scientists at the Livermore lab that Wattenburg used to pal around with, how he taught them to ride a horse in a local rodeo, shoot a pistol, water-ski, go deer hunting in the Sierra, and some of his amusing escapades with women at the lab. None of this is relevant here, but it is consistent with Wattenburg’s general playfulness and hobbies that are reported elsewhere in this report.)
He continues:
“Bill Wattenburg’s latest hobby on radio and television is just the right place for him to show off what a clever smart-ass he can be… . On the other hand, there are probably few good scientists who can explain complex technical things to the lay public as well as he can… . He can cook up the most clever little experiments for people to do at home so that they can explain science to themselves. He’s really good with bright kids. I’ve heard ten-year olds call him on the radio at midnight. They love him…but that’s because he’s still just a kid at heart himself.
“I’m sure a lot of people are happy he is spending his time as a radio celebrity nowadays instead of on their backs in the laboratory… . It’s probably a good thing that the crazy guy got rich from his early inventions because the ordinary engineers of the world simply wouldn’t be safe with him wondering around looking for consulting contracts to beat them at their own game… . Anyone who has ever worked with him would never bet money that he couldn’t open a bank vault with the manager’s own pocketknife… .
“I think he has been away from the scientific laboratory too long now to still be up on the cutting edge of scientific research. … That means he’ll probably walk into my lab any day now and tell me how much he enjoyed reading my latest scientific papers. Then he’ll probably show me all the simple things I overlooked. …
“But if you want to know what I really think of him, I’ll tell you. If I am ever trapped in a spaceship and everyone says it is hopeless, I hope he is still around, and near a telephone…”
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