-6~
left this field for areas of scientific interests of possibly greater national
productivity and certainly more stable future."
Bradbury feels that it won't
be too difficult to keep the number of people employed doing weapons work but
since the most imaginative and ingenious may be moving away,
the productivity may be expected.
some decrease in
As for the overall laboratory employment
(roughly 3250 to 3300) he expects and feels that the total lab size should remain
constant through this no testing period and gives some indication of how the
bulk at the laboratory is broken out in terms of dollars.
dollar budget,
39 million supports the weapons and much of this is general nuclear
research; Rover receives about 13 1/2
3.1/2 million;
Of the total 60 million
million; nuclear reactor work receives about
Sherwood receives about 3 million;
gets about 1 million.
and radiobiological research
Bradbury makes clear in his discussion of these various
broad programs that the effort in the plasma thermocouple and the Rover and
reactor areas will be substantially increased, with a total increase of 15 to 20
million dollars in those areas.
After discussing how these several programs would
be stepped up with something like 100 people added to those 3 programs, it is made
clear that the bulk of this increase will come by decreasing the number of people
devoting themselves to the weapons test program and he feels that about 10% of
the current level
in the testing program can be diverted over the next 12 months
with such a diversion starting in about 3 to 6 months if there are no extraordinary
changes in the testing or Geneva or weapons scenes.
He makes some interesting
statements about future testing activities that I think are significant and are
quoted here in fu1i:' the problem of weapon test activities and the maintenance of
some capability in this area is far from simple, and all of the details have not
been worked out.
The LASL intends to take a long anticipated step and forego any
further responsibilities in the area of test series administration. » Aithough this
has probably been a useful task when series were conducted at Eniwetok and above
ground in Nevada, it no longer appears to be particularly fruitful in the