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Reporter's Log: Touring the Los Alamos National Lab

KAGS Anchor Jay O'Brien toured the birthplace of the atomic bomb with the TAMU leaders who will now help run it.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. —

KAGS Anchor Jay O'Brien was invited to tour the Los Alamos National Lab, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and a highly secretive government facility, with TAMU System leaders who will now help run it. Below is a journal of his thoughts. "Building the Bomb," a televised report examining the lab, will air 2/20 and 2/21 at 6pm and 10pm only on KAGS. 

Day One: 

The delegation included A&M System Chancellor John Sharp, Vice Chancellor for Communications Laylan Copelin, other A&M higher-ups, and me, the only reporter aboard. Although, Laylan is a former print reporter for the Austin American Statesman, and a darn good one. 

We departed on two A&M System Planes, mine headed first to San Antonio to pick up an additional A&M Regent. From San Antonio, it’s about a 2 hour flight to Santa Fe, at the base of the Jemez mountain range that’s home to Los Alamos. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

Landing at Santa Fe’s small municipal airport caught my attention. The commercial airport was small, resembling more of a bus terminal. And, there was snow on the ground. Our planes had left the dry Texas winter air and landed in snow capped New Mexico. 

Those snowy mountains made for the background of a great on-camera segment of our piece (something reporters call a standup), in which I pointed upward toward the high mountain range that we’d ascend the next day, toward the lab. 

Los Alamos National Labs, called LANL by those who work there, has a strict NO CAMERAS policy. For most of the trip, I carried a small DSLR camera that I used for interviews and stand ups. The US Government assured us that camera operators, provided by the lab, would be able to shoot our required footage (also called Broll).  

That night, armed with my tiny camera (and a much larger camera loaned by a freelance videographer), I interviewed the Lab’s Deputy Director John Sarrao. He’s an expert in computing and National Security, helping run the lab’s massive supercomputer that verifies the health of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

Next was Nan Richards, a senior staff member at the lab who’s in charge of recruiting talented young scientists and convincing them to move to the New Mexico mountains to pursue their research. Like a well-versed recruiter, she knew the lab’s benefits and drawbacks inside and out. 

Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp and Chairman of the Board of Regents Charles Schwartz spoke later that night. Addressing a room of former students (about 180 Aggies work at Los Alamos), Schwartz discussed his excitement over the new relationship A&M and Los Alamos National Labs now have. Sharp, employing his characteristic wit, updated Aggies on happenings in College Station and across the TAMU System. 

Day Two: 

Our delegation went to bed early. Wake up calls were doled out at 5:00 a.m. sharp; we needed to be on a bus for Los Alamos at six. 

After an hour- long journey, climbing higher into the snow covered Jemez Mountains, we arrived at the front gates of Los Alamos National Labs. They’re intimidating, resembling a border crossing. Dozens of armed guards stand there, dressed in US Military fatigues, flak jackets, equipped with side arms, and sporting a patch that denoted a branch of service I couldn’t make out.  

Two security vehicles then joined our convoy, escorting us to the main administrative building. We would be under armed guard for the rest of our visit. Their goal seemed to keep us in, rather than keep onlookers away. 

The A&M delegation, nine people strong, entered the main building with me in tow. We were shepherded into a massive conference room with the words “This Conversation is Unclassified” on the door. Where it said “unclassified” you could see a page that could be flipped and make the sign say “This Conversation is Classified.” As we entered into the conference room, we first stopped in a holding area. Chancellor Sharp and the other A&M dignitaries were shown a memo, written in 1943 and said to be the first time the phrase “atomic bomb” was written in an unclassified setting. Standing inside the birthplace of the atomic bomb, the artifact was goosebump inducing. 

In the conference room, newly minted lab director Thomas Mason addressed a group that made up a third of his new bosses. A&M, the University of California, and a private company called Battelle, joined to form the holding company Triad LLC, which now manages the day to day work of Los Alamos. Each has one third control, represented by board seats. Mason reports to two entities: Triad and the Executive Branch of the US Government, mainly the Department of Energy. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab


There was the usual yet compelling lab history. It was built in 1943 for the sole purpose of developing a devastating atomic bomb, the likes of which the world had never seen. It ended making three that worked, two were dropped. 

The lab, once run by the renowned J. Robert Oppenheimer (often known in our nation’s history as simply “Oppenheimer”), still has a nuclear mission and at its core is still a weapons laboratory. It’s broken up into five areas, each with its own set of buildings: Nuclear Weapons, Science, Tech and Engineering, Global Security, and two with mainly administrative focuses. Now, the lab focuses on nuclear deterrence, maintaining our massive stockpile of active warheads, and reducing and/or limiting the spread of nuclear arms. In a world that’s seen climbing tensions with Russia, a turbulent Middle East, and a clearly confrontational North Korea, you can see why the lab takes its role seriously. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

Next, our official tour began at a plutonium testing facility. Los Alamos makes all of the “pits” for plutonium-based nuclear weapons (think of the trigger on a nuclear bomb). The outside of the pit and the material used to make it are not classified, according to our tour guides. But the interior is highly secret. We donned reflective vests, hard hats, and protective goggles (part of the lab was under construction) and were led to scientists handling the most complex and destructive element in the world. Safety precautions were kindly barked at us. As a reporter, I naturally wanted to get as close as possible to the action. Teamed up with a government cameraman, we wedged ourselves in the doorway of one of the labs and shot video. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

We went on to the building known for Security and Computing. Inside, is one of the few SuperComputers in the United States. Called Trinity, after the first successful nuclear test, the supercomputer can runs at 13 petaflop, which is 1 million billion calculations per second, according to our tour guides. Staffed by specialists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the supercomputer's primary task is the massive series of complex calculations, done to certify that nuclear bombs in storage will still work, without physically testing the bombs. The US hasn’t tested a nuclear bomb since 1992. 

This is how the lab often describes it: think of a Boeing 747, sitting idle in a hangar. Without flying the plane, how can you be sure it will work up to peak efficiency if it’s ever put into service? The same style predictive science is used to check up on our nuclear stockpile. 

Mixed in after a lecture on the lab’s impressive history was a meeting on the lab’s global security mission. That area of work includes nuclear weapons inspection across the globe and nuclear counter-terrorism efforts. Almost all of the IAEA inspectors (often controversially discussed in things like the Iran Deal or North Korea Talks) are trained at Los Alamos. 

Afterwards, we (particularly me) got our biggest treat. Our last tour stop was the DARHT particle accelerator. There are about 36 particle accelerators in North America, varying in size, design, and purpose. Needless to say, they’re rare and cool. DARHT consists of two separate accelerations. Their main purpose is to individually accelerate electrons towards a mock nuclear blast, testing how the materials used to deliver nuclear weapons react to the blast. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

You can’t xray a nuclear blast using average technology. It's just too fast and powerful. DARHT was designed to do just that and is only used a handful of times a year. Testing day, technicians told us, is a big event. There’s a big, red button that says “fire” in one of the two control rooms that starts the test. 

On our bus home, concluding the tour, we passed one of the buildings from the original Manhattan Project. When the wartime project began, Los Alamos was built in a matter of months. As a result, the buildings were sturdy, but not the kind that could last scores of years. Most are gone now, except for three, run by the National Parks service, that dot the Los Alamos Lab campus. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

This building, known as Gun Site, was used to design a kind of nuclear explosive, eventually used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A historic site on a campus of academics and luminaries, Gun Site was blanketed by untouched snow when we drove by. A chain covered its small driveway, indicating this was property of the National Parks Service. Think of that. This building is preserved for our national posterity and collective history. But, it’s on a restricted site. And thus, people like you or I, rarely if ever get to see it. What would surely be an attraction to historians and tourists, not to mention those curious by the awesome power of the atomic bomb, is hidden away behind classified gates. Needless to say, it was moving to see. 

Credit: Los Alamos National Lab

Our visit ended there. Soon after, we gave back our classified badges and descended down the mountain. Each of us, in our own way, reflected on what we saw; the awesome power of the device born at the lab and the massive undertaking to now promote nuclear deterrence. It’s both horrifying and humbling to think about. 

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