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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Document//EN"
+  "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0/oebdoc1.dtd">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/x-oeb1-document; charset=utf-8" />
+<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/x-oeb1-css" href="DrBillBio.css" />
+<title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: A Colleague’s Observations</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+<h1>A Colleague’s Observations</h1>
+
+<p>We interviewed a professor of engineering at a major California university who worked with
+Bill Wattenburg at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in 1962–1963 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>These are the professor’s comments taped and included here with his permission:</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.’</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.<p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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?’</p>
+
+<p>“He answered: ‘No. I got twice as much as I needed.’ ”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><i>(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.)</i></p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p>He continues:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>…</p>
+
+<p>“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. …”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
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