after working on the timing apparatus of the atomic bomb, he was set to observe the 1945 trinity test, the first nuclear bomb detonation. he also discusses the national revocations of nuclear weapons and his thoughts on nuclear disarmament. val fitch died in february, 2015 at the age of 91. this oral history is from the voices of the manhattan project, created by the atomic heritage foundation and the los alamos historical society. val: i was born on a cattle ranch in northwest nebraska, 1923. and actually born on a ranch. this is about five miles from a little town of merriman, in the sandhills of nebraska. you probably do not know anything, but they occupy 1/5 of the state. it's cattle raising country. they call it sandhills because

the terrain is made out of sand. the hills are the dunes. that is almost pure sand. but the only thing that can be grown there without destroying the terrain is something that lives off the native grasses, and that is cattle. you try turning the soil lower, and is simply blows away. so, that's the sandhills dedicated to growing cattle. my father raced purebreds. the ranch was too small to support a family on raising beef cattle. he raised breeding stock.

that was the enterprise i was born into. it was, i have an older brother and sister. both of them now dead. my brother was 10 years older and my sister six years older but they both started school, and as long as we lived on the ranch, they attended a one-room schoolhouse half-mile away. so, most often the schoolteacher lived in our home. and all three of them would get on their horses in the morning and ride up the valley to go to school. i thought it was a little ridiculous, but the important thing was to get out of the house. and so, that's how they lived the first few years of their lives. and when my brother came of age to go to high school, then, and i was just about ready to start

school, we moved to gordon nebraska, a town 25 miles to the west. and so, all of my k-12 education was in gordon, nebraska. and this is, this part of the world is just south of the pine ridge indian reservation. so there are a lot of sioux indians around. and my father was always rather close to them. he understood them. as a young teenager, he had bothered to learn their language. so he was really a great friend of the indians, which is very rare for white people in those days. the net result of that was that he was, in 1937, he became an honorary sioux indian chief. chief eagle star. i think, to my knowledge, he was the only non-politician that has ever been recognized in such a

way. so, he received on that occasional full headdress of eagle feathers. all the way to the ground behind. and i inherited that. and just a couple years ago i presented it to the local library as part of their western united states collection. and so, that's now out of my hands. but they take good care of these things. then after high school, i went to shattering state college which was -- shaderin state college, there is a geological formation called a shaderin formation. it is named for the formation. that it is where the, where the

high plains start to break away into the lower country in south dakota. and that is what forms the pine ridge escarpment. hence, the name pine ridge. pine trees grow along the escarpment. so, it's part of the formation. so, i guess, the only thing i emphasize here is that indians were -- always there he much present in my young life. i never learned the language which, unfortunately, but it was an interesting thing to have about. interesting culture to have about. i went to state college. and i graduated from high school in 1940. of course, in december 1941, you know what happened. and all of us who were 18 years

of old new precisely what was going to happen to us. and i did try to volunteer for the air force but was turned down for being colorblind. and so i decided it that time just to wait it out and get as much college as i could before being drafted. that is what i did. so, eventually, i was, in march, 1943, i was drafted in wyoming. sent to utah for basic training. and then after that, after basic training, the army was just starting their specialized training program. and so, i was taken out of regular army units and sent to astp, the unit in what is now carnegie mellon. then carnegie tech in pittsburgh. and i was, i had the choice of

going into four different areas. chemical engineering, electoral engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering. i'd already taken most of the -- i concentrated very heavily on chemistry and physics and mathematics in my undergraduate work. the one thing -- i could learn something and was electrical engineering, so i opted for that. so, eventually, that program, well, in january of 1944, the

pressures for manpower were being felt in the army. so they disbanded most of the aftp across the country. and most of my pals went off to the 95th infantry. then were subsequent part of the european enterprise. there were a number of us left behind. and i was one of those, sent to los alamos to work as basically the technician. so that was in december, 1944. so, there i was in the army. and part of a unit called the special engineering detachment. and i was immediately assigned to work for a member of the british mission. so, very quickly i became this right of left hand man. however you want to describe -- ernie had a flair to getting involved in interesting things.

and i was always there. i don't know if you're interested in what i did a los alamos are not. >> absolutely. val: when i arrived they were just getting, being seriously involved in the fusion -- i'm sorry, the implosion program. there as is well known they were detonating explosives in such a way as to produce a shock wave, spherical shockwave going inward to compress plutonium to a critical point. and timing of all of these explosive -- was all important. and so, i was very much involved in developing the timing apparatus for measuring when the shock wave passes a certain

point. so that is what i did. we did all of the electronics for doing that. and also made some of the measurements. i should say as an aside that it was a time in my life when, well, the sad's are a very unusual unit. there was a lot of talent. i made very good friends just among the people at the one end of the barracks. and there was gunner thornton. who had immigrated, his parents had brought him from norway when he was 10 years old. there was hans, perhaps that name brings about with you.

the son of the famous mathematician. and our, still, after all these years, i still communicate all the time. when he left los alamos to go to mit after the war, he had a girlfriend at los alamos. he assigned me the job of taking care of his girlfriend. this i did. we eventually were married, as a matter of fact. so, that was a nice story. but also, i learned to ski. this norwegian -- i had to learn to ski. and also at that end of that there is, a member of the dartmouth ski team. so i had lots of good

instruction on skiing. so that became, every sunday, we would go out to sawyer field to ski. the many of the famous physicist were also skiers. you name them, they were probably on the ski slopes with us. i probably had more interaction with these famous papal -- people on the ski slopes than i did in the laboratory, as a matter of fact.

in the spring of 1945, elaborate testing was underway with dummy bombs put in b-29's at wendover air force base which was just on the nevada-utah border, near salt lake city. the technique was to load the dummy bombs in b-29's there and drop them over the salted sea where to love it too would pick up the signals from the falling objects. and tell people what was going on inside the dummy bomb as far as the timing mechanisms, whether they were functioning correctly. so, in the sprin gof 1945, i was one of those sent to wendover. another s.e.d. i worked with, we set up a laboratory on the field to initiate this testing program. and also to educate some of the army officer so they could carry it on after we left. so that was my first exposure to, to b-29's and bombs and all that.

but in my memory, i went to wendover from kirkland air force base in albuquerque. [coughs] and riding in an old b-17 bomber. and we were just over the mountains, and they were not far below, the second engine went out. so, we were asked to get on parachutes. and so on. so, it was quite a trip. in that respect. but it was also characterized by the fact that during world war ii if you were ever out of uniform, you are automatically thought to be a deserter. so we were required to wear uniform at all times. all those in the military. but there was a special dispensation for us.

this group of s.e.d.'s who went out to wendover. for security purposes, we had to play the role of good scientists from washington. so, we were given money and we went down to santa fe and bought civilian clothes. and including shoes. in order to have something to wear at wendover. i still have this piece of paper they have given me permission to wear civilian clothes. one of the memos that means a much at the time. -- so much at the time. in any event, then it was not long after we came back that we went to trinity to start the testing program there. and initially, as you know, the

first test was setting off 100 tons of tnt. with that, we tested all the far he mechanisms and so want to make sure the signals were getting through, all that. the main control for the test was, the bunker was 10,000 yards, which is slightly less than six miles. from the gadget itself. and so, it was a job of -- his group to send up a signal to detonate the thing. at the appropriate time. but also to send preliminary signals into groups that needed signals in anticipation of the thing going off. photographers had to open their shutters. a few milliseconds before him.

we did the fast timing. actually another name -- elmore -- did the slow timing which consisted of a rotating drum picking up signals. so, we did the fast timing and sending out the main detonation pulse at the end of the timing interval. by we, i mean in the main control bunker there was just titterton and myself. we did have a technician. his name was calvin benton. he helped out hauling things around, putting things together. on the other, the fourth member of the team was russ. and his prime concern was the apparatus that we used to

measure the simultaneity of which all the detonators were fired on the bomb itself. there were 32 of them, and it was our job to measure the degree of simultaneity of those detonators fired. that was where my previous experience had come in. russ was in charge of the recording of that data, done in a bunker half a mile west of the tower. so we had to pull in all of the apparatus to make those measurements. got all that stuff ready, running cables up to the tower, to the bomb, to carry signals back to the recording apparatus. so that was the secretary measurement -- four of us, plus, including the technician.

that is what we were doing. actually, it was two or three days after the test when lowry made a very quick trip into the book or to retrieve the film in which the data was recorded. and unfortunately, when it was developed, it fell -- radiation had just been too much for it. and it blasted it. and when the bomb went off, the blast had taken all the earth that it piled over this bunker and threw it back at it. and threw it off the bunker totally. between that bunker which was a half-mile west, and the sand had been turned to glass. so, when the time to set off the

bomb approach, we were at the main control bunker. and lowry was back at base camp, which was five miles further away. and i do not know if you have seen photographs of those places, but they are rather interesting. i have some upstairs if you would like to see them. but just as far as our timing measurements are concerned, that was all done automatically, of course.

one of measuring times in milliseconds. can't be somebody throwing a switch. had to be automatic. that was all an automatic mode. then titterton suggested maybe if i wanted to go out and take a look at what was going on, go ahead, because he could not do anything about it. so i went outside the bunker and around to the east side. there were two or three others -- who went out. left the bunker and went out to get a good view. of course, i had this glass to cover my eyes with. which i also kept as a memento of the occasion. but sprawled out on the ground with the glass over my eyes. of course, initially, i was looking away from the tower.

but that enormous flash of light, of course, just over -- overcame any lack of transparency. it is just, it is the most surprising thing of all. a fantastic flash of light. then, of course, you see the dust cloud and the ball slowly rising off the ground. this mushroom cloud eventually. so i got up to, got up off the ground to get a better view. totally forgetting that the shockwave had yet to arrive. so, i take only 30 might -- microseconds for the light to arrive but it takes 30 seconds for the shock way to arrive -- shock wave to arrive. i had plenty of time to get back down on the ground and hear that fierce rumble. first that blast, and then the rumble of the sound off the nearby mountains.

it was hard to overstate the impact on the senses for something like that. first the flash of light. that fireball -- the mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet in the sky. and then a long time afterwards, the sound, the rumble, the thunder in the mountains. words have not been invented to describe it in any accurate way. so one thing you allude and something i quoted when i wrote a piece about the experience, read, you put in your book about

the manhattan project, apple is a -- f it was over, people started milling about and coming in out of the bunker, and there was an mp on duty at the door. a single mp. he was supposedly there to control access, even though it had to mainly symbolism, because the security was just -- of course, the mp did not know anyone. but in any event, i saw him absolutely ashen faced. and i simply remarked, the war will soon be over. i was right, fortunately. i stayed around for two or three days to pack up equipment and take the stuff back to los

alamos. and we were driving an army panel truck. len was driving, as we were leaving the place -- we had to go past where the tower had been to leave the site, so as we were passing by the tower, we rode past perhaps a mile west of where the tower had been, we turned up the road towards where the tower had been, past that small bunker that we had instrumented a half-mile west. and there the cable we had so laboriously strung to the tower were flung back over the bunker,

and all of the earth that had been piled on top was gone. it was just sitting there bare. drove on a bit further to where the sand had been turned to glass. i pull the little box out of the back that contained a transformer and i reached down and scooped up some of the glassy material. and then, we did not know what the radiation level was, but thought it was a good time to get out of there. that we did. so, i still have some of that trinitite that i picked up myself. it was a couple years after that i went back to los alamos to work for the summer. and i came across a stockroom, an old stockroom where stuff was stored.

the circuit we had used to put the signal on the line to trigger the bomb, the basic trigger -- the high-voltage trigger -- i do not know maybe 2000 volts to make sure it got through. and so, at the time, i was wondering, well, may be a should call that to somebody's attention because no one else knows what that is. but, of course, i did not do it. it was scrapped with everything else at one time or another. i was discharged almost exactly three years after i entered the army from texas. and then went back and worked at los alamos to make some money doing the same job i had before,

but this time making a reasonable amount of money. and i had none. so saving money for college was important. so i worked there for another year and a half after being discharged. let me say more about the s.e.d.'s, because they're not properly advertise. virtually nothing to say about the s.e.d.'s in that otherwise fine book. by the end of the war, 50% of the technical personnel were s.e.d.'s. they lived in barracks, ate in the mess hall. worked in the technical area for civilians. when we were in the technical area, military could not touch us. but of course, we ate in mess halls and slept in the barracks, and any time you have 60 to 120 men collected --

the army is pretty good about making sure that a certain amount of order is kept. so, friday night scrub sessions, cleaning out down in the barracks. and saturday morning inspections. when i first arrived, there were 6:00 calisthenics. that was discontinued. his group, which was involved in producing the lenses for the

implosion gadget was staffed s.e.d's.y std's -- he was worried -- working more closely than anyone else in the logic. he was concerned about the way they were treated. he was expecting them to work 24 hours a day. they had all of this other .onsense to do he complained about the attitude of the military that was there, complaints directly to the and threatens to leave the place it was not changed. so after the complaint, things were muchformed and it became a

easier life. we do not have to wake up at 6:00 a.m. we did not have any kp or anything like that. the mess hall was staffed by indigenous labor supervised by a drill sergeant. -- as staffed by we no longer had to clean the -- clean the latrines. .hat was not our sensibility one job we always had was keeping the stoves going in the wintertime. any generic there was three or four potbellied stoves in the center aisle on either side. in the center i love the barracks. those fires to keep going in the wintertime.

los alamosa is a wonderful climate but it gets a fair amount of snow in the one to time. he gets rather cool. in our barracks, we hired one of our members to do the job. he was happy to do it. he had more money to send home. he took care of the stove. we just checked in. hat's we just chipped in. he had been a member of the dartmouth ski team. when you look at some of the .d's, he liveds.e my barracks that the other end.

then there was peter wax who became a well-known mathematician. the mathematicians finally set up a prize equivalent to a nobel prize. he became the first one. london museum interested in the exhibit coming their way. this --o talk about how what the british contribution was. val: i am glad u.s. that question. there is a great tendency in this country to forget about that component and their contributions. there is a book about it. byook that has been written

a professor of history at the university of new mexico in albuquerque. he has a rather peculiar name. one can take off the names. niels bohr was one of the members of the british mission. and chadwick. chadwick was the leader. tony french was going to be .peaking at st. louis he is taking my place, as a matter of fact. then there was otto frisch. one of the authors of that that showed that

it was possible to make bombs. he himself was a member. interestingly enough, they were because theyis cannot wake on -- work on the secret things in britain at the time. they denied clearance. they were working on the ramifications of the fission

process. .t was totally unclassified they could play around with it. they cannot work on radar which they should have been doing. they had this time available. they chose to work on the ramifications of fission. i once talked to him about the report the put together. they had calculated a critical mass may be as little as one u-235.of yo as you know, the first weapon had something like 130 pounds of u-235.

the observation was it is a good thing they made a particular error. it was not an error, they decide the wrong information. when i was updated -- one that was updated, the calculus were correct. if they had said 130 pounds, no one would have tried to make it to begin with. they were refugees from hitler's germany. they were in england largely because of the efforts of mark olofond. he made it his business to make sure those people at some place

to go to when i left germany. even though he did not have a job for them, he managed to create a job for them. in the university environment. he had been the director of the magnetron of the inch have been instrumental the development of radar and airplanes. ever -- have not had radar and airplanes without the magnetron. he brought a sample over to the united states in 1941 when he was trying to sell the atom bomb project. he brought the magnetron to united states. out that tiverton, for whom i worked, and then a graduate student.

there is a connection. war, he went to australia to found the science section of the chilean national university. tiverton one along with them. he died at the right old age of 96 or so, just two or three years ago. he was an avid advocate of getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. he worked very hard towards that end, right towards the end of his life. in my book, he is a great hero.

i was a g.i. and had many friends in the military. many of those friends were training for the invasion of japan in the philippines. me all about this afterwards, thanking me for my participation in the original project. i understand that totally. somehow, people who have never been shot at don't appreciate this. another g.i. in effect.

get this whole thing over with. i certainly cannot be against it. as i told bnp outside the bunker door -- and it certainly was. it, there's noof doubt. there are any number of people walking around today who would not be walking around simply because their fathers and their grandfathers would have been killed. i am convinced of that. had -- in my own mind,

just shutting down that war was worth it. but that is not to say that we should not do everything we can to put that genie back in the bottle and keep it there. certainly my sentiments have been along those lines ever since. to have the military-industrial complex that dictates the speed at which we are ourselves is totally wrong. somehow we have to learn to turn

off the influence of the hawks thathe super hawks -- turns out to be awfully hard. toply because they know how spend the money to get the largest political support. even things like the b-2 bomber, which, you know, we have 22 or 23 of them. i noticed one of them have crashed off of guam yesterday. of course they only cost a couple of billion dollars apiece. but it is a nonsense weapon. it has no utility whatsoever. in a serious war it would be the first to go. without any impact whatsoever. let me say, i have some additional qualifications.

i mentioned to you at lunch time of thed been a member project 137 group. and then later, in 1970, i became a member of the president's science advisory psac.ttee, psac has a number of standing panels and i have become chairman of the strategic plan -- panel. i became quite an expert in that. i know what is involved. but no matter what has happened, i remember when the minuteman was first being proposed. they questioned how many

minuteman do we need? those rockets are an elegance design but they have a single warhead at the top. it was calculated that it would take 400 to take down any reasonable target within the soviet union. 400 of them. thenjust automatically more than doubled that and went to a thousand. that is the way things get escalated, again and again and again. the other thing, as a member of psac that i was involved with was be so card -- so-called safeguard. you have probably forgotten about it. the safeguard system was

something that nixon was pushing involved, and it radar andng a big using bulwark missiles which are nuclear tipped as a weapon so you did not have to worry about hitting cicely the thing that was coming in. if you are close that was good enough. but this whole safeguard system this in norma's radar was built, it is the size of giza, the pyramid, fully equipped and everything.

it cost $20 million in 1970. in 1970.llion dollars and in norma's -- and enormous waste of resources. i am talking about the resources . so much of what happens in the is all, as near as i can tell, driven by those elements of the military -- the aerospace industry. arranged for all the contracts of the government construction of the b-2 bomber. basis ofcated on the certain congressional districts theatisfy the demands of clients of the congressman in

those particular districts, and the congressman could probably point to the funding brought into the district from the government. part of the -- well, eisenhower had it right. the military-industrial complex is very real and is always going to be there. we have somehow never been able to handle it and deal with it, make sensible decisions. what other prejudices do i have? oh, the other thing i guess i is that psac was

very much against any missile systems that i just described. they were also very much against &t, this was during the nixon administration. wereof the members of psac quite vocal. they should not have been so loud in their opposition. but the outcome of this is that the nixon administration file -- fired us all. psac.re {sa one of my prize possessions in the letter from nixon saying psac no longer exists, you no longer have a job. 1970 or so. then i have had very -- except for with

things having to do with the national science foundation. i have had nothing to do with any classified work since then, since i was fired from psac. that was a clean-cut. three otherou and experts in physics approved the copperheads of test ban treaty, and then in 2000 you and other came down on any nuclear initiatives. maybe you want to talk about this, how scientists became activists and what they help the cop was? val: you're quite right.

in your question to suggest that it all started in the manhattan project. the idea that this is something that civilians control is entirely due to the scientists. the military was keen on getting control. aec,unately the easy -- well, you know that there were some of board's efforts -- aborted efforts to get it under control, but it all energyp with it nuclear commission, which i think was a fairly reasonable way of doing things. i would say it was almost entirely due to the activism of scientists. of course there was the establishment of the federation of american scientists, and it

chicago the bulletin of atomic scientists started to be published. these i think have been very .ffective entirely inspired by physicists, course as time went on other scientists got involved. but the initial inspiration really came from physicists. almost entirely. doty,were some, like paul is certainly very active. he would describe himself as a chemist. their -- and then there was just the establishment a group which consisted

entirely of physicists during the eisenhower administration. of m.i.t. -- n the chairman of m.i.t. was the first president. that was a very effective organization at fighting the to thent and bringing it forefront. i know when i first went on psac it was just very active in advising executive policy. in those days when policy questions arose in the variousnt -- department of the government

would have to sign off. well, psac was another agency that have to -- had to sign off on this. they were privy to these things. there was a time when the officen of psac had his in the old executive office building, which through world war ii had been the state department, as you know. , the officeof fact was that that had been inhabited by cordell hell -- hull. i say this to give you some idea of the high esteem with which science was held in the government up until i would say the early 1970's.

then nixon got rid of psac everything pretty much fell .part as you know the president has someone called the science advisor now, but it is the office of science and technology and it is off on 17th street someplace in some obscure building. the chairman is pretty much a unit -- eunuch. he is a princeton graduate. in this present demonstration you can understand why. administration you can understand why. that was not the case, and it all started to change in the early 70's. >> i want to talk about secrecy -- do you want to talk about

, there was al secrecy that was not just during the duration of the war, but maybe the, and how biggest impact of the manhattan theect was not the bomb but secrecy. maybe you did not experience this. there were these petitions to a test or whatever. val: certainly growth was a with a strongves one on compartmentalization, but eren higher -- oppenheim did not stress on that.

people likew-level me, we did not have any sense of compartmentalization. doingat was oppenheimer's . s> did you see growth -- grove at all, did you have any run-ins with him? al: no. well, when he would come to los alamos and we would have to come out and parade. i think that was the only time i ever saw him. as a matter of fact, i think i mentioned someplace that in his book -- i can't remember the name of it -- told"? it can be val: on the other hand, he was an absolutely brilliant administrator, apparently. how anyone in that position

shows oppenheimer still amazes me. it was just a perfect choice. that's a separate and sad story of course, the oppenheim or -- oppenheimer story. he was certainly the perfect selection for the job. had to stick his neck out a long way to make that happen. much.re him very do you want to talk about the oppenheimer story? val: it is one of the great tragedies of our generation. well, with regard to the oppenheimer affair, i consider in the be a real tragedy history of our country, and it

does not speak well for how the country sometimes operates. it was all because of the invasive nature of some people -- the addictive nature of some people in high positions of washington, who oppenheimer at some time or another had managed to insult. as they never forgot it. oppenheimer was an incredible resource for this country. and because of that they through that talent down the drain. i think it is a crime to be allowed to happen. there's a wonderful book about the oppenheimer case. it is entitled something like -- oppenheimerj robert

and the start of the cold war, or words to that effect. i highly recommend it. gives a very good account of the nasty doings of these people , these vindictive people who did oppenheimer up. course, this is not long .fter the mccarthy era you would've thought this kind of thing would have been , that this was a reaction to the mill -- miserable mccarthy. but no, it just continued on. just personal nastiness.

i have deep feelings about that. he was such a talented person. to just throw that talent down the drain is too much for me. >> i don't know. in yourhe things autobiography you say, the manhattan project was one of those times when the mind was able to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job. val: well certainly the manhattan project had an enormous effect on my own career. i kneweing at los alamos precisely that i wanted to go into physics.

that was not so clear beforehand. saw of the what i physicists at los alamos. i liked them very much as people to anticipateame having a collegial relationship with great joy. that is what has happened. with respect to what i learned at los alamos, one thing i learned was that i became very skilled at electronics. so in doing expert muscle experimental physics, i was never limited by

those instruments that were available on the shelf that you could simply buy, but i could go .ut and invent my own i knew how to do it. freedomave me a norm is with which to tackle things which i would not otherwise have been able to tackle, addressing problems of physics. i had a very successful phd and a lot of success -- from just that kind of what do i want to say? that kind of application of

knowledge about all kinds of have anyich did not particular frontier. whatld always go beyond seems to be the limiting factors. for me that has been an enormous advantage in doing experimental physics. think that is basically what i meant when i said that statement. i have not felt constrained by what i see in front of me. including math. maybe you can make a couple of summary statements about how the manhattan project changed science, or physics. know, before you

the manhattan project the only support for any kind of science or profit -- science were profit, and it was normally some rich person having some extra cash to spend on something like a telescope or whatever. it was all private money. project showedan the way for the government to spend money on science in a constructive way. and out of of course -- out of that the office of naval research involved, and that office as many can talk to things in supporting -- that office did many can act of things in supporting ryan -- constructive things in supporting science. as you know, the national

science foundation was created as a direct result. of theifications manhattan project have just been without bounds. as time has gone hashe government funding been so successful that private companies have attempted to give up doing basic research. bill labs -- be ll labs exist. ibm used to spend something like -- certainly in the 60's and 70's, the use of spent something like half $1 billion on their research laboratory. no more.

they have essentially left that for the government to do. i think that is a tragedy. gradually we are learning to deal with it, but at the same time, congress does not really realize that this has happened is that they now have the responsibility, whereas if it were a shared responsibility, now it is entirely the government's responsibility to support this. said, i am afraid most congressmen don't really appreciate that. as near as i can tell, anyway. they have left the leadership in certain fields entirely to the europeans. for example, energy physics.

killed the collider that was being built in texas after $2 billion had been spent on it. they suddenly canceled it. -- simply canceled it. all of that activity now is taking place in europe. cern and japan, germany, has all picked up where the united states has by default letting go. that.feel sad about that is particle physics, it has suffered most. at the same time we spent enormous quantities of money on absolutely foolish wars, etc., etc.

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