after the war ended, an engineering section of the nuclear weapons program became known as the sandia laboratoryand sandia became america's first atomic bomb factory. man: i realized if i joined sandia, i would be working on atomic bombs, and that was okay with me. we were driven by the fear of the soviet union. you couldn't talk about what you did outside of the tech area, but you could feel a sense of, "this is the number one national priority." schlosser: the early atomic bombs were essentially handmade, and if you wanted to use one, it would take days for a team of 20 or 30 people to put it together. my computer was a slide rule. you ever seen a slide rule? anybody? we pressed and pressed to improve the early product to make it smaller and more deadly. anything we conceived of the military wanted, and money was free. schlosser: as the technology improved, as the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal increased, there were soon assembly lines for making nuclear weapons. we had bombers in the air at all times loaded with nuclear weapons. we had submarines that had missiles carrying nuclear w

sandia labs. that particular point in time is steeped myself in really finding out about these laboratories and the men and women better that are in those laboratories, the extraordinary individuals, the technology side and the science side of the department of energy. there are a fascinatingly large number of opportunities that we have on the economic side to make people's quality of life, in your home state for instance, better by bringing technologies that we may have an idea about today and some that we haven't even dreamed up yet to the table , to commercialization, to affect your state and this nation as a whole. so my record as governor of texas has been one to not only think outside the box and do some things that people might not necessarily have associated with a republican governor but to do it in a way that both sides of the aisle and people who don't much give a tinker's dam about either political party but want to see results and that's what i want to do to find those results i will have a positive impact on your citizens of alaska and of this country. >> i appreciate that commitment