Us versus Them!

In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first nuclear weapon. American Physicists Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller were both affiliated with the Manhattan Project and supported the creation of a second laboratory to facilitate the ongoing work at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Teller was interested in developing a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb that would be more powerful than the previous atomic bombs. The Livermore Laboratory formally opened in 1952 under the umbrella of its parent laboratory, the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.

Located Just outside of Livermore, California, the former site of the Livermore Naval Air Station was chosen as the location. For almost six decades, the laboratory has used advanced science and technology to augment national security.

The Livermore scientists' gained initial creditability with their development of warheads for the Polaris Missiles designed for U.S. Navy Submarines. In the sixties, the laboratory started a development project knows as Plowshare which was intended to use peaceful nuclear explosions to assist in large scale projects such as excavating canals or assisting the flow of natural gas in underground rock formations.

Although these concepts eventually faded away, Plowshare gave birth to Livermore's biomedical research program. Originally concerned with the hazards of radioactivity, the program evolved to launch the Human Genome Initiative that completed the sequencing of the human genome in 2000.

In the seventies, Livermore started conducting research with laser technology. This led to President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to destroy enemy ballistic missiles in flight. The experimentation with laser technologies has led to the recent construction of the National Ignition Facility at Livermore.

Podcast Written and Narrated by Wes Meiss, Public History Student at the University of West Florida.