Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

"The single event that triggered the establishment of Lawrence Livermore was detonation of the first Russian atomic bomb in 1949. Some American scientists were alarmed that the Soviets could advance quickly to the next step, the hydrogen bomb, with potential disaster for the West. Ernest Lawrence was a key participant in the World War II atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, a Nobel Laureate, and founder of the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Edward Teller was a brilliant physicist at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory.

They met in October of 1949 to discuss the Russian threat. It was essential, Teller came to believe in the course of the next several years, to start a second nuclear weapons laboratory- to provide competition, to diversify expertise, to handle the large volume of work that future fast-breaking discoveries would bring. Lawrence supported Teller's proposal for a second weapons lab, and he wanted it established at Livermore.

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