About Lab-to-Lab

The Beginning of the Collaboration

We tell the story from both Russian and American perspectives. Together, they express the full spectrum of views and challenges of the times – and illustrate the achievements of this cooperation.

The story begins in February 1992, barely two months after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the Russian nuclear weapons laboratory directors visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Two weeks later, LLNL Director John Nuckolls and LANL Director Siegfried Hecker visited the Russian analogues to American labs, Russian Federal Nuclear Center- VNIIEF and Russian Federal Nuclear Center-VNIITF, in the formerly secret cities of Sarov and Snezhinsk.

In September next year, LANL and VNIIEF scientists conducted the first joint experiment using an explosive magnetic generator designed in Sarov. Dozens and hundreds joint endeavors followed suite.

More about lab-to-lab in a 15-min video (courtesy of CISAC)

The Origin of the Book

The idea to write this book originated in 2000 when Vladimir A. Belugin—who had been director of VNIIEF at the time of the initial laboratory directors exchange visits—and Siegfried Hecker agreed to jointly author an article commemorating the tenth anniversary of the visits and document the remarkable nuclear scientific cooperation that ensued. Sadly, Belugin passed away shortly after an outline was crafted. In 2010, Hecker proposed a similar commemoration for the twentieth anniversary of the visits to VNIIEF Director Rady I. Ilkaev, who had been deeply involved in collaborations from the beginning. Ilkaev thought that there was so much to tell and so many people to involve that he believed they should write a book, not an article. Hecker and Ilkaev asked Evgeny N. Avrorin, former director of VNIITF, to join them as a co-editor, and together they planned to enlist some of the key scientists and engineers from the three nuclear weapons laboratories on each side to describe their experiences.

In order to solicit papers from Russian and American scientists, conferences were organized in Russia in 2012 and 2013 in order for the contributors to tell their stories. Unfortunately, by early 2014 the book project was impacted by the crisis in Ukraine and the dramatic worsening of relations between Moscow and Washington. The crisis slowed the writing process, but most of the individual contributions from the scientists and engineers on both sides was received by the end of 2014. However, in early 2015 Ilkaev and Avrorin told Hecker that the deepening political crisis would no longer allow them to publish one book in two languages. Rather, they suggested that two separate books be published, both based on the material already completed by individual authors. This book constitutes the American version. A Russian-language edition, Обреченные на сотрудничество, was published in two volumes by the RFNC–VNIITF publishing house in Snezhinsk in 2018.