The photos in the links below illustrate the early series of meetings where nuclear weapons scientists and engineers met to talk shop on unclassified aspects of nuclear safety. These Surety Technology Symposia were an effort to forge a Lab-to-Lab channel for unclassified safety and security exchanges as a supplement to the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (Nunn-Lugar). These symposia served as a bridge to the more formal WSSX Program that framed technical exchanges that, while remaining unclassified, were directly relevant to nuclear weapons.
Read more on the background and documents of those symposia.
The photos in this gallery come from personal archives of William Bookless of LLNL and Paul White of LANL.
In the beginning of the 1990s, William Bookless served as LLNL program leader of the Nuclear Weapons Surety (Safety, Security and Use Control Program). In this capacity, and together with similar experts from LANL and SNL, he made several trips to Russia in 1993 and 1994 that led to a series of US–Russian nuclear weapons surety workshops. During the first trip in July 1993, the U.S. team held exlporatory discussions with representatives of VNIITF, VNIIEF and Minatom. The U.S. team consisted of Dave Olson from DOE; Paul White from LANL; Bill Bookless from LLNL; and Patricia Newman, Dennis Croessmann, and David Nokes from SNL.
Paul White, Lead Designer at LANL, became involved in the interaction with the Russian labs from the very beginning of the lab-to-lab relationship and continued to play a key role through its entire duration, contributing most significantly to WSSX and Sister City projects.
Surety Technology Symposia – Fourth Surety Symposium hosted by LLNL in Pleasanton, CA (March 1994)