Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility dual-use

Tom's neighbor's visit to Lawrence Livermore. Tom explains to her that NIF's stated mission (fusion energy) is cover for the real mission (simulating nuclear weapons effects after the test ban). Used as a parallel to the space-laser-on-the-shuttle case to teach how military programs are described to the public versus to Congress.

Anyway, this woman around the street is a virtuoso violinist. She's not technically inclined — her son is the computer scientist. She started telling me about this big laser. I said, you mean NIF? Oh yeah, that's it. They're doing fusion. She's pretty bright; she asked the question: how much power have you gotten out of this? They tell her, well, nothing yet, we haven't reached breakeven. You've spent all these billion dollars, have been working for fifty years? Then I explained to her, the real reason for the National Ignition Facility is to simulate nuclear weapons, because we can't do actual weapons tests anymore. So they built this five-billion-dollar laser, or set of lasers, so they can hit something small and implode it, get nuclear fusion, and test the physics of the weapons. So a lot of things are dual-use. They tell the public one thing — we're trying to make free energy by nuclear fusion, which they sort of are — but the main reason they're doing it is to simulate nuclear weapons effects.

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