Born on the 16th of July!

Joe Martz -

You Rock! You go guy!

The good Doctor was getting on a Southwest Airlines flight in Albuquerque when We recognized the face of this man. We had seen his picture on LANL news stories and We had met him "socially" once, so it took Us two looks to realize who We'd just seen. We were flying to the Bay Area for personal reasons (no, We weren't interviewing with Google Labs but maybe We should have been!) so We didn't think much of it.

The next day, Our hostess handed me the SF Chronicle and by golly, larger than life, there was Smiling Joe leaning up against a bomb case, looking all serious and competent and hopeful and dire at the same time! And what did he have to say?

RRW is the route to nuclear disarmament!

Unfortunately, the Doctor was taking a nap under a tree, at least so far as the LTCS blog goes... We entirely missed the piece contributed by (now) old-time Weapons Design Physicist John Pedicini... and the link and discussion of Joe Martz's interviews.

Martz was called a "used car salesman" by at least one anonymous commentor. Oddly, Our "social contact" with Joe was a test drive in his Dodge Diesel Truck We were considering buying. He was a good salesman up to a point. His Truck was immaculate, he knew every detail about it, and he politely but firmly gave me hints about precisely how to drive this 4x4, manual transmission diesel. We would have bought it except for one little thing... it was too well taken care of, it was too nice, and We didn't have the heart to offer him less than he was asking, only so We could take it out and ding it up, overheat the turbo, let the oil go an extra thousand between changes, pick up a dozen cracks in the windshield, haul rocks, manure, trash, firewood in it, etc. *as we are wont to do!*

The good Doctor came to LANL as a veritable youth... a vegetarian, a pacifist in most ways, but We believed in MAD (mutually assured destruction)... the logic was just too hard to avoid... *somebody* was going to have the biggest stick, it might as well be us.

(bwahahahaha..haaaa....!)

We didn't come to develop or maintain or test or even play with nuclear weapons. We did come to play with high-energy systems, with ultra-scale, mega-giga-hyper accelerators. We came to play with these new things called computers.

But We also thought that Nukes were a necessary evil, at worst. We also thought that real pacifists (those who would risk being subject to violence in the cause of peace) were ignorant goofballs. We also thought that Science would outpace the horrid uses that mere Plebes (non-scientists) found for it... that We, the Anointed, could come up with a an anti-anti-anti-anti-anti-missile for every anti-anti-anti-anti-missile crafted to beat the anti-anti-anti-missile crafted to beat the anti-anti.... you get the picture. We learned our Science-ethics from Comic Book and Science Fiction heroes (and total losers like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein ... sorry Libertarian friends... La-oosers! Get over it, We did).




We believed in the innate good of Science and when confronted with all of the Bad Uses of Science on the planet, over history, We retreated meekly behind "science is nuetral". But deep in our twisted, dark little heart was the belief that "Science is Good!" I fear that our young Doctor Martz (he was 41 at the time of his interview last month) is still in the thrall of this concept, but I completely understand it... and it might very well be the "lesser of evils" here. To hear a serious player in the development of nuclear weapons stand up publicly for a long-term plan of disarmament is unprecedented.

You go Joe! (oh... and you too John... )

- the Doctor of Love and Strangeness