The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 282

With regard to Bill being a child of the Cold War and falling in love with a Russian girl, I have this interesting story:
I will keep names out of it, but I have a friend who was the director of one of the largest institutes for nuclear physics in Russia. I helped to bring him here to the United States and we worked together on a physics project.
While here, he eventually got hired by one of our nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence-Livermore.
Afterwards, he told me the story of how he was sitting around the table with all these guys from Livermore and he said to them, “You know, it’s amazing that only a few years ago, we were enemies.” And, to his surprise, they immediately responded, “Oh no. You were NEVER our enemy. Los Alamos was our enemy!”
I love that story and that sentiment is a very good explanation of why our national labs were so successful. Because we pitted them all against each other.