Despite the importance of the two U.S. nuclear weapons design laboratories—Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)—to national security, they are largely unknown to most Americans. Surrounded by security fences, and patrolled by armed guards, the two sites employ almost 25,000 people and cost the government nearly $8 billion a year. But most of what goes on behind the barbed wire remains—much like the laboratories’ creations themselves—top secret.
That veil is partly lifted—allowing readers at least a peek—in Tom Ramos's book. Ramos is a physicist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has worked for four decades at California's LLNL, established in 1952 as a rival to Los Alamos. The hero of Ramos's book is the laboratory's eponymous founder, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who invented the cyclotron. Lawrence was also the inspiration behind Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory—the “Rad Lab”—a...