David Bober

Sometimes when I drive to work, I try and imagine, how was that meeting when this was proposed?

And I think what I come back to over and over again is that when you want to know how important this is, it's important enough that someone was able to propose that idea.

And the answer was, yeah, let's think about that.

And then it got done.

We're using really well proven tools.

So the science behind this dates back decades.

So we try to be very open about how big our error bars are.

And we try to be really transparent in everything that goes into that uncertainty.

I can tell you a thing is an inch long, but if it's an inch plus or minus a mile, that's not that useful.

Historically, the shock physics community has not maybe done as good a job about that as we should.

I think that has changed.

And I think Jasper was one of the ways that helped that change.

By the time we actually produce the data, there's a lot of evidence to show that what we claim to be measuring really is what we're measuring.

In practice, that relationship works better than you might think, because while we have separate budgets coming from the federal government, I think both sides of that relationship realize that you can't row with one oar.

We do a good job cooperating.

There are changes afoot in the nuclear weapons complex.

We're building new pits, for example.

Many of the existing weapons are quite old.

The questions that are being asked related to things like new manufacturing and aging, those have influenced the sorts of science that JASPER and facilities with similar missions are doing.