- Brodie Anderson
- Doctor Thomsen
- Patricia Newman
- Bits of Humor
- Not By Bread Alone
- The Curious Incident
- 2nd Chances
- Walt Atchison
Andrey Sviridov
This is a collection of lighter episodes that VNIIA’s Andrey Sviridov interjected into his serious accounts of collaborative activities of his institute.
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1994: The first American visitors to Mayak, the vast nuclear materials storage and processing complex in the closed city of Ozersk in the Urals
During the discussion of the visit program in the hotel hall, the Americans put a satellite imaging map of Ozersk and Mayak site on the table. The reaction of Mayak people was quite interesting. It seemed to me that the security service officer tried to faint and snatch the map away from the Americans at the same time.
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The head of the US delegation was Mr. Chakovsky from the State Department. After the end of the technical part of the visit to Mayak, the city administration of Ozersk invited the guests to the musical concert played by the students and teachers of the local musical school. The concert was really great, the quality of performance was really high, and the highlight of the evening was the performance of a cello quartette – tall, slim, and charming female teachers of the school. The head of the US delegation thanked the musicians after the concert and said that he was especially delighted to listen to this concert since his family name was Tchaikovsky. The audience applauded!
1995: My three-month trip to Los Alamos
The next day after my arrival in Los-Alamos was the Columbus Day (October 5) and the lab was closed for three days. Ron Augustson, understanding my problems, decided to provide me with a rental car for the first days of my stay. The customer manager in a Budget rent-a-car office processed the paperwork for my vehicle, we went to the car, got into it, and she handed me the keys. Seeing my confusion (it was my first experience with the automatic transmission), the woman asked if I could drive at all, then briefed me on the basics of AT. When asked what gears 1 and 2 stood for, she said I would not need it and asked me to drive around the parking lot. After making sure that I knew how to drive and that my hands were not trembling too much, she left me alone. My next adventure was the discovery of the fact that in the US they as a rule put the traffic lights behind the crossroads. After stopping my car on the red light in the middle of my very first crossroads in the USA (luckily it happened in Los-Alamos where there was not too much traffic), I quickly grasped the specifics of the local traffic rules, thus confirming the postulate that a graduate of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute was capable of coping with any problem, given the motivation.
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Greg Mann
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Planning and conducting trips to Moscow and to St. Petersburg from Albuquerque were always a challenge. The bureaucracy was always unpredictable and the weather always cold. The project reviews were fascinating and always offered unexpected twists. In particular, the MOD colonels would often want to be center stage and insist on their invitation and attendance at the next US meeting. Foreign travel by the MOD officers was a unique perk that offered them a chance to see the US culture first hand…a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery or a walk down Bourbon St. in New Orleans; it was a pleasure to their tour guide.
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After our closeout meetings either in Russia or in the US, we would have a special banquet of food and drink. Everyone looked forward to these celebrations and the glorifying the great deeds and accomplishments of the visit. Toasts would be offered back and forth. First the laboratory host-leader would offer a toast to the joint cooperation & success of the program. Then the guest-leader would rapidly respond with a toast to the graciousness of the host, the third toast was always to the ladies, then a toast to our soldiers in uniform, and of course to a safer world and peace, somewhere there would be the toast to our grandchildren, etc. Most any moment you would be expected to offer up a toast, the longer you waited the more difficult it was to come up with an original toast. But after a while the protocol didn’t matter too much. After about toast number 6 or 8, my lips and nose would be numb to the vodka and the realization that the banquet was about to get blurry. It was time to quit. Most American’s knew they couldn’t keep up with or out drink our Russian colleagues, but occasionally, some middle-age frat boy would try. This invariably resulted in a messy van back to the hotel.
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Usually at the farewell dinners, each side would exchange gifts of some cultural significance with one another. On one such occasion, the VNIIA delegation was visiting Sandia, and I asked Andrey Sviridov to step forward so I could present him a small gift. Andrey has a fake shyness that goes along with his matchless dry sense of humor. It took months for me to pick up on his wit and his quiet drama. Most of his joking comments just went over my head. On this occasion, as we say in English – I wanted to “pull his leg.” I had a bogus, but official looking set of blueprints of the Fat Man atomic bomb, courtesy of the National Nuclear Museum’s gift shop. As I explained to Andrey, this was a sensitive and special gift to my dear friend. And, I hoped he could appreciate the difficulty of getting approval from the US Department of Energy to give him drawings of US nuclear weapons. At first glance he seemed cautious to accept such a gift. But, he quickly realized the wry opportunity to remind everyone of the Russia nuclear weapons program history. Without hesitating, he said: “I have seen the originals many years ago.”
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