John Hopkin Nuckolls (born 17 November 1930) is an American physicist who worked his entire career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Nuckolls began work on weapon designs that minimized the amount of fission and maximized the fusion, in order to reduce the radioactive byproducts of peaceful explosions.
Nuckolls was struck by the huge size of the caverns needed to contain the explosions and the accumulation of fissile material from exploded primaries that would render them highly radioactive.
The secondary relies on neutrons to carry out a chain reaction that converts lithium deuteride (LiD) into deuterium and tritium which then undergoes fusion.
Nuckolls noticed that as the secondary became very small, on the order of milligrams, the energy needed to start the reaction began to fall into the kilojoule range.
This was a break with tradition, where Directors generally remained aloof from such actives, and a number of commenters stated this made the lab "like any other defense contractor".
"[14] This led to an increasingly confrontational relationship in Washington, culminating in his public statement that the Clinton administration was failing in its constitutional duty to "provide for the common defense.
At first he refused, claiming there was support for his position within the Department of Energy and the Pentagon, and then calling into question the objectivity of the review due to its chair being Richard Truly, who had been dismissed after being criticized by Teller.