President John F. Kennedy is seen here during a December 1962 visit inspecting the VELA satellite package designed at Sandia for detecting atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Twelve VELA satellites performed such duty for the US from 1963 to 1984.
Contacts
Rebecca Ullrich, (raullri@sandia.gov) Corporate Historian
Sandia National Laboratories' roots lie in World War II's Manhattan Project and its history reflects the changing national security needs of postwar America. Sandia's original emphasis on ordnance engineering — turning the nuclear physics packages created by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into deployable weapons — expanded into new areas as national security requirements changed. In addition to ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile, Sandia applied the expertise it acquired in weapons work to a variety of related areas such as energy research, supercomputing, treaty verification, and nonproliferation. To preserve the crucial records of Sandia's history, the Corporate Archives collects and preserves information from Sandia's past, while the History Program brings Sandia's story out to a broader public. More detail about Sandia's history is compiled in the History Program's various Publications and in the History Highlights Fact Sheet (268K PDF)
The following timeline highlights a few of Sandia's achievements. Please click on a decade to view more information
1949 | 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000
1949
- 1949 Responsible for weapon surveillance activities at the nation's nuclear weapon storage sites until 1960, when the introduction of sealed-pit weapons reduced the need for constant weapon maintenance. Sandia retains its stockpile surveillance responsibilities.
1950
- 1950s Innovations in technologies to achieve the wooden bomb concept (a weapon that could sit ready in the stockpile for years with little maintenance).
- 1956 Opened a new laboratory in Livermore, California.
- 1958 Shock-resistant components and parachute systems made possible the safe laydown delivery of nuclear bombs.
1960
- 1960 Tonopah Test Range replaced the Salton Sea Test Base as the permanent range for field testing components and weapon designs.
- 1960 The science of terradynamics emerged from earth-penetrator design efforts.
- 1960 The Permissive Action Link was introduced to prevent unauthorized use of nuclear weapons.
- 1960 Sandia's Laminar Flow Clean Room was the first in a long line of weapons spin-offs.
- 1962 The Strypi rocket was developed for the high-altitude Dominic nuclear test series.
- 1962 The B61 design program to create a flexible lightweight tactical thermonuclear weapon began. Its most recent modification, the B61-11, was introduced in 1997.
- 1962 Work began on an independently targeted warhead fully integrated with its reentry vehicle. The Navy subsequently contracted with Sandia for the mark 3 reentry body for the Poseidon Missile.
- 1963 The VELA satellites, with Sandia-designed optical sensors as well as data processing, logic, and power subsystems, were launched to detect nuclear detonations.
- 1966 Sandians helped locate the bomb lost in an aircraft collision over Palomares, Spain. This and other accidents prompted closer scrutiny of nuclear weapon safety; Sandia established an independent safety group to assess weapon designs.
1970
- 1970 Designed the Safe Secure Trailer for transporting nuclear weapons. In succeeding years, Sandia also designed and tested accident resistant containers for nuclear materials.
- 1972 Began an ongoing series of training opportunities for agencies concerned with physical security and developed more formidable barriers to protect crucial sites. Sandia is still involved with work related to physical security — recently introducing an improved airport security portal and a school physical safety design.
- 1973 Responding to the energy crisis, Sandia carried out research on solar and wind technology, photovoltaics, enhanced fossil fuels recovery, and fusion development.
- 1974 Named the technical advisor on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, beginning a long series of scientific studies and site analyses. The first barrels of transuranic waste were placed into the facility in 1999.
1980
- 1981 The Combustion Research Facility opened at Sandia/California. It is open to researchers from around the world.
- 1983 Contributed to the assessment of countermeasures and vulnerability of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
- 1983 Published research on strained-layer superlattices, a new class of materials that allow scientists to tailor semiconductors to specific functions.
- 1984 Factored the 69-digit Mersenne number as part of the ongoing "black hat" effort to test and challenge weapon security codes.
1990
- 1990 Sandia-advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was used in Desert Storm. Capable of seeing through cloud cover, SAR was first studied at Sandia in 1986.
- 1991 Congress passed the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, opening the way for collaboration among US and former Soviet weapon labs.
- 1993 The mission assignment for neutron generator production was given to Sandia.
- 1994 The Cooperative Monitoring Center opened. The Center hosts arms control specialists from around the world, informing them about available treaty-monitoring technologies used to build confidence among neighboring nations.
- 1995 Sandia and Intel agreed to pursue development of a computer ten times faster than any existing at that time, resulting in a series of computer speed records. In 1998, Intel gave Sandia a no-fee license for its Pentium processor design, allowing the Labs to develop radiation-hardened microprocessors for space and defense purposes.
- 1997 NASA's Pathfinder space probe arrived on Mars, its landing cushioned by airbags designed by a Sandia/Jet Propulsion Laboratory team.
- 1998 The Z machine briefly achieved an output of 290 trillion watts — about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.
- 1999 Sandia is currently involved in a profusion of projects ranging from training bees to find landmines to developing ever-smaller locking and sensing devices. Many technical breakthroughs are being achieved through collaboration with other organizations.
2000
- 2000 Sandia expanded its work in microelectromechanical (MEMS) technology research, pushing ever-smaller chip features to the atomic scale.
- 2001 Sandia-developed decontamination foam used to neutralize anthrax in buildings on Capitol Hill.
- 2002 The Rapid Syndrome Validation Project (RSVP), a joint Sandia and New Mexico Department of Health system to quickly detect disease outbreaks, was deployed in southern New Mexico.
- 2003 Researchers in the Thermal Protection Materials Program created ultra-high-temperature ceramics
(UHTCs) in Sandia's Advanced Materials Laboratory. The new lightweight material can withstand temperatures up to 2000ºC and is of potential use on hypersonic vehicles, such as the space shuttle.
- 2004 Introduced the Sandia Gauntlets shoulder—length Kevlar gauntlets with carbon—composite forearm and upper arm protective inserts-as a direct response to U.S. military needs in Iraq. Also in 2004, the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (DISL) was dedicated at Sandia/California; the facility will provide a test-bed for research, development, and prototyping of new advanced technologies before they're deployed throughout the nuclear weapons complex.
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