The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
_____________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release July 26, 1996
Press Briefing
By
Jack Gibbons, Director Of The Office Of
Science And Technology Policy
And
Hazel O'Leary, Secretary Of Energy
The Briefing Room
Mr. Gibbons: This is an important day, I think, for the
administration in recognizing and underscoring the central role of
science and technology in achieving the kind of options that we want
-- whether it be for national security or economic growth in the
creation of jobs, protection of the environment and human health and
all of the above.
Today the President will be celebrating the
contributions of 13 individuals and one company, with the highest
awards that he can give in science and technology, the so-called
Medals of Science and the Medals of Technology, in a ceremony in the
East Room.
Let me tell you about two of them. One is Ruth Patrick,
from Philadelphia, who made fundamental discoveries in understanding
the importance of biodiversity, which we all hear about now but was
something, in a sense, she worked on before the term was coined. And
the relationship of biodiversity in water systems to the health, the
pollution and the human impacts on the water systems. And her
fundamental work has underscored and driven a lot of the strategies
in internal metal research over the past several decades. That's a
Medal of Science.
Let me mention one person of the Medals of Technology.
Stephanie Louise Kwolek, who is a chemist working for DuPont Company,
discovered how to take liquid crystals and turn them into particular
kinds of fibers called aramid fibers, which I think we all know as
Kevlar which, in turn, has been used for a lot of protection. And I
think that alone has saved the lives -- I believe the account these
days is something like 1,300 law enforcement lives have been saved by
this discovery of Stephanie Kwolek.
The President, in his address, besides honoring these
people, will reiterate his abiding commitment to the support of
science and technology as a public enterprise in partnership with
private enterprise. He will talk about a strong scientific base as a
fundamental underpinning of our move toward comprehensive test ban
treaty. And he will announce, in that regard, the new super computer
investment that is being made at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in
California. Ibm will furnish this computer, which is hundreds of
times faster than anything we have now and will be utilized for
assuring the confidence in the safety and reliability of our nuclear
stockpile.
At the same time it's being designed so that within
about an hour, maybe two hours, it can be converted from very
sensitive missions in stockpile stewardship over to fundamental
science work and even things related to industrial needs, such as the
calculation of the shapes of proteins and the design of new drugs and
the like. So it has dual needs and is designed specifically to
handle both of those kinds of needs.
And I'm delighted that Secretary O'Leary is with me, who
can expand on that part of the program this afternoon. Hazel, do you
want to add anything?
Secretary O'Leary: Thanks, John. That's great. I'm
not too breathless.
I think Jack has hit the high notes on this very
exciting announcement that the President will be making formally
later today. I have tried for about two and a half days now to
express myself in ways that most people can understand that points
out why this is such an exciting announcement, and part of the
earlier strategic initiative in computing that we announced last
year. And someone else has done it a lot better, so I'm going to
start to steal that line.
I think the comparators are very simple. When I was
just in college in the late 1950's we were beginning to see the
challenge of outer space. Today, both in need of supporting our
stockpile stewardship program to permit us to keep a robust nuclear
stockpile without nuclear testing, we find ourselves in another
challenge. And someone else has called it the challenge of
cyberspace. And what we've actually done now is approached a set of
very tough technical issues and asked ourselves if we cannot simulate
the circumstance of nuclear testing rather than do it. And the
answer is yes, and these fabulously powerful computers help us do
that.
In describing how much more powerful they are than those
computers in which the government has been the major investor, the
way I like to express it is to go back to the Olympics -- because we
all have these metaphors -- and to challenge you to think about the
stadium in Atlanta where so much is happening and to use as proxy for
that stadium the supercomputing device that we will get in
partnership with Ibm for about $93 million. That stadium, if it's
comparator were this capability to compute, would be large enough to
hold every citizen in the United States of America.
And the opportunity now to move our testing away from
-- in the industrial complex -- away from clay models or small metal
or material models to 3-D simulation is the most exciting thing that
I can conceive of. And this is the benefit that flows out of our
national security initiative. I've talked about this in ways that I
understand because it relates to my business. When I was in the
electric utility industry, we were very proud to say that we could
come up with a computer design for a power plant in nine months.
Well, now this can be done in a very short period of time but much
more dramatically moving us from the mental concept to a 3-D design
in cyberspace.
If you want to take this a step further, the automobile
industry today is using supercomputing that came out of our national
security program to simulate crashes of automobiles in order to make
the materials therefore safer. But that's not the real issue. We
want to make automobiles safe from crashes, but we really want to
make people within cars safer from crashes. And that's what this
equipment will do. And understand, as Jack has already
indicated, that while its uses are primarily dedicated to our
national security initiative, we have been told that within an hour
it can be flipped over away from secure and classified work to be
dedicated to the work of scientists and universities or, perhaps more
importantly, collaborations involving industry and scientists as well
as our laboratories.
It is part of the vision that we all had when the
President told us that he believed in the certification of our
weapons, laboratories, directors, that the United States could take
the principled and the moral leadership to forswear nuclear testing
and in so doing could we rely on science and technology.
This is the second extraordinary achievement in progress
to move us into cyberspace. There will likely be other announcements
before the end of this year. We're up and running, and we're up and
running in a way that keeps the United States in its premier position
in supercomputing that begins to meet the goals and the initiatives
of the Clinton administration on a moratorium, a lasting moratorium
on nuclear testing and also begins to open up science and technology
in a new universe, this universe of cyberspace, to both intellectual
challenge and examination, and to industrial output that helps us
reduce costs and be more competitive in the 21st century.
Q Ms. O'Leary, can you give us just a little bit of
nuts and bolts? Is the computer already built and ready to go? Or
is this something that's going to be designed and developed and we're
hoping that it's going to function?
Secretary O'Leary: The computer will be ready to go by
1998. You may remember that the earlier computer in this strategic
initiative will be ready in 1996. The reason I'm so certain to say
it will be ready to go is that the valuable partnering with Ibm, who
won this competition, is that Ibm had already an existing business
plan that would have taken them to this new frontier in
supercomputing but at much slower pace.
The advantage of the Department of Energy now partnering
with Ibm is we can take this quantum leap that actually moves us
times 100 into the capability that Ibm had already planned at a later
time. And what my colleagues in the national security side of our
business international labs will tell you, is that that begins to get
at their issue, and now my issue, which is 10 years out, how can we
continue to certify to the safety and reliability of the weapon
stockpile.
And so 1998 is our target date and Ibm was a natural
winner because they were already on that course. We have invested to
speed them up.
Q And what do you mean by "partnering"?
Secretary O'Leary: I mean that they are the
Department's partner, as is almost every partner with whom we enter
into a contractual relationship. They will be building this
equipment. They will be building it to our specifications, but we're
clear that they have the capability.
Q And the Department's role is financial?
Secretary O'Leary: The Department's role is financial
and it is also to guide with respect to the requirements and actually
indicating the performance of this computing device.
Q Can you just get a little bit into the nuclear
testing aspect of it?
Secretary O'Leary: Yes.
Q With other countries, some other countries have
said, we have to test because we don't have the capability to really
know how these weapons are aging. Is the idea, then, that either
they would be able to use this very machine, or is it that they would
buy their own or what -- you know, in other words, what are the
international indications?
Secretary O'Leary: Well, you've asked, I think, perhaps
the most difficult and subtle question here, and that is how does the
United States, in partnership with other of the nuclear nations, go
forward to ensure that we all begin to be able to move on to
certifying safety and reliability. And I will discuss this with an
example.
One of the clear examples are some of our colleagues who
are now asking for some of the supercomputers that now exist. Our
requirements of the Department of Energy, working with all of our
partners in the National Security Council, is to ascertain that
everyone who wants the use of our supercomputers has peaceful uses in
mind. There's also a nuclear users facility internationally that has
a regime so that we can all be certain that people are using
supercomputers have that purpose in mind and do not have the purpose
of engaging in the development of nuclear weapons.
So we are certain that we can test the intention of our
collaborators and we will move forward to begin to collaborate. The
other major peg in our scientific stockpile stewardship regime, of
course, is the national ignition facility. And we've been very clear
to say we want to be open and bring people in. We simply have to
understand their requirements.
Q Secretary O'Leary, just a quick follow-up on Jill's
question. Case in point: How would you deal with France?
Secretary O'Leary: Well, I think the way we've been
dealing with the French is to have very detailed conversations with
them, which obviously lead to a partnership, that share in this
capability, but we also want to be certain that their goals are the
same as ours. And we have had a set of very valuable and worthwhile
discussions with the French, most of which have been reported in your
papers and on your networks.
Thank you very much.
End
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