Pete Domenici: “I vividly remember coming down and hearing Senators have to tell the Senate about a disaster of significant proportions…”

“I vividly remember coming down and hearing Senators have to tell the Senate about a disaster of significant proportions in their home State. To tell you the truth, I have been to Los Alamos, oh, so many times over the last 28 years. Most of them have been very joyous occasions, when we met with some of the greatest scientists in the world, talked about some fantastic science, met some wonderful people, and saw a beautiful town up there in the mountains. It came into being when the United States of America decided a former boys' academy up there in the mountains would be the center around which we would develop our first atomic weapons. It was a closed city for a long time but a beautiful place. Sure enough, never did I expect to see what I saw last Thursday when Senator Bingaman and I, the Secretary of Energy, and James Lee Witt, the head of our emergency disaster relief agency for the United States, and others flew out there.”