Last week I saw an obituary in the New Mexican of someone who made a difference in my life. We were professional colleagues, never close friends. But that difference was consequential beyond me, and I had questions I wanted to ask him. I didn’t realize he had been in town all this time.

In the 1990s, the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) was launched by the United States, the European Union, Norway, and Japan. Its purpose was to find work for weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, so that they would not feel it necessary to sell their nuclear weapons expertise. The countries that had been part of the Soviet Union were unable to pay those scientists. The scientists were asked to propose work to the ISTC, which would then evaluate and, if appropriate, fund the proposals. This also served to help the scientists adjust to the international ways of proposals and funding, which was different from what they were accustomed to.

Steven (Steve) Gitomer was the Los Alamos National Laboratory liaison to the ISTC. He distributed information about the current proposals to those of us who were interested. Many of the proposals were physics-related, studies of semiconductors and stars. But in one group was a proposal from Kazakhstan’s Institute of Nuclear Physics to survey radioactive contamination at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS). It sounded a great deal like what I was doing at Los Alamos, so I asked Steve to send me the proposal.