«Following the 1994 Shoemaker - Levy 9 comet impacts with Jupiter, Edward Teller proposed to a collective of U.S. and Russian ex-Cold War weapons designers in a 1995 planetary defense workshop meeting at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), that they collaborate to design a 1 gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a 1 km diameter asteroid. (americaspace.com)
McMillan, a nuclear physicist and weapons designer with government - funded compensation exceeding a million dollars a year, responded that he had believed the problems could be solved while that lab kept operating. (sciencemag.org)