“Cold War warriors”: Sandia’s decades in nuclear weapons

The idea for the program came from David Thompson, former manager of the Nevada Test Site, who suggested capturing the recollections of those behind the nuclear tests. He turned to then-Sandia President Tom Hunter, who backed the idea. Thompson tapped Buteau to put the documentary together.

Field tester also worked on the documentary
Field tester Al Chabai, now retired, suggested many of the people interviewed and conducted most of the conversations. Chabai, who also appears in the documentary, worked in the testing program for decades. “He was the perfect choice,” Buteau said. “He knew the people because he worked with them. I did some of the interviews, but I just didn’t have the knowledge to ask the questions that he knew to ask.”

She began editing by paring the interviews to the most striking nuggets, then wove those clips into a chronological story. “When you interview people on certain topics they’ll say very similar things, and then it’s easy to cut back and forth,” said Buteau, a Sandia video producer and director for two dozen years.

“People can tell a story better than I could ever script it, and they have passion and the emotion,” she said.

The first order of business was to talk to as many field test workers as possible. That took a year. The original list was longer than the forty-four eventually interviewed, but there wasn’t enough money to film everyone. When the initial budget ran out, there was no funding to edit all the footage and produce the documentary. It took a decade to finish.

“I wanted to get as many interviews done as we could because of the advanced age of some of the individuals,” Buteau said. “I thought that was more important. I thought perhaps sometime in the future we could get more funding to do the editing. Little did I know it would be ten years.”

Historical archive of those who did the work
About 40 percent of those interviewed have since died, she said. “Had we not captured this knowledge, we would not have this historical archive of their stories and what they went through and who they met, what they did.”

Buteau wanted the entire interviews and the high-resolution format available in the future, so the original tapes eventually will be housed in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency archives. “I don’t want them to go into an abyss where no one has access to them,” she said. “I think they’re historically important.”

Buteau hopes the film gives people a greater appreciation for field testing “in the era in which these people lived and worked, which was under the fear of the Cold War. I hope they have a greater appreciation of all that it took to protect our nation and to create a nuclear weapons arsenal.”