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Facing post-cold war budget cuts, nuclear weapons designers told me last summer that morale was souring. but in October, the bomb design tribe won a stunning victory in the struggle it had never really abandoned--to create the next bomb.

Carol Alonso's creative flashes sometimes came to her as they do to a lot of us, at home in the evening, gazing into a fire. The idea would take shape the next morning as she showered, made breakfast for her husband and two children, pulled her Porsche out of the driveway of her split-level home in the Northern California suburb of Orinda. At the office she'd try the idea on her closest workmates. If they liked it, she'd create some computer models, deliver some briefings, submit her idea to rigorous scrutiny by the best in the business. Every step grew more and more competitive. A pleasant, kind-faced woman, Carol Alonso has "seen grown men cry" as they watched their ideas "picked to pieces." Still, when one of hers made it through, the pain all seemed worthwhile, for Carol Alonso would be handed the prize she and her peers spent their lifetimes chasing.

She would be given America's next nuclear explosion.

Then would follow the heady days leading up to an underground test, Carol Alonso directing dozens of scientists and technicians towards the ironclad "shot" deadline a year away. If this meant dad and kids saw a lot less of mom, the Alonsos, a thoroughly modern family, coped. After all, they had been through this many times before.

And, too, they had something to look forward to. Once mom's creative flash had become a thermonuclear reaction causing the Nevada desert to rumble with the unleashed force of 150,000 tons of TNT, once mom's bomb finally did go off, the family would celebrate together, unwind, escape. They'd all take a nice vacation.

"We sailed together in the kingdom of Tonga. We hiked in the Himalayas. We sailed in the Caribbean several times. We went to Tahiti and sailed around it in a chartered boat," says Carol Alonso, eyes alight with memories.

"We had wonderful times together." 