THE TECHNICAL SUPPORT ORGANIZATION AT BNL IS TWENTY YEARS OLD

The Technical Support Organization was established by the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1968 at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The original idea came from a small group of scientists at BNL. The group included Willy Higinbotham, Herb Kouts, Frank Miles, Richard Dodson, and Gerhardt Friedlander. The AEC endorsed the idea of a technical support group to provide technical assistance to AEC's Office of Safeguards and Materials Management and they sent requests for expressions of interest throughout the complex. For a number of reasons, to be discussed in the paper, the Technical Support Organization was established at BNL. An early project was the Conceptual Design for Safeguarding Nuclear Material which formed the first logical and systematic description of the integration of several elements into a safeguards system for protecting nuclear materials. Many other projects were undertaken over the years. TSO today provides technical assistance to the DOE Office of Safeguards and Security, the Office of Classifica- tion and Technology Policy, and the Office of Security Evaluations. Technical support to the IAEA is provided under the Program of Technical Assistance to Agency Safeguards (PQTAS). Recent- ly, TSO began a program of technical assistance to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in the area of nuclear systems security.