projects at other labs resulted in critical comments by scientists at other labs, Sandia National Laboratories in particular. In May 1997, Sandia fusion scientist Rick Spielman publicly stated that NIF had "virtually no internal peer review on the technical issues" and that "Livermore essentially picked the panel to review themselves". A retired Sandia manager, Bob Puerifoy, was even more blunt than Spielman: "NIF is worthless ... it can't be used to maintain the stockpile, period". Ray Kidder, one of the original developers of the ICF concept at LLNL, was also highly critical. He stated in 1997 that its primary purpose was to "recruit and maintain a staff of theorists and experimentalists" and that while some of the experimental data would prove useful for weapons design, differences in the experimental setup limit their relevance. "Some of the physics is the same; but the details, 'wherein the devil lies,' are quite different. It would therefore also be wrong to assume that NIF will be able to support for the long term a staff of weapons designers and engineers with detailed design competence comparable to that of those now working at the weapons design laboratories." In 1997, Victor Reis, assistant secretary for Defense Programs within DOE and SSMP chief architect defended the program telling the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that NIF was "designed to produce, for the first time in a laboratory setting, conditions of temperature and density of matter close to those that occur in the detonation of nuclear weapons. The ability to study the behavior of matter and the transfer of energy and radiation under these conditions is key to understanding the basic physics of nuclear weapons and predicting their performance without underground nuclear testing." In 1998, two JASON panels, composed of scientific and technical experts, stated that NIF is the most scientifically valuable of all programs proposed for science-based stockpile stewardship. Despite the initial criticism, Sandia, as well as Los Alamos, supported the development of many NIF technologies, and both laboratories later became partners with NIF in the National Ignition Campaign. Construction of first unit, 1994–1998 Work on the NIF started with a single beamline demonstrator, Beamlet. Beamlet successfully operated between 1994 and 1997. It was then sent to Sandia National Laboratories as a light source in their Z machine. A full-sized demonstrator then followed, in AMPLAB, which started operations in 1997. The official groundbreaking on the main NIF