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  • 17 p. transcript, digital audio
  • 51 p. transcript, digital audio
  • PDF, MP3
  • 106 p. transcript, digital audio
Published
  • 7/​22/​2004
  • 7/​18/​2004
  • University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries
  • 11/​24/​1921
  • 1/​16/​2004
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  • English

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Title
  • York, Herbert Frank
Author
  • Palevsky, Mary
Published
  • 7/​22/​2004
  • 7/​18/​2004
  • University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries
  • 11/​24/​1921
  • 1/​16/​2004
Physical Description
  • 17 p. transcript, digital audio
  • 51 p. transcript, digital audio
  • PDF, MP3
  • 106 p. transcript, digital audio
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  • Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectUniversity of Nevada, Las VegasInterview withHerbert F. YorkJuly 22, 2004La Jolla, CaliforniaInterview Conducted ByMary Palevsky© 2007 by UNLV LibrariesOral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/​ researcher with an interviewee/​ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/​ his individual life experience.Produced by:The Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectDepartments of History and SociologyUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020Director and EditorMary PalevskyPrincipal InvestigatorsRobert Futrell, Dept. of SociologyAndrew Kirk, Dept. of HistoryThe material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/​ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education.UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1Interview with Herbert YorkJuly 22, 2004Conducted by Mary PalevskyTable of ContentsU. S. and Soviet discuss a comprehensive test ban before they agree on the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty ( NPT)1Dr. York shares his views regarding the development of the first thermonuclear device.3Radioactive fallout from nuclear testing and the health of those living in the Marshall Islands.5Discussion of how arguments against the test ban included research into masking evidence of tests and methods to evade detection.10Dr. York discusses the role of civilian contractors at the Nevada Test Site.14UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectInterview with Herbert F. YorkJuly 22, 2004 in La Jolla, CAConducted by Mary Palevsky[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1.[ Recording begins mid- conversation.]Herbert F. York: — but one of the reasons is the history of the past, so that past reasons are relevant but, of course, it has to be relevant now.Mary Palevsky: Right. So he was saying— one of the main messages I got from [ Sidney D.] Drell was that one of the main reasons for being behind the comprehensive test ban now is the Non- Proliferation Treaty [ NPT], which you talked to me about.Yes. That’s what everybody says, yes.But the NPT has been in effect for a long time.Yes, for, what is it, since 1970, is it? It had its twenty- fifth review quite some time ago.Yes. So the question is, then, the two couldn’t have always been so closely linked, because we haven’t had a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [ CTBT]. Now the concern seems to be—Oh, no, but we’ve always been in favor of one. No, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty idea goes back to the Eisenhower administration. It’s twenty years older than the NPT.Right. But it’s never been ratified, and now it seems—No, the argument for why you should have it, which is what you were discussing, predates the NPT. So the NPT has always been a reason. When I asked the Russians why were they negotiating a comprehensive test ban, when we all knew that the Russian military didn’t think it was a good idea, the answer really was that [ Andrei] Gromyko thinks it is a good idea because of the NPT, because of non- proliferation. I mean, don’t say the treaty, just the general idea. So it’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2always been that, since there’s been a non- proliferation regime. The main reason for the NPT is that. The main reason for a test ban now is the non- proliferation regime.And so the other question that sort of arose from it going back that far is— and you and I have talked about it, but I guess really Eisenhower’s importance in understanding this and his— would it be fair to say that your work in that administration, it really informed your thoughts on arms control?Oh, yes. Sure. Yes. Forever since. Oh, yes.Yes. Because I know you’ve written about this, but it’s this idea of being in the weapons world and then being in the arms control world.Yes, broadening my point of view.Yes. Because [ Richard L.] Garwin talks about that, too, in a different way that I know you know about.Oh, does he?Which is, let’s see, how does it work? And I can’t quote it exactly, but something happens in IBM [ International Business Machines] where he’s asked to be on some sort of commission, and he becomes involved with the Cambridge crowd. Having been a weapons designer and builder, then he becomes involved with people who are trying to influence policy—Oh, yes, [ Paul] Doty and [ George] Kistiakowsky and those, yes.And [ Jerome] Wiesner and that that sort of makes him aware of that whole other world.Yes, it would. I can see that. I’ve never heard him— you know, that’s news to me but it’s 100 percent plausible.Right. Because I think one can see how someone like Garwin could be so technically focused.Yes, he is.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3And when he told the story of— because I asked him, remember? A few years ago when that Bill Broad piece came out, [ William J. Broad, Teller’s War: The Top- Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception, Simon and Schuster, 1992] Garwin was the real inventor of the H- bomb, and they had a piece in the—That isn’t true, but go ahead.Right, so I asked him about that, and he told me the story of going that summer to Los Alamos and [ Edward] Teller giving him the problem, and then him building this, I guess, model of how you do it. So it isn’t true, you would say.No, no, it’s true that Teller did bring him in, but there already was— I mean he didn’t invent the H- bomb. That was Teller and [ Stanislaw] Ulam period. What Dick did was sketch up something practical, based entirely on those ideas, and I don’t think he would say anything different.He doesn’t.And then it’s also complicated by things that he may not be fully aware of. There was already a group at Los Alamos whose job was to build an H- bomb. You know, they were going ahead. I think Garwin’s work fed into that in some important way. But the story that Teller tells, [ 00: 05: 00] and that’s my main point, the credit that Teller gives to Garwin, he gives in part because he doesn’t want the other people to have any credit.Ahhh. The other people he’s been fighting with all this time?Yes, the ones who actually were responsible for doing the engineering, getting the thing built and tested, and then getting practical versions of it. There’s actually a progression of things. One is the test that they put together for Enewetak in 1952, Mike, and then there are the practical devices for building an emergency capability for delivery by B- 36s. There’s a sequence ofYork_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4things. And Teller does turn to Garwin because he doesn’t like the other people. But that doesn’t mean they’re not working on it.Got it. No, Garwin seems very strong on not wanting it to be anybody’s personalities, that people were working, and he talked to me about what his piece of that work was.Yes.Then this is really a technical question I need to ask you, related to the test site. I really don’t understand this. You’ve got testing going on at the test site, but you can’t be testing thermonuclear weapons. Are they too big to test at the test site?Oh, yes. Well, at the beginning, absolutely, yes. We did them at Enewetak.You did them there, but then as the years go by, don’t the fission weapons become less important as weapons themselves?No, no, they’ll still remain important. They remain important twice over. One is as weapons per se. I mean a large part of the stockpile is still fission weapons. I don’t know what the fractions are. But in addition to that, all thermonuclear weapons have a primary, which is a fission weapon. Then the primaries, whether you use them as weapons themselves or whether you use them as primaries for thermonuclear weapons, can be tested in Nevada. So Nevada still has a major role to play, no matter what the relative importance for the nuclear is. And furthermore, it’s just so much easier to do things in Nevada than it is to do them at Enewetak, for all kinds of reasons, including politics; because as bad as the politics of Nevada might be, it’s worse out at the Marshall Islands, ever since Bravo. But even before Bravo, because we were just cavalierly moving people around. Not many. That was what made it all seem so plausible. Yes, it’s somehow wrong, but there’s so few of them. And the cause is so great.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5Yes. Actually, Mrs. [ Dorothy] Grier mentioned to me, I guess at one point, Herb Grier in the late eighties goes out to the islands to see what the state of those people that were moved from the early test were—Yes. Yes. Gerry Johnson did, too.Maybe they did it together.Maybe. I don’t remember that.And she said she had some letters somewhere about his concerns about— I guess it had become like a welfare state out there.Oh, yes, it’s terrible. But it’s somewhat similar to everywhere in the world. I mean the western civilization destroyed some of the more primitive civilizations they found there and didn’t replace it with anything that really worked. But in the case of the Marshalls, it just turned them into a welfare state, as you say. But in terms of the American Indians, it brought them the Baby Jesus but it destroyed everything else, family relationships, et cetera. Religion, as well as politics and so on, the Christian religion is one of the main factors that destroyed the American Indians. Because with all primitive peoples, religion is connected to family relations, it’s connected to agriculture, it’s all connected together. You destroy the religion. The missionaries come in and say, Your parents are stupid. We’re here to tell you young folks the truth. Don’t pay any attention to your parents. So they destroyed everything. The American Indian, it’s a welfare state. They didn’t replace it with anything useful. They replaced it with something artificial and partial. You know, you can build a [ 00: 10: 00] civilization on Christianity. I mean the Europeans did. But when you destroy everything they’ve got and replace it just with a piece of something different, it doesn’t work. Now, in theYork_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6case of the Marshalls, there’s also religion there, you know. The missionaries were all through that place.Yes. I really don’t know about what was done for the testing except for that this population of people was moved off their—Yes, both the Bikini people and the Enewetak people. And then when the big fallout accident happened, there were some more. I don’t remember what they did. They took everybody off of the islands where there was a lot of fallout. So you had, I don’t know, three or four or five atolls. You just moved all the people into an entirely different circumstance. Then recovering from that takes hundreds of years, if ever, and it takes local leadership, which doesn’t arise.Well, it won’t arise in a welfare state in that situation.No, it doesn’t arise. The French have done it differently. In Tahiti, they’ve essentially bought the loyalty of the Tahitians. Well, the French put large amounts of money into Tahiti. Practically everybody is on what you would call “ the dole” somehow, either being employed by the government to run the welfare system for the other people or hire the school to use everything. All through Tahiti, when the French test— and this relates to tests— when the French test in the nearby atolls, the Tahitians don’t object. It’s the New Zealanders. And the Tahitians don’t object because they have it so good. The French have completely bought them off. Slight exaggeration. But I wanted to hear about Garwin. I didn’t want another interview of me.OK, so the other thing we talked about a lot, and it’s sort of still vague in my mind, so don’t hold me to it, was this question, I guess his latest book, Megawatts and Megatons [ Garwin and Georges Charpak, University of Chicago Press, 2001]— have you seen this book?Yes.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7It has some discussion of damage from fallout, illness and deaths from fallout. So we talked— I sort of picked his brain how I can begin to sort of try to sort out various claims of the various constituencies in Nevada about, you know, low- level radiation harms and all those other kinds of things, because one of the striking things on the studies, the talks I’ve had with people so far, is these narratives are so very, very different about the effects of the testing, illnesses from testing.Well, there’s enough uncertainty about the effects of radiation at very low levels. It is untestable, you know, you cannot test, you can’t do experiments about one in a million effects. You have to use theory. And so once you start using theory on something like that, instead of experiment, you can pick and choose because there are different theories. So we’re not going to resolve that. I mean the people at Three Mile Island, the people in Nevada, who want to believe the worst have some scientific basis for believing the worst.And he said that the whole question of low- level radiation, just what you’re saying, I asked him about the studies of this fellow Gofman, John Gofman.Oh, yes, they’re greatly exaggerated.What Garwin said is that there’s actually some good science in there. I guess he quotes a lot in his book. But again, I have to—Well, Gofman was a good scientist, but he became a fanatic about it.And he was at Livermore. Did you know him?Yes, I knew him very well. He did cholesterol measurements on me long, long before they were fashionable. That was one of his studies, the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease. He was doing that in the fifties. He had this nice captive group, or cooperative captive group, which I was part of. So my cholesterol measurements are fifty years old.But he was a medical doctor at Livermore.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8Yes.On this whole question of health effects, is that right?Yes. Right. Like everybody at Livermore, he had certain things he was supposed to do and other things he did on his own. I think a lot of his work about the damage from radiation was self- inspired. And then he got crosswise with some of the people there, so that it became a highly personal thing. I think he and Mike May had a major [ 00: 15: 00] falling- out. But yes, there is Gofman, he has done good work, but he is a fanatic also.Right. So that was helpful to me with Garwin, just to start to sort out how I might be able to start thinking and at least asking good questions, because one of things that happening in Nevada is you’ll have, say, DOE people saying, There are certain cancers that we know are caused by this, and if you come to us without one of those cancers, forget it. Because there’s this whole compensation program, right? Then I was talking to someone else—You see, that supersedes the scientific facts. Once you’re in court, it doesn’t matter what the science— I mean it may matter, but not very much.Right. But then I was talking to a labor guy who’s working for the Department of Labor helping to find people who may have claims, and he’s telling me, Well, no, we’ve got doctors here right now from— I think it’s Boston University or something— trying to determine what those cancers are. So apparently those cancers haven’t been identified. So, you know, you get different stories.Yes, and both stories have a lot of truth in them. I mean there are people who think they’ve done it, and there are other people who think you haven’t done it right. That’s just the way it is. It is so emotional, and litigation is such a poor way of deciding science, that it’s absolutely and permanently screwed up. I mean you’re not going to straighten it out.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9No. And then I had a DOE guy basically say, if people could make claims to private industry the way they’re making claims to the government on this, we’d have no free enterprise anymore because it’s so arbitrary, in his opinion.Well, yes, you’re right. It’s just not entirely arbitrary, but the claims are just so grossly exaggerated, and in the Pacific, and at Three Mile Island.Yes. Well, I asked Dick Garwin about this because one of the arguments is you do apparently see clusters of leukemias in Utah, members of families, a whole bunch of young children in schools. You know, someone like me, who is not an expert in any way, wants to be persuaded by some of this kind of thing.But there are just, all over, strange clusters of diseases. Now, one knows there is a connection between leukemia and radiation. By the way, you also know that if it doesn’t happen within ten years, it probably isn’t radiation connected. That I know from my own case. But, of course, some of the radiation, they might have picked up something late. So it’s something you never can be sure about, but clusters happen anyhow. You know, even the clusters involve very rare events. It isn’t as if everybody in some town had leukemia. It’s a teeny little group. And then newspapers, you can just write down the interview. They’ll go in and they’ll interview and they’ll say, Oh, yes, there’s three on the next block and there’s four on the— you know, they’re just making it up, almost.[ 00: 18: 51] End Track 2, Disc 1.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 3, Disc 1.You know, this is one of the big emotional issues that we’re looking at.And there’s a huge amount of amateurism. Everybody knows a cousin who, on the next block, there’s a cluster of eight. It’s just mostly bad information, and sorting it out would be justYork_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10extremely difficult. But it’s in the courts, and the courts are not a good way. They have an entirely different set of rules for deciding what’s right and wrong.Yes. Another thing that Garwin talked to me a little bit about, and I really don’t know enough about it, was the test ban and this problem of decoupling?Oh, yes.I sort of understand it. This was a controversy about whether you could have a test that would— you explain it to me, too.Well, it goes all the way back to the Eisenhower administration, the very first negotiations with the Russians by us, with [ Hans] Bethe involved, and others. Teller comes in with some work that has been done by the Latter brothers at the RAND Corporation. There’s a book by Teller and Latter. I don’t remember its title. But it dates from the late fifties or early sixties, and the central theme to it is this idea about decoupling. Now, it does work, up to a point. It is a major feature. However, it’s not as easy as they make it sound.And decoupling is? Because I want to sort of—Well, you explode an atomic bomb in the center of a large, spherical cavity under the ground. And when you do that, before the shock hits the walls, it’s expanded and a lot of the energy becomes somewhat diffuse. The energy doesn’t disappear, but it behaves differently from what happens when you explode a bomb in a tunnel with all this rock right around it.OK.[ Telephone rings.][ 00: 02: 15] End Track 3, Disc 1.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 4, Disc 1.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11Now, before you go any further, this is a theoretical sphere, right? Do we know how we would build this sphere?Yes, there are lots of ideas. One of them is a previous nuclear explosion, especially in a salt mine. The Russians actually have done those things. They’ve exploded nuclear weapons in salt mines with the idea of making big cavities for storing gas, they say, but it could be used for this purpose. So it’s one of these things where there is something to it. I mean you can make a complete scenario, and when you do, you come up with the fact that a nuclear explosion of fifty- x will make the same kind of long distance seismic signals as an explosion of merely x, closely coupled with the rocks. But, you know, you can’t be sure. You don’t know whether the thing is going to collapse. I mean, in other words, that makes a big signal of a different kind, the collapse of a cavity. So that it’s one of these things which does point in the direction of being able to cheat, but leaves doubts in both directions. But when it was first raised, I remember somebody, I think it was Bethe, expressed his great annoyance. Bethe expressed some kind of public annoyance about Teller going around trying to undermine everything. But they had a lot of ideas about how to evade. Teller kept inventing all kinds of ways to evade the test ban, like going behind the moon, things like that, which still come up occasionally. You can still find somebody that talks about it.Yes. I think it makes sense now. There is a piece in the Bethe collection [ The Road From Los Alamos, AIP 1991] about how you would actually do it in this salt environment.Well, there are a whole bunch of ideas, including just digging a big hole with mining machinery. There are various ways to make cavities under the ground, but the bigger they are, the more difficult, not just because there’s more work, but because they may collapse. You can’t just put a big cavity anywhere and expect it to stay there. I mean it’s an iffy proposition. York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12Yes. But this is something that kept a test ban—It was a major factor in slowing things down at all times. It keeps coming up all the time. It’s an idea that goes back to the fifties which people will bring up today. If you have a debate over a test ban, if the treaty ever reached the Congress, the opponents to the treaty would come in and say, Look, we can make these cavities. They can’t make them, actually. It’s theoretical physicists performing a somewhat complicated mining engineering job with the uncertainties that go with that.Right. So at this point, because this is from the Cold War, at this point, obviously, similar arguments are being made against the test ban, but how does that work? It’s still the Russians? This is what I don’t understand.Oh, well, what’s happened is that both the arguments against the test ban and arguments for the test ban have greatly diminished with the Cold War over. Even though it is mainly connected with proliferation, nevertheless, the end of the Cold War just brought down interest on all sides of those questions. So the argument against the test ban, people will raise the issue of whether it can be monitored, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about decoupling. But that’s not the main reason for wanting the test ban to go away. It’s because they feel that it’s inhibiting.Right. And I think that when I spoke to Teller, that was one of his main concerns about any treaty, was that it would inhibit the United States from doing what they wanted.Yes. The people who are against it— this monitoring issue is much argued but it wasn’t what motivated people. What motivated people was that they either did or didn’t want the limitation itself. [ 00: 05: 00] Then monitoring is a juicy issue to argue about because it can be endless, you see, because that has to do with seismic detection. That relates to how many seismic detectorsYork_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13you need, how close you have to be, how reliable the results are. It goes on and on. You start studying how many parts of the Soviet Union have salt beds which are big enough to put cavities in them. You know, it just never ends. The details on something like that never end. There’s always a new wrinkle. But they never are what motivates. What motivates, on the one side, is that they don’t want those inhibitions.Right. And there must be complicated reasons for that. I mean then you get to the—Oh, there are general and complicated. The general reason, which Teller typically turns to is, You’re prohibiting research that will lead we don’t know where. He didn’t argue about the bunker busters or multi- megaton weapons for frying states. He said, You’re interfering with the accumulation of knowledge, and you never know where that’s going, and you mustn’t limit it. So Teller’s main arguments were general. Lots of people argue the details about bunker busters and on and on. You find a lot on both sides. As soon as somebody says, We need them to break a deeply- buried command headquarters, somebody else says, I got a better idea. You can do that without nuclear weapons, and besides, nuclear weapons have these side effects. So that it’s rich in detail. All of these arguments are rich in detail, on both sides.Yes, because Drell talked to me about that a little bit, that if you’re going to look at the bunker buster question, there are other ways to do it, and I think he’s written— he gave me some articles.He’s written a lot of stuff. He’s one of the most prolific authors of good stuff in this area.Yes. So he handed me several things which I haven’t had time to read yet. And I guess that would take us back, and just maybe next time, to historical questions about the reasons that you do tests to begin with. There are a variety of reasons, I suppose, why you would even test. Garwin brings this up in his Drell Lecture, I guess, at CISAC [ Center for International Security and Cooperation], and I don’t have it with me.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14It’s far and away the easiest and best way of telling whether your design is right.There’s a design question, but there’s also— I’m sure some tests are done to— maybe that’s why the Russians went over the moratorium deadline— to freak out the enemy. You know, there’s lots of—Well, that’s a rare thing but, yes, I would say not so much political reasons as political considerations that do these things. Like what happened when the moratorium ended. These long series of tests on both sides that had no meaning were done for purely political reasons. But that’s part of a different world and set of arguments. The reason for doing tests is it is far and away the best and most reliable and easiest way of telling how you’re doing. If you have a teenager and you give him all sorts of lessons in driving but never put him in an automobile, you’re really not sure. Testing is a normal way of doing everything. You have to have a good reason for not testing. Well, like the trouble it makes, you know, it could be even expensive. Nuclear testing causes problems but the starting position is that they’re useful and why not do them? That’s where it starts.Right. Let me see what else I had on here. Oh, this is just a comment I thought of, and this was related to meeting Mrs. Grier yesterday, which again is something I’m getting my mind around when looking at the test site, is the major role that certain contractors played in the work of the government then and how that developed, and then how that became problematic. But that was certainly the case of EG&​ G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier], I guess, they did—Well, they did the firing and time, and doing that right is important. Everybody can do it. It’s not as if they had a unique idea. You know, every country in the world that tests weapons has somebody doing what EG&​ G did. Maybe not quite so good, you know.York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15[ 00: 10: 00] But at that time, I guess, the reason to contract out was because the expertise wasn’t sitting in the labs themselves, or—?Well, I think we could’ve done it, but it’s easier to do the contracting out. It’s sufficiently special. They could’ve done it themselves. There’s no question about that. They could’ve done it all themselves. They contracted out for convenience.Because one of the things that came up when I went to Livermore on that panel was the question, which remained unanswered among the panelists of these people who had been in the testing world, was maybe Livermore didn’t need something like EG&​ G because they had good enough engineers that they would do it themselves, and did this sort of reflect on a culture about Livermore that was different.But it’s also historical. When you start out, when you’re first starting out, like when we first tested in Nevada, suddenly you’re adding a lot of new things all at once. It’s natural to contract part of it. You do part and you contract. It’s a very natural— otherwise it’s slower. In other words, doing it themselves would’ve taken longer. They’re always in a hurry.Yes, exactly. And then these relationships build up, and then they’re long lasting relationships.I don’t think there was a contractor involved at Trinity.Well, there was some private industry involved.There were construction contractors for buildings and things, and they bought a lot of parts, but I think probably the timing circuits were their own.Yes, I think you’re right.What EGG did was just done by— you see the same pictures that are published over and over again of half a dozen people up on the tower putting things together. [ Norris] Bradbury’s always there. There’s some other pictures down in the bunker where there are a number of peopleYork_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. docUNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16whose names are important but I don’t think of them. One of them, Donald Hornig, was a guy who later was science advisor for Lyndon Johnson. As a younger person, he was there doing this. He was the one who pushed the button, or he was the one who didn’t stop it. His job is to push the stop button if [ J. Robert] Oppenheimer or anybody else says, Stop, for some reason, whatever it is, then this guy, it’s his job. I mean, they talked about it. He’s one of the people who was interviewed not long afterwards, and it’s a well- known interview of him talking about that’s his job, to press the stop button.[ 00: 12: 53] End Track 4, Disc 1.[ End of interview]York_ H_ 07222004_ ARCH. doc
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  • Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectUniversity of Nevada, Las VegasInterview withHerbert F. YorkJuly 18, 2004La Jolla, CaliforniaInterview Conducted ByMary Palevsky© 2007 by UNLV LibrariesOral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/​ researcher with an interviewee/​ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/​ his individual life experience.Produced by:The Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectDepartments of History and SociologyUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020Director and EditorMary PalevskyPrincipal InvestigatorsRobert Futrell, Dept. of SociologyAndrew Kirk, Dept. of HistoryThe material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/​ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education.UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1Interview with Herbert YorkJuly 18, 2004Conducted by Mary PalevskyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dr. York discusses academic and governmental liaisons between Soviet and American scientists. The Joint Verification Experiment, Pugwash, Dartmouth group.1Cold War politics intensified as both sides debated a test ban treaty.3Dr. York discusses elements of arguments for nuclear test bans, including fallout from Pacific tests and the issue of non- proliferation.5Dr. York makes the argument that fears about enemies nuclear capabilities exist whether or not nuclear tests are carried out9Discussion of the complexity of the relationships among nuclear testing, test bans and national security.11The early days of China’s U. N. involvement in nuclear testing issues and Dr. York’s meetings with Chinese officials in Geneva.16Discussion of Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva.20Differences between former Manhattan Project scientists who had experienced World War II and the Cold War generation of policy- makers.22President Eisenhower rejects some of Dr. York’s proposed projects for weapons development at Livermore.25Weapons laboratory scientists play key advisory roles for the military27President Eisenhower’s personal commitment to arms control led to a temporary moratorium of testing. Eisenhower and Khrushchev were “ ahead of their bureaucracies” on seeking ways out of the arms race.29The 1958 nuclear testing moratorium.30The moratorium ends in 1961 with resumption of Soviet tests in response to French testing of nuclear weapons.33Analysis of Soviet rationale for returning to nuclear testing and discussions of U. S. weapons laboratory activities during the moratorium.35Immediate and long term arguments for testing and not testing nuclear weapons38Regional concerns about nuclear proliferation.41Dr. York recalls his perception of the Soviet Union and his reactions to the end of the Cold War.43Conclusion: the post- Cold War era and views on contemporary challenges and dangers.47UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project1Interview with Herbert F. YorkJuly 18, 2004 in La Jolla, CAConducted by Mary PalevskyMary Palevsky: It would be useful to begin with some of your thoughts on the significance of the Joint Verification Experiment [ JVE] and how that worked.Herbert York: Well, it was the first chance to talk with scientists who were deeply and currently involved in the nuclear weapons program. You mentioned earlier Pugwash, and there were other things— like the Dartmouth Group and so on, academy groups, separate from Pugwash— where we did have a chance to meet with people who had been in the program, like [ Peter] Kapitza and then sometimes [ Andrei] Sakharov, [ L. A.] Artsimovich. But generally speaking, the Joint Verification Experiments were the first time that people in the American— currently in the nuclear weapons program had a chance to talk with Soviets currently in their program. And for me, when I first had a chance to meet [ Evgeni N.] Avrorin, not because of the JVE, but it was the JVE that had first brought him to this country, I met him in Washington quite separately from that. I found it just very interesting to meet somebody who came, in his case, from Chelyabinsk, the Soviet Livermore, and talked with him about it. And I already knew that they were real human beings trying to accomplish a result for what they thought was a good purpose; but I think a lot of the people at our laboratories and elsewhere, for them it was a discovery that these are just people like them who, unfortunately, had been totally isolated. In other words, Americans who knew the weapons program did occasionally travel in Russia for scientific and other meetings. Soviets in their program were totally isolated. It wasn’t a symmetrical situation at all, until after the Cold War. Well, the JVE is what opened it up, and then the end of the Cold War, it blossomed. What year was the JVE? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project2Nineteen eighty- eight.So just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union [ USSR]. It was on its way but hadn’t yet happened.Right. So is there any connection, then, between some of the earlier work that— you mentioned the Dartmouth Group. Tell me what the Dartmouth Group was, because I don’t know.Well, that was one of the half a dozen Soviet- American, or East- West bloc, discussion groups of academics and people with connections but not employed by the government at the time of the talks. The Dartmouth Group was mostly non- technical. It included David Rockefeller. It included Norman Cousins. But technical people did attend. I attended a couple of times. And it was always the same Soviets. Georgi Abratov was one of the key figures at Dartmouth. Then the American Academy. There were academy- to- academy relationships which had a strong overlap with Pugwash but they were separate from it. And it was Paul Doty, George Kistiakowsky, I can’t just remember—[ Wolfgang] Panofsky. And many of those people were the same people who were involved in Pugwash. There were others. The president of Pepsi- Cola sponsored one, if you remember that.No.Well, he was working with one of the big computer executives in this country, I think it was Computer Development Corporation or something, along with the man who was the president of Pepsi- Cola, co- sponsored frequent meetings in the Soviet Union. So there were a lot of different contacts, but they never included people from the Soviet weapons program. And that was true of Pugwash. They had some scientists, but they were not people who had any current contacts with the weapons program, or the missile program. When I finally got into this overseas as a negotiator, I looked into the question. It was obvious they had a complete different set of people, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project3except for the KGB man. He showed up both in the official negotiations and in the Pugwash meetings. The KGB man with the thin cover. You never know about those with the thick cover. But [ 00: 05: 00] I did find that a few of the people that were involved in negotiations did in fact have direct contacts with the people who were involved with Pugwash. But they were not the same people, but back in Moscow they did have some connections.So do you think in the long run, looking back, with the establishment of Pugwash and Russell- Einstein Manifesto and this whole worry, do you think there was actually work there that ended up being useful at all when the end of the Cold War came?Yes, there was, but it wasn’t so much involving the details of anything, as it just simply kept the phone lines open and kept people talking and acquainted. And there are a small number of things where, in fact, Pugwash played a role in the details. They played a role in breaking the ice for contact between Washington and Hanoi. When [ Henry] Kissinger first contacted people in Hanoi, he actually used the French Pugwash group, which were heavily Marxist. They had contacts in Hanoi and Kissinger, who had been to one Pugwash meeting, used that. So the opening contacts with Hanoi actually went through Pugwash.That’s interesting.The best communications between Israel and Russia during the half- dozen years following the Six- Day War also took place through— they were opened up in Pugwash and it was Israeli and Soviet Pugwash people who were the contacts. Pugwash didn’t provide it; it just simply was, they got together privately.Got it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project4Well, Shalheveth Freier on the Israeli side, one of the founders of Mossad, and the guy who headed the Middle East Institute in Moscow and then was also the prime minister for a while, [ Yevgeny] Primakov. Primakov and Freier formed a link.Freier was actually born in Berlin, went to Israel. When the Germans started coming across Africa, he just said, I’m not going to run again, joined the British Army, and then he was active in the Israeli terrorists or whatever, and there’s the foundation of Mossad, and the Israeli nuclear program. But he was also a Pugwash guy, and a charming guy. I got to know him and talk about a lot of these things.But then they also may have played a role in getting the idea of a ban on ABMs [ antiballistic missiles] accepted. They certainly worked at it, and we dealt with people who were not themselves decision- makers, but some had some access to them, for sure. But it was simply keeping the communications open, was the big thing. The formal communications were very poor, or virtually nonexistent at the time, and very hard to transact anything serious, even approaching serious. I mean, the formal communications were characterized by semi hostile behavior. So Pugwash played a role.But that doesn’t have a lot of connection with the test site, except that Pugwash was a hotbed of opposition to testing. The Russians who were there had really nothing to do with their testing, and really, it was ABM and things like that, that they were talking about. We know through the laboratories— this is a little bit a diversion, but following the JVE and [ 00: 10: 00] following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were a lot more contacts, laboratory- to- laboratory. And at one of the meetings, they talked about testing, or they talked about maintaining the stockpile without testing. And the Russians made it clear that they doubted the United States could maintain its stockpile without testing, but they were certain that they could UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project5not. So the Russian nuclear community was, and probably still is, much more hostile to a test ban than the American nuclear community.So maybe you can just tell me sort of what the logic of the notion of a test ban and arms control is, the idea that if you don’t test, you don’t continue to develop. What’s the whole thing?Well, let me come at it historically and then see if we can bring it right up to date. Historically, it happened because Eisenhower on this side, supported by just a few others, and Khrushchev over there supported by probably just a few others, too, really believed that something had to be done about the nuclear arms race. In general, something’s got to be done. This isn’t going anywhere where we want to go. Reliance on nuclear weapons, on an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons, for peace and security can’t be right. That’s what Eisenhower believed and it’s apparently what Khrushchev believed.So how do you do it? It just turned out to be frustrating. How do you get a handle on the bigger problem? Eisenhower proposed Open Skies, he proposed Atoms for Peace. The Russians kept coming back with this very formulaic proposal, general and complete disarmament. First we disarm, and then we negotiate inspection systems. They were both serious, they both knew we couldn’t do it, but they were miles and miles apart. And the notion of a test ban as a way into this came up because nuclear tests make such a tremendous commotion that it was felt that the best possibility of finding a limitation that would be easy to verify, the test ban was the best thing for that. So it had to do with the fact that a test ban looked more promising than anything else which you could see on the horizon. And it did, of course, get some additional support because of the fallout problem.OK, talk a little bit more about that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project6Well, there were, at the same time that Eisenhower was searching for something, the fallout accident in the Pacific happened— at the Bravo test— and that aroused a certain amount of passion in a small group of Americans. Linus Pauling is sort of the very important figure among them. But there were others. And Sakharov said the same on their side. We didn’t know it at the time. But the idea that fallout’s a serious problem and you got to do something about it, and the fallout’s from a nuclear test, got a lot of extra support from various certain elements of the public. And a lot of people, when they finally got the atmospheric test ban, a lot of people were dismayed because they said that will take away the support for a comprehensive test ban, and it did greatly decrease it. The proper reason for a test ban was its connection to the arms race. It started out in the Eisenhower time as something that looked like you could do, that was headed in the right direction, and that could be done with the least intrusive kind of inspection arrangement. Then, when we got into nonproliferation, it was seen as having a powerful connection with nonproliferation because we thought that testing was a necessary step in proliferation. Now, the Israelis have shown that it isn’t, really, but it seemed to everybody like [ 00: 15: 00] if you could forbid testing, you also were powerfully assisting the broader goal of nonproliferation. So it had that kind of rationale. It still has the nonproliferation rationale, both politically and actually— forbidding tests and making a big issue out of testing. When the Indians and the Pakistanis tested, we made a big issue out of it and so did other countries. Pugwash did. It’s probably useful. And the Israeli case is not a general case; it’s a special case.How do they do it? How does that work?Well, I think that despite what people say about how essential testing is, it isn’t. You know, everybody’s bomb worked the first time. Every single first bomb now in seven or eight countries worked without prior testing. That is, the first test worked. That became the test. The UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project7Indians didn’t do so well, but it worked anyway. And then there’s some questions about how well the first French hydrogen bomb worked, so that’s another question. But testing is a very powerful aid to developing nuclear weapons and to proliferation, and almost everywhere, people who work in nuclear weapons are agreeing on how important it is. All I’m saying is that every first bomb worked. And furthermore, one of the big issues we make in this country is how important it is to have a cadre of people with experience in weapons, and it’s one of the most discussed questions. Every first bomb in the world was made by people with no experience designing nuclear weapons. And they all worked. Now, the answer to that is— the rebuttal is, well, yes, but they weren’t so sophisticated as they are today. And that is true. Testing is what led to the very sophisticated versions, which means lightweight, slender, easy to deliver on an ICBM [ intercontinental ballistic missile]. But you could have atomic bombs and they could make a big difference in the world without having that. Now that A has sophisticated bombs, B has to have them, too, but [ if] neither of them had them, it wouldn’t haven changed much. Well, anyway, the whole question of the role of testing is an extremely difficult question in which I tend to have a somewhat isolated view of what its role is.Wouldn’t you just articulate it there, what you just said, about that it’s not really as necessary as it could be?Well, you asked me, How do the Israelis do it? And I said, Well, they did it because it isn’t really necessary. You can build reliable bombs without testing them. Now, some people would tell you that the Israelis did have a test, and maybe they did. Well, there was this incident in the deep south, where the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean come together. There was an ambiguous event, and some people think it was a test and some people think it was not. But it certainly wasn’t a test in the Nevada sense. It certainly wasn’t a highly UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project8instrumented test or anything like that. If it was a test at all, it was probably just a go- no go test to see if it worked, and it probably had a very low yield, and I don’t think it told them much. I doubt that they had a test at all, but if they did, it wasn’t the kind of test that we mean, or the Russians mean, when we talk about nuclear testing. It was a far cry from that.Also, everybody in Washington and in other countries, all the experts in the world, are deadly afraid of what Saddam Hussein might do in the way of building an atomic bomb, with no experience, no experts, none of these things which we say are absolutely essential. And yet it doesn’t matter. We’re afraid of what they might do, and for good reason. They might be able to build a bomb that works, without any tests. You know, we’re nervous about the North Korean bomb. We don’t know what to do about them, but we’re nervous about this North Korean bomb. They never tested it, they have no experts, or their [ 00: 20: 00] experts don’t have any experience. They don’t have any big computers. They don’t have any of the things which we say are absolutely essential, but we’re afraid of them.Testing allows you to develop bombs which are more elegant than you otherwise would. And if you had neither testing nor computers, I don’t know how different they would be from the World War II bombs. But they would be deliverable atomic bombs, with neither computers nor testing. Now, with computers but still no testing, you can go a very long way towards developing more sophisticated bombs. Not as far as we are, but my bottom line is, it doesn’t matter that we’re so sophisticated. It only matters in the competitive sense. If the Russians have sophisticated bombs, we have to have them, partly just for that reason. That’s a reason all by itself, is that we can’t stand the competition of not having what they have. But more than that, they’re easier to deliver, you can put more of them on a submarine. If you didn’t have the sophisticated bombs, then a typical submarine missile might only deliver four instead of twelve UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project9or sixteen or whatever it is. But the nuclear world would be virtually just as dangerous as it is today, without testing, if the test ban had gone into effect long, long ago. Well, that’s essentially what [ J. Robert] Oppenheimer and the GAC [ General Advisory Committee, Atomic Energy Commission] said way back there in 1949: We’ve got a stockpile of bombs that’s pretty good and can deter anything we need to deter. They were right. It’s only when you get sophisticated competitors that both sides have bombs that are sophisticated. If only Japan made automobiles with automatic shifts, we’d be out of business. Even though the world doesn’t need an automatic shift, it’s so desirable that you have to have it. Once somebody has it, everybody has to have it.But in the world of nuclear testing, you’re not talking about everyday consumers like you and me driving automatic cars; you’re talking about some cultures of particular interest, whether it’s the military—Yes, but everywhere in the world, not just here, and well placed. No, I mean all of the big countries have large national security establishments who are very much involved in these things and would totally disagree with what I said, you know, you have to have these weapons. See, I say that there’s nothing— talk about testing for reliability or for confidence. My view is there’s nothing we could do that would persuade any of our potential enemies that our bombs don’t work perfectly. We can even give them documents that said, We tested, here’s a photograph of it when it’s corroded. Misinformation, they’d say. There’s nothing we could do that would persuade anybody that the American stockpile isn’t totally adequate to the need. And yet the people in the nuclear establishment, including even many on JASON, say, Oh, no, you know, yes, we can get along without testing, but that’s because we have the computers. And I say, bottom line, there’s nothing we could do that would make UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project10Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Jung or Putin or anybody doubt the American stockpile. They know it works. Because they know how many tests we had. They know how good GE [ General Electric] is at building refrigerators. It’s unbelievable that the American stockpile would not work.Right. And then I would have to assume that you have to put another factor there, which was, there are so many weapons that if some didn’t work, that—Yes and no. The notion is there might be some defect we don’t know about that would make an entire class of them unreliable. Now, I don’t regard that as right, but that is the rebuttal.But see, again, from an outsider’s point of view, it’s like, but aren’t there lots of classes, so that even if this whole class went, then—[ 00: 25: 00] There’s that, too. But one peculiarity about all of this— and here I have to scold the doves a little bit, because one of the things that we could do is to make the bombs vastly more robust than they are, so that the questions like reliability and confidence would be gone forever. In principle, I’m not saying that this is what they should do, but in principle, you could build them all out of uranium so you don’t have any of the problems that go with plutonium. Probably, you could get by with no boosters, so you don’t have the tritium problem, either producing it or wondering what it’s going to do inside the bomb. Now, they would be somewhat bigger. You probably couldn’t build a ten- kiloton weapon for under five hundred or a thousands pounds, probably a thousand pounds. But you could do that, and a thousand pound bomb with ten kilotons or forty or something like that would play a role somewhat similar to what the stockpile now plays, would deter most people. Anyway, but there it’s the doves who say any purpose, including making them more robust, the laboratories simply are not allowed to redesign the bombs. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project11Oh, I see.Well, because there’s just this idea, it’s soundly based, that you can’t trust them. And so they might be telling you that’s what they’re doing, but they would be doing something else.Oh, wow.Well, there is a lot of hostility between the hawks and the doves on issues like that.Yes. When you mentioned earlier the competition and the idea of the competition between—In other words, in this world, the way we talk about testing isn’t legitimate because, given real people, not in the national security establishments of all the important countries, they don’t think that way. They would not agree. You would only get a few mavericks to agree with me. My views are regarded as quixotic.Well, that’s OK. That’s why I’m talking to you. I’ve talked to other people, too. Did you say they were legitimate or illegitimate? I didn’t understand.I don’t remember which I said. I would say the nuclear weapons establishments, the national security establishments of all the big countries are made up of people who, given their backgrounds and their responsibilities, are honestly concerned about reliability and the possible role of testing, the possible necessity for testing. It’s a natural outcome. So often when I talk to peacenik friends, they think it’s because these people are somehow ill informed and deliberately evil and so on. They’re not. They’re just human beings with certain experiences and responsibilities and friends and colleagues and information that leads them this way. And there’s not a chance in the world of getting rid of them in the current international— now I’m getting really deep— but the international system is characterized by lawlessness and chaos, and the lack of law, and anarchy. And in a world like that the people who are responsible for national security do have to use worst- case analysis. You can’t assume that everything is happy and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project12everything’s the way it ought to be. As soon as you start using worst- case analysis and realize these other guys really aren’t nice, whether it’s Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin or anybody, you overdo it. In other words, I don’t say they’re completely wrong. I just say they’re exaggerating everything. So in summary, there isn’t going to be a test ban for a long time. And proliferation’s going to slowly go on. Take Iran, where there’s a big fuss. The reason that we’re opposed to Iranian proliferation— I mean our policies towards proliferation are way more than half- informed by [ 00: 30: 00] whether we like the other guy or not, not by general ideas about proliferation. It’s OK for Israel to have atomic bombs; it’s not OK for Iran. The difference is we don’t like Iran. Well, and also in the case of Israel, in America generally, people understand the extremely delicate situation the Israelis are in, with all those enemies all everywhere. But Iran is surrounded not only by enemies but nuclear- armed enemies, with Pakistan, Israel, the Soviet Union, and the United States surrounding Iran. With nuclear weapons. Whereas the enemies of Israel don’t have nuclear weapons. So, you know, Iran is in at least as bad a situation, from an Iranian point of view, but Americans will not understand Iran. You can’t get anybody here to sympathize with Iran, because it’s a crazy country with an unreliable government. I mean, they got this funny mix of mullahs and an elected parliament that still doesn’t really work. I would say the Israeli government doesn’t work very well either, but also, and again it calls for pessimism. I don’t think anybody would do better. Take Sharon and his group. It’s hard to imagine replacing them with anybody who would do better, given the situation. Given what mothers feel about having their kids blown up on a bus. I told you one of my favorite stories here about that, the way people react. We had a case here where— well, it was the captain of— I think it was the ship that the North Koreans had captured early on. Then he retired here. And anyway, it was a captain in a famous circumstance like that. And somebody put a bomb in his UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project13wife’s car and it blew up and she managed to survive. The case has never been solved to this day.And where was this?Right by the Marriott Hotel up on La Jolla Village Drive. I happened to be in the garage at the time. I heard it. But the point is, the wife of the captain, the one in the van, was a teacher at the La Jolla Country Day School, and they fired her because she represented an attractive peril of some kind. And I talked with one of the— not a mother, but an older woman who knew people there. Of course, she said. I mean, who wouldn’t? They might come after her again, closer to the school. So not only did they fire her, but they were widely supported in that. I’m now getting back to Israel. You imagine a situation like that in La Jolla, and then it happens a hundred times in Israel, in a smaller country. The way that people are reacting there, the remarkable thing is that there’s any doves at all. There are. So that what I’m saying is that at one level of abstraction, this whole testing argument is full of holes. On the other level, I can’t imagine the country going substantially differently. I wrote Harold Brown a letter relating to all of this. It’s actually public. It never got much distributed. See, when Harold Brown became secretary of defense, he got a letter from [ Norris] Bradbury and [ Richard] Garwin— I think they wrote it to him; maybe they wrote it to somebody else— supporting a test ban— this same issue— saying, It’s OK, we don’t need it in order to maintain the stockpile adequately. Same question. This is 1977. Harold asked me, What do you think about that? And so I wrote him a letter, and the letter says— I might be able to find it, but the letter says, They’re right, technically. We do not need testing in order to maintain [ 00: 35: 00] that stockpile adequately. But the American national security system can’t cope with the uncertainties that will inevitably arise. And I think I even used words like, you know, Eventually they’ll get frantic about it UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project14and demand the resumption of testing. So the only reason we can have such a long moratorium as we’re now having is that the world’s got other worries. The nuclear issue tends to be a side issue [ when] we’re worried about terrorism in airplanes and even chemical and biological war. But in ’ 77, that was my answer to Harold, They’re right. You don’t need nuclear tests, but our defense establishment can’t cope with the uncertainties that will inevitably arise. And it was about one year after that that I was appointed to be the chief negotiator on the test ban. And the people in the arms control agency didn’t like my letter one little bit. And so there was a little bit of dismay over there in the State Department when I was appointed. Because the White House did it. The ACDA [ Arms Control and Disarmament Agency] didn’t. I think they were just informed that I was going to be the new negotiator.So the White House appoints you and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency says—They were worried. Kistiakowsky was worried also.That you would do what? That what would happen?Well, that I wouldn’t take it seriously, that I wasn’t really in favor of the test ban. My attitude was the test ban’s a good idea. I also don’t believe we can get it, but I mean it’s worth trying.So that was how you went into the negotiations, then?Yes. Well, I went in with enthusiasm and optimism. I thought, well, if that’s what [ President Jimmy] Carter wants, I’m going to try and do it because I think basically it’s a good idea. But, at the beginning and at the end, when I really thought about it in a non- enthusiasm environment, I never believed it could be done.Just from sort of realistically looking at the way people—Yes, I met frequently with Senator Alan Cranston. Some political heirs of his have a big research institute now that is constantly soliciting funds. Well, I don’t remember their name. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project15But when he was the whip in the Senate, that’s when I was the negotiator on the test ban. And I would drop in on him occasionally to get some support because it was quite evident that there’s just not much support for a test ban out there, anywhere. Brzezinski was against it. Carter and [ Cyrus] Vance were in favor of it. That’s about it. Well, and the ACDA people and, well, the doves. By that time, there was a big dove community. And so— I lost the thread. Where was I going?You were saying, let’s see, Cranston—Oh, yes, I had seen Cranston, and I would say, Test ban, let’s hear it for the test ban. Say something nice about the test ban. What about the test ban here? What are you saying on the test ban? He would pull out from his coat pocket, and we all wore jackets, even in the hot Washington, pull out this tally sheet. He is Senate leader. They had this pre- printed, all of the senators, their names, and then “ for,” “ against,” or “ uncertain.” The tally sheet wasn’t for the test ban; it was for SALT [ Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]. And that was his rebuttal to the test ban. I mean, You guys are in the way. We got this bigger problem. Don’t bug me. He didn’t say that, but I was, Let’s hear it for the test ban, and Alan Cranston would show me that there was no sure two- thirds vote ever in favor of SALT. This is before the question of— I remember Senator [ Frank] Church made this big speech about Russians and Cuba that was totally off base, and that finally put the death knell to SALT. And then they invaded Afghanistan. You know, everything went wrong. But first Church and then Afghanistan. But well before either of those, [ 00: 40: 00] Cranston was telling me, There’s no majority on SALT. There’s no sure two- thirds vote on Carter’s version of SALT. So don’t talk to me about the test ban.So when you look back at those negotiations with your—And Margaret Thatcher was against it, too. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project16Yes. So what’s your realist sort of judgment on whether that was a worthwhile thing to even be doing?Well, Winston Churchill said, Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war. And we did explore ground. We did push each other on things like inspections. And we did further develop the understanding of what the basic requirements were on each side. And furthermore, all of those things together helped to create a bureaucracy in the Soviet foreign ministry which, like all bureaucracies, developed its own self- interest. So they had a big arms control bureaucracy by the time the Cold War ended. It was the result of everything, you know, not just us.See, I had that experience with the Chinese at the very beginning of their serious involvement in these matters. When I was in Geneva negotiating the test ban [ Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty], they took their seat in the United Nations. Then they started moving in on the committees, the various committees, and they accepted a seat on the disarmament committee. It was forty countries, a committee of forty countries, which met half a year in Geneva and half a year in New York. They accepted their seat but there was no one there. Then after a few months, they send the team. Four guys show up, or three. But there’s a visitors’ gallery— they’re already there, it’s so dull, but there’s a visitors’ gallery. And I occasionally went there. See, I wasn’t part of that committee but I was [ negotiating] the test ban, which is directly related. And they came, the Chinese came, and they sat in the visitors’ gallery. And the place at the table is always there. China, it says. Right between Canada and Cuba, there’s this empty chair. And every month, the table, the whole committee would rotate one person, and there’d be a new chairman. The whole table rotated. Everybody’s in alphabetical order. And part of the alphabet UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project17is Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United Kingdom, United States. That’s the order. It ends with Zaire, obviously. The guy never knew anything about it. Mongolia, too.But anyway, the Chinese showed up. And China had made a constant stream of statements about test bans and how everybody’s doing it wrong and, We’re in favor of no first use and we’re in favor of cutting off production. They’re in favor of all these good things, no first use being one of them, but it was purely polemics. I mean, there was no thought behind it at all other than, We Chinese know which side we’re on. But I mean, there was no staff work of any kind behind these pronouncements. So now we got these three guys in Geneva that are going to take this seat, and they’re going to be obligated to discuss things. And they would never do what— the Zairians, the Mongolians, and then my experience with the Turks, just speak nonsense. The Chinese are not going to speak nonsense. It might be purely polemic but I mean they won’t say dumb things. So they need to know more than they knew, because they had come from Beijing without any staffing or any studies. And so they couldn’t ask the British. They wanted to ask somebody. They couldn’t ask anybody who already is there on the disarmament committee. There are lots of other ambassadors around in Geneva. But they weren’t about to ask the Japanese, they weren’t about to ask the British. Even more, they weren’t about to ask the Russians. So who’s left that knows anything? There’s the Americans. What American? Me. They came at their initiative to my house for three or four afternoons, seminars, with me just simply telling them everything I knew, [ 00: 45: 00] that wasn’t classified, about what had been going on in Geneva all these years, to the extent I knew. Because they trusted me. I felt that both personally and patriotically, you might say. The only people they trusted were the Americans. And among the Americans, it was, by chance, me. By accident. Well, they must’ve had a dossier or something. But I’ve always thought it was one of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project18the most heartwarming things in my life, was the fact the Chinese turned to me. When they finally got serious about arms control, they talked to me. Met at my house for this seminar. Then finally, they still don’t take their seat, but finally the deputy foreign minister comes through on some kind of a trip and he’s going to speak to the disarmament committee. So he gets up there, and of course everybody speaks their own language, he’s speaking Chinese, which I could follow where he was without understanding it. And of course there’s simultaneous translation. And not very far into it he says, This is a wonderful purpose and we’re here and we want to accomplish it, but with the Soviets here, how can anybody believe that we can really do this? Look at them, you know, and all the things, they can’t trust them, la- da- da- da- da. Anyway, not so on- and- on, just a few sentences, and the Soviet ambassador, an Armenian with the name Victor Israelyan, Victor son of Israel, is the Soviet ambassador. Bangs on his microphone, Point of order, in English, Point of order. The Canadian was in the chair, the Canadian ambassador was in the chair. And he [ Israelyan] said, Point of order is that this speech is not relevant to the purposes of this committee. I object. So the Canadian takes hardly a moment and he says, I rule the speech to be in order. And so the Chinese— and that’s where my knowing a little Chinese helped— he went back a full paragraph so we got the very same insults a second time. Israelyan again bangs his microphone, Point of order. Same point of order. And the Canadian chairman, the same thing, he ruled it in order, at which point I remember Israelyan just throwing up his hands, but not leaving. He just threw up his hands, What can you do? His point of view was the same as the Chinese: What can you do with those people? As far as the Russians were concerned, dealing with the Chinese was impossible, and vice versa. “ You couldn’t trust them. They’re erratic.” UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project19Then the very next session, they took their seat, these guys that I’d been briefing, finally took their seat. One of them, and the other two were staff or something, I don’t know if they even came, but the head of the group did. He had been to Columbia University, so that his English was great. He was there just before they cut off all relations with United States, just before the so- called liberation. But a friendly guy who knew America middling, and his wife was another Chinese student whom he’d met in America. I think two out of the three of them spoke good English. Maybe all three.That’s so interesting.Yes, it’s one of my more interesting moments, is dealing with these Chinese. The fact it was me, in my role as an American ambassador, because they trusted Americans. I came to know later, during the worst days of the Mao time, we didn’t have anybody— they didn’t have any ambassadors abroad either. There was a Chinese ambassador in Warsaw who dealt with the American ambassador in Warsaw. They had more serious conversations with us than any other country.Really?Well, they weren’t many, but there were serious conversations, pretty stilted. They were terribly polemical and political. Nevertheless, they dealt with us more seriously than anybody else. Because they think we’re dumb to be— they think we’re straightforward. The whole world does. [ 00: 50: 00] But they also think it’s a little stupid. I mean, these Americans are pretty naïve. But they trust us because we are naïve. It’s not necessarily all good. But we’re not naïve. We’re just straightforward, more so than almost anybody. That’s what George [ W.] Bush is blowing. It’s so sad about him. I don’t think he can destroy it but he’s causing a lot of harm to American’s reputation. It’s too big for him to destroy. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project20I think so. How long were you in Geneva? How did that go?Well, just over two years, just over half of the time during two years. Typically six weeks on, six weeks off for a period of— well, it really was very close to two years, because we adjourned after the Reagan election, never met again. They wanted so badly to meet, both the Russians and the Brits, partly for personal reasons.What do you mean?Well, the British ambassador was sixty, as I was that year, and he was in the Foreign Service. And they have a strict rule: you have to retire unless you’re right in the middle of some kind of a mission, and he didn’t want to retire. In the case of the Soviet deputy, he was— see, the head of the delegation was from the nuclear power world, but the deputy— who spoke beautiful English, it was part of the career in this sort of thing. He was just ready to be promoted to ambassador, just in career terms, and was sure they were going to send him to Anglophobe Africa and he didn’t want to do that. So, these personal things that are in such a strange way.That’s so interesting, though, because of course they do, but you don’t think that they do when you think about it.No. But he didn’t want to serve—Go to Africa. Just in Geneva. That’s a nice place.Actually, they didn’t. They assigned him to the UN. So he lucked out somehow.So the negotiations basically ended because Reagan comes into power?Yes, it simply— well, at first they didn’t know what to do, but they were getting very powerful advice not to proceed, that the whole thing was bad, and one of the principal advisors who played more of a role than usual, the assistant director of the Arms Control Administration for administration, was an ideologue. Now, he was also a professional, but he was absolutely UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project21against the negotiations all along, all the while they were happening. There was nothing much he could do about it, but he was very much against it.Who was this?Oh, I don’t remember his name. He’s not an important person, not a well- known person. And he didn’t become the director, but they appointed [ Eugene V.] Rostow, I think was the first one, and then it went on to [ Ronald] Lehman who’s now at Livermore, but not him. He was starting at the very end. A couple of guys who were against arms control. Oh, Lehman’s against it, too. He’ll be down here for Susan Shirk’s seminar.So then, that just ends. So the negotiations basically end?Yes.And then when the next wave comes along, how does that get picked up, or what happens there?Oh, it’s not hard to pick it up. What did happen is they did actually eventually open up a negotiation, but I forgot how they did it, and Paul Robinson was involved. But it was clear that we were willing to talk about it but we had no serious proposals.This was during the Reagan time, then.Yes. We were willing to talk about it, but I forgot how they did it now, but it was just all form and no substance. And they didn’t start up right away. When then finally did send somebody to talk about it, and I think Paul Robinson was the one that got the [ 00: 55: 00] assignment. But as I say, I’ve always known him as being somebody strongly opposed to the test ban. Well, most of the people at the labs are opposed. Some more strongly than others. It was only old- timers who were sympathetic, like Bradbury. Some of them come from the war and who had memories about how bad things can get, instead of people who are just there for whom it’s all entirely theoretical. But Carson Mark was the other important person at Los Alamos. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project22Right. And you think that really is what it is, that you get a certain distance from the war?Yes. Well, I don’t know whether it’s the war or the Manhattan Project, but you see, the people who were recruited into the Manhattan Project, like me and thousands of others, saw the whole war as a terrible thing and you’ve got to do something. For those who were recruited in 1960, somebody has persuaded them that nuclear weapons are in the best interest of the United States. It’s a complicated story. Deterrence is a complicated story. World War II was not. Many of the older people used the Germans as their rationale, especially the refugees, so the story was common that it’s vital that we should accomplish this project before the Germans do. It was not an unreasonable idea for people who weren’t up on all the latest intelligence. I often spend time with historians and others to remind them that that’s not why most people joined the project. It’s not why people in my generation joined it. We were aware of that and indeed that was an important additional reason, but doing our part to win the war was why we did it. And I think most of the people would’ve been easy to— well, when they finally did discover that the German program was, not there, Joe Rotblat, the only person who left, and the only other person I know who really had a lot of tears about it or fretting about it, was [ Robert] Wilson. Then there were a lot of others, like [ Victor] Weisskopf and your father [ Harry Palevsky] who said, Never again. But that was after the whole thing is over and everything, whereas Joe Rotblat left, Why don’t you just leave? Three or four months before they— I’ve done it, my part.Right. Yes, it’s so amazing to see how you do go from what you talked about, which is Oppenheimer and the GAC back in ’ 49, with this very limited number of weapons, to what so rapidly comes into being, and then the logic seems to be based on that new reality.We never thought there would be so many. That’s a direct quote from [ Hans] Bethe, but it’s also my own quote. Bethe says it with a certain amount of passion at the fortieth UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project23anniversary: We never thought there would be so many. And the fact is, they kept the numbers so secret that even the insiders, in the military as well as at the labs, didn’t discuss the numbers.Is that right? Because now, see, I have that book that I sent you that has all the numbers of tests, and then you see the reports in the bulletin that those guys put together of the number of weapons.When [ Robert] McNamara came in with his sort of budgetary approach to everything, and with Charlie Hitch as his comptroller, he put Charlie together making up a chart: I want to know how many there are, and I want them by categories and locations and so on. So Charlie Hitch, for the first time ever, drew up a single piece of paper that said, This is the nuclear situation. Well, the SAC [ Strategic Air Command] had its plan for all the offensive weapons, but even they ignored the others. So there was a war plan, but even that war plan— that war plan didn’t exist as an overall document, because the Army and the Navy and the Air Force each had them, totally uncoordinated, because they didn’t talk about those things. And then when McElroy and [ Thomas S.] Gates came in, they were pressed— well, Gates said to me later—[ 01: 00: 00] This is who?He was the last secretary of defense for Eisenhower. Soon after, but after, he said to me— I was asking him, Why did they prepare that first so- called SIOP? And he said, Well, Arleigh Burke and you told me that there ought to be some kind of a central plan for all of this. I don’t remember. I could have, you know, in some kind of a— I don’t even remember why I might’ve said that, but that’s what— Gates said, Arleigh Burke and you— Arleigh Burke was CNO [ Chief of Naval Operations] for the Navy, and Arleigh Burke was concerned because there was no connection between the plan for using the Polaris UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project24submarines and the plan for using the airplanes and the bombs. Well, they had done it the easy way. They’d said, OK, the Navy’s responsible for the Ukraine and southeast Russia. The Air Force is responsible for the rest of it. But there was no plan. And so anyway, then we made a plan and I saw it hadn’t much changed. I saw what they did during the Eisenhower administration. They did put together a plan, and then called it SIOP, even from the beginning.And tell me again what SIOP means.Strategic Integrated Operational Plan. The “ integrated” is the key word.But this is for nuclear weapons.Yes, all of them. How are you going to use strategic forces? We all talked about deterrence, but the question is, what do you do? And people that had been in— they’d been planning for little subcomponents, so there was no plan. And there was no accounting of the total number. Back in the Truman days, I’m told— I never was there— they would report to— the law requires that the president be briefed every year on the stockpile. And they would brief him. And they would give him two sheets of paper. One of them is the mark numbers, you know, Mark 6, 8—The different kinds of weapons.Different kinds. And then the other has these numbers that go— they would just be blanks on this, and there’s another piece of paper with the numbers. And they didn’t leave the numbers in the White House. If the president insisted, they would’ve left them, but he didn’t ask to have them. So in the president’s safe, there was a list of the stockpile models, but not the numbers of each model. It was so secret, and I remember when, in the early fifties, Johnny von Neumann at an Air Force science advisory board said, You know, these things are going to be much more numerous very soon. We’ve been thinking of them as if they were very special and very rare, and that’s not going to be the case in the future. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project25We’ve got to change the way we think of them. Now, also implying plans and also implying that you use them for uses other than extraordinary and extra special.He’s saying this?Yes, that’s what Johnny’s saying at this meeting.Now, once you have the SIOP in place, does this mean that the different services are thinking there’s pieces missing in this integrated plan and we need to fill them?Oh, yes, there’s never enough.Does that in itself drive production?Yes. Everything drives. You see, the only people who are in on everything are all hawks. You see, there are no doves there, or hardly any. There’s only people with some doubts like me or Harold Brown. Or Eisenhower might have some doubts, or Andy Goodpaster. But most people don’t. They don’t have any doubts about it. America’s right and what is there else to talk about?And is this true no matter— you must reach— this is a question but I’m saying it as a statement. Don’t you reach a point in the development of these things where the capacity of a weapon could be so awful that you would think, what’s the logic of going this far?Yes, if you’re talking about just one, it’s awful. I don’t know if I’ve written— it must be written somewhere, but when I was director of Livermore, I used to write an annual letter— I’ve told you about that— describing what we were going to do the next year. And then insofar as it involved [ 01: 05: 00] tests, it had to be approved by the president. And in one of them, in the middle of the fifties, I had a paragraph in there about in the case of— we called them small weapons and large weapons, one stage and two stage— in the case of large weapons, we were going to start down a road of developing a hundred megaton bomb. I think we were just going to go to fifty. The Russians finally did fire one. But anyway, I had it in my list of things to do. And it’s the only UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project26time, it’s a unique time, I got a call back from Washington— see, the bureaucracy was so thin in those days. I, as the director of the lab, wrote this to the Director of Military Applications. Lawrence didn’t look at it. He might have looked at it but he never said anything. I didn’t have to get anybody else’s approval. I probably did talk it over with Brown, Foster, and four or five others. Well, it was a result of a conversation, a continuing conversation. And I sent it directly to the head of Military Applications in the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC], who took it directly to the president to get the approvals he needed from the president. And he took this in, this fifty megaton bomb, and the word came right back to me, The president says they’re too big already.I got put down by the president on another case where I was being too hawkish. That was with regard to non- lethal biological and chemical weapons. There. I found this on the web. I can probably find it again. But I was briefing, it’s either the Cabinet or the Security Council, about non- lethal chemical and biological [ weapons]. I thought they were worth exploring.To make people sick but not kill them?Yes, and the president said, That’s a dumb idea. But I went on, and he said, No, we’re not going to hear about that, Dr. York. So he just shut me up, and rightly so, because the problem is it’s again you get too narrowly focused. They did have a lot of benefits, but introducing chemical and biological weapons into our war plans was a dumb idea, so [ he] didn’t want to hear, and these are just small steps in that direction. So he was right.And what, when you’re the director of Livermore, is causing you to think that, say, the fifty megaton—?Well, we took a nearly purely technical— but we were very much aware— I was very much aware and so were we— one layer down thick, I mean Johnny Foster, Harold Brown, Gerry Johnson, Edward Teller— of what the policies were, what people wanted, what the plans in general were. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project27And then I took the special point of view that taking all of that and putting it together, adding another ingredient, that the way you keep the laboratory vibrant and our substitute for basic research is to always be working on the extremes. So we always have a program going, as small as possible nuclear weapon, the largest, the slimmest, whatever, the cheapest. We just were always exploring all of those. So this business of fifty megatons— if that’s what it was, maybe it was only thirty. It was on the way to bigger. We were thinking about bigger— was just part of that. We just did that as a matter of course. These days, it’s harder because the budget is so tightly controlled. Nowadays they argue in the Congress whether or not Livermore will develop a bunker buster. You see that in the papers. Well, we would’ve just gone ahead with that, and then only when we got to the point of testing it would anybody at a very high level intervene.So is there any thought on the larger level? Is it purely technical and scientific or are you saying, We want to provide the government with as many choices as possible. Does the thinking even go that far?No, it’s more detailed than that because, right from the very start, the people at Livermore and Los Alamos were central players on all kinds of advisory committees: Air Force [ 01: 10: 00] advisory committee, Army, Navy, all the services. Then we would meet occasionally with the GAC but more often with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Those are all discussions about strategy, tactics, you know. What does America need, what are the problems we face? There would be maybe some professional strategists there, but not many, just people who knew the— there would be the generals there who ran the center for the development of this and that, and some planners; occasionally people from a place like RAND, but not usually, and of course never anybody that you would identify with the academic community. Well, there were one or two individuals. William Kaufman was one and there was another one who occasionally were UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project28there. But in the course of that, and these would be— each of us would be involved [ in] a half a dozen meetings a year. It’s a regular, ongoing thing and a major part of life, so we know from those meetings what’s wanted, or we know what the people we’re dealing with think they want. And all these committees reported direct to— we dealt with the chief of staff and with the secretary. We didn’t see them every meeting, but I mean we saw them occasionally and they’d come to stimulate us and cheer us on. So we were dealing with strategy at the very highest level. So we didn’t wait for them to— we didn’t wait for the system to tell us what was required. We already knew. Or at least, we thought we knew. So when we started talking about a fifty- megaton bomb, we already knew. We’d already been in discussion elsewhere where people said, Well, if you had a bomb so- and- so big, then you might just deliver it by boat. You’d put it in harbor, then there’s this tidal wave— I mean in other words, all those things are discussed, and whether to destroy ports is a good thing or not. But they were always bloodthirsty. There’s no question about that. There was nobody around to say, You sure you want to do something like that? I’ve come to the point where when I lecture to people, and I just do this on the campus, I make a big thing out of the fact that Eisenhower was self- starting on this. I mean his interest in arms control, not only was him, it wasn’t what the staff told him they ought to do. It was an uphill battle. He had almost nobody— he had very few people on his side, internally, until finally PSAC [ President’s Science Advisory Committee] came along.We’re at the end here—[ 01: 13: 14] End Track 2, Disk 1.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 2.So why was there a test ban? I guess that’s the place to start.Well, we had a long talk about that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project29Right. So the move to the actual— what actually happens leading up to October ’ 58.Well, Eisenhower, who had been on this track on his own, with very little support from the bureaucracy. After Sputnik a lot of scientists come in to the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and then me in the Pentagon, later, a little later, all of whom are supportive of Eisenhower’s goals for a nuclear test ban. In fact, more than supportive, many of the people came in on the president’s science advisory committee, already thought it was a good idea, were already convinced. But it took Sputnik to bring them in to a high level in the White House. Prior to that, the advisors that had been involved in the White House on nuclear matters were all nuclear hawks. There was [ Harold] Stassen, who was not a nuclear hawk, but he headed Eisenhower’s arms control team, and his principal advisors were the three guys from Livermore. Lawrence, Teller, and [ Mark] Mills, who were Stassen’s advisors, all of them dead set against a test ban— well, it was in the air— and doing what they could to forestall it. Then comes Sputnik, then comes a new set of advisors. Eisenhower’s now got the support he needs to make it happen. But it was Eisenhower’s idea.Now, around the same year, a little bit earlier, Khrushchev writes in his diary, his memoir, about how when he first reached the top, they brief him on the nuclear war plan, and he said, I couldn’t sleep that night. And then he said, I woke up the next morning and I realized, It can’t happen. And I never had trouble sleeping since. I mean that’s a typical Khrushchev kind of remark.So both Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and ahead of their bureaucracies, are moving forward on a nuclear test ban, or trying to find some way out of the nuclear arms race. They finally settle on a nuclear test ban, as I said earlier, because it was practical, seemed practical. And then there was a meeting of the President’s Science Advisory Committee at Ramey Air UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project30Force Base, just to discuss the question of a test ban. That meeting concludes that it’s in the best interests of the United States and it is probably feasible to monitor. Everywhere I’ve written, I’ve got that meeting in there.Right. Feasible to monitor.Adequately monitor. You know, you have to put in the word “ adequately,” because none of these things are perfect.And then the President’s Science Advisory Committee set up a special subcommittee chaired by Hans Bethe to study this whole question. I was a member, you know, Pete Scoville was a member. It was a fairly big committee. I think Norris Bradbury either was a member or a consultant. And so on. And so, then during the spring and summer of 1958, this idea is being talked about at home, in great depth and in much detail, more than ever before. And exactly how the diplomacy all worked, I don’t know, except to say it was largely— it was semi- formal at the most. But Eisenhower and Khrushchev began to make public statements, occasional public statements, which more and more matched each other. And finally— I followed this very closely from Washington. I was already in the Pentagon. I was the only really senior official in the Pentagon who thought the test ban was a good idea. The secretary and some of the others were happy to go along with what Eisenhower wanted, but there was no enthusiasm, except me, that I remember. Oh, there was one guy, the Secretary of the Air Force. There were a few. [ 00: 05: 00] So finally we came to understand in the late summer that there were these matched statements from both which we understood to mean no more testing after October 31 [ 1958] on either side. And so, our people did— you know much more about it than I do— did tests— were talking about getting ready for tests in Nevada. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project31Now, just to back up a little bit, to reiterate what we were talking about more informally, how did these agreements that aren’t an agreement happen? Are they statements made or letters written?You know, that I don’t really know, because it was probably both public and private, and I may even have once known the private ones but I’ve simply forgotten them. But essentially, they were not negotiated in any formal sense. There’s no signed— there’s nothing signed. It’s just each leader has said, We’re going to stop testing on October 31 if you do, and that sort of thing. And there must be public statements, and there are probably private statements. There was no formal negotiation. We called it a moratorium, not a treaty. That was its name. It means you stop. And Eisenhower’s reasoning was that this will create the necessary political climate for negotiating a treaty. The objective was a treaty, but we were having a hell of a time getting together on anything in those days, and so one of the goals of the test moratorium was to create a climate in which we could negotiate a test ban treaty.And you mentioned how close it was on our side and the difficulties with the weather. In Russia— and here again, it must be in the papers, in the newspapers— the Russians tested, I think, November 1, and then again, November 3. And I remember from the White House national security perspective how puzzled and really sort of disheartened and nervous everybody was. We thought there was going to be a moratorium and here they are, there’s two tests. But even so, we figured maybe something’s out of control, some special thing. And of course, they were so secretive. They never told us anything. Khrushchev could have said, We’ve got this problem. We need these two more tests. But they didn’t, as far as I know. Maybe you can find that in the papers, too. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project32I can find that out, but my question that arises here is, now, how do we know that they’ve tested? Did they announce it or do we—?Oh, no. We had very close track on what they were doing. In those days, it was in the atmosphere, and so that was how. It was just easy to tell. They might’ve been underground, but I don’t think they were doing underground tests. No, we were quite confident in what we knew about their testing program. That’s why we’re so confident that it was probably monitored. We’d been monitoring all the time. Closely. And then there was other kinds of intelligence, too. So I mean we knew what was going on.And then finally they did stop, just three days late, and we stayed stopped, and so the negotiations started in Geneva. Lawrence was one of the people there. Harold Brown was there. Harold was there as a consultant. He was much younger than the others. But Lawrence was there. I’m pretty sure Bethe was there. The American chairman was James Fiske from Bell Laboratories, and he was vice chair of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. So the new President’s Science Advisory Committee is much involved, but Brown and Lawrence were in addition to that, and there were some others.And they tried to get serious negotiations going to work out a test ban, and the issue always was, from the American side, creating an adequate monitoring means. And our people always worried about it, and the political pressure is tremendous to make sure that you don’t give [ 00: 10: 00] the store away. I mean you ineffective test ban types, make sure that you really can monitor this. And they were arguing about the size of the table. It just got nowhere. It was very frustrating. And it got frustrating at the talks. The Russians began to imply that they were fed up with it. And many of the Americans were, but not the ones in the delegation, but many of the support people and at home. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project33And finally, after fourteen months, and as I say, this will all be in the papers, President Eisenhower in December of ’ 59, because it starts in ’ 58, so now we’re December of ’ 59, he says, There’s been plenty of time and they’re just not serious. I don’t know what he said exactly but, We’re not bound by this moratorium anymore. So the first person to denounce the moratorium was President Eisenhower. He said that we won’t begin testing without giving notice. But he didn’t say what the notice was. I mean there was no discussion. There was no treaty. There was no paper anywhere. It’s all done by matched statements, and now the leader of one of the states has said, It’s off. We’re not bound. But we won’t begin testing without giving notice. That was the important point. Within a very short time, and this is in the press, too, Khrushchev met, I’m pretty sure it was with an Argentine newspaperman. You know, it’s just so unlikely. And he says, Well, in that case, we’re not bound either. But we won’t begin testing unless the West does so first.So for another year— this is now December- January, ’ 59-’ 60— the moratorium is still there in the physical sense. Nobody’s testing weapons. And then finally, and I’m pretty sure it’s early ’ 60, but again you can find— early ’ 61, right after Kennedy came in, I think— the Russians start a big test series. Well, no, first the French test. And Khrushchev said, That’s testing by the West. Which had been his condition for resuming. We said, Well, but you know, we don’t have anything to do with that. But Khrushchev said, That’s testing by the West. And to what extent it was alibied or what extent he thought we were in cahoots, who knows? He could’ve easily thought both. He was a paranoid type also. But at any rate, the French testing ended the moratorium. It’s now over. Eisenhower says, We won’t test without notice. Khrushchev says, We won’t test unless the West does, so now the West has tested. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project34So there we sat in early 1961. Sometime after that, and the date’s of some importance because it has to do with whether the Russians were already planning things or whether they had enough time to gin up a series, but sometime after that they started testing nuclear weapons. Kennedy was in office. Gerry Johnson was in the Pentagon as the special assistant for nuclear weapons to McNamara. And I remember Gerry telling me that when it first happened, everybody is amazed and disheartened, didn’t know what to do. Kennedy says specifically, We’re going to wait and see what happens next. Well, “ next” is a day or two later there’s another one, and another and another. So after the second Soviet test, Kennedy orders resumption of testing by the United States. And what they did is not very far from what the Russians did. They just went out to the stockpile and elsewhere, got a whole bunch of devices, started testing them in Nevada, and they weren’t real tests in any sense. Our tests were simply in response to theirs.We know in retrospect a little bit about Khrushchev’s reasoning, in addition to the French and feeling they were no longer bound. Because [ Igor] Kurchatov and Sakharov, totally unknown to American intelligence, tried to intervene and asked Khrushchev specifically not to resume testing. And especially, If you do resume testing, don’t include this big one that is already under development, a hundred- megaton bomb, because of the fallout. I mean that was Sakharov’s concern. He had two concerns: the political concern about continuing the moratorium, and then a narrower concern about the huge bomb and all the fallout. In Khrushchev’s diary, or memoir, and in Sakharov’s diary, this meeting is very [ 00: 15: 00] explicitly discussed, and it’s clear from each— they both say the same thing, but in different words. Sakharov is concerned about safety and development, and Khrushchev says, You know, you’re a brilliant scientist but you don’t know politics. That’s my business and I can tell you that Americans only understand strength. It’s a standard argument over here: the Russians only understand strength. But that’s what Khrushchev told to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project35Sakharov as his reason for going ahead with the tests. They’d already had some bad relations, you know, to begin. When Kennedy became president, there were sparks between Kennedy and Khrushchev. So the notion that the Americans only understand strength and you’ve got to put them in their place was not unreasonable, from Khrushchev’s point of view. There are plenty of people here with the exact same view today, not just in 1961.And so it all ended. And we had this enormous series. They tested the biggest bomb ever tested, but in a clean version, so it was fifty- eight megatons instead of a hundred, the Russian bomb, and it had proportionally less fallout. I’ll just throw out a number. It produced only 5 percent as much radioactive debris as it would’ve had if it had been the full- scale non- clean hundred megaton. So Sakharov was able to sell the idea of not being quite so free and easy with fallout. And so it ended.And then Kennedy was— by that time, the idea of a test ban was something that people had gotten used to and liked, so Kennedy did get right back to work with Khrushchev, trying to work out a test— getting it going again, preferably a total test ban. And when it finally became evident we couldn’t have a total test ban, they decided instead to have this ban on atmospheric testing in outer space and oceans, allowing underground. That was the compromise that made it possible to have a test ban. It also eliminated one of the reasons for supporting a test ban, because once they were underground and out of the atmosphere, the fallout problem was a million times different.But people continued, you know. By that time, there was enough of a constituency for test ban, so the idea never died. It continued from then on, until the present day. But the notion that the Russians— when the Russians ended the moratorium, which in the physical sense they did, after having made it clear that they were no longer bound by it, and Eisenhower the same— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project36it’s common to say that it’s another example of Russian perfidy. The Russians did plenty of perfidious things, but ending the moratorium of ’ 58 to ’ 61 was not one of them. But it’s common to believe that they’re the ones who broke the— that in doing so, they broke solemn agreements and so on. They broke no agreements. By that time, the only political basis was that in each country, there were some people who favored the test ban, but there was no international basis for the test ban.Right. And a test ban is just that. You’re not going to test. Both sides must’ve been developing things during that period. Or what was the approach here?Well, yes, the Livermore was very active, the Los Alamos was very active, developing things, coming up with new ideas, and the people coming up with those ideas obviously hoped that some time they’d get a chance to check them out. By this time, Johnny Foster was the head of the Livermore lab. He [ had] always been opposed to a test ban. And Teller was there as an ever more eminent eminence grise.And what was— not to speak for him, but Foster’s philosophy was—Brown was in the Pentagon by then.What’s Foster’s objection to the test ban?Oh, it was all during the Cold War days. It was a common one: You simply can’t trust the Russians. It’s ridiculous to deal with them on something that’s vital to us. The common view, Teller, Richard Perle, Johnny Foster, and all that group of intellectuals, is that the Russians wouldn’t even talk to you if they didn’t know in advance how they [ 00: 20: 00] were going to cheat and take advantage of you. The Russians are never serious about things like that. It’s always a trap. That’s Teller’s view. That’s Perle’s view. It’s Foster’s view. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project37Now, was it true in the case at the end of the moratorium, because they come back with this giant bomb, is the argument that they used it as time to catch up? I’ve heard that argument.That’s what many people say. I believe they did exactly what we did. The laboratories kept on working and coming up with new ideas, but it was not a case of perfidy. And I think one of the best evidences of that is that the laboratory leadership, Kurchatov and Sakharov, tried to stop the resumption of testing. The people in immediate charge of the program were not engaged in some kind of special perfidy. You can’t be 100 percent sure about what they were doing. And it’s a case today where the Russian laboratory people think the test ban’s a bum idea, same as most of our laboratory people do. So there’s more parallels than differences, and it’s been a common statement that they used it to “ gain a lap on us”; that’s the phrase that’s used. “ Gain a lap on us.” And the guy who used that, or the guy who invented it— well, Johnny may use it, but there’s another guy at Livermore. He was secretary of the Air Force for a while, and he was an advisor in either the Nixon or the Reagan time. That’s what he always says. It was deliberate. They did it in order to gain a lap. Now, they didn’t gain a lap. That whole picture of gaining a lap is not right to start with. Now, if it was perfidious and they were working, knowing that they were going to test soon, maybe they were doing more than we did.But we were working seriously on atomic bombs. Teller and Foster were both of them extremely concerned about the harmful effects, on American nuclear weapons science, of this moratorium. So they did everything they could to keep the program lively and moving forward. The laboratories never thought it was right and always fought against it. So what did they do? Probably the same things the Russians did. You know, maybe a little different. The Russians knew when the testing was going to start, and it’s hard to say. How long before the tests started in Russia did they say, Let’s go. And I don’t think we know. It was long enough so that they UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project38could change the hundred megaton ordinary bomb into a clean bomb, however long that took. It may not have taken long, but I suspect it was many, many months. And so, first of all, there’s not much of a time difference. It gives them some small advantage. But more than that, our laboratory people were working just as vigorously on future nuclear weapons as they were. Maybe better. Probably better. So there’s no “ gaining a lap.” On the other hand, that’s an easy- to- sell idea.Yes. When you talk about the labs, it always brings up the question, again for someone outside the system, the easy answer is the labs were engaged in this to keep themselves in business. Now, to be critical from the other side, that the reason Foster and Teller, they want to keep doing this because— or the Los Alamos people, parallel at the time. I don’t [ know] who was running Los Alamos in the fifties.[ Harold] Agnew, probably, at the later time.Later. I think Agnew comes in ’ 70 but—You’re right. You’re right. It was still Bradbury. Bradbury right up to Agnew. Twenty- five years.And then people say that that’s unfair, to just characterize the labs, complicated by the lab competition, that they’re doing these things so that they can keep doing what they like to do.Well, but you see, they would say both of those reasons are the same. Keeping the laboratories healthy and doing what’s necessary for national security, this is the same thing. It’s not as if, is it really this reason or is it really the other reason. It’s only one reason. They believe in what they’re doing, very deeply. I would say very desperately. They really have a lot of trouble with things like the test ban and why do people— you see, it’s a fundamental trouble. It’s not just some crazies. They’re not even crazy. It’s that the reasons for having a test ban have to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project39[ 00: 25: 00] do with its long- term effect on the arms race, which might someday blow up in our faces. The immediate reason for a test is this particular device is going into the stockpile and needs to be tested. So you’ve got an immediate reason for testing and you’ve got some long- term or other abstract reason for not testing. And it always loses, but that’s just general with people. I’ve sometimes lectured on this with students, and I point out the more general case, Eisenhower supported nuclear weapons because they were the short- run solution to the problem whose name is the Soviet threat. But they were themselves a problem for the long run. Whenever you have this conflict between what’s good for the short run and what’s good for the long run, the long run loses. And my favorite examples were [ that] there would be no undesired pregnancies if people always put the long run ahead of the short run. There’d be no overweight people, and then I pat my stomach when I give this speech. I don’t want to lay it all on the girls. But that’s true. That’s human behavior, and it’s serious. There wouldn’t be any unwanted pregnancies if we didn’t put the short run ahead of the long run. And there wouldn’t be any overweight people, because every meal is good, it tastes good, it’s fun to eat. Yes, in the long run, being fat is bad. So it’s a perfectly normal human behavior, this business. It’s one of the many reasons, I believe, we can’t get a test ban. The short- term reasons for testing, which may also be uncertain, but a reason for testing which says, we’re not sure about the safety and reliability of the stockpile. The stockpile that exists right there today. You know, that’s one argument. On the other side is this argument, well, there’s the proliferation and the arms race and it’s a long- run danger. That argument can’t win enough people. It’s like my argument about red tape, even with security. All these security rules have created a situation in which people find them onerous, and so they cheat or they get careless. You can’t persuade anybody that that’s right. I mean it’s the same with red tape generally. Every rule, every regulation that we UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project40have, whether it’s the labs or the university or the city parks, has a good purpose. It’s just when you put them all together that they’re onerous. And nobody cares about that. What they care about is the immediate rule. We want car safety so we want a law about seatbelts. I mean don’t tell us— people don’t obey the seatbelt law because to many people it’s onerous. Like the speed limits. But they expect everybody to obey the security rules, which have exactly the same kind of origin and administration as the speed laws do. It’s bureaucrats making judgments about what’s safe, and telling you what you can do.And so if you’re a scientist on the ground, wanting to get something accomplished, you may find a security rule that gets in your way or—Yes, you often do. Oh, no one even knows what the rules are. I mean there are thousands and thousands of pages of rules. So there are experts who know these rules, and they have to be in high positions so that the rules won’t be violated by accident. But it’s not just the rules about security. It’s the whole system of red tape, the fact that society is now oriented towards perfection. You can’t get it, but I mean it’s oriented that way. And the nuclear weapons, you can’t just be fairly sure that— if you think they’re serious and that you might actually use them and that using them will make the difference between living and dying, you know, survival of the republic, why then, why shouldn’t you test them? What’s wrong with being extra sure? If you don’t believe that foregoing tests has any value—Right, if you don’t believe that foregoing tests has any intrinsic value—[ 00: 30: 00] Even with respect to proliferation. You see, the role of the test ban is still sort of not central. It’s been made to look central, but it really isn’t. What’s important when country X approaches the test ban, the question’s not whether the United States is testing nuclear weapons, though that’s what everyone fusses about. The question is, What about my neighbors, and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project41do they have them or don’t they? You put on a lot of diplomatic argument, the Swedes and others, about the Americans and the Russians testing and not caring and so on, but that’s not what drives proliferation anywhere. Even the argument that it supports proliferation is a little too general for most people. Well, for people who want to test, it’s way over the edge. It was in Russia, too.So you’re saying it’s more regional now. It’s not about the superpowers. It’s about whether Pakistan has them—It’s always been. That is, the proliferation. The reason for signing the nonproliferation treaty was the best way to make sure your neighbors don’t go nuclear. For everybody. And once the neighbor went, and in the case of Iran, they’re surround by nuclear, hostile nuclear states, or at least potentially hostile. None of them like each other. Who can rely on the Soviet Union? Why are there American weapons there, or are there American weapons there in the Gulf? Who knows? We won’t say.Nuclear weapons, you mean.Well, there are ships, and the United States refuses to say, generally, whether weapons are on ships. That’s our problem with New Zealand. The New Zealanders say that, You’ve got to tell us there’s no nuclear weapons on your ships or we won’t let them in. We say, Well, there aren’t any, but we’re not going to tell you. We have a right to have them and you can’t tell us. So even though we don’t have them, we won’t say so. Well, the Israelis do that. You know, they have this— what do they call it? Deliberate ambiguity, I think is the word. That’s their nuclear policy. They simply refuse to say anything. We do have and we don’t have and we’re not saying. Deliberate ambiguity. And the United States does that. And Helen Clark, she’s the prime minister of New Zealand, and a real UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project42peacenik. We have a mutual friend we haven’t seen in years, but it was a sociology student, an older student, here, that I was part thesis advisor. And she was always convinced that— she wouldn’t argue with me but she was convinced that— she would tell me, that all the pregnancies or nearly all the pregnancies of Rongelap [ Republic of the Marshall Islands] lead to miscarriages or deformed fetuses. She believed all of that.This is from Bravo, now.Yes. All from Bravo. And she’s a good friend of Helen Clark, and I think Helen Clark believes all those things. No, maybe not. She was just in the papers recently. There was some big issue— oh, it was with the Israelis and the stealing— did you read about that, or were you traveling?I don’t know.Israeli intelligence tried to steal some New Zealand passports in New Zealand.No, I didn’t see that.And they refused to apologize. They’d come on the radio and say, We’re sorry about that, but they wouldn’t apologize in any more forms. So they’ve broken off relations. Well, but it would be in New Zealand where it happened. They’re in jail, these two Israeli agents, and they’re maybe going to be— well, the New Zealanders may let them go in a few years, but they’re in jail for now. But the Israelis won’t apologize. Well, it’s just like us. We won’t tell the New Zealanders we don’t have them [ nuclear weapons] on our ships. We don’t have to do that, for anybody.Right. But I want to go back to the test ban a little bit because during that era, say the moratorium era and then into the Kennedy and into your negotiations for Carter, the point of all this is to stop the arms race with the Russians, right? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project43That’s the main point. Later comes the question of proliferation.[ 00: 35: 00] All right, but let’s just say with the first one, then the Soviet Union falls.Well, thirty years later.Right. So when you put in perspective this activity that’s been going on, from my recollections of the Cold War, no one’s envisioning what actually did happen. We’re all envisioning, or trying to envision, what a possible outcome can be, and another outcome—Well, I was one of the optimists because I never envisioned what happened. I always believed it would come out OK.Did you?And I know other people who did, too. I didn’t know how it would come out. But, I think many of the Cold War liberals, you know, We’re going to work our way out of this somehow. And the more I traveled there, the more I realized the Soviet system is fundamentally rotten. I mean, there is so much cynicism, so much hypocrisy in the Soviet political society. I didn’t know it was going to collapse, but— they went from terror to corruption fairly fast, in less than a decade, as the main means of running the country. But other people felt that way. I know from talking with Kapitza before it was over, that’s how he felt. And in fact, Marshal [ Sergei] Akhromeyev. He was chief of the Soviet general staff. He visited our chiefs. They have a good, long, frank talk after it’s all over with [ Admiral William J.] Crowe, Akhromeyev and Crowe. And I happened to have a good talk with Crowe afterwards, soon after he had his talk with Akhromeyev. And he said Akhromeyev said, I was sure that it would never be a nuclear war. Well, I was afraid of it, always was preparing for it, but I was sure there’d never be a nuclear war. He said, I thought what would happen is, we’d get half and you’d get half. And what happened? You got it all, and we got nothing. So he was bitter and disillusioned by the end of the Cold War, as many of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project44them were. But he thought it would work out, too. Kapitza said, We’re going to reach the time when our leadership will consist of well- educated people. We started with people with no education at all, and it worked out the way you would guess. You know, Stalin and so on. Now, he says, our leadership is made up of people educated in engineering. It’s a lot better, he said. But next generation, they’re going to be educated in the humanities and social sciences and the law, and it’ll be the same here as it is anywhere else, as it is in the West. So there was optimism.Well, nearly every high level Soviet official I know who knew that things had been terror, with the revolution and the camps and the gulag and the starvation, they all felt, That’s bad luck. It’ll work out. It’s the right way to go. And by “ the right way to go,” they didn’t mean, We’re going to conquer the United States. They meant, We’re going to win the political war for the hearts and minds. So there was a lot of optimism. It’s not so surprising that Akhromeyev — you see, if you didn’t believe it was going to work out, you would be inclined to go the way von Neumann and many other went, which was to say, Look, the longer we wait for this war, the worse the result. The only sensible thing is to go soon, and if that means starting it, that means starting it. For our own good. And, you know, I thought about that much because I knew people who said that. It was all based on their pessimistic assumption that it would not come out, that Stalin and his colleagues had created the perfect system that would last forever. We just had the idea of Hitler’s thousand- year Reich, which didn’t work, but no, with these Communists, you know, it works. But, in fact, it didn’t work. That’s what I was saying. My visits to Russia persuaded me not very clearly and in no details, but it wasn’t going to work.[ 00: 40: 00] Because you saw the corruption. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project45Well, not just corruption. I didn’t see much corruption. I saw huge amounts of privilege, but I thought of it as hypocrisy rather than corruption. And then, Sakharov used that word. “ Cynicism” was another word. He said, When I came to realize how cynical the leadership was, that’s when I started thinking about, It can’t be right. That’s what Sakharov, in his memoirs, says. And what stimulated him, there’s always some detail, was the fact that the construction workers at the nuclear facilities were all prisoners. Treated like prisoners. Twenty years for having said something not quite proper. Now, he didn’t talk with them, but he knew— I don’t know what he knew. And he used the word “ cynicism,” which others did. It was a word that was used in those days. I saw it everywhere. You go to an airport, and I remember one time, there was a bunch of pamphlets in English about the Soviet republics: the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. And they all told about how it was a voluntary association. They can leave anytime they want. And it was just so obvious there wasn’t a word of truth in it. They could leave anytime they want. Now actually, they didn’t want to leave, but that’s because the control of any discussion was so complete, something like that has to sort of stir up and get going. It never had a chance to get that first little vortex. So the Armenians were not in favor of separating. They just never talked about it.But I remember a meeting with a group from the Latvian Supreme Soviet. And the prime minister was at this meeting. And we’re a bunch of foreigners from the Dartmouth Group. I mentioned it earlier. And he starts telling us the history of Latvia and how the Russians came finally and at long last and saved them from their Fascist leaders, and how grateful they were to the Russians for doing that. Another time, I heard an Armenian say, We owe our lives and everything we have to the great Russian people. And of course, with the Turks on their backs, in the case of Armenia, there could be a lot of truth in it. But the Latvians, it’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project46utterly false. Well, I mean they did have fascistic rulers. They were common in Europe in those days. They did have authoritarian rulers. Whether they were Fascists is a different story.So you don’t foresee what actually happened, but I guess I’m trying to get an understanding of how all the energy of, say, test ban negotiations or whatever, arms control kinds of things then sort of make sense when you look back and see what actually happened. The Soviet Union falls. And we said earlier— I don’t know if we have it on the CD or not— that the Joint Verification Experiment comes at the end. Things were already beginning to unravel, so it gives something there.Well, by that time, Brezhnev was dead. And the next three people, it was back and forth. The guy who succeeded Brezhnev was Andropov. And Andropov was, in certain dimensions, liberal. I mean because he was head of the KGB, people often said, Boy, how could you have somebody who… That’s precisely what— he was in a position to know how bad things were and how dishonest the whole thing was. So he was for opening— Berea was for opening up, too. One of the most nasty persons they had. Probably was responsible for killing many. Was responsible. But wanted to let East Germany go, to get rid of that problem. So, you know, there were these things that started moving towards a better world. And Gorbachev, among other [ 00: 45: 00] things, realized that the world was indeed, did indeed, feel threatened by the Soviet military. That they were behaving in a way that made it plausible for the Americans and others to believe there was a serious problem there. And you know, as well, his ideas about reforming the Communist Party and so on.So, I guess, what would be the logic of, say, a test ban now when the whole atmosphere is totally changed? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project47Well, it’s simply that the test ban, per se, doesn’t have a lot of logic, but nonproliferation does. And we haven’t really made— we haven’t moved near far enough in handling proliferation. I think, and so do some others, and the very hard liners agree with me, it’s won the case, that proliferation should be forbidden, not just— see, the treaty is voluntary. You agree not to proliferate. Well, I believe we’ve got to get to the point where it would be forbidden, and then you’ve got to be prepared to enforce this ban.How do you do that?Well, my answer— and I can’t get it much more complicated— is Gulf War I. You simply get, at the United Nations level, a consensus to that effect. And you get them organized, not with their own troops but with the kind of coalition we had in the first Gulf War, where you just simply threaten action with such certainty that the threat works. You got to get to that point. That does imply that if the threat doesn’t work, you have to do something. You have to take real military action. Well, to put it more generally, the international system needs more of both law and order. You’ve got to get to that.So when the United States says at the beginning of the Gulf War II, sounds like that would be a rationale for what the Bush administration did—It was, but it wasn’t collective. I don’t really object to what they did. I say the style, the vigilantism, is itself so wrong that even thought the result was good, it was a bad thing. Because vigilantism is wrong, even when it produces a good result.The good result being—?Getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and really being satisfied there are no weapons of mass destruction. You see, both sides are still playing terrible games with weapons of mass destruction. It was entirely reasonable to believe they had chemical weapons. My own beliefs at UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project48the time were, they’re nowhere in the nuclear field. They most likely have chemical weapons. They’d had them. They are storable. Even this fake intelligence was plausible, you know, these wagons, these mobile chemistry labs. It could be. I always regard it as iffy on biological because they’re much more sophisticated, and there are storage problems. You can’t just make them and put them away for fifteen years and then use them. You can’t do that reliably with chemicals either, but it’s much easier. So I believed, and most of the people I know believe, who know something about these things, have access, that they did have chemical weapons. They probably, maybe, they had biological, but they just didn’t have anything nuclear. So it was a surprise that they didn’t have chemical but chemical weapons, is it right to call them weapons of mass destruction? So that if they ever find a chemical weapon, maybe they will. They won’t really be able to say, See? We were right.Yes. But you are saying that there needs to be multinational law and order, like you just said.Yes. The international system is totally anarchistic and virtually lawless. There are international laws, but really very little. You catch a guy, Milosevic or something, you know, you have laws about treaty, you have laws about trade. But it’s basically lawless. And [ 00: 50: 00] one of the conundrums that people are raising, which I really don’t know how you cope with, is to say that, Well, OK, let’s the United States back off and stop intervening. Will that really be better? You know, with all these lawless regimes all over the world, it’s hard to believe it would necessarily be better. But I’m just convinced absolutely that it must be collective, and that it’s not easy. It won’t be easy to get collective action. That’s just too bad. You have to take what you can get. All the jawboning and stuff like that, you have to do it. And if nobody goes along, then you don’t do anything. But if you can get— you got to get more than the British but not necessarily everybody, but you got to get an obvious majority. You got to get some of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project49China, Russia, and India, you got to get some of the Europeans other than Britain, and you got to get some Third World going with you, but not everybody. The first coalition was good enough. We had Syrians and we had Egyptians. We had French as well as British. We had fewer allies, but they were genuine. This time it is all coercion. All phony.Yes. But the problem that you see, the proliferation problem, remains. Even though in the short run we’ve taken this action, you’re saying it’s something that’s looming out there in nuclear—Yes, and a test ban contributes to holding the lid on. It’s not as clear as it used to be and it’s not as effective as it was, but I’m in favor of a test ban but I always put a “ but” after it, but the world, the situation, really is different, and you guys are arguing from the same basis. The basis of your arguments as seriously you wrote it is even more from the point of view of ABM. The argument about refraining from ABM because of the way it has stimulated an arms race spiral, that is really obsolete. You hear it because people say, Well, if we develop an ABM, then the Chinese will increase their missiles. I don’t believe that for a minute.You don’t.No, they’re so expensive. The Chinese will decide whether or not to build more missiles on grounds that don’t have anything to do. You know, maybe they’ll have an argument ten years from now and some guys is listing a series of twenty reasons and there’s the U. S. ABMs. But it’ll never be the reason that they expand. So, where did they go?I don’t know.[ 00: 53: 10] End Track 2, Disk 2.[ End of interview]
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  • Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectUniversity of Nevada, Las VegasInterview withHerbert F. YorkJanuary 16, 2004La Jolla, CaliforniaInterview Conducted ByMary Palevsky© 2007 by UNLV LibrariesOral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/​ researcher with an interviewee/​ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/​ his individual life experience.Produced by:The Nevada Test Site Oral History ProjectDepartments of History and SociologyUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020Director and EditorMary PalevskyPrincipal InvestigatorsRobert Futrell, Dept. of SociologyAndrew Kirk, Dept. of HistoryThe material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/​ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education.UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1Interview with Herbert F. YorkJanuary 16, 2004Conducted by Mary PalevskyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dr. York discusses involvement with the Manhattan Project and his graduate studies with Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley.1Dr. York compares the personalities and political views of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence.4In 1943, Lawrence sent Dr. York was part of large team to work at the uranium separation facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Manhattan Project Site Y- 12, which created highly enriched uranium.5Explanation of uranium separation process. Recollections of June 1945 when the word came down to stop production and he knew “ the end was coming.” What he knew about the significance of his work at the time.7Discussion of secrecy on the Manhattan Project what he and other young scientists knew and discussed about the project’s work and achievements, code words used.8Local rumors about the work being done at Oak Ridge14The working environment at Oak Ridge was shaped by segregation and the presence of women workers, his sensitivity to race issues due to Mohawk ancestry.15Dr. York reflects on his family heritage and race issues in the U. S.16Discussion of women workers at Oak Ridge.20After World War II, Dr. York returned to Berkeley to complete his Ph. D.22After the first Soviet atomic test in 1949 E. O. Lawrence sent him and Hugh Bradner to Los Alamos, involvement with Operation Greenhouse diagnostic experiments, witnessed Ranger test ( NTS) from top of Berkeley hills. ( 1951),24Dr. York discusses his reactions to viewing Greenhouse atmospheric test, his view of nuclear tests as “ spectacle” and that policymakers must understand the weapons’ destructive power by studying photographs of Hiroshima.28First discussions with Ernest Lawrence about creating a second nuclear weapons laboratory30Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller debate the merits of creating a second weapons laboratory and York’s preliminary activities in that regard.32Dr. York describes setting up Livermore lab in 1952.34Norris Bradbury’s early complaints about Livermore activities and Teller’s and Lawrence’s reasons for wanting a second weapons laboratory.35Dr. York worked with Duane Sewell on Livermore organization and logistics, his views of Teller at the time and later.37Dr. York’s policy of working on extremes at Livermore.39 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2Discussion of competition between Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories and nature of some differences in weapons development.41Dr. York discusses work at the Nevada Test Site, relationship among the labs, AEC, University of California and contractors.42The scientists early concerns about radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests at the NTS43Dr. York explains the tasks involved with designing and managing a nuclear test, Gerald Johnson ( Livermore) and Jack Clark ( Los Alamos).45All nuclear testing was subject to President Eisenhower’s approval, role military and governmental decision- makers. Dr. York explains this process and describes how the laboratories generally avoided Cold War political issues and focused instead on applied science.46Dr. York discusses first Livermore tests at the NTS, Ruth and Ray ( 1953).50Discussion of first Livermore test in the Pacific, Koon ( 1954).52General discussion of various Pacific tests and experiences while there.55Nevada tests, Bill Ogle and the “ Pogo staff.”58Dr. York disagrees with the notion that the Nevada Test Site was a “ battleground” of the Cold War” rather than an extension of key work carried out at the national laboratories.60Discuss fallout from Bravo test and trip with Lawrence to investigate impacts on Wotho Atoll, Marshall Islands.61Discussion of the origins of the Plowshare program for peaceful applications of nuclear energy.63Dr. York recalls naming the Rover program ( later the Nuclear Rocket Development Program) and discusses the Soviet version of Plowshare.65Dr. York discusses exchanges between of Soviet and American scientists including the Joint Verification Experiments and his own interactions with Soviet scientists.69Visits to Eisenhower in Palm Springs and views on the military- industrial complex721980 visits with Soviet physicist Peter Kapitza in Geneva and views about the coming end of the Cold War.74Security concerns, debates about the nuclear test ban, role as Carter’s chief negotiator in Geneva.77The shock of the first Soviet atomic bomb and of Sputnik.81The U2 incident and Eisenhower and Khrushchev at Camp David.82Dr. York describes experiences in the defense department85Dr. York discusses the postdoctoral fellowship established in his name at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.89Dr. York shares memories of visiting the Las Vegas Strip while he was working at the Nevada Test Site.93Dr. York discusses the early mathematical careers of John von Neumann and Theodore von Kármán, as well as the development of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.95Conclusion: the interview concludes with more personal memories of the Las Vegas Strip and the Nevada Test Site.99UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1Interview with Herbert F. YorkJanuary 16, 2004 in La Jolla, CAConducted by Mary Palevsky[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1.Mary Palevsky: You and I have spoken a lot about the Manhattan Project over the years.Herbert York: Yes.I realized, as I was preparing for this interview, that we’ve never really talked that much about Ernest Lawrence. And when I was thinking and reading in Race to Oblivion [ A Participant’s View of the Arms Race, by Herbert F. York, Simon and Schuster, 1970] and remembering how Lawrence was your teacher, you refer to yourself in Race to Oblivion as his last student, and how he was so instrumental in many things in your early career.Yes.I wondered if you would be interested in talking a little bit about Lawrence, when you met him and just what your remembrances of him are sort of chronologically.It’s important to note that I was twenty years younger and I had this student relation with him, almost a father- son relation. I was a favorite of his, not to be too shy about it, and what he liked about me was my simple side. I came from a simple family and so forth, with no pretensions either bred in or developed, and he liked that sort of thing. But he himself was fairly pompous and was very bossy and it turned off a lot of people. It made for some difficult relations with him and others, but I didn’t mind. He would do things like tell me that, You’re as good as anybody. I was mentioning Russian scientists and, You’re as good as anybody in Russia, he says, but don’t let that go to your head. Or if I would ask for something which he thought I shouldn’t have, he would say, You know, Herb, if you talk like that, people UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2will think you’re a spoiled brat, so it was that kind of relationship. But of course, the positive part of it was that I worked a lot at night because I could get the big cyclotron at night and the faculty— I was a graduate student— the faculty members preferred to work in the daytime, so I got the odd hours. But Lawrence was one of these people, rare people who just loved to visit his laboratory empire over and over and over again. And so, more or less once a week I’d be there working in the evening or maybe a Saturday or Sunday— also time available— and he would come by and ask, What are you doing? And I would talk about what I [ was] doing, the mechanics of it, how the counters were working, where the beam was and all of that, and I’d talk about the theoretical basis of the experiments that I was doing, and then he would just beam and go away and then a week later he’d come by again. So the fact I worked at night was important, and then I took the odd hours. But I’d already become quite familiar with him at Oak Ridge.But anyway the first time I met him I was looking forward to meeting him. I knew about him and I was— one of the odd characteristics of my whole life, including my youth, is that I’ve always just glommed on to the superlatives— and I knew that Lawrence had a Nobel Prize, he’d invented the cyclotron, and I was just very eager to meet him. And I came to California because they had the redwood trees and the Sierra and, you know, the longest five- foot bookshelves in the world and things like that—I get it.— but I was that way as a boy so I was just looking forward to meeting Lawrence and I was awed by him before I ever saw him. Well, he’s big, both tall and a little bit heavy. And I remember that we had [ a] weekly colloquium, maybe even more often than weekly, at Berkeley, in a room that had— well, it was in an unfinished room. Everything was, you know, you could see all the two- UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3by- fours and so on, and there were just a bunch of these folding chairs arranged in a geometrical array, blackboard and a podium in front. All of us, maybe thirty or forty people gathered, and after we were all there this big guy came in from the back— the entrance was at the back— and he was heavy, you could feel the floor bounce. And he beamed at everybody as he came in, smiled, and went up to the front, to the right, where there was an easy chair. All the rest of us in these— he sat in this big easy chair and sort of presided, but very gently; he was obviously the presiding officer but he didn’t intervene very often. And I remember wondering about the easy chair, but he felt he needed to explain it at some time later to me, and that was he had a bad back, but I mean it’s the usual thing.But that was my first meeting with him and from then on it was— I just enjoyed being there with him. I enjoyed the laboratory and I enjoyed Lawrence.[ 00: 05: 17] So this was, remind me, this was 19—This was May of 1943.So the war was on.During the war, we were engaged in separating uranium isotopes by what was called the electromagnetic process.And you were doing that there at Berkeley.We had some prototype devices, two of them. There were two of them between what became eventually the one- eighty- four- inch magnet, between the jaws of that magnet. There were two teams. One was headed by Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s younger brother, and that’s the team I joined. And that meant a great deal to me too. Frank Oppenheimer was a wonderfully empathetic person. And the other team, as I remember, was headed by Duane Sewell, who we mentioned earlier. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4Yes, we’ll talk about him later a little bit.So that’s when I first met Duane.So then— you mentioned the name Oppenheimer. I just want to ask you about this because it sort of fits with something you said. When I interviewed the late Robert Wilson, also a student of Lawrence’s, he mentioned that Lawrence was much more down- to- earth and less sort of cerebral—Yes, comparing the two men, yes.— and that the students were aware of that. Was that something that was just— Wilson is noticing or was there sort of like camps?Well, you see, by the time I arrived Oppenheimer was already gone—That’s right.— so I didn’t meet the senior. I did eventually meet the senior Oppenheimer two years later, after the war was over, and I was a student and he was a professor at Berkeley.Right.And yes, they were very different that way. You know, Oppenheimer liked music and sophistication and political theories and— whereas Lawrence was very disdainful of political theories. He wasn’t too sure about physical theories either and had this— he was from a rural college. Lawrence’s father had been the president of a small church- related college in one of the Dakotas. And that showed, and I think that showed in him. He had very different politics. I didn’t see a lot of the politics of either of them but what I did see was very different. Oppenheimer’s view, you know, was a sophisticated view. Oppenheimer was proud to be. He knew he was sophisticated and proud of it. And Lawrence, on the other hand, if something— when McCarthy came along and the oath came along, Lawrence’s attitude, Well, if you have UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about, why make such a fuss? And, OK, sign the oath if you don’t— if you don’t have anything to hide there’s no problem. So Lawrence took that kind of an attitude, whereas Oppenheimer would take a much more complicated attitude.[ 00: 08: 16] Yes. So you were with Lawrence—Starting in 1943.Starting in 1943, and then did he send you to Oak Ridge?Yes.How did that work that you got to Oak Ridge?Well, I went to Oak Ridge during the war as part of a big team, a team of, I don’t know, fifty or sixty people; yes, Lawrence sent us there. What had happened, it was an unexpected result— it hadn’t been planned originally. What had happened is that they set up these so- called racetracks, which were gangs of big magnets and electromagnetic separators, like a hundred in a group, kind of laid out in an oval called racetracks, and each one operated separately from a big console that controlled the electric power that made the machines work. And they had hired a lot of people from Appalachia, mostly women in their late teens— all the boys were off to war or dodging the draft or whatever— so they hired these squads of young women, all of them wearing blue jumpers, I remember very well— but they couldn’t get the units started. I mean, they would do what they were told to do: to turn it on. And it turns out that devices of that type— mixed high voltage and magnetic fields— they’re very much subject to breaking down and sparking, and they couldn’t get it started. So Lawrence essentially sent sixty of us young people back there to get it started. And so as soon as we arrived we went to these racetracks, these various consoles, power control consoles, and we started turning them on, with these girls watching us, and after a few weeks we had it all running. And then they took it over and then they did better than we did, but UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6I’m not at all surprised— so utterly strange, these girls had never seen anything like it. I mean, you know, totally novel. Well, the world hadn’t seen anything like it. But we’d grown up with it because we were in the development— making the prototypes at Berkeley. So that’s why we went. And then we stayed. I don’t know why it was we didn’t come home. Well, I think some of the older people did. But most of the young people I think were probably all men.Yes.A few had wives, but mostly just single men got this thing going. Then we stayed, and then I became involved in improving it. In particular my job had to do with trimming the beam in such a way as to improve the quality of the product, that is, the percentage of U- 235. And I determined fairly early that it was a tradeoff between quality and quantity, but I knew it only as a function of making the stuff. I didn’t know what the tradeoff was at the other end, I mean, in making bombs.In using it, yes.So I remember asking Lawrence, I said, I could do this better if you would tell me what the tradeoff is between quality and quantity; and he went back and forth to Los Alamos, monthly or weekly, very frequently, Berkeley, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge. And so the next time he came by he had a little tiny piece of paper, like two- by- three from a pad, and on there were two columns of numbers, maybe four numbers in each column—Wow!— and they essentially were the purity in one column and the other column, the critical mass. Now whether it was the critical mass really or fudged, I really don’t remember anymore. But anyway I took those numbers, turned them into a curve, and then adjusted the way the beam was trimmed in order to— my purpose was to increase the number of critical masses slightly. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7[ 00: 12: 41] Right. So just in sort of layperson’s terms, you’ve got this beam going through the cyclotron—Yes, through the magnetic field.Through the magnetic field which causes you—?Well, the two different isotopes are— the magnetic field— they’re ions of uranium— which are going through the magnetic field. And the magnetic field acts on both of them, but one of them is lighter than the other so that it moves in a different way. The lighter one moves in a tighter circle, but it’s very little less. I mean the receiver that these all went into was 180 degrees away and that meant, I forget, but four feet or five feet or something. And the U- 235 arrived slightly closer to the source than the other one, but they overlapped, I mean, for a lot of reasons, like air, the residual air, and other imperfections in the magnet and so on. They overlapped, so it wasn’t pure U- 235 here and pure U- 238 there. They overlapped. And so the idea was to take out as much U- 235 as you could while— and you could get more by the closer you moved towards the U- 238, the more you drew from it. But, you know, the question is where do you— how do you do that? So the problem was to adjust the trimming mechanisms that separated the two isotopes at the far end of the machine. And do that in a way that maximized the number of critical masses. I really don’t know whether I did any good or not but my purpose was to do what would ultimately make the Hiroshima bomb more powerful, but I don’t know whether I did. That was my purpose.[ 00: 14: 48] And one of my memories from that time, special memories, is that in June of 1945, after we’d been there already about fifteen months, sixteen months, the word came down to stop everything. But to go back a little bit, the uranium was processed in batches and it took a few weeks or a month to process a batch. You put it in the machine, you’d run the machine for UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8about a month till the source material was exhausted. And so stopping and taking everything out at once was inefficient. But it’s clear what it meant. I still remember a little shiver. It meant that we were finished. And in some ways— I still didn’t know the details but I knew we were finished in June. June of 1945, I knew the end was coming.I think we’ve talked about this before but I don’t know if I’ve ever asked you this specific question. How much at that point [ did you know?] You knew you were making a bomb?Oh yes, I knew quite a bit. In fact, I knew more than the typical young physicist at Oak Ridge because of my contacts with Lawrence and because of this particular question of what to do, how to trim it, and because I was involved at the very end of the physical process. I was, so to speak, the last physicist to touch it before it went to Los Alamos. Now there was a chemist in between and he’d take this stuff and convert it into something which they would then ship off to Los Alamos. And then I had several friends that were sort of clued in to— heard that— we gossiped a lot. So I knew very little about Los Alamos. I didn’t know what a critical mass was, I mean how much it was. I only knew that by June 1945 we had one or maybe it was two. I didn’t know that either, in June of ‘ 45. I just knew that somehow we were ready, done. And I knew about the plutonium project.You did?Yes. That, though, I figured out— well, not all by myself. But just gossiping. One person had heard— it’s like the intelligence people say, you know, Loose lips sink ships. It works. We, this small group of us, figured out the plutonium project illicitly, just from things we heard— and were able to put it together. And then when I had somehow put it together, somehow in talking with Lawrence when it was evident that I knew nearly all of it, then he probably told me some more. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9So someone had heard about what— had you known—?No, we just got little bits and pieces at a time.Had you known— would you have known about the chain reaction and things like that?No, not— I did eventually.Eventually.But no, I was not privy to it at all, even though there was a reactor at Oak Ridge, I didn’t know what it was. It was the X- 10. I never knew what was there. X- 10. But the very first thing I heard that started us thinking, this small group, was that Bohr had been briefed about what we were doing at Y- 12. I didn’t— I never saw him. I don’t know if he came or not, but I— but he had been briefed and he said how surprised he was that, They’re doing it by the brute force method and I never thought that would work, I didn’t think that would work. Now, he could’ve meant a lot of things.Right.But we began [ to ask]— What does he mean? And then somebody casually or by accident or somebody over here, somebody mentions “ forty- nine.” And it becomes clear somehow in another single sentence that that’s an element. Well, there is no element forty- nine. What it— well, there is, but I mean it hadn’t anything to do with anything. I don’t even know what it is. But it meant ninety- four, element ninety- four, and it wasn’t reversed, it was the four from ninety- four and the nine from 239, which was the molecular weight of this— plutonium that made weapons- grade. So we heard that. I don’t remember what else we heard, but it just was a sentence at a time. And then, you know, us smart young bucks trying to figure out what it is. And figuring it out.Yes. Interesting. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10Or half figuring it out, and then getting far enough so that somebody confirmed it, somebody who knew. [ 00: 19: 47] But it was so little- known that we at Oak Ridge, at Y- 12, about six months before the end of the war, the diffusion plant, K- 25— we starting working first, then the diffusion plant started working, and it turned out that the most efficient thing to do to get the war ended was to run the diffusion plant up to about 15 percent U- 235 concentration and then take that stuff and bring it over to Y- 12 and process it through the second—OK.See, we had a two- stage process. And to bring it over and put it into our second stage. So I was involved in preparing for that. And the president of Tennessee Eastman Company, whom I’d somehow gotten to know— he knew that I was there and somehow that I knew things— he came and suggested to me, he says, You know, we should get the stuff from this plant in Washington, Hanford, and we should run that through, too. Now that doesn’t— that’s wrong, you know. I mean, I would never—.Well, but you see, he thought it was another uranium plant. So the executive head of the Y- 12 plant didn’t know about plutonium.Right.And because it was me— I forgot how I handled it, but I made it clear that wouldn’t be a good idea. And he— I didn’t say anything about why. I didn’t even hint about why. But somehow or other I was persuasive and so he dropped the subject. Of course, maybe he brought it up with Lawrence, I wouldn’t know necessarily. But he brought it up with me early on.Do you remember, or was there a time when Lawrence told you— or who told you what was happening at Oak Ridge or that whole piece of it, that you knew what you were working on, or did you piece that together too? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11Well, it was just the normal— at Los Alamos, everybody was clued into everything. At places like Berkeley and Columbia, and there were only a couple of other places.Right.Chicago. All the physicists were clued in with respect to the purpose of the project. The general project, and also the specific project. Right from the day I walked in, somebody told me that we are separating uranium isotopes with these electromagnetic devices.At Berkeley.Yes, at Berkeley, in order to build an atomic bomb. It was perfectly— for most of us, we knew that before we got there. Again you had to figure it out, nobody told you. But here’s Lawrence, the nuclear laboratory at Berkeley, and that’s all I knew about him. And then there’s these people at Columbia that were recruiting for the same project; and the nuclear physicist Vicki Weisskopf was at Rochester and left a few months before I did. He would go to Chicago all the time. I didn’t know he was going to Los Alamos but we— you know, it’s just obvious, and furthermore fission was discovered in the open just before the war. So we got fission, we got nuclear physics, we got cyclotrons, we got Weisskopf and Lawrence, I mean, what else? What else?Yes. Yes.It would’ve been amazing if it wasn’t an atomic bomb, so we all knew that without talking about it. And then on the secrecy side, one of the first things that was made clear is you don’t say the word “ uranium” or anything like that. And that was so strong, I mean, this prohibition about saying the word “ uranium,” we never, never did it.At Berkeley and at Oak Ridge.And at Oak Ridge. Never said it. We called it—“ R” was the mixture of U- 235 and 238 we were producing, and that was made out of “ X” and “ Y”. “ X” was U- 235, “ Y” was U- 238— and, you UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12know, at the laboratory in Berkeley there were some meters that measured the current and said “ aluminium,” you know.Interesting.So the point is, when at the end of the war, the day after Hiroshima the newspapers published accounts of the project and used the word “ uranium,” it made you shudder. Seeing “ uranium,” I mean that word had just been forbidden.That’s interesting.We called it— if we needed a name for the metal, we called it tube alloy.Tube alloy.A name that had been given by Churchill. Winston Churchill named it. Now you call oralloy the stuff that’s produced at Oak Ridge. But we— that wasn’t at that time. But Churchill—That’s all right, the Brits had that, right.At the very beginning of the project the question is, What are they doing? And he said, We’re developing alloys for tubes.That’s where it came from?Yes. It was— the word “ tube” was the operation - “ tube” and “ alloy.” I mean—Interesting. Well, “ tube” has a “ u” in it, I guess.And the idea somehow that it had to do with tanks, that they needed special tubing for tanks. But it was— we never, just never, said that word. I think even when we were gossiping about what might— what are they doing at Hanford? We still didn’t use any— except for “ forty- nine.” Somehow since we had heard that illicitly it didn’t bother [ us]— somehow we didn’t— and since it was a code itself, you know, forty- nine, what’s that?[ 00: 25: 35] Right. Right. Well, what’s interesting about that, maybe related to a later conversation we’ll have about secrecy, is just how that begins to work on such a simple level; UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13groups of people have agreements about what can and can’t be said. And just almost your, I don’t want to say emotional, but your gut reaction when the secret is finally said it’s— how powerful that is.Yes, and to be perfectly frank, I don’t remember anybody objecting. There may have been some older people who did, but I was young and naïve and I didn’t object.Yes. Interesting.But when we went to Oak Ridge, we had a fake address for our parents to write to. They wrote— before that, when I was in Berkeley, we just had ordinary correspondence, but once I went to Oak Ridge they used a fake address.Like a P. O. box, like they did at Los Alamos?Yes, but it was at Berkeley, so the letters went to Berkeley and then to Oak Ridge. And— well, it was a room number in the one where they had “ Donner Laboratory.” Like Room 600, which is in a four- story, a three- story building, and then the mail was forwarded. There was never— it was not censored. At Los Alamos it was— but not at Oak Ridge. And people could come visit. My father came and visited me twice.Really?At least maybe just once, but I think twice. Yes, he came once and I went to visit him several times.So what, he visited the town or—?Yes. It might’ve been after the war, during a tiny little interval because we sat up on a hill and we looked at the Y- 12 plant and I didn’t tell him— I didn’t violate any rules. But somehow or other— people noticed at Oak Ridge that everything’s coming in, nothing’s going out, so the question is, What are they doing there? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14Yes, that’s interesting.There were these wonderful rumors; They were digging a hole to China, things like that.Well, that’s so interesting though because it’s the war and people are producing things for the war and you’re not producing anything.Yes, nothing’s coming out. Well, stuff was coming out. They didn’t know it was four or five grams at a time and the guy was taking it with him in a railroad car to Los Alamos.What would it actually be put in, the uranium?Well, I have— for some reason I remember a thing that looks like an ordinary tin, a round thing this big around [ demonstrating size], metal, with a cap on it, but you know, I’m not at all sure that I have that right. The stuff that I saw, I saw it just before that, when they were processing it. That was impressive for a different reason because they had like a cake tin, a container that was rectangular like this [ demonstrating] and an inch- and- a- half or so on high, with heavy walls like a sixteenth of an inch or maybe an eighth of an inch, all platinum.Wow!Big piece of platinum. [ 00: 28: 48] And the coils— this is all well- known but maybe you’ve forgotten— the coils for the magnets were so big and so heavy and involved so much metal that they made them out of silver instead of copper because copper was in big demand for other electrical machinery and the silver was all lying there backing up the currency in West Point, wasn’t doing anything.Oh, I didn’t know that story.So that they made the coils for the Oak Ridge machines out of pure silver, and the coils were made out of straps and my memory of them is, they’re a little over an inch wide and around a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15quarter of an inch thick. So that’s that kind of heavy stuff. And that’s all wound around these cores to make these magnets. And in places it was exposed. You could see this all this silver.Amazing.But another thing now that I’m just reminiscing, and one thing reminds me of another— I was very much aware of this big contradiction because here we were doing the most exotic thing in the world. I mean these machines unlike anything that had ever been built before, separating isotopes, never been done before. But on every floor of these factories there were four toilets: colored men, white men, colored women, white women— and there were always at least two drinking fountains, colored water and white water. I always thought the colored water was orange and blue. But there it was. There was the primitive America right there superimposed— and there were black people around the project because Tennessee had a lot. Appalachia had fewer, a smaller percentage, than a lot of the South, but there they were. I remember I knew one girl a little better than the others and we dated once or twice, not much. And I remember in her presence— she invited me home somehow and I referred to a black person as “ Mac” and they just didn’t— that just went over like a lead balloon.I don’t understand.Well, they probably called him “ Uncle,” you know, I don’t know what they would call him— but the use of a familiar sort of name was not accepted.Oh, that’s interesting.[ 00: 31: 12] Well, I accepted it but I was sensitive to it. I was always a little ahead of my family and the crowd on issues like race but— well, partly because I’d been aware since I was a small boy that I was partly Indian. I’m partly Mohawk.I never knew that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16And— well, people do. Some people do and some people don’t but— so I knew from the library and things like that, I knew very early about the evil that had been done to the Indians. It was only a tiny step from that to understanding slavery in a way that none of my neighbors did. So I was much more sensitive to— the family wasn’t, it was just me.I was going to say, it sounds like you—Just me.— got the fact and then you read about it—Yes.— and then you learned about it.My grandfather simply said, my mother was a squaw. Actually his— my grandmother was a squaw. Well, they had deliberately— they had done everything they could to assimilate. They just walked in 1845 when it became impossible— around the time of Jackson, who’s thought of as a great democrat, but he’s the guy who finally stuck it to the Indians. A popular thing to do. Then my people, the men, left. They left the women behind. I always wondered what happened. They were a family of ten, and the two oldest men, my great- grandfather and his father just walked away from it and stopped being Indians. They were half- breeds so they could do that. And furthermore it’s always been a contradictory and ambivalent policy that Indians should assimilate, unlike blacks who were forbidden to assimilate. Indians were supposed to assimilate. And so I don’t know how— I don’t know any of the details, just that they walked away from it in 1845.And so you knew that and then you went and found out what that was.I knew it but not very well and so that got me. I read about Indians and I don’t know exactly how things— but then that segued immediately into, very quickly into blacks. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17And the whole race question.And so my family was very religious. My mother [ was] an avid Episcopalian. And so I thought in those days that God just couldn’t allow this. I mean, there was going to be retribution. He wouldn’t allow it. And of course I still— now I don’t think God would. God’s not going to— but there still may be retribution.Another kind of retribution.Yes. But anyway—You mean like social unrest.Yes, like the kind of turmoil— actually I think that the race problems are going to work out here.In this country.Yes, and of course the big change that I was totally unaware of is the really important minority from the point of view of issues, the Chicanos. Here in California it’s, you know, every year they vote more. And there are bigger— the reason the University of California is building a campus in Merced and the reason that’s not being cut out in this budget crisis is because the Chicanos won’t have it. They’re behind the campus in Merced. The whole Central Valley is heavily Mexican.So you can see I’m partly Indian, if you look at my nose and eyes.Your cheekbones.And also there’s my hair, you see. Indians don’t get pattern baldness. They keep the color longer, and I suppose that’s what—Yes, when you said it I thought, well, I guess that you do have those really high cheekbones.Yes, and from— and not just that, my eyes and— I remember driving with a Navajo on the reservation one day and he’s looking at me and he says, Your nose is just like mine. You have a small hooked nose. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 18[ 00: 35: 02] Now, not to get too far off that track, but what were you doing driving with an Indian on the Navajo Reservation?Oh, I was just visiting. You know, it does all tie together. My interest involves myself, but in this particular instance he is the representative of the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] or the Department of Energy [ DOE], working with the Navajo, and he’s employed by the Livermore Laboratory. I mean, that’s how I came to know him.What’s his name?His name is Gray, Steve Gray.Is he still involved with the DOE?Yes, he’s actually— he probably is in Washington. He was at least half- time in Washington, and he— it has to do with uranium ore and with mine tailings. But it has a positive side. They’ve tried to find a way to support research related to science and reservation matters, as in for example health as it might be related to uranium. Or energy.Like nuclear medicine, you mean?Energy— yes, maybe. It could be anything that they— it hasn’t worked out particularly well but they keep trying. And both Livermore and Los Alamos have a lot of work [ they] do take a positive attitude towards trying to work with Indians. And why Steve Gray was at Livermore instead of Los Alamos, I don’t quite know. But anyway, I don’t know if you know, one of the big family names— the Smiths of the Navajo are the Begays. And his mother- in- law is a Begay. And she never did learn English. We met her when she was about eighty. She says, at least the way— the translation of what she said is that all white men are evil. So I mean they’re— anyway, I was visiting. When I got the Fermi Award he was there.So that was just a couple of years ago. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 19Yes, I guess it was aught- aught [ 2000]. I think so.Two thousand.I had leukemia in aught- one [ 2001] so it was the year before that.That’s right, it was before that. “ Aught- aught,” I haven’t heard that in a long time.So I was lying there just at the very end of my chemo— when— looking at television, it’s one of the things for us to do. By that time I was sufficiently sick so that I could read but it was hard. Energy. It was an energy problem. But I could watch television and there are these airplanes over and over and over and over again, flying into the World Trade Center. It was that day [ September 11, 2001].It was that day.That morning. I woke up to it. And Sybil [ Dr. York’s wife] came in regularly every day after breakfast. But there was already a big deal.Wow.The people there knew that I had been involved in the whole national security and nuclear question, so that I became the instant guru in my part of the hospital. I didn’t know anything about it but I mean they kept—You’re a guru wherever you go, Herb, so even in the hospital—— kept asking me about it.Yes. Well, I have to say, maybe we’ll have time today, when I was thinking sort of about the Cold War and where we are now, I actually did have some questions for you about any relationship you see, but I think we’ll move—Livermore is much involved. Los Alamos too. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 20[ 00: 39: 00] Yes. You know, so— but I’d like to get there chronologically. The two things that you said that I want just a clarification on. All these women who were working at Oak Ridge, these would’ve been white women then, though.Oh yes.And were there hundreds of them?There were, as we said, colored people there, but as always they were cleaning the floor. They wouldn’t be used for anything else.So they would be in the area where the bathrooms were because they were doing the cleaning.That’s why we had these four bathrooms.Right. Were there hundreds of women?A matrix.Pardon?A matrix of color and sex, a little square matrix.That’s scary.No, it’s life, you know, that’s how it is. I remember being in the Pentagon. You know, I was in there for years. And I often went around, and I went— there’s a niche where they have all of the names of all the Medal of Honor winners, and several others. And I remember reading through them and there’d be Indian Scout Joe, you know, or there were medals given at times when there was no war except against the Indians. So I was very much aware that in the Pentagon these people were being honored for killing Indians. I never said anything to anybody about it.But you thought about it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 21Yes. I had a different— see, my view is that the Great White Father in Washington is not trustworthy either, but he’s more trustworthy than any other Great White Father anywhere else. In the world.Including in China where he may not be so white, but you can’t trust anybody. Now of course the Founding Fathers had the same view, from a somewhat different perspective. People would say, We’re worried about biological warfare.And they would say that, We would never do that.And then I’d say, well, they used to give the Indians blankets that had been previously used by people with measles and smallpox. It was the sort of thing I knew in those days. It’s the furthest I would ever go with it.OK, I see what you’re saying.Well, how about— we haven’t been to the test site.We’re going to go. We’re going to the test site now. We’re going to go, but the only little question I had about Oak Ridge was when you said all the women in the blue jumpers.Yes.Were these women in the tens, in the hundreds, I mean, how—?They were in the many hundreds.Many hundreds.I suppose for the whole plant there might have been thousands because— well, there had to be thousands.OK. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 22There’s something like fourteen hundred of these consoles, and there are three shifts. And if you have a three- shift operation it takes four people per shift, because you have all the holidays and weekends and occasions.Right.So there had to be six thousand of them running these machines. And they came in by buses. They didn’t live— we lived on the site, but these plant operators came in. I know this one particular girl, she was a twin. I have no memory of her name at all, but somehow I went to their house. It was a nice middle- class house. I don’t think I’m making this up.[ 00: 43: 30] No, I’m sure you’re not. OK, so how are we going to get to the test site? We’ve talked a lot about the war and the use of the bomb, so we won’t have that conversation here today. Then after the war, will you go back to Berkeley?Yes, with Lawrence. See, he’d made a point of that, that he would take me back to Berkeley with him.And so you stayed at Oak Ridge a little bit after the war and then—?Yes, but only weeks. I mean it was just a case of cleaning up, unlike the poor GIs who often stayed for many months. It was just days or weeks. I don’t remember exactly.And then had you— so what happens at Berkeley and then sort of how does that lead to—?Well, I went to Berkeley. I became a graduate student, one of about two hundred in Physics. Nearly all of them people like me whose education had been interrupted, which made us just a little bit more mature and determined and eager. It was like the— everybody with the GI Bill. We weren’t on the GI Bill but we had that same attitude. The opportunity has returned.Yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 23And I remember specifically, getting back to Lawrence, about politics because we knew that at places like Los Alamos and Chicago, people were talking about the politics of the bomb. Lawrence would say, Keep your nose to the grindstone, that, Being a graduate student here at this time is the greatest opportunity you could have. You know, Keep your nose to the grindstone. He was very definite about that. So except when Oppenheimer would visit occasionally and give a public talk, I was really pretty much unaware of the FAS [ Federation of Atomic Scientists] or any of those things. But anyway I did get my Ph. D. in a timely fashion and I got a good reputation in doing so, and then the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 came.Right.And Lawrence was eager to get back into military science, into war science, because again that’s his the simple side. For Lawrence, like millions of other veterans, even with his Nobel Prize and everything he’d done, it was perhaps the most exciting part of his life, was the Manhattan Project.Right.And so I knew that, saw that in lots of people. I remember clerks who had been bombardiers or navigators, it was clear the war was the most exciting thing that happened. And it was also clear to me that the problem was that that wasn’t true for the dead people, they weren’t there, they weren’t part of the discussion. For the living it was, a vast number including even a lot of the people on the Manhattan Project. I can feel this myself. Now since I’ve had so much excitement, I could easily have gone through life thinking that the Manhattan Project was the most exciting thing I’d done. For me it isn’t but—Right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 24But anyway Lawrence was determined to get reinvolved— well, also because he felt that there was a real problem that needed to be addressed. The Russians were a threat. A real threat. And so he sent me to Los Alamos with Hugh Bradner, just to see what we could do to help.Hugh Bradner.Hugh Bradner, who’s still here. We saw him a couple of days ago. He’s again about four years older but in good shape. He was during the war at Los Alamos. He wasn’t there afterwards. So he’s not a test site person. But we went. We met all these exciting people.Right.We met especially [ Edward] Teller, but in the course of that visit or maybe in some others I met [ Enrico] Fermi and [ Richard] Garwin and [ Hans] Bethe and [ John] Von Neumann, George Gamow, and [ John] Wheeler. It was great. It really was great, you know, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. And that was part of the reason I went.So what we did is we got involved with the Greenhouse Operation, and Hugh Bradner and I put together a small group of people, about thirty or forty, to do one of the so- called diagnostic experiments. Our job was to try to get as close as we could to measuring the temperature of the little tiny thermonuclear capsule that was part of the George experiment. And just a few grams of tritium and deuterium burned, the first time ever a thermonuclear reaction on the Earth’s surface. But that meant I knew a lot about the program.Then that was finished, then I was back at Berkeley and they started Operation Ranger. And they— I was one of the few people at Berkeley who actually knew— had really working contacts, fresh contacts, with Los Alamos. So probably the first Ranger shot, I’m a little uncertain but one could check the papers, they reported in Los Angeles and elsewhere they had seen it. And people were surprised. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 25Scientists were surprised.Yes. So they called me from Los Alamos— it may even have been the test director, Jack Clark, it might’ve been somebody else— called me to say, Would you go up into the Berkeley hills and see if it’s true, see if you can see it? So they gave me a time and a date and I went up there. It was like seven in the morning, maybe earlier, and it was all fog everywhere, I couldn’t see anything. And so the time came and went and I didn’t see anything. So I called him back and I said, I didn’t see anything because it was foggy. They said, We didn’t do it. Tomorrow. So I went up the next day. Beautiful clear day, not a cloud in sight. And at the appropriate moment— we and the Russians always fired them on the hour. It’s one of the things that helped all the intelligence people everywhere.That’s amazing to me. It’s a military thing, I guess.Well, also you’ve got data collection all over the world and you’ve got to tell them, you know. So anyhow— I shouldn’t have said that— but I went up the second day and the time came, the sun came up and then it went down again, this thing that covered that many degrees in the sky, this light, maybe it was smaller, but it was clear over the Sierra Nevada and it silhouetted the peaks. I could just see this jagged— you ordinarily would never see them, but there it was, this bright— and the back light was this bright light. So the whole Sierra’s there. Because there’s a straight line from Oakland to the Nevada Test Site, goes more or less over Mount Whitney. I’m not exactly— we could check it out.Yes, we’ll have to look at the atlas.It was over the highest mountain. It was a great airplane flight because you went right by Mount Whitney and the little lakes around there. So then I called him back and said, I saw it. And that might have even been the second shot in Ranger, but as I say, the way you find out is that you UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 26check out the Los Angeles papers because it was reported in the papers that they saw it. And then it was after those reports, probably the very next test that I went up to watch. So that’s my first contact with the Nevada Test Site, is watching from the Berkeley hills. If you know Berkeley, the place I was, was right over the Caldecott Tunnel, which is the tunnel that goes out to Lafayette and so on.Yes.So anyway that was my first contact and it was sort of official; I was up there, Los Alamos asked me to go look. And you see, they could talk to me in adequate code. That’s why they picked me. Well, they knew me but also they could say things without— they probably did violate some rule but not really, just formally.When you said you shouldn’t have said that, were you saying—?I was talking about the timing.The times. OK.And its utility for keeping track of. But the world’s full of things like that.Yes. So this is still sort of unofficial but official because you are someone who knows and so you can tell them this.Yes. And I’m employed at the RAD Lab at Berkeley [ University of California Radiation Laboratory].Right.What was the date for Ranger? It was in 1951.It was 1951.Yes.It was the beginning of 1951, January or February. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 27You see, I was already— my status then was postdoc. I was a postdoc. I may even have been a professor. I was an assistant professor, and Mike May was my TA [ teaching assistant], and it probably was then.Really?Yes, it might’ve been just then. Mike was just here.See, when I looked at— oh yes, maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to him too. I talked to him for the—He’s at Stanford and he lives in Pleasanton.Yes. When I looked at the Ranger data, and we can look at it in a minute, I thought maybe the one you saw— a later shot was a lot bigger than the first shot, but I think it’s equidistant probably from the test site to Los Angeles and the test site to Berkeley.Yes, just about. Los Angeles is probably closer.Yes. We’ll check that out. And then we can probably look at the records to see that delay that you’re talking about.I’m quite sure it’s closer. People in the Bay Area didn’t report it. It would be the other side of the hills.Right.I had to be up on top of the hills. And people in the valley wouldn’t see it. Because there they were too close to the Sierras.Yes. Maybe you were the only one up there who saw it.Maybe.Yes. So the background history of you getting to Livermore is the whole issue of Teller and Lawrence? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 28No. I got involved— you see, Lawrence had sent me down to Los Alamos in 1950, two years before Livermore, that’s when I went down and the Greenhouse tests were in 1951.Well, about Greenhouse, just a diversion here, what were those explosions like? I mean, that was your first witnessing of a— what was that like?Well, it’s impressive. I used to argue with [ Harold] Agnew and some others; they would say that the world would be better off if the politicians could see these things. And I felt oppositely. I said, No, they’re just simply spectacle, because you always see them from a safe distance and nothing ever happens. I said, It’s the pictures of Hiroshima, that’s what you should have. If you want to impress somebody, that’s what you show them, not an enormous orange and blue and purple object. The radiation makes the air purple and you get these— and a big mushroom cloud. So I said, That’s all spectacle.So you didn’t experience it as a scary thing in and of itself.No. It was just a great spectacle. There was that side to it, but it wasn’t the explosion in a scary sense, it just— I was always concerned. I was always aware of the fact that these atomic bombs have their downside. They are necessary, people say: In the Cold War and the problems, we have to be ready, have a proper level of preparedness. And I accepted all of that. But of course I hadn’t yet met [ Dwight D.] Eisenhower, but when I met Eisenhower six years later I learned directly from him, he felt exactly the same way. That nuclear weapons may be the necessary solution to an immediate problem but they can’t possibly be the solution to peace and stability, in the long run.Yes. Now you sort of answered a question I was going to wait chronologically to ask you, but I’ll ask it now and we can get back to it. Was it Eisenhower himself— well, it must have been in UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 29combination also with your experience to date that that insight that you just articulated sort of came together?Yes, that’s right. But my knowledge that Eisenhower— who as far as I was concerned knew more about national security than any of my friends who were criticizing him, I mean like Teller and Lawrence— the fact that Eisenhower felt that way, it was the clincher. I mean, it was— before that, I was open to the idea of a test ban, but possibly no one else at Livermore, certainly not Teller or Lawrence or Mills who were involved.And Mills is who?Well, Mark Mills was the man who would have been my successor as director, but he was killed at Enewetak.Yes, I read about that—His wife’s—— in the Gerry Johnson interview just now, I read about that.It was one of the religious holidays, it was like Easter, something like that. And I was in Puerto Rico with the President’s Science Advisory Committee when it happened.Wow.Sybil was in Livermore and she and Duane Sewell somehow got together with the Mills’s doctor and drove over to talk to Polly, to tell Polly that it had happened.Oh my gosh.So Sybil was right in the middle of that. And Duane.[ 00: 58: 07] Yes. So then back to— let’s skip back from Eisenhower a little bit to the getting from Berkeley and how— you wrote in the book [ Race to Oblivion] that Lawrence says to you something like, We’re going to start this lab and you’re going to run it, or—? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 30Well, before that he asked me— it’s memorable because it was a New Year’s reception, a regular one, at Carl Helmholtz’s house in Orinda, or Lafayette.I have to ask you the spelling: Helmholtz.He was chairman of the— a known physicist, chairman of the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley, just died a few weeks ago. Very friendly guy. His wife had money, maybe he did too. So they had a real nice house out at Orinda. They had a New Year’s reception every year, and us graduate students went. By that time I was a postdoc and an assistant professor. And Lawrence took me, he was there, he said, Herb, come in and see me as soon as you can, at your convenience, or something. And I was always happy to talk with Lawrence, so I went in the next day, I guess, and he told me a little bit, but it ended with a question, Do we need a second laboratory? And he made it clear that Commissioner [ Thomas] Murray, who was a man who had marvelous internal conflicts about this— well, he was a very serious Catholic, Murray was. He was also a hawk, but he was concerned about the moral aspects, so that there was a lot of ambivalence in Murray’s view.Commissioner—?He was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. And he’s the one out at Enewetak who eventually forbade the display of pictures of naked women, because they were all men and these pictures are everywhere and he was offended by it. So Lawrence told me that Murray had asked him— I knew almost none of the rest of the background of that issue, but of course I knew all the people because I had just been through Greenhouse. So I knew Edward [ Teller] and I knew [ Norris] Bradbury and I knew Carson Mark and everybody, the test directors down there, and this was after this episode with looking to see the bomb in the Berkeley hills. And so I started touring the country, mostly Los Alamos, Chicago, where Teller was, and Fermi too, and then UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 31Washington, D. C. And I spent a lot of time going from one to the other, talking with people. I met a lot of interesting people there: Jimmy Doolittle, I first met in that connection— he was special advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force— and a lot of others.Now you’re not just barely thirty years old, are you?That’s right, I was thirty, yes. November of 1951, I was thirty. Well, that’s where Lawrence is key also. No one else would’ve sent somebody that young, but Lawrence would. That’s typical Lawrence and it’s something that sets him apart.Well, explain a little bit why—That he would have confidence, that he would just disregard questions of age or background, you know, or anything.Just based on his assessment of you as a person.Yes, this is, you know, a smart enough guy with— that’s all that— Well, I had been working quite hard for quite a long time, and he liked that. So I started visiting all these people on that issue, and at the very same time he [ Lawrence] was in one of the periods when his colitis was especially bad, and that’s a disease that reacts to tension and worry and busyness. And so he was constantly under a doctor’s orders to rest, and he went on a cruise at some point during this period right after he asked me the question. He was always thick with the Standard Oil Company, he was already thick with the Standard Oil Company, and they took him on a tanker, a cruise down in the Arabian Gulf. I remember one of the times when he got back from that trip, he was all full of the fact he’d been to this oasis called “ Woof- Woof” and a famous oasis near the Red Sea, near the Arabian Sea, called H- O- F- U- F. It’s part of Saudi Arabia. Lawrence was always excited about things like that. That’s part of his youth, you know. I can’t imagine UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 32Oppenheimer coming and talking about it unless he saw a great concert or something, whereas Lawrence, you know, he went to this oasis, wow! And I appreciated it too.So anyway I’m making all these visits and thinking about what to do and he’s not there most of the time, so I’m not in touch with Lawrence except sporadically. And I’d been talking with Teller and others and I’d come to the conclusion, well, we could use a second laboratory. I don’t remember thinking that it was urgent but that yes, it wasn’t a bad idea. And after one of these trips fairly late in the spring, General [ Kenneth] Fields, who was then the head of the Division of Military Application, was visiting to talk about these things. It was very much in the air. And the Commission was refusing Teller’s exhortations because they said it’ll take talent and effort away and besides, they didn’t want to do it; what it amounted to, especially they didn’t want Teller to do it. So they were able to say No— even despite the threat of the Air Force— no to a second lab.And Fields came out at one point, but Ernest had just gotten home and I hadn’t seen him. And he said, Tell General Fields what you’re thinking. I said, Well, I haven’t talked with you yet. [ He said,] Just tell him what you’re thinking. And at that time I was thinking about a second laboratory and how you might go about building one and what it might do. And it growed like topsy. I mean we approached it— it was a problem because Teller wanted a guarantee of a big laboratory working on nuclear weapons from day one, and he wanted it in writing because he didn’t trust anybody. Teller really was paranoid. Lawrence, on the other hand, was always relaxed about that. He says, Ah, you know, put a floor under it and we’ll see where the ceiling is afterwards. Just go out there and do a good job and things will develop right. And of course Teller didn’t agree with that at all. By that time I was anxious to go ahead, so to some extent I was involved in keeping them apart so they didn’t screw everything up. And they never really liked each— there was always UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 33tension between Lawrence and Teller. They each admired the fact that the other one was a nuclear hawk but beyond that— and they admired each other’s work in a sense. Teller could see Lawrence as a great physics entrepreneur and Lawrence could see Teller as a very bright guy. And by that time he’d invented the hydrogen bomb and that was a very big, positive thing for Lawrence.But anyway I described all of this and Lawrence was a little bit taken aback but didn’t say, No, we’re not going to do that. And so within a month or two after that we actually had a meeting, big meeting in Berkeley, at which it all was finalized. Gordon Dean was there, Teller was there. Fields was not there but his deputy Captain Hayward was there.Do you remember Fields’s first name? It’s OK.Ken.Ken. All right. And Gordon Dean was then—?He was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.Was he the chairman there? OK.Teller had a spy in the office because—In the AEC office?Yes, because it’s a typical thing. Freddie de Hoffman who was Teller’s amanuensis, sort of his bootblack as well as his assistant— Freddie made all the travel arrangements and everything. I hear Teller just never did any of those things. But anyway he was romancing Dean’s secretary.Ahhh, OK.He married her. When Freddie was here at General Atomic and then Salk Institute. This was his only wedding that he had. I think he was only married once. Anyway it was she— I forgot her name but she was here. So when I say “ spy in the office”— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 34I understand.But when I was in Washington I not only met with people in the Air Force and the Pentagon but people in the Atomic Energy Commission, which at that time was on Constitution Avenue. I think it’s Constitution. It’s the one parallel to the Mall away from the river. I think Independence is the one on the other side.I don’t know.But anyway it was right there, something like 19th and Constitution so it was right, I think, probably next door to the National Academy of Sciences. And that building, I think, now is the Federal Reserve, where they meet, but they may have changed again.But then, you know, the rest is history, as we say. I mean, we started that summer, went out to— opened up Livermore on about the second of September. Extremely hot day!That’s the summer you start, the summer of 1952.Nineteen fifty- two, yes.And you open up Livermore January of 1953.No, it was September of 1952.Nineteen fifty- two, OK. It was a hot day, you were saying, yes.It was the hottest day of the year, well over 110 [ degrees]. Well, one or two days a year in Livermore it gets above 110. It was 114 or something like that. It was extremely hot, and there was of course no air conditioning, even for years there was none, except for the computer. The computer was air conditioned but the rest of us weren’t.So you had had to build buildings.We took over a whole bunch of leftover buildings from World War II. It had been a naval air station. And Duane and I set up our office. He was from the beginning the deputy. We set up UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 35adjacent offices in what had been the infirmary, and I think my office— one of us had the ambulance breezeway; we had done a little bit of reconstructing, and the other one had the emergency room next to the ambulance breezeway. And I think you had to virtually go through my office to get to Duane’s office, something like that, something unreasonable, but it all worked out at the time.And the mission at the beginning was simply that a second weapons lab— to do things different from Los Alamos?Yes, that’s what we promised, and Bradbury complained endlessly about the fact, they’re not living up to that promise. They said they were going to do things different and they aren’t.What was the rationale?Well, the rationale was simply technical optimism. We thought— Teller thought for one set of reasons, Lawrence for quite different, and us because we were young and brash, Harold Brown, Johnny Foster, Gerry Johnson, me— that we would find other ways, not necessarily— that the technology was new and that it had many branches. And of course— yes, did have many branches but they were not radically different from each other.[ 01: 11: 26] End Track 2, Disk 1.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 2.One of the last things you had said before we stopped was that Lawrence and Teller wanted Livermore for different reasons. You talked about that a little but—Well, they both wanted it for similar reasons in one sense. They wanted to expand the nuclear weapons program, but the big difference was not in what they wanted but how they talked about their relations with Washington and planning and so on. Teller wanted everything in black and white. He was paranoid. He didn’t trust anybody. The suspicion came and went, that the whole UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 36business of doing the Livermore Laboratory was just to get him off their back— as soon as they pretend to start the Livermore Lab they’ll go off on a tangent or they won’t do anything very worthwhile. So he was paranoid about it, suspicious. Lawrence was optimistic nearly always about everything and his view was that, All we need to do is get started and then we’ll see what happens. We don’t need any guarantees from anybody. And it almost broke up at the beginning over that. There was an incident— I’ve written about it several places— in which there was a party with drinking and so on at the Claremont Hotel, sort of celebrating the idea of getting started. And Teller suddenly became morose and said that, The whole thing is a fake, it’s just to get me off their back, so I’m not coming to Livermore.Oh wow.And Lawrence said to me privately, That’s all right, we don’t really need him. At which point Navy Captain John Hayward, who was then seconded to the Atomic Energy Commission, said, You can’t do that, you’ve got to have Teller, and you’ve got to butter him up. I mean, you somehow have to persuade him. So I a little, but mainly Lawrence, did get together with Teller and others from Washington. And they actually went off by themselves, I think, Gordon Dean, Teller, and Lawrence— to Lawrence’s office which was a couple of miles away. And they worked up a letter that would be satisfactory to Teller, and to Lawrence and Dean too. And so we started.But that party was somewhere in June of 1952. During the summer, we spent a lot of time having meetings and talking about program, what should we do, what do we do next. Duane Sewell and I talked about buildings and buying a computer. We bought the first UNIVAC to go to anybody that wasn’t part of the government.Wow! UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 37It was the number five UNIVAC, and numbers one and three or whatever never left the factory. And then we talked about the need for an engineering building. We did a lot of that. And about recruiting because there was no staff yet, but Duane and I were already— Duane was key. And then we had a— I’m not sure, Duane started in June, maybe he was later, like August. But then we had some physics groups meetings and we talked about controlled thermonuclear energy, now called magnetic fusion. We thought that’d be a great thing to have in addition, because we wanted to have the laboratory a little broader than just nuclear weapons. Not much broader, just a little, so we were doing something else that people would find attractive and interesting, partly for recruiting reasons but generally our relations with the world. And so we started with fusion. Teller in some of his reminiscences later says, That’s the only thing that Herb was interested in. It’s just utter nonsense.I remember reading that.In all of the things he’s written he belittles me. It’s always pleasant, Herb’s a great guy, good physicist, great husband, but when it comes to something substantive about the lab he never puts it in. And one time he wrote a letter to Lewis Strauss and said, Herb York’s a traitor to Ernest Lawrence, so that’s the one thing he did that made me angry.He actually wrote that to Strauss?Yes. Yes.Oh wow.Well, it was when I had made it clear in Washington that I thought the president’s goal of having a nuclear test ban was a good idea. Ah, Teller would never have thought that thought. Always thought that was the dumbest thing coming up. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 38Now what was your— so you’re here with the, you know, the brilliant Edward Teller and you’ve got Lawrence but you’re seeing him as the great physicist that he is and he’s going to do great things at the lab, or what was your view of him [ Teller]?No, I thought him, I think, from the beginning as a bright idea- type guy. We never gave him any authority. He didn’t want any; at least he said he didn’t want any. He was director for about a year later on.I remember, yes.And I always thought he was content. Harold Brown has told me that Edward did chafe a little bit with me as director, but I thought we got along fine. You know, there were things that I thought he was doing wrong and that bothered me and were difficult to deal with because of his special status. But I remember, and Sybil might remember this, talking with her about the bad— occasionally mentioning to somebody some of the bad side, or somebody else might mention it. And I at that time was very defensive about him. And I said, Well, you know, you just can’t subdivide him, you just got to take the good with the bad. It comes that way. And it’s that way with anybody. I was philosophizing.And so he had a special role, but it was not an executive role in any way. He inspired young people. Many of the people who came remember their visits with him and were genuinely inspired. He was a charismatic person, and I found him so myself. It was fun to talk with Teller about anything else, about nuclear issues of all kinds. And so he was there with us really only the first year. I mean, nobody realizes that, even people at Livermore. From the second year through the fifth year he was hardly around.Really? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 39Well, he was busy, off with the Rockefellers, with the oil companies. He was consulting, and he was politicking. I didn’t realize that at the time. He was pushing his own ideas about the world and national security, relating to Livermore but not at all exclusively.But he was always inspirational. He did almost nothing with regard to recruiting. He had a lot of ideas about who to recruit, and there really was only one person who came of all of those, not a well known person either, a theoretical physicist named Montgomery Johnson. [ He] was somebody that— actually I knew him too, so that I’m not sure that Teller was the sole recruiting agent. But I associate him as coming because Teller was—I remember Teller writes about him in his— memoirs, yes.Montgomery Johnson. Yes. Well, he liked him and he was the most senior theorist that we had when he first came. There were others. Mark Mills was a theorist and Mark maybe came primarily because he was inspired to come by Teller. But the great majority of the people, not only did Teller not recruit them, but they didn’t come because he was there. I’m sure they all found it interesting that Teller was there, and it was a plus, but nearly everybody was recruited by Lawrence and I. Sometimes just me, sometimes just him, but more or less jointly. And I recruited nearly everybody from Berkeley, so they were all Lawrence’s people who knew that Lawrence was behind this project. They were early postdocs who didn’t know what was going to happen next, so Livermore was a great solution that enabled them to stay in this great laboratory and do something that we all thought was useful.[ 00: 09: 10] Right. So early on you’re thinking you’re going to design a weapon that does something different, or what is that about?Well, I initiated the policy that I thought was closest to Lawrence’s views in pure science, that this policy was the applied science equivalent, and that we would always work on extremes. We UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 40would not wait for Washington or the military to tell us what to do. We would simply from day one work on the largest weapon we could think of, the smallest— smallest meaning physically small or low yield— the smallest diameter and that’s what led to things like Polaris. See, Polaris was half the weight of the ICBM [ inter- continental ballistic missile] that preceded it and it was much smaller in diameter. And so we were working on Polaris before the Navy said they wanted Polaris. And that’s why— just because we had this policy of working at the extremes— and as I say I thought, naively or otherwise, that maybe it was just brilliant intuition— that that would substitute for working at the frontiers of pure science, that working at the extremes of the technological envelope.So as I say we were working on the largest, the smallest, the smallest in many different ways, et cetera. And what Bradbury— we talked about this earlier— Bradbury always complained that everything Livermore finally did, he said, We were thinking of that already. Some of the things are still nominally secret. I mean, everybody knows them but I’m reluctant to say.That’s fine.But we did explore some new territory in primaries that made things like Polaris possible. They really were a big step forward. But Bradbury said, We were going to do that anyway. There’s only so many things you can do and that’s one of the things we would eventually have done for sure.What do you mean by “ in primaries”?Well, thermonuclear weapons have a primary and a secondary.Correct.And Johnny Foster was in charge of primaries—OK. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 41— or of course they could be freestanding, and Harold was in charge of secondaries, really. And so Johnny is very aggressive. I don’t know if you ever talked with Johnny Foster.No.But he’s personally an aggressive person. He’s very smart but he’s personally aggressive, and so that he would find out what’s happening at Los Alamos because they were pushing in new primaries also, smaller— that just means smaller, more efficient atomic bombs. Both of those things are important: small and efficient. And he would find out what they’re doing at Los Alamos, then he would change it just a little bit, to make it a little bit more daring or a little bit more— and they got annoyed at that, and so I said, Johnny, you can’t do that. We’re going to make them different. And actually what I said is, You can’t make them round, is what I said. And that may still be at the borders of classification. So Johnny started working on genuinely new ones and they worked out very well. The idea for non- spherical bombs was in the air already. Von Neumann had ideas about it and George Gamow had ideas about it. To make them fit into artillery pieces, they can’t be round, you know.Oh, OK.So anyway that’s what we did. But even there, when we did something new Bradbury said, We would’ve done that. We just hadn’t got there yet. We were busy doing these other things that Washington says they need. But Bradbury’s complaints were almost entirely private, not even to me or to Lawrence. They were complaints internally. [ Harold] Agnew reports him saying those things. And the documentary record from the Atomic Energy Commission. But a lot of the stuff that Sybil Francis found were letters by Bradbury complaining about what we were doing at Livermore. The simple fact is that Bradbury was always good to deal with. He was always cooperative. He met every legitimate need when we asked for assistance doing something. And Agnew in fact has said, Bradbury seemed to like you, I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 42don’t know why. But personally because there was bad blood between Livermore and Los Alamos all those several years.Well, in the Gerry Johnson interview, he’s talking a little bit about— well, several pages about how I think at the test site that the Los Alamos people were treated better by the AEC and other types of people, treated more as elites, than the Livermore people were.Well, I don’t know about that.So what’s curious to me as I’m reading it is this—That’s news to me.Well, you’ll read it and you can see how you interpret it.Yes.So you’ve got the tests being designed and then you have to test them, so I guess the test site belongs to the labs that want to test there, or—?Well, we were the primary users, and then there was a completely separate organization for running the test site. I think run by the military. Not even the Atomic Energy Commission, although Holmes and Narver, the contractors may have been AEC contractors, I’m not quite sure. And there was a certain formalism. When they finally fired off a bomb, the University of California transferred it on paper because there was some kind of a belief, I think both in Washington and in Berkeley, that the University of California didn’t fire these bombs. I mean, that’s not something we did.Interesting.So we built them.You built them. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 43Designed them and built them, but the government fired them. And they surely had the authority. I mean, not Jack Clark or not Gerry Johnson had any executive authority at the test site other than for the particular events taking place, but not for the maintenance of the property or the operation of the site.Right. Yes, there’s that whole—And the weather, all the question about fallout. We were acutely aware of fallout. People who sometimes say we were casual about it are wrong. They tried real hard to get it right. It’s just that it’s so complicated, they couldn’t get it right, I mean all the time. And there were surprises. We knew about fallout but we didn’t really understand at the beginning about rainout. The stuff gets up in the clouds, it’s moving around the world, and some of it somehow gets caught in the rain. Either raindrops form on the radiation or the rain falls through the lower parts and picks it up, takes it to the ground. And we discovered that— or it was discovered, we didn’t discover it— when Kodak film started showing that it had radioactive materials in the emulsions. Special emulsions, not your ordinary film. And discovered that some of the organic materials that went into the cellulose, that sort of thing, were in fact radioactive from the tests in Nevada. Stuff that was harvested back East. It wasn’t local. Then it was essentially local rainout. There would just be a few acres or a few hundred- acre patches where there was this radioactivity, which was extremely low in level. You would’ve never found it with counters and things. You found it by these— the films themselves were the delicate detectors.Yes. I guess that’s a question that sort of general public people have about not only the test site itself but the tests that were designed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after tests in the Pacific, what was the knowledge of what fallout would be? You know, what the environmental and then health consequences would be, because then later it was a big furor. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 44Yes, I think both of those things were—[ 00: 18: 37] End Track 2, Disk 2.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 4, Disk 2.Yes, so the question of how much government people, scientists, were concerned when they started exploding the tests.Everybody was very concerned, but we only knew so much. There was a certain naiveté but it was perfectly natural. No reorganization of the world at that time would have produced anything substantially better. Fire everybody and hire philosophers, or something. It was good, considering what we knew and what we could’ve known. But people did know about biological damage, they did know about the way fallout would work. They had ideas about it, but there were a lot of surprises. The rainout was one. The fallout from the first big thermonuclear shot was another because what happened there, and nobody knew this, the stuff went up about a hundred thousand feet, a little more. On the way down the winds blew in opposite directions in different altitudes and no one knew the wind structure was that complex. So that’s why the people on those other islands were hit with radiation, almost killed but it happened not. They were lucky they weren’t killed. It could’ve been much worse than it was. But it had to do with the fact that it was unprecedented.That’s the George shot, is that—? No, that was the Bravo shot.Excuse me, right. Bravo. But that was the first actual, what, thermonuclear bomb?Yes. Well—Or the largest— you tell me. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 45It was like Mike only it was much lighter and more practical. But it was the same explosive size as Mike. It was actually a little bigger, fifteen megatons instead of ten, but it was the first real prototype.Of the hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear bomb.Yes.So let’s talk now— we’ll get to the test site finally. So you designed a test at Livermore, you need to test it at Nevada. How does that— will you go down there? What does that work like?Well, a whole bunch of people go down. Gerry Johnson, who organizes the test for us, and the experiments. There really are two fundamental parts to it. One is the device, the explosive device. And then the other is all the instrumentation you use to observe it.It’s called diagnostics, as in medicine. And the idea is to find out as much about the details of what happened. It’s not just go- no go, does it work or doesn’t it work. If it doesn’t work or doesn’t work quite up to snuff or whatever, there’s lots of experiments in addition to the explosion itself that are there. We measure X- rays, neutrons, I mean, we measure them underground, above the— there’s just lots of measurements. So there’s a team of physicists who go down there in order to measure the various aspects of the explosion, as well as another team which puts the bomb together.And the test director, for a long time— now that you mention Gerry— part of the time I remember some of the people in administration found it just a nuisance to have two test directors, so they favored Los Alamos. They expected us to work through Los Alamos just because it was too much trouble to have two separate— Somebody’s got to be in charge, they said. So that’s why Gerry had a somewhat secondary position to the Los Alamos people. But they were good friends. The head of the Los Alamos group at that time was Jack Clark, who UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 46retired here. He was retired here about thirty years. He died in his nineties. A lifelong bachelor, so he had plenty of money— good pay and nothing to spend it on, and then good investments— so he just was an inveterate traveler. He was the most traveled person I know. And in between trips to Zaire or Malaysia— kept getting malaria and everything like that— living to ninety- five, he lived in an apartment here. I knew him but Gerry and Mary Kay were closer to him, visited back and forth.So when you designed, say, the first weapon at Livermore, are you thinking in terms of science or are you thinking in terms of policy?No, in terms of applied science.Applied science, but are you thinking in terms of the Cold War and what the government wants and how we need these, or—?Well, we don’t talk about the Cold War because we don’t have a foreign policy at the laboratory. We work with the government; it’s up to them to decide the foreign policy. Well, there’s a formal system of requirements and so on that we know this is what the government says it wants. In addition to that there were certain experiments simply to design the parameters, to investigate these extreme parameters. Now every one of those has to be negotiated. We couldn’t do what we wanted to do. Every shot has to be negotiated, and actually at the primitive level it was me. I negotiated with Washington about what kinds of tests we would make and why. I’d provide the rationale, the cost estimates, all of that came out of the director’s office. And the president approved every one. They took those things very seriously. The president— and he really did, it wasn’t just some nominal thing which he then delegated. Every test went to Eisenhower. This was during that period.Right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 47And he approved them. And at one point I had suggested some tests that would lead to a bomb bigger than any we’d exploded so far, maybe fifty megatons, I’m not sure about that. And the word came back, the president said, They’re too big already. It was Eisenhower’s peacenik side. My first direct contact with him was word coming back, They’re too big already, or, They’re big enough already.Interesting.You know, something like that. He just said no. So that’s the only case where we were going to do something and the word came back no. Otherwise they were very permissive and welcoming. They let us do essentially everything. And some of the things worked out and some didn’t. And they were very tolerant of things that didn’t work out; they said Yes, well, OK, you can’t make progress without making mistakes, and so on. But there was this one where the president just said no.Interesting. So when was the first time you—?Now I didn’t see him, of course. But the then- Director of Military Application did tell me personally. I did deal directly and personally on all of these things, not through staff and not through his staff either. Now it would all be done by staff. But the principals did these things directly in those days. So I would talk with then- General [ Alfred] Dodd Starbird about what it is we would do at Livermore and what we thought we ought to do and how that would relate to so- called requirements and how it would relate simply to the general development of nuclear weapons.OK. So I guess that the way you framed it was my question. There’s the question of how are nuclear weapons going to develop, and then there’s the question of what particular things do we think we need to do for— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 48Well, by the time we got into it even in 1952, there was a formal system for working out requirements, involving primarily— well, central to it was something called the Civilian- Military Liaison Committee, sometimes just Military Liaison Committee, based in the Pentagon, and a person with assistant- to- the- secretary- type rank. In later years that office became known as the Assistant to the Secretary for Atomic Energy, and your Troy Wade was one of the— and Gerry, were two of the people who occupied that office over time. The person in that job, he didn’t make the decisions but he chaired a fairly complicated decision- making system which formally told the Department of Energy [ DOE] what it is they should do. And when they finally gave the requirements, there were lots of things. There was a yield, there was a weight, there were questions of safety, there were questions of reliability. There were ten or fifteen different— at least ten different requirements for any particular bomb.Wow.Well, sometimes they were mundane. What kind of aircraft had to be suitable for this aircraft or this missile. The yield and the weight were the drivers but there was always all this stuff too. And that was worked out by this formal system in which we participated just along with a lot of other people. In fact, we were not formally members. It was a government committee because they’re deciding what the government wants, and the laboratories never had that function of deciding. However, we were very insistent about telling the government what could be done, and we weren’t shy about saying we thought this is a good idea, or something. Build Polaris. Don’t do this. So we weren’t shy about it, but we were input rather than members of the decision- making.Right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 49But every year I wrote a letter to the— every year I was there. I wish I could get these. They’re probably still all classified. Sybil Francis knows where some of them are. But every year I wrote a letter, only four or five pages long, about what it is we’re going to do, what I thought we should do at Livermore. Dividing it into large weapons, small weapons, and then tests and nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics, a dozen or so topics with estimates of how much money for each one, and the testing one, when we would be ready to test and so on. But it was all a request; it was a statement of plan, but it had to be approved in Washington, but basically by just one guy, the Director of Military Applications. Only when something like the president saying, It’s too big already, did anybody else get into it.Yes.The remarkable thing— it can flatter the ego. See, I wasn’t given the title “ director” until we’d been going for two years. So I’d write these letters and then just sign it with my name, “ Herbert York, UCRL Livermore.” No title, just me. And then after two years Lawrence said, you know, Start calling yourself the director, or, Why don’t you start calling yourself the director, something like that. And so I became the director. From the moment he walked out of my office, I told my secretary, Next time you answer the phone, say ‘ director’s office.’But the AEC published an annual report. In those days it was only like this [ demonstrating size], and they always had the laboratories and who was who, and they simply had me listed under Livermore, there I was, no title. But then I told Lawrence, we have to have titles for everybody else, so by then everybody but me had a title. Harold Brown was assistant director for large weapons—“ A” Division, we called it, we didn’t say “ large weapons,” “ A” Division. Johnny’s assistant director of “ B” Division. Or maybe just division leader, but they all had titles; working with Los Alamos, they got to know who we are. And in fact in Washington UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 50this same Admiral Hayward, many times more than once I’d be back in Washington and he’d say, Tell me, who is Mr. Livermore? And I’d say, Ernest told me to go out there and run the place, and I’m, you know, I’m Mr. Livermore, but I didn’t even say that. Ernest told me to go out there and run the place. That was my answer to the question, Who is Mr. Livermore? Then finally after two years I was named the director, Lawrence named me the director. He could just do that. It was the sort of thing he could decide. Now it would take—This is really so amazing, that he could—— now it would take all these committees and approvals—Right. But he was Ernest Lawrence, so he could do that.Yes, he was very high- handed with the university and they knew it. Some people asked [ Robert Gordon] Sproul, who was president when I first got into these things, Why do you let him do that? Why do you let him treat you like that? And Sproul said, He made me famous. And actually that’s largely true. I was just talking with Dick Atkinson recently and he knew that Sproul felt that way about Lawrence. It was Lawrence who put them on the map, and so they tolerated stuff that nobody else could get away with. And Lawrence did it usually with a smile or with his great sense of enthusiasm that everybody would want to do this, wouldn’t they, you know, whatever it is we’re doing.So when did you first go down to Nevada? We talked about this a little before, off tape.Well, it was very early. It was very early and I don’t remember quite when. Duane and I went down just to see how to operate down there, because from the day we opened the laboratory’s doors we had in mind that we were going to do these two tests which became known as Ruth and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 51Ray, are the names of these tests. The so- called hydrides. But we didn’t use those words then. Those are my godparents’ names, Ruth and Ray.You’re kidding me.Ruth and Ray Foos. My mother, when she moved back to Rochester at age 18, the family in Oneida, which is where she was raised, they were Germans and Jews. She lived with Jewish relatives, although she was a staunch Episcopalian because her mother had been. But in Rochester her relatives were all Dutch and they were very specific, that’s Holland Dutch.Not Pennsylvania Dutch.No, not German.Not German Dutch.Because Deutsch, you know, the word was— and they lived by themselves. Everybody was Dutch in the neighborhood. It was self- segregation. And the Fooses, that’s a Dutch name, Foos, Ruth Foos had been one of her girlfriends. Actually my sister’s godparents were named DeWitt. Everybody was Dutch that was connected with my mother. Not my father but connected with my mother. So Ruth and Ray are my godparents. Or they’re my sister’s godparents, I’m not quite sure. And the DeWitts were the godparents for the other.Yes.But anyway, from when we opened Livermore, this and the first things we did at Enewetak were some ideas that Edward brought with him. They were some ideas that from even before Mike he had in mind about how to do things. And they were bad ideas, but nevertheless they were not a bad way to get started, although they could’ve discouraged everybody but they didn’t. Somehow we were just too young and naïve and the government accepted us— and Lawrence, accepted him— to get things right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 52So Ruth and Ray were both smaller than we expected, and we expected small. So they didn’t knock the tower down. It’s a famous event. The first thing we did in Nevada was on a short tower and the tower was still partly standing. There used to be pictures of that everywhere. We had a big object lesson at Livermore. The director’s office for years and decades had a picture of the stump of the tower from either Ruth or Ray, whichever was first. And the Los Alamos people just got great pleasure out of it. Laughed unashamedly, gave us the horse laugh, saying, You guys at Livermore think you’re so hot.So it was an embarrassing time. And then unhappily the first thermonuclear one didn’t work either. It fizzled, really a very big fizzle, I mean not just a little. Well, only the primary went off in the two- stage weapon— two- stage device, it wasn’t a weapon. That was a different idea that Teller had, and we didn’t like it. We thought it was kind of doubtful. None of us thought it was all that great but we went ahead and did it.Yes. Now were you there for the tests or would you be—?Yes and no. It was right after Bravo. I think it was called Koon. And I was in an airplane with Norris Bradbury and we were getting ready to land at Enewetak. I’d been out there earlier to see it, then I’d gone home and I was coming back now to see the explosion. And we saw the explosion. It was all cloudy. All you saw was reflections in the clouds from this airplane, but both Norris and I thought, that’s pretty small. And it missed by a factor of twenty or more from what it was supposed to be.And then we were on our own. The next tests were locally generated ideas, not ideas that Teller brought, and they all worked out. Ideas that Johnny [ Foster] and Harold [ Brown] were primarily responsible for, with me, visitors and Teller also playing something of a role. We operated the laboratory very tightly. I was in intimate touch with the weapons designers at that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 53time. There were so few; there were only a few hundred people, maybe a thousand, five hundred. And so I was able to do that.Now you said you first went to Nevada with Duane Sewell. Did you guys fly in, did you drive in, or do you remember?Well, I’m not absolutely certain but about that time, the normal way to get there was to fly to McCarran, the airport in Las Vegas, and then be driven up. I mean, that was the normal way. And I think there was one time only when somehow or other I actually took off from either Indian Wells or— there’s an Air Force place closer [ Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field].Yes.Yes, but we didn’t go there. Now later that became the normal way, going to this Air Force base that was closer than Las Vegas.Yes.[ 00: 21: 45] End Track 4, Disk 2.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 5, Disk 2.I was just looking, while you were out, at these tests here. Yes, so I’m seeing Ruth, Ray, and I see one named Simon.No, everything else was as Los Alamos.Did you witness Bravo?No. I got there just when they were discovering how bad it was. I got there just as the Koon shot went, if we have a date for that.We do.That would be in what series?Let’s see. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 54Redwing. No.Castle [ Operation].Castle, that’s what it was. Do you see Bravo?Yes, Bravo says February 28.And what about Koon?And Koon says April 6.Well, that’s six weeks, so I’m not sure. That doesn’t quite fit because my memory is they were still developing an understanding of what Bravo had done. Was Koon the next one after Bravo?No, there’s something called Romeo. Here, I’ll show you. These are all at Bikini, it says.I wonder what Romeo was, whether it’s— because they’re not otherwise labeled, are they?Well, they are. I just—Oh well, Romeo’s LANL [ Los Alamos National Laboratory], yes, you can see there, it says— you see, there’s only one Los Alamos shot. There were supposed to be two.Koon says LLNL [ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]—Yes, and it’s the only one.Right, and so it says Bravo—Romeo.Romeo was a barge, it says. Eleven megatons.Yes. And Koon says what, fifty kilotons?A hundred ten kilotons.Does it? Well, maybe it was. It could be. Without that I would have said fifty.When I met with the DOE people about secrecy, they were saying the yields had been gone over and maybe they were just ranges, they were not going to reveal the actual yields. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 55Well, Koon was supposed to be a megaton. Just about one.Yes. So you didn’t see Bravo but they’re still trying to figure out what happened.But I arrived there when the turmoil was just sort of building up, in connection with Koon, which then fizzled. I mean everything’s a mess. I wasn’t there for Bravo but there’s six weeks in there and I made more than one trip, so that I could have been there right after Bravo and then come again for Koon. It’s quite possible. By that time, as a director I wasn’t involved, actually handling equipment and setting things in place. So I could’ve been out, could’ve gone home. But I wasn’t there for Bravo, and I wasn’t there for Mike either. I don’t know what’s the biggest bomb I ever saw. I’m not sure. I’m sure I saw multi- megaton but not very many. I saw lots of kiloton- size bombs. And that tells whether they were Enewetak or Bikini also.It tells everything.Yes. Because I think all three of those— well Koon and Bravo were Bikini. And Mike had been Enewetak. And George was Enewetak.Correct.And on Engebi. One of the things that enters into this, and again I’m going to psychological feelings and understanding, there’s plenty of evidence of the war in the Pacific at Enewetak. When we went there, there were busted tanks and there were busted ships on the reef. So war was not an abstraction. You know, 1950 was only five years.So in the sense that you’re experiencing this and you’re thinking—Well, we’re not thinking that it’s peacetime. We’re really thinking there’s a— dangers everywhere. Two wars already this century and now everybody’s worried about more, nuclear this time. So we all took it fairly seriously and didn’t do a lot of second guessing.Yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 56Again, Duane Sewell, for some reason, I don’t know why he was there. I know why I was there. I was at Wake Island during an explosion in that very early period; I’m not sure which series. Might’ve been Greenhouse, but that doesn’t seem right. We were up there for that same reason as in the Berkeley hills: Can you measure the yield from five hundred miles away by observing the light curve? There was already a fairly good idea about it. It was just a question of details and demonstrating it. And so we were up in Wake Island in order to observe one of the explosions. I think that’s eight hundred miles or six hundred miles, something. And there again Duane and I were just around. Hardly anybody was going to Wake. There were a lot of Americans there, fifty or a hundred. And we drove and found a Japanese bunker. And in this bunker Duane found and kept a little piece of wood about like this [ demonstrating size]. And it was obviously the firing instructions, because it was all in Japanese, in the event of an American attack. And in addition to Japanese language it had pictures, you know, sun, moon, sun covered with clouds, and then obviously instructions about what you do. When ships were there, I think there were pictures of ships, about how this battery was supposed to work against an American invasion. Well, it was five years after the war and nobody had yet actually explored this place and taken it away.Of course. That’s amazing.Duane may still have it but I mean it was a piece of wood and I think it had been burned in, the sort of thing you get with— because I think it was scorched rather than inked, with these firing— what to do when the Americans come.Wow. And this was Wake Island looking at Enewetak.We were at Wake in order to look at Enewetak. And we saw it, it was easy. I don’t remember whether we— the thing I remember is not seeing the bomb but just a bit of scientific data, and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 57that is looking east you can tell the sun is coming about one hour before it actually rises. That is, there’s enough— the light curve goes flat, then an hour before the sun comes up the light curve starts to turn. And that would be eight hundred miles away or something, maybe a thousand, so that tells you how far away you could see an atomic bomb. I mean about a thousand miles. Something like that. And measure the yield. And of course the Russians were testing in the atmosphere in Siberia, and so even then we were in bed with the Pakistanis trying to, getting data.So let me understand this a little better. From the light you measure the yield?Yes. When a nuclear weapon goes off the light changes with time, and the plot of that is called the light curve. And it looks like this [ demonstrating], right side up for me. It rises a little, it falls, and then it rises way up. And that first little rise and fall depends on the yield. By measuring the time from zero light to that dip, you can measure the yield.Wow.And that’s called a Bhang meter but it’s spelled with an “ h”: B- H- A- N- G. I think it’s Agnew’s word. It comes from the Hindu, you know. Well, that’s what was at issue in connection with this more recent event in the south Atlantic/​ Indian Ocean. That curve wasn’t there, that characteristic wasn’t there.Which explosion?Well, there was this one— south Atlantic or south Indian Ocean. I mean in something like 1978 there was this explosion that ever since people have said, Was it or wasn’t it?Oh, OK.And maybe it did have a little nick in it, something like that, but not in the right place. I forget exactly what the situation was. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 58So when it goes up again that’s the—Well, that’s the big light that everybody sees.That’s the big light.The first is just the original gamma rays coming out and making the atmosphere shine. The fireball is just this big [ demonstrating], it may be real hot but it’s tiny. And it’s not producing much light; it’s producing X- rays and things like that. And you see the light produced by these gamma rays and X- rays away from the bomb, then you finally come to a point where the shock wave breaks away from that. I’m not quite sure what’s happening here anymore. And so it starts to dim and then you get the real bang. But the first rise and the first dimming are due to detail processes that take place within a millisecond after the— it’s a very short time. And it’s a standard candle, like what’s in astronomy. It’s a way of measuring the yield.And someone must have discovered that at some— what was going on with the detection?Oh yes, well it had to be fresh but it wasn’t super fresh; we didn’t think of it as a— at the time we just took it as a fact.OK.But anyway I used to go to Nevada quite often in the beginning, in connection with Ruth and Ray, and then we always had something, nearly always had something. It started with them. And the firing site, sort of the headquarters for the scientific team and for the team in charge of firing, pushing the button, was called the Pogo. Well, the site was a control site or something up above Frenchman’s—Yes, CP, control point, they seem to refer to this.Yes, up above Frenchman Flat in a kind of a pass. But the staff was called the Pogo staff, and I don’t know truly why, but I believe that Bill Ogle, who was a local test director, was responsible UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 59for that. On the blackboards in the test— there were a lot of— because of academics and scientists, blackboards— these blackboards were always covered with large representations of the comic strip character Pogo and all his friends, about this size or maybe this size, but big. Very well done, and I think Ogle did them, though I’m not quite sure about that.I can find out.And of course they had some of the really famous Pogo- isms which were very fresh at the time. Two of them that were on the walls there for lessons for all of us, you know: We have met the enemy and he is us. And the other one is, When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, stamp and shout. That was another Pogo- ism.And that was about six miles away. I’m not [ sure], one could check that but about six miles, and so that’s part of my story earlier. It’s always a spectacle with nothing serious ever happening. You can feel the heat, you get this brilliant fireworks, this mushroom cloud, but nothing ever happens. You know, it’s sagebrush out there where the explosion—They did some experiments down there with buildings, but of course that’s what you always see on the specials— but that was the exception. It’s easy to believe that was the norm, or the soldiers in the trenches; but you know how many shots there were in Nevada and that’s two of them or something like that, so that it made for good documentaries but it just was quite an abnormal situation.I was going to ask you this later but it sort of fits with what you’re saying. The test site book I was showing you, at the end has a phrase about the Nevada Test Site having been the battleground of the Cold War. Someone described it as such.Yes? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 60And that if you actually go out there, with the buildings and the holes and the craters and the torn- up train trestles that they blew up, yes, it looks like a battleground. And there’s something sort of interesting and odd about that because of course no actual physical battle took place there and yet what was going on there was related to this local battle—See, if you had asked me, or I think most of the people at Livermore and Los Alamos, I’d have said if— the word “ battleground” really isn’t appropriate anywhere. If you want to apply this back home at the design labs, Nevada’s just someplace we go because we have to go someplace remote. We never thought of Nevada as being a big deal on its own. It was just an extension of our activity. So the whole notion of a Nevada Test Site having its own place in history and time—Its own identity.Yes. You know, there’s something else that probably— it may not— it may be a diversion for you, but there was a lot of thinking before Nevada about what to do. And Jack Clark looked at all sorts of places, and maybe other people too but I think of Jack Clark, including off the Atlantic coast where the wind normally was out to sea.Right, they write about that in here.And in northern Canada. You see, when the Korean War broke out just as we’re getting started— we’re already testing at Enewetak— but there was a question: Can we continue? I mean, with the Russians and the Chinese, the Koreans, sharing the same ocean, is it really safe to test at Enewetak? So the whole question was reopened. And I remember myself studying maps of the far north of Canada. And the trouble is there isn’t any place in the world where nobody lives except the icecaps. That’s all there is. There’s always somebody, either transient or permanent, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 61and having had that accident in 1952 at Enewetak— I’m not quite sure I have the time sequence right but we were already getting sensitized about people.You mean the Japanese ships and the— I mean the fishing boats?[ 00: 16: 40] Well, there was the Japanese ship [ Daigo Fukuryu Maru]—[ for] Bravo was the Japanese ship and it was the Marshall Islands at Rongelap and Rongerik. And in the case of— I guess it’s Rongelap, the one where most of the people were, it’s a big atoll, twenty miles or so across, and the natives were at the north end, and they got a hundred Roentgens. The south end got a lethal dose but they weren’t there, they were in the north. It was just the other side of the atoll from where they were living.So it was a close call. The Bravo thing could’ve been much worse than it was. And of course our people fought back— they always do— and that’s when we had these silly things coming out of Washington about sunshine units and the various kinds of discussions about how fallout’s not so bad. It wasn’t that we didn’t know that it was harmful and that it happened, but the program seemed more important— and these people who are fussing about it [ saying], get them off our backs. Not me, I’m not talking about myself, but it was very common that, We can’t let something like this stand in the way. It’s not very bad and it was an accident besides, you know.So one of the funny little side trips I took with— I think I may have arranged it or Gerry probably arranged it. We got an airplane, it was easy to do, and we went to another island called Wotho which was nearby, and we took Ernest Lawrence and the regents, just sightseeing. But it was one of the places where there had been a little bit of fallout. There was no commotion there. Well, somebody had gone just before us to find out what the problem was and nobody seemed to understand what the problem might be. Nobody there cared anything. And then there was a schoolteacher— there were only fifty people there— and she was pregnant by an American GI. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 62We thought, oh, we’ve got another problem. So people went over trying to explore that problem. That was even tougher. That had no idea: What are they talking about? What is this problem? you know. She’s pregnant. What’s the problem? That’s a good thing. And they knew, intuitively that a population of fifty need a constant stream of outside blood. So they all thought it was a great idea.But it was really a joy. We spent a day maybe— maybe not; probably we came in the morning and went back in the evening— visiting the school and the schoolteacher. Wonderful tropics, almost— Bali Hai stuff. We met women sitting under trees weaving baskets. There was a ship that came in only a few times a year, and it traded copra and it took out cocoanut and left medicines and things like that. And also by that time they had become accustomed to importing, rice or something, maybe a little more. Not very much. They were really self- sufficient. But they had come to depend on these boats. And because of the boats they made the little baskets and they traded them via these boats to the outside world. And, you know, souvenirs often say, “ Made in Japan.”Right.Using mercurochrome and gentian violet as the colors, that they got from the medical center, they painted on them, “ Made.” You know, not made anywhere, just “ Made.” Because they knew that souvenirs had that on them.That’s lovely.I used to have a couple of them downstairs. The mercurochrome and the gentian violet faded, evaporated I suppose. But anyway I had them for years, just “ Made” they said. And I remember— I was always pleased when Lawrence was pleased because, I said, that means that a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 63fifty- year- old man can enjoy this sort of thing like he was a boy. That’s great. And I saw it as a good omen. Because I remember arranging helicopter rides for Lawrence. He just really loved it.[ 00: 21: 37] End Track 5, Disk 2.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 6, Disk 2.One thing I wanted to talk to you little about before the day gets too far along, because you mentioned it earlier and I was curious about it, was Plowshare. What was the story with that?Well, I’ll tell you the whole story, which I didn’t even know at the time, was that Fred Reines, who later got the Nobel Prize for the neutrino when he was at [ University of California] Irvine, was one of the top senior people working on testing, or worked anyway at Los Alamos, a physicist. And when the Russians first made the test in 1949 and the Americans announced it— [ Harry S.] Truman announced it— the Russians said, We don’t know what you’re talking about. We told you all along we knew how to make bombs and we’ve been using them in experiments and moving mountains and maybe that’s what you’re talking about. They just denied testing a nuclear bomb, or tried to cover it up, and they used this notion that there’s some experiments with nuclear bombs that you may have. And Reines thought about it and he then started thinking about ways to use nuclear bombs to move mountains and do other useful things. And he published a little piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist. So that’s where it started, but I didn’t know any of that. We at Livermore were always looking for extensions. That’s why we got in to thermonuclear power, fusion. And so I think independently, although somebody might have talked with somebody at Los Alamos, I think independently we started thinking ourselves about how to use nuclear weapons in a positive way from an economic point of view. And very soon ideas about creating dams, underground reservoirs— mostly we thought in terms of digging, like digging a new Panama Canal, making a big harbor in Alaska at a place whose name was Teller, northern coast, it was somewhere around Nome. And these UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 64peaceful uses, we called them “ peaceful uses.” Later we learned the Russians called them “ economic uses.” And as I said, I think that Harold [ Brown] suggested called it Plowshare because of the biblical injunction: Beat your swords into plowshares and your spears into pruning hooks, or something. [“ They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up their sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” ISAIAH 2: 4.]Right. Yes.Later, when I looked it up, there are actually three references like that in the Bible, and the other two are the reverse. You know, “ Beat your plowshares into swords,” and they were each of them playing on the words. I mean, one of them was first and then the other, even in the Bible, was somebody who knew about this and making the opposite twist. Because they both appear. I mean, “ Beat your swords into plowshares,” and “ Beat your plowshares into swords.” They’re both in the Bible. Well, the Bible’s wonderful when it comes to contradictions. [“ Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.” JOEL 3: 10]Right.And I think that actually twice you’re supposed to make your weapons and only once you’re supposed to get rid of them. As we say, we could look it up. In my reader that I wrote for Scientific American long ago, Readings [ from Scientific American] in Arms Control, [ W. H. Freeman, 1973], in there it actually says, Isaiah, chapter something, chapter something. And I’m not sure that Harold [ Brown] named it but I think he did.[ 00: 04: 06] UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 65I named Project Rover, which was our version of the nuclear rocket, and then for quite a while they used it— it was called the Rover Project even after we were out of it, and then that name disappeared and names like Kiwi and whatever else took over.That was at Nevada, right?Yes, at Jackass Flats.Because we saw, when we went on our tour, the remains of whatever had been there.See, I got back into that. I was in it originally because we were promoting it at Livermore. Then we were taken out. Washington said, and correctly, that really we don’t need two laboratories working on nuclear rockets. And since Los Alamos has the technology base for working graphite, it’s obvious it should be there. So they just took us out by force, they just said no more. We’d been spending modest amounts of money and they just, No! They gave us Pluto instead, which I didn’t like but Mills did. That was a nuclear engine and I didn’t think that was going anywhere either, in the long run. But Mills was very enthused and some others too, so we did it. We took it up as a sort of a booby prize when they took us out of Rover.I called it Rover because I asked two guys— Biehl was one and I’m not sure who the other would be— I asked them to study the question of a reactor for use as rocket propulsion. And I called them the Rover Boys, that’s how it got started.And was there an allusion there or—?Oh yes, well, we were certainly naïve. Whether we should have been smart enough to know it was a dumb idea, that’s always hard to say.Oh no, I was saying— OK, but that’s a good thing you’re answering me, but was there— when you said the “ Rover Boys” were you referring to something—? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 66Oh, something in my youth about some kids that had that name. I really don’t know the reference. Unlike Isaiah, I wouldn’t know where to look it up.Yes. Because I was reading yesterday, when I was reviewing Race to Oblivion, your critique of the nuclear- powered airplane.Airplane.But obviously with Rover that was a different— that was a rocket.Of course it was a different era. My involvement with Rover was well ahead of my involvement with the nuclear airplane. And much of what I learned in connection with Rover and with Kiwi and the Los Alamos program is what made me cool to the nuclear airplane. I mean, I already was getting into an understanding of the kind of problems before I ever was involved with the nuclear airplane.Later on, and it’s too bad— this might be in some of Gerry’s memoirs somewhere— Gerry was actually in close touch with the people in the Soviet Union who had the Plowshares program there. One or two of those people actually came here on a lecture tour, and I remember Gerry shepherding them around California. I think I actually met them. They were eager to talk about their experiments, and they had a lot of them. They did more than we knew, and their ideas, of course, were well beyond what we knew, about building dams, and they brought us all kinds of blueprints: if you have a valley like this, this is where you put the bombs to blow the stuff to close off the river.But they never did it, did they?Yes, they did.Oh, they did do it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 67Once. I think just once, and that one was done by putting the bomb, I believe they put it right in the river or on the river plain and then the crater lip formed the dam.Oh wow.So they had the dam upstream blocking the water and another one down and it’s not doing anything. I think that’s right. But the guys who talked with Gerry talked about, I remember, and I met with them briefly, they were talking about putting them in the canyon walls and blowing the whole canyon wall down into the river.And I guess the layperson’s question right there is what about contamination?Well, that was always a problem even there. Our people would always say, Well yes, that stopped us but since they have no care for human life, it won’t stop them. That phrase was just sort of standard in dealing with the Russians. They could do this or they will do that because they have no regard for human life. And of course Stalin didn’t have a lot when it comes to treating his prisoners. But they were aware of those things. They tried to take them into account, especially the scientists; but you know Central Asia has a pretty low population level and so they were more careless than we would have been. We would not have done what they did. But they could get away with it. And they also made underground reservoirs and they used it to put out an oil fire. They actually did a number of things. And we never did very much. I mean, the fact that we never did anything practical. We had a lot of experiments like Sedan and other things. But I remember one of the things that made me realize how crazy this is, somebody showed me and it’s correct, how you can use a nuclear weapon to stimulate an oil well. You got this oil well, you put the bomb down the shaft, you blow it up, it cracks up all this rock, the oil— the gas starts to— loosens it up.Right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 68And that’s true. But we drill something like close to ten thousand new gas wells a year, and in order to make an impact, the number of wells you stimulate with nuclear weapons has to be comparable to the total number of wells you drill. There would’ve been thousands and thousands of underground nuclear explosions all of them behaving differently, some of them would put a lot of radioactivity in the gas, some of them wouldn’t. Lord knows, but it’s just a crazy idea. The idea of getting more gas by stimulating the wells with nuclear explosions is just wonderfully crazy. Imagine ten thousand underground nuclear explosions per year scattered throughout the Rocky Mountains or in Texas. But the Russians did do things, and they explored another thing. They explored putting cavities in salt domes that could be used for storage of anything, gas, oil, water. And so the Russians were quite eager about Plowshares for a while. I mean, all the stuff we got in 1949 was phony.What they said, yes.It was Foreign Minister Vishinsky who said these things. It was the foreign minister himself who said these crazy things. But the technical people in Russia did become quite enthused about it. That’s why we tried to work out in the Ford administration the technique for separating peaceful explosions from military- based explosions. And that’s what got the Russians, that’s when they started coming to the Nevada Test Site. That’s a story that happened when I wasn’t looking, mostly. But that’s a very important story.Well, let’s stop for a minute and then we’ll have that story.[ 00: 12: 05] End Track 6, Disk 2.[ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 3.I thought maybe we could talk about— you mentioned the Russians coming to the test site. I know that there’s documents over there I’v
  • Physicist, First director, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; Arms control negotiator; Director, Defense Dept. Research adn Engineering
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