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Interview with Herbert Frank York, July 18, 2004

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2004-07-18

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Narrator affiliation: Physicist, First director, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; Arms control negotiator; Director, Defense Dept. Research adn Engineering

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nts_000160

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York, Herbert F. (Herbert Frank). Interview, 2004 July 18. MS-00818. [Transcript]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1d21rw5t

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2004-07-18

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Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Herbert F. York July 18, 2004 La Jolla, California Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral 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 Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The 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 1 Interview with Herbert York July 18, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Dr. York discusses academic and governmental liaisons between Soviet and American scientists. The Joint Verification Experiment, Pugwash, Dartmouth group. 1 Cold War politics intensified as both sides debated a test ban treaty. 3 Dr. York discusses elements of arguments for nuclear test bans, including fallout from Pacific tests and the issue of non- proliferation. 5 Dr. York makes the argument that fears about enemies nuclear capabilities exist whether or not nuclear tests are carried out 9 Discussion of the complexity of the relationships among nuclear testing, test bans and national security. 11 The early days of China’s U. N. involvement in nuclear testing issues and Dr. York’s meetings with Chinese officials in Geneva. 16 Discussion of Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva. 20 Differences between former Manhattan Project scientists who had experienced World War II and the Cold War generation of policy- makers. 22 President Eisenhower rejects some of Dr. York’s proposed projects for weapons development at Livermore. 25 Weapons laboratory scientists play key advisory roles for the military 27 President 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. 29 The 1958 nuclear testing moratorium. 30 The moratorium ends in 1961 with resumption of Soviet tests in response to French testing of nuclear weapons. 33 Analysis of Soviet rationale for returning to nuclear testing and discussions of U. S. weapons laboratory activities during the moratorium. 35 Immediate and long term arguments for testing and not testing nuclear weapons 38 Regional concerns about nuclear proliferation. 41 Dr. York recalls his perception of the Soviet Union and his reactions to the end of the Cold War. 43 Conclusion: the post- Cold War era and views on contemporary challenges and dangers. 47 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Herbert F. York July 18, 2004 in La Jolla, CA Conducted by Mary Palevsky Mary 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 Project 2 Nineteen 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 Project 3 except 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 Project 4 Well, 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 Project 5 not. 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 Project 6 Well, 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 Project 7 Indians 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 Project 8 instrumented 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 Project 9 or 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 Project 10 Saddam 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 Project 11 Oh, 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 Project 12 everything’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 Project 13 wife’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 Project 14 and 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 Project 15 But 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] Va