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Interview with Robert Campbell, March 9, 2004

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2004-03-09

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Narrator affiliation: Test Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory

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nts_000044

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OH-03020
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Campbell, Robert "Bob". Interview, 2004 March 09. 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/d1z31p10p

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2004-03-09

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Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Robert Campbell March 9, 2004 Los Alamos, New Mexico 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 Robert Campbell March 9, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. Campbell discusses his childhood, college education, and employment with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. 1 Weary of the Navy’s rigid bureaucracy, Mr. Campbell decided to work for the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos. 4 Edward Teller and other scientists conducted a wide variety of scientific experiments at Los Alamos. 6 Mr. Campbell discusses his role in operation Greenhouse, as well as the difficulties of keeping records in the pre- computer era. 8 Mr. Campbell explains the organizational challenges posed by nuclear testing, the managerial structure of the test program, and his eventual appointment as test director for the Rover project. 11 The laboratories were eager to resume testing after the end of the Eisenhower moratorium in 1961. 19 Mr. Campbell describes the living conditions for workers at the Pacific Proving Grounds and the Nevada Test Site. 21 Mr. Campbell discusses some of the political and economic issues that created tension within the nuclear testing community. 24 Mr. Campbell explains the responsibilities of a test director. 27 Though perfect information was never available, safety was a major concern for those involved in the nuclear test program. Test directors were charged with protecting both on- site and off- site areas from contamination. 32 Mr. Campbell discusses the balance between the need to test nuclear weapons and the risk to surrounding populations. 33 Mr. Campbell discusses the experience of witnessing his first nuclear test, Greenhouse/ Easy. 39 Recollections of Bravo test 41 Conclusion: The interview closes with Mr. Campbell’s general views on the importance of doing the best job when one is asked by one’s leaders and the difficulty of the general population understanding the science/ technology behind testing and safety. 44 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Campbell March 9, 2004 in Los Alamos, New Mexico Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Mary Palevsky: What I was thinking about when framing this question was, here I’m sitting with you in your house in 2004 and people say, Oh yes, you have to speak to Bob Campbell because he has all this great knowledge. And so back sometime long ago, I guess, starting at the end of the Second World War, whenever you arrived here, you were a person with a certain amount of experience who got involved in this whole nuclear testing area. And even to go back a little farther, it would be helpful to know where you were from and where you were during the war and then how you ended up here. Robert Campbell: Well, if I can do it quickly. Yes, just an overview, yes. I was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. Born in 1920. And ended up at Purdue University. Not a distinguished student. But in 1942 the draft board was after students and— one of those things and I ended up taking a job in August of 1942 at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. And I was there for, I don’t know, it must’ve been two or three days before they sent me down to a little field station in Solomons, Maryland. And I worked pretty much out of Solomons for quite a while after that. The game there was, well, mine detection. The Navy wasn’t very well equipped. In fact they weren’t equipped at all. At that time there was this big to- do to get mine detection work. The Germans were putting magnetic mines all over the damned East Coast, in our shipping lanes and that sort of crap, tankers coming up around Florida. And I got in pretty much on the tail end of that. That’s where I met your father [ Harry Palevsky]. He was an electrical UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 engineer doing electronics, the amplifiers. Don Hughes was in charge of that group but he worked out of Washington. We didn’t see him too often. There weren’t very many people, half- dozen or so. I know where two of them are today but the rest of them I don’t know. Anyway, there came a time that the law of the land was everybody under twenty- five puts on a suit [ uniform], no matter what. No more occupational deferments for single men. So I put on a suit. By that time I had left Solomons and worked a couple of years in Nova Scotia. You evidence some surprise. Early on all the mines were laid from ships, surface vessels. And that wasn’t going to catch it, you know, you can’t mine Tokyo’s harbor with surface vessels during the war. So there’s a big to- do about getting aircraft capable, things that were capable of launching from airplanes. And I’d have done the damned field work forever and ever, I guess ever since I got out of school. But the tail end of that program, somebody designs a mechanism and somebody builds it and somebody, you know, [ asks], Here’s the damned thing, does it work? The way you find out is you take it and drop it in the water and see what happens to it. OK, for a while people tried to drop it in the water, if you will, and used divers to recover things. And that’s pretty damned poor. You can’t really— well, it’s hard to tell from what a diver saw or didn’t see, felt. You know it happens, sometimes you can’t even find the case. But Nova Scotia, the upper end of the Bay of Fundy, they had tides like fifty feet. And so you could drop something at high water and drive out to it in low water. It was a wonderful thing. We could do more in a day up there than you could do in a week in Florida in a lake or Bermuda. [ 00: 05: 14] So no need for a diver then at all? No divers, no. Amazing. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 So I went up there and worked. That was before I put the suit on. Worked as a civilian there for, oh, year- and- a- half I guess, last half of the summer of 1943 and then 1944 in the summer. We didn’t work during the wintertime. There were chunks of ice that were floating around that it made a messy thing. But then I ended up after that, when they said, put on a suit, they sent me back there as officer in charge of the damned place. Interesting. Yes, I got a full set of shots, a copy of Navy regs [ regulations], and best wishes. I didn’t finish that job— I wasn’t released from active duty until the summer of 1946. The last job I had was to go back to Nova Scotia and close out that station and disband it. We turned it over to the Canadians. So were you up there at the end of the war? Yes. When the bombs were dropped? Yes. People disappeared from NOL [ Naval Ordnance Laboratory]. Right. I never knew where the hell they went. But after the bombs were dropped, if you will, then I started learning where some of these people were, you know, where had they gone? And actually they took the better people from NOL. Some very good people. And I went to work for NOL again when I was released from the military. And peacetime Navy, well it’s kind of frustrating. Why? Well, the war is over and so now we have to play by the book. And the Navy had some books that are wonderful, just kind of frustrating. Having been accustomed to doing something and not being thwarted by a bunch of paper. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Right. Going through all the procedures? Yes. So I made a mistake. After a year of that, as a permanent civil service employee and all those wonderful things, I decided that this AEC [ U. S. Atomic Energy Commission] bunch, Los Alamos, was new and never in my lifetime could they get as hidebound and as bureaucratic as the Navy. Interesting. And I was talking to some of my friends who had come here and they said, Well, come on out. At that time the lab was in a pretty low point for getting people to come here, so they weren’t too fussy. Oh, so you’re being humble about— No, no, it’s a matter of they needed bodies. OK. And this was—? I arrived here on the third day of July in 1947. In 1947. OK. And I’ve been mad about that ever since too. Why? Well, it was one of those things that— we came by train of course and the train was late and the bus that was supposed to meet the train had already left and so on and so forth— the taxi had left, and I got a bus from Lamy to Santa Fe. And there I was, a young kid with a sport coat, you know, and a tie and all this sort of stuff, a fishing rod, a briefcase, a couple bags, plunked down in July in the sun in Lamy. And you know, you get off an air conditioned train and you wonder, What the hell have I gotten into? This isn’t helping you, is it? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 But it’s interesting because you said— it’s helping me, I like all these— human details that you don’t get when you read a book a lot of times. You get on the damned bus and come up out of that little gulch that the tracks are in, towards, Lamy, look around. And this is my first trip west of the Mississippi. I didn’t know what to expect. And all these tufts of bushes here and there, I thought, My God, this country has the mange. And I got to 109 East Palace, Dorothy McKibbin, bless her. And she arranged for me to get on some sort of a local bus and get up the hill. And that thing— this is before the road from Pojoaque was paved. And it went through all sorts of little back places and put off a package here, pick up a package there, you know, and it was getting warmer and warmer and warmer. Finally got to Los Alamos and then— this is the part I’ve been mad about— it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, the third of July, tomorrow’s a holiday, everybody’s pfft! Out of here. And they gave me a key to a dorm room and says, Come back Monday. This was on a Thursday. I didn’t get paid for the Fourth of July holiday. I’ve been mad ever since. They owe you that. Yes, they owe me a holiday. [ 00: 11: 36] They do. But now when you said a few minutes back— I sort of— I missed this beat. You said you made the mistake so you were saying the mistake was— The mistake was, what I found since was if there was something in the Navy regs that I didn’t understand or didn’t like or thought didn’t make sense, you know, if you go back far enough in the Navy history there was a reason for it. But here you are in a completely new program, with no prior history, nothing to guide them, so they made up rules. And sometimes these didn’t make sense. But it was wonderful because if you find that you can work your way through the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 bureaucracy of the Navy Department and had that for a background, these people were pretty naïve. It was very easy to get along in this system. Yes, I know what you’re saying. So the Navy was good training for me. So you were hired to come here sort of remotely. You sent—? I had never been here and never had an interview with these people. You just said, This is my background, and they said, Come? I sent to them an application. Today they’d be called a resume but it wasn’t that formal. And they said, Fine, come. And I had no idea what I was getting into. Nor did they. But they needed bodies and some of my friends here recommended me and that was it. Now at that point when you’re coming in that era, are dealing with having to get clearance before you show up here? Oh yes. But that wasn’t all that big a deal. It didn’t take that long. You had to have a clearance before you could come, but they initiated the clearance sight unseen, and I think it was only a couple of months or something like that from the time I said, Well, if you can clear me, I’ll come. And then did you have a position or a title or what were you? Oh no, no, no, no, no. You just were a body coming to work? You were just a body coming to work. And I found out later the question was, OK, who gets the body? Which group? And there were two groups that were interested in me. And I don’t know whether they flipped a coin or what the hell they did. That’s their problem. I ended up working briefly for a man named Koski, Walt Koski. He was one of the legendary types around here too, as a group leader. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 OK. But within a month or two or three or whatever it was, he pulled out and went back to some university, and I ended up working for a chap named Willig, Frank Willig. And it was out at one of the test sites, one of the firing sites, our site. Where, down at Trinity or—? No, here. Oh, here. [ 00: 15: 18] Trinity was long over. Trinity was in 1945. Oh, I know. I’m just saying the site itself. No, no, no, it was on one of the— there are still a number of locations out in the southern and I guess the southwestern part of the lab’s property where you can fire explosives or do whatever. And this was one of those. The game at the place where I was at, our site, one of the games, the thing I was interested in doing, was trying to take two jets made by— putting an explosive cylinder around a pipe and it squeezes and makes a jet. And the question was what’s the ionization in that jet? And so I was trying to make a jet go through a spectrometer. OK, and measure that way. And measure that. Didn’t work, or I couldn’t make it work. But we fiddled around with things like that at that site. It was Group M- 6. It was changed to GMX- 6 in a reorganization but didn’t change the thing. But then there came another time. But there came a day that I was kind of fed up, bored, I don’t know, with our site and playing with the explosives, and just before Greenhouse dear Edward [ Teller], he always had some damned thing, some idea he threw away, you know, or threw out. People would go along behind him and pick these up, look at them, and see, Oh, this is what we want. Yes, we’ll try this one. Well, one of the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 ones that got tried, he asked the question: What is the inside of a fireball like? And so on the spur of the moment we, for Greenhouse, put together a small group, I think four or five people, young engineers, field types, and so on, to look at that. And we ended up making a gadget that would hold a piece of pipe and close the ends of it, wheel it in the fireball area, and try to just take a sample, a snatch, and see what was there. How do you do that? I mean that’s a technical question and other things but how would you even be able to measure it when it just—? Well no, what you hope is that you can get a sample of whatever was there and hand it to the radiochemist and let them play with it. OK. All right. So somehow you have to get a piece of it out. That’s right. OK. So we built some things, and it was fun. And basically it was a piece of pipe and we had to have a valve for each end of it to close it. And you don’t get that by turning off like a water tap. So we went into the interior of ballistics and made some guns which fire a projectile across that thing. And you don’t do it with round projectiles; you do it with flat ones. And you don’t want them to bounce, you throw in a taper, you know, there are all sorts of things. So we developed little guns [ 00: 20: 18] to close the damned thing. And then came the business of, OK, we’ve got that. How do you hold it? How do you get it back? And it turns out that Baldwin Locomotives had works, you know, they made steam engines. They had quite a foundry and they could cast the machine things for us. So we designed just a brute strength cast steel housing that we put this bottle in, little old intake, if you will, a little funnel- like on one end and an open back, so the fireball is supposed to fill that bloody thing and we’re were going to close it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Oh wow! Well, we built them, put them in place, they were fifty feet out from the bottom of the Greenhouse Easy tower. So they were well in the fireball. And after the damned shot we went up and took those castings apart, got the bottles out, took them to a lab down in the other end of the atoll. They had a copper liner in, took the liner out, gave them to the chemist to dissolve. They were clean. Didn’t work. Amazing. Did not work at all. So we went through all that damned rigmarole, money, time, energy, whatnot, got the damned copper sunk, and I think what happened— That was my question. I think what happened is that there was no flow through there at all. The damned thing in that nozzle or intake just stagnated. Yes. Interesting. But you see it raises one of the questions that I sort of had generally about testing, or what you did, and you can tell me if this is a good question or not. Edward Teller says— I’m curious I guess from a scientific point of view and the way his mind was, I guess he would be curious about lots of stuff— so then the decision is made, This is a worthwhile thing for us to do. I guess it would be just a purely scientific point of view having nothing to do with— Nothing to do with bomb design, nothing to do with anything else. Thank you. Yes. So you’re saying, how can we look at what? What’s in the fireball. Actually some good came of this, but it was many, many, many years later. Many years later. The question floating around in the system somewhere came to the lab, where people were developing silos for missiles and they wanted doors that would open and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 what not and so on and so forth. They asked the question, Have you ever had anything in a fireball that you recovered? So we could go back and show the drawings, photographs, what not, of these castings. They were bolted together. And we were able, because of the way the bolts were positioned— the nuts were down in the shadow— we were able to unscrew those damned things— they were big bolts— and get this apart. Well, this gave those people some idea of the amount of melting you got and what would survive in a fireball— well, in a fireball, period. So that experiment was some use. It was used again for people who were designing missile silos. Yes, for a completely different reason. Yes. But there’s a wealth of information in it if you know where to look, you know about it. And a lot of field experiments in this laboratory— and Livermore too— had been very poor, even damned bad, about documenting failures or why things failed. [ 00: 25: 06] Interesting. You know, you’re trying to do something and if it doesn’t work you drop it and try something else, but you don’t record what you did. And I’ve been in many, many meetings over the years and somebody would bring up, Why don’t we do so- and- so? and the voice in the back of the room says, Well, do you remember so- and- so? Been done. But no record of it. But that body of information is gone. Was it ever documented? No. Never. No, no. What I was saying is if it worked you used it. If it didn’t work to hell with it. You’d drop it. We never stopped to document what we’d done. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Right. See, that’s another— That’s a part of this laboratory, and part of Livermore, and they went the same path, they had the same pressures on them, that it’s lost. It’s just gone. A lot of that walked out the door— In people’s heads. In people’s heads, and if you’re not sitting in the room to ask the question, Hey, how about old Tennis Shoe? Nobody ever knew there was an old Tennis Shoe or whatever the name was. Right, right. Now this raises a couple of interesting points. One is the whole notion of talking to people in the classified arena about those kinds of things, so at least you get it out of their brains and onto a piece of paper. That’s one way that these things could be done. This generation that’s in there today is several generations from what I was talking about, and they don’t know who to ask. They don’t know what to ask, and the people sitting back in my generation don’t know what the problems are over there. It’s a disconnect. There’s been an effort for people to go back into things that there’s some data for and try to put that data into a format that somebody can use but that is a tremendously uphill— Sure. Sure. But the institutional pressures— I’m guess, now, you tell me if I’m right— what were they that would cause that to be the case? You don’t want to look at mistakes because they— No, no, no, no, no, not at all. The problem that was set for the laboratory when it was designed— to design a thing that would do so- and- so. And that’s what you were focused on. You put all your energy into doing that and if you went down a path that didn’t help you, get back on the track. And the pressure was to have something in the stockpile by such- and- such a date that would do so- and- so. And there was no pressure on you to document how you did it. Just do it. [ Pause] And it was a sort of a family- type business over there. You had all sorts of people who UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 did all sorts of things and his contribution was going to be— and he was responsible for that, somebody else did so- and- so and so- and- so, and you worked together and then met your stockpile commitments. Say that again. And met your stockpile commitments. And it was done, a lot of it, in a handshake business. You’d have a meeting for the various divisions, people from the various divisions, maybe once a week or something and I’d just say, Hey, I’m at this point, or I had this problem, but Where are we? But those were not documented. To my knowledge. Oh, there were some minutes of the meetings in later years. But either a thing helped you and you used it, or you forgot it. Right. Moved on. Yes. And there was a fair amount of pressure to meet your commitments. Right. I mean it raises a question for me, and again correct me if I’m not getting this right. Go ahead, you were going to say something. No, I’m just going to caution you, this is my view of it. That is a given. Not necessarily of all. No, but that’s a given in this kind of work. Absolutely. Yes. But I’m just wondering if— I guess in sort of the ideal purely scientific and experimental world you’d have the luxury of saying, this didn’t work. What knowledge can we gather from why it didn’t work? But here you’re actually going toward applying this to actual product or— Yes, you’re solving a problem. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 Right, and that’s what you’re doing. Yes. So you don’t have the luxury of thinking about why your first guess or first attempt didn’t work. No, if it didn’t work you can’t use it. You still have the problem. But interesting that this piece did somehow end up being useful all those years later. Oh, that was just— [ 00: 31: 08] By chance. Yes, it was strictly by chance. When they asked did anybody have anything, it just happened that I was around. In fact I’m the only guy left in the lab at the time. That was fairly recently. I’m the only guy left around town that would remember. And I could go to the photo lab and it works strange things. We had, forever I guess, a group around here who were responsible for the document photography. If you had such- and- such an experiment and you needed a picture of it, you called Norris Gardner [ sp] and he’d send a guy out and take a picture. And these photographers kept notebooks and their notebook would say on such- and- such a date he did a job for Joe Schnook. They didn’t always say what the job was. They did some sort of caption sheet that said something like “ Joe’s experiment”. So if you want to go back into those records, you’d almost have to know who the photographer was that did that. I wanted a picture of one of the experiments and I had to know that— well, of course it was on Greenhouse and it was about, oh it must have been about January/ February of 1951, and Roy Stone was the photographer. Roy Stone. So I can go to the photo lab thirty, forty years later and say, Hey, you got Stone’s notebooks from—? Amazing. There were a number of attempts made by those photographers to go back to those notebooks and actually catalog, if you will, that stuff. But I don’t believe there was ever anything near like a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 successful— they would get a few of those photographers together and they’d start through from day one and the whole thing would grind to a halt and be out of funding or, you know. And then maybe ten years later somebody would try it again and there were fewer of them and I don’t know that they could ever untangle that stuff. But there is, if you could untangle it, there is a wonderful collection of negatives over there. Yes, it sounds amazing. But they were all done in this wonderful family— it’s like you have— I’ll bet you, somewhere in your family you have a box of pictures that need captions and don’t have them. That’s it. Everybody’s got that. Yes. Well, the laboratory has a big box of pictures. Yes, it’s a big institutional family with their box of pictures. That’s a great analogy. I mean it’s not even an analogy, it’s the same thing. Yes, that’s it. That’s it. That sounds incredible. Well, it’s believable. Yes. It’s totally believable, and you can see how it would happen. I don’t know this, I don’t know what they’re doing now, but in today’s world where you can dump things into a computer and sort it and so on and so forth, you don’t have to live that way. But these were individuals with notebooks and pens, and it wasn’t a quill pen or a stand- up desk but—. No, but you know I know something of that world from my dad’s work because I have these little notebooks, you know, those little academic spiral— not spiral but with the little marbly outsides of [ 00: 35: 14] his experiments in the 1950s, and they’re handwritten and everybody’s watching UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 the run in the different handwriting and printouts of the little graphs are pasted in and, you know— I’m from the era, having been born in 1949, that I remember when things weren’t computerized for a whole long time until my adult life. But it’s an artifact now, for God’s sake, because you don’t see it anymore. Well, it’s awfully hard to sort. It’s impossible to sort. You have to read it, right. Yes. Well, that’s somebody’s big project if they ever had enough money and time to do it. It’s too late. Too many of those photographers are not living. It’s just like so many other things. It’s information that people carried around in their heads and they were walking encyclopedias, if you will. But they’re not walking any longer. So that just becomes “ stuff” that no one understands. Well, it’s stuff that’s no longer useful. If you don’t know what it was, don’t know that it ever existed, how the hell can you ask for it? How can you ever do it? You can’t just say, dump all those negatives that you might have in my lap. It’s a hell of a limbo. So the notebooks actually then contain the negatives? No, no, no. They refer to the negatives. If you use a picture in one of your reports— and we didn’t write very many reports— it’ll have a negative number on that picture. Which is still a long ways from Nevada. The road leads there. But so you were able to go over to the lab, what, photographic records, and find that photo. Yes. Oh yes. Because I knew the photographer, I knew the time, so on and so forth. But there is— well, the stations, there were two types. There was— we called it Station 123 and the 124. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Just arbitrary numbers. And I couldn’t go to the lab over there today and say, Will you give me a copy of the pictures of Station 123 on Greenhouse? They’d just say, Ehh. But you have to say, Roy took the pictures about this time, and then they go find Roy’s notebook somewhere and then we can go through them and say, Yes, let’s look at this, and I’d get a number. OK? Yes. Yes, but see, this is useful because people don’t, especially as time goes on and technology changes— Well, this is not the information you’d get from the more illustrious people who are out here. Right. But it’s the way things— How did it work? That’s what I’m saying: How did it really work? For me it worked that way. Yes. Yes. That’s interesting. So that was Greenhouse. That was Greenhouse. At the end of Greenhouse we’d been put— that handful of engineering types— my background was optics and spectroscopy, not engineering. It’s probably the only thing I’ve never worked in. But at the end of Greenhouse— or at Greenhouse, just for administrative purposes, we were assigned to a group. And it happened to be a group [ where] the guy in charge— group leader— was a colonel, Bob Jarman. And he was in the Task Force One. He was the only military guy here in Los Alamos that was in charge of all the damned military experiments. And he kept books on the whole bloody military effort. And Greenhouse was a very large thing for effects measurements. Old Bob Jarman, he was supposed to keep track of that. Right, OK. Bob Jarman, OK. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 Well, this small group of people was put in under Bob Jarman’s wing just because it was a place to put it. We didn’t fit, had no business there, it was just administratively a time sheet to sign. Is he Army then or—? Yes. [ 00: 41: 53] Yes, Army colonel. And that was during Greenhouse, and we got paid that way. It was convenient. At the end of Greenhouse they decided that they’d keep that group of people together. They were a bunch of mechanical engineers. And I guess I should back up and say there was, in 1948, a division formed here, J- Division. Right. I read about that. And before that, Crossroads, Sandstone, when the lab had a part to play in a testing operation they’d pull a bunch of people in from that into a group and they’d do the job and then at the end of the operation they’d go back to their own departments. But this seesaw in and out got to the place that it was kind of obvious that this was going to go on for a while, we’re going to do a lot of testing, it’s going to be a continuous thing. And so in 1948 they formed a division to do this. OK? Probably one of the most influential people in starting that was Darol Froman And he may have been the first division leader, I’m not sure. I ask