Interview with Troy Ernest Wade II, July 14, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Troy Wade July 14, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada 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 Troy Wade July 14, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: in 1968, Mr. Wade was hired as a nuclear security officer for the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC]. 1 The AEC was a military- like, hierarchical federal bureaucracy in which he was not used to working. 2 Mr. Wade was later promoted to division director in AEC’s Test Systems Division. The accidental venting of the Baneberry test had forced the imposition of new regulations and procedures that drastically affected his work. 7 In the early 1970s Mr. Wade becomes assistant manager for operations at the AEC’s Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO], description of responsibilities as a test controller and head of the Joint Test Organization [ JTO] during nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. 11 Mr. Wade’s position often required him to leave the Nevada Test Site to work on other projects. He discusses his involvement in work in the Pacific, Canada, and Washington, D. C. 14 Mr. Wade recalls the evolution of his career as he moved progressively higher in the federal government’s bureaucratic hierarchy. 15 Position as principal deputy assistant secretary for defense program and move with family to Washington, D. C. ( 1981). 18 Conclusion: transition from Carter to Reagan administrations. Some officials did not realize that nation’s nuclear weapons program was in the Department of Energy, proposals to dismantle the DOE did not succeed. 21 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Troy Wade July 14, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Troy Wade: In early 1968, I was still an employee of Livermore, and I was loaned to the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] to help write new federal regulations for what we in those days called atomic weapons safety. It had to do with applying what were national standards for dealing with atomic weapons in the military and in the AEC’s production complex. Those same regulations had to be applied to the test program, and so Livermore loaned me to the AEC to help do that, since I was involved in that for the lab. And then one day in mid- to- late 1968, a fellow that worked for the AEC at the time named Don Edwards said, How would you like to come to work for the Atomic Energy Commission? And as I mentioned the other day, I thought a lot about that and I thought about the things my dad had taught me to think about. I thought about longevity and stability and retirement and benefits— and that was even before it was fashionable to worry a lot about benefits— but I had been kind of brought up that way. And as I mentioned the other day, to go to work for the AEC was indeed a pay cut from Livermore. So if you went back and looked at my arrival in Las Vegas, working for REECo [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company], I took a pay cut to go to work for the laboratory and now I was taking a pay cut to become a federal employee. And it didn’t appear that I was on the right track, but history’s shown it worked out well. Anyway, I became a federal official in late 1968. What was your title at that point, do you remember? I was a nuclear safety officer. And it was a very interesting transition for me. I was unaware of the hierarchy, because it didn’t exist at Livermore in the classical sense. It certainly didn’t exist UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 at the test site. But when you got into the government, then you ran into— and particularly in those days— the AEC was a very military- like organization and organized in that fashion, and you worked through the system. And I had not been an AEC employee very long when I made my first trip to Livermore as an AEC employee, a trip I had made many, many times. And I traveled with an AEC guy, the fellow that I worked for, as a matter of fact. And we flew over and he rented the car and we got to the motel in Livermore and I said, Where are we going to go have dinner? And he said, Well, I don’t have dinner out. I can’t afford it on the per diem. And I said, Well, what do you eat? And he said, Well, now, this is a true story, he said— and he had a couple of hot dogs wrapped up in Saran wrap, and he had one of these little folding pots, and he had a package of potato chips, and he said, I just heat up these hot dogs in hot water out of the faucet. And I was absolutely shocked, but I said, Fine. Well, then, may I have the keys to the car? I’ll drive down and find— He said, No, we didn’t put you down as a driver and so, you know, the government’s liability interests are not protected since you didn’t sign, so no, you can’t drive the car. And I said, Well, what am I supposed to do about dinner? And he said, That’s kind of your problem. It’s not mine. So that was one of my entries into the federal government. And shortly after that, I walked into the cafeteria in the AEC building, and there sat Carter Broyles, who was a very [ 00: 05: 00] senior Sandia test program guy, and Harry Reynolds, who was a very senior UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Livermore test program guy whom I’d worked with as a Livermore employee. And I said Hi to them and they said, Hey, Troy, you’ve got a dumb thing going on up in the tunnels, this new atomic weapons safety stuff. You’ve actually got armed guards patrolling a cable trench in the tunnel— where the cables are actually buried in concrete, so there’s little chance that any saboteur can get to the cables or anyone wishing to do an evil deed— and it’s costing us a ton of money to have a guard twenty- four hours a day, seven days a week, guarding a concrete ditch. And I said, You’re right. I didn’t realize that was happening. I will take care of it. So I went upstairs in the AEC building and I went to the office of Bob Thalgott, who was the assistant manager for operations and the senior test manager, whom I also had known with my Livermore hat on, and his secretary, Sophie Alexander, whom I knew. And I said, Sophie, I need to see Mr. Thalgott as soon as possible on a nuclear weapons safety issue. And she said, Sure. I’ll call you. And within an hour or so, she called and said, Can you run up here right now? And so I went up and went in to see Bob Thalgott. And I explained to him about having this guard patrolling this concrete ditch and he said, I didn’t realize we were doing that either. I will take care of it. I will fix it. And I went back to my office feeling pretty good. I was a GS- 14, and Bob Thalgott was a GS- 17. And my boss, the GS- 15, when he found out what was happening, he had a fit. He called me into his office, and he and his GS- 16 boss really chewed me out. And they said, This is not the laboratory. GS- 14s don’t talk to GS- 17s. What you should have done was come to me, the GS- 15, who then would go to the GS- 16, who then would go to see Bob Thalgott, the GS- 17. And they said, you know, If you can’t live in this— you’re going to have to obey these rules, Troy, or you’re not going to make it in this environment. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 And so you would know everyone’s grades in order to— you would know the hierarchy so you’d know who the next one up was? And I knew the hierarchy. I just didn’t realize that it was that kind of a military operation. So a few months went by and I was not happy with the change I had made and the way things were going. And I got a call from a fellow named Charlie Williams— who was in Livermore— who was a Livermore employee who had been a military officer assigned to Livermore and later a physicist that later switched over, and was at that time the head of the field test program. And I knew that the guy that ran the AEC office here in town, Bob Miller, was talking to Charlie Williams about coming to work— no, it wasn’t Bob Miller. Bob was gone. It was— I’ll think of him in a minute. The AEC manager was looking for a deputy manager, and the rumor mill said he’d been talking with Dr. Charlie Williams. So Charlie called me and he said, What do you think? And I said, This is the worst place I’ve ever worked and the worst environment that I’ve ever been in, and if you don’t take this job and come down and try and fix this place, then I’m going to quit and go back to work for the laboratory. Well, he did it. He came down, and he was the new deputy [ 00: 10: 00] manager— very, very senior federal official— and a bull in the china closet, which was typical of Charlie. And the very first thing he did was call my boss in and chew him out and say, You know, if ever I want to talk to Troy— Charlie had an Arkansas drawl [ imitating drawl]— If ever I wanna talk with Troy, I wanna talk with him alone. I don’t want the rest of ya here. And things got better. Things got better. Yes, let me ask you a little bit about this because you’ve given a couple of incidents, but generally, I’m asking, what are the kinds of things you’re concerned about? I guess you’re concerned personally for your own work environment, but also with the efficiency of the organization, with this stratification, when you’re saying it’s the worst place to ever work. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Well, I was not used to that regimentation. And I didn’t understand why it was necessary, because my conversation with the test manager, with Bob Thalgott, my ten- minute conversation, had solved a several- hundred- thousand- dollar problem. And it was difficult for me to accept that I had to spend two days to find a way to solve the problem that I had solved in ten minutes. So it was new for me. I’d never been in the military, and this was a military- like organization. And GS- 13s didn’t talk to GS- 15s, and GS- 14s sure as hell didn’t talk with GS- 17s. And most of the people were long- time federal employees and had grown up in this environment and they did it and liked it. I didn’t like it, and neither did Charlie. And the AEC was beginning to absorb a lot of laboratory people onto their staff. There were several other Livermore people that came to work: Don Schueler, Gene Freeman— I can think of a bunch of people I worked with at Livermore who also ended up in the AEC— Bob Clemenson. And I think we helped. I think we brought the technical expertise the organization wanted, but we also brought the Nevada Test Site, Let’s find a way to get the job done and not worry about all the stratification. So over the long haul, it worked. Yes. It’s sort of interesting. I’m thinking now of organizational history because of conversations I’ve had with people like Duane Sewell and others about how clear Ernest Lawrence was, that he was never going to have an organizational chart or hierarchy like that. He always wanted to be able to say, You’re the best person for the job. I’m putting you there. And these kinds of job classifications of any sort would be problematic for him because of what you just said: Get the job done. So it’s interesting for me to hear this sort of culture clash, almost, of the ways of getting things done. And I later found that the AEC offices in Washington, if you go back and look at the Atomic Energy Act, it specifies very clearly that while the Atomic Energy Commission was a civilian UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 agency, there would be military officers assigned. And certain positions were identified as flag officer positions, so naturally, there was sort of the military way of doing business. One of the many things I’ve learned over the years, of course, was how right President Eisenhower was when he said, You can’t turn over the entire defense complex of the United States to the military, or it will consume every single dollar. The whole gross national product will become subsumed by the military. And that’s exactly, of course, what happened in the Soviet Union. So the decision to make the AEC a [ 00: 15: 00] civilian agency was a brilliant decision, and the subset of that that had it populated with military officers was also a very important element. It did tend to make the AEC look like a military organization and it tended, therefore, to have a chain of command that was much more stringent than I had ever seen or the laboratories had ever seen. And it was kind of a challenge to find out a way to do things. Yes, that’s very interesting, because what you’re saying about the Atomic Energy Act, the thing that I came away with, of course, was that it remained a civilian organization. That fight ended up being solved that way by Congress and that whole bit. But the fact that there’s this military culture within it is something that wouldn’t be obvious to me, so that’s very interesting. In fact, the act talked about the Division of Military Application of the Atomic Energy Commission would be headed up by a flag or general officer. And that prevails today. The deputy in defense programs is a flag officer. It’s changed somewhat today. There aren’t as many military officers, or as high- ranking military officers. But the interesting thing— we’ve talked a lot about retrospective views. I personally now have watched and participated in examinations of this decision that created the Atomic Energy Commission half a dozen times in my forty- year career— about should the weapons program be in the DoD [ Department of Defense]— and every time it’s been examined, people have supported the thesis that caused the original Atomic UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Energy Commission structure. The belief that the total control of nuclear weapons should not be in a single agency prevails to this day, and I think it’s proven to be a very sound thing. Those guys knew what they were doing when they set it up that way. Yes. That’s very interesting. Now, another thing we need to talk about sometime is I have watched this whole thing go from the AEC to ERDA [ U. S. Energy Research and Development Administration] to the DOE [ Department of Energy]. That’s another long subject. Well, yes, let’s continue with the time line, and then any insights you have about that, because people are constantly alluding to it, that will be a useful subject for another talk. Well, as I continued my career as a federal employee, I was a pretty fortunate guy. We got the nuclear weapons safety program going, and I ended up as the branch chief running that piece of the program. And then I was promoted to a division director’s status in the Atomic Energy Commission. We called it Test Systems Division, and it had in it not only the nuclear weapons safety stuff, but all of the emergency programs and support to the containment panel and all of the people of the test site. And by the way, it was while I was wearing that hat that we founded and started the Nuclear Emergency Search Team [ NEST], which was another big, wonderful part of my career. The Nuclear Emergency Search Team got me into some strange places, like forty- five days in the Northwest Territory looking for pieces of satellites. Right. What year was that, again? Oh, I’d have to go look for sure. I think— It’s the seventies? Yes, early seventies. The very early seventies. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Because I did want to ask you, because it’s an important event at the test site in the seventies, as far as I can tell, is Baneberry, right? So I wondered if you were around in that era and in what position, and what that was like from your vantage point. [ 00: 20: 00] I think I was the GS- 14 branch chief of the nuclear safety branch when Baneberry happened. Curiously enough, I was in Livermore when the Baneberry thing happened. But one of the fellows that worked for me, Bob Peterson, called me and chased me down in Livermore— long before the era of everybody’s got four cell phones— and said, We have a big problem here. It’s not a nuclear safety problem, but it is an enormous release and there’s going to be hell to pay. And of course, there was. There was. The way it affected me was that since my— well, no, I guess it really didn’t— because at that time I was still the nuclear safety branch chief. A lot of the way that containment was evaluated was changed as a result of Baneberry. And I later inherited all of those changed procedures when I became a division director. So nuclear safety means something other than things going wrong with the test. Nuclear safety means—? Nuclear safety is a very defined program to assure that there is no accidental or inadvertent detonation of the device. It’s a program that applies across the whole breadth of nuclear weapons, whether they’re in civilian custody or military custody. So that could be in the stockpile or launched by mistake or— I’m trying to understand what that means. Yes. There’s a national program that has pieces both in the civilian side— what is now the DOE— and in the military, where you do all that you can to assure that there is no path to an inadvertent or deliberate detonation of a nuclear explosive. And this could range from having an accident with it when you’re taking it from a dock to load it on a submarine, or a disgruntled UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 police officer firing his revolver into it. And in the case of the test site, to make sure that there was no way that a lightning strike, for example, could have an effect on the device to be tested. It’s gone from atomic weapons safety to nuclear weapons safety. And part of it is the two- man rule: no single person is ever left alone with a nuclear device, whether it’s civilian or military. A program that [ has] served us well over fifty years now. Yes. And just so I can understand, this is a different world than no mistake in thinking that an attack has to be launched because of some— no one’s sort of pushing that ultimate button. That’s a different— that’s a political thing. That’s a different— yes, ma��am. This is the physical safety of a particular unit, civilian or military. OK. Got it. So that’s correct. You explained that perfectly. Thank you. So with Baneberry, the containment world changes. That’s also another, I think, important thing to understand historically in the history of nuclear weapons. And maybe that’s another subject that we can hit on later. But you’re saying at some point, that becomes under your purview. Yes. Yes. There was a very long time, most of a year, when we didn’t do any tests until a detailed review of what went wrong with Baneberry could be conducted. And it was, and it suggested perhaps a little complacency, but it also suggested that there were some— we can talk about this at length, and there are experts, too, much more expert than me. But the bad guy on Baneberry was a geologic feature, a band of montmorillonite clay, which people knew was there but did not recognize that it would absorb so much water. And the after- the- fact review said in order to keep drilling [ 00: 25: 00] you use drilling fluids, and there was a lot more water used to drill the Baneberry hole than there ever had been used on any other hole. And that was because this clay was absorbing the water. And then after all of the preparations for the test were UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 complete and the Baneberry thing was fired— as the shock wave was running out from the explosion point— when the shock wave got to this band of montmorillonite clay, it actually picked up speed as it went through the band of clay because it was saturated, and all the containment calculations had looked at dry montmorillonite clay. And so it turned out to be a weak point and it failed and the thing got to the surface. And it took a very long review to establish that that was the problem and to put into place procedures that wouldn’t let it happen again. What was the atmosphere among people at Livermore early on after this happened? Was there panic? Was there confusion? Or how did scientific types think about that? Well, I think there was more panic in the Atomic Energy Commission than there was at the laboratory. You know, the laboratories tend to say, Hey, something went wrong and we’ll go find out what happened and we’ll fix it so it never happens again. That’s how the labs do business. The Atomic Energy Commission, on the other hand, had to deal with the politics of the release. And when you have a release like that, it’s an ace in the hand of the people who oppose nuclear testing or oppose anything nuclear. And if you’re in the AEC, you have to deal with that. If you’re in the laboratories, at least below the director in the laboratories, you’re shielded from all of that. So kind of different points to view what happened with Baneberry. To me as an AEC employee, it meant that the structure of a containment review was changed and much more stringent reviews of the geology, for example, much more stringent as- built measurements. When you were actually doing something with a hole where you were about to shoot, you had to exactly measure every gallon of water you used because the people who had done the containment calculations to begin with had said, We have to see this much moisture, and you had to assure that there wasn’t any more than that. Much more stringent, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 much more bureaucratic— but necessarily so. And shortly after all of that new stuff was in place and we were back to testing, then I got this promotion to this division, which didn’t have responsibility for containment but had responsibility for assuring that the Containment Evaluation Panel [ CEP] had everything they needed. So we were the arms and legs of the Containment Evaluation Panel. In the early seventies, then I was selected to be assistant manager for operations for the Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] in the Department of Energy, which meant that everything at the test site was my responsibility— all of the federal people out there, all of the federal safety [ 00: 30: 00] responsibilities, lots of interface with the laboratories. And that’s where I got to be test manager, test controller, which I believe was— there are many, many high points in my life, but certainly one of them was being the test controller, the federal official responsible for the test, the guy with his finger on the button, so to speak. Right. Now, this comes with the position of being the assistant manager or are they two separate— I’m trying to understand. Organizationally, are they not necessarily the same? No, they’re not necessarily the same. You don’t have to be a GS- anything to be a test controller. The boss is the senior manager. The manager of the office has to believe that you have the street smarts to become— and I actually learned at the arm of a fellow named Bob Newman. Bob Newman had been a long- time Los Alamos test director. He and Bob Campbell. Bob Campbell and Bob Newman were Mr. Field Test for Los Alamos. And then Bob Newman moved over to become a federal employee and was a test controller, and I became a test controller in training at the arm of Bob Newman. But there was no formal selection process. There is now. There is a formal selection process, but in those days it was, you know— being a test controller is kind of a strange job. For a few hours or a few days, you have the authorities of the President of the United UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 States, and you have a full range of people working for you— and you know from history all the things that can go wrong, like Baneberry— and so the boss has to decide if he thinks you’re the kind of person that can deal with that. And they thought I was, and I proved that I could do it. Those were the high points in my life. Now, that’s interesting. Let’s stay here a little bit. Again, so I can understand the organizational structure with the Nevada Test Site, you’ve got test directors of both labs, say, of Bob Campbell or Bob Newman, as you just said, and they ultimately come under the government official that’s the test controller at the test site, is that how I’m understanding that correctly? Yes. Let me play that back to you a little bit, because it’s interesting and it’s one of the things that makes the test site so unique. You have all of these organizations— Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, REECo, EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier], Holmes and Narver, and the federal government— all with their own organization charts and their own chains of command and all of this. To conduct a nuclear test, all of those merge into a thing called the Joint Test Organization, the JTO, and that’s headed up by a federal official, the test manager or the test controller. And the beautiful thing about it was that you lost all of this chain- of- command stratification thing because they all went together as the Joint Test Organization. And you had test managers and test directors and the electrical guy, and it didn’t make any difference what organization you worked for; your job was to get this particular test done. And once again, you ended up out at a ground zero at the test site, where the operation of lowering the nuclear device into the hole was going on. And you would have feds working side by side with Ph. D. physicists, working side by side with geologists, working side by side by electricians, and nobody was rank- conscious or organization- conscious; it was the Joint Test Organization. Pretty unique way of doing business and very successful. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 [ 00: 35: 00] Now, this raises several interesting questions which we’ll touch on here. But one of them I’m curious about is, you’re talking about nuclear weapons, the most destructive weapons ever known to man, and you’re describing really what comes across as a real pinnacle of democracy, capitalism, free spirit— you know, entrepreneurial kind of everyone does their best for this thing at once— in the service of a really destructive weapon, in the context of the Cold War. So my question is how much of a sense, day- to- day, do you have within this larger bureaucracy of the Cold War mission? You’ve talked about the importance of the test site in the Cold War. Is that something that’s actually in your consciousness as you’re working? Because I guess the question for an outsider is, how are you thinking about what the actual result of this is, which is a terribly destructive device? So that’s the question. You know what I’m asking here. Well, of course, I can answer that more easily than most because of the different things that I did and the things I learned. Certainly, as I rose in the government hierarchy and began to travel to Washington and to go to reviews in Washington, I became much more aware of the civilian- military mix that was in all of this. And I became aware for the first time of the importance of détente, what it really meant. And I think people like Troy Wade, who had assumed a pretty senior position in the AEC, carried those notions back with him and talked with his staff here and said, You know, guys, this is really important. This test that’s coming up, Test Hoop- Snoopy, is a test of a warhead for a particular submarine system, and it’s going to be very important, and we got to make sure that this is really done properly. And then those guys would go talk to REECo and to EG& G and to Holmes and Narver. And the labs brought their own feeling of national need and patriotism. And so although, you know, the electrician out at the top of the hole who was out there because the union hall had sent him out there and it was one of the best jobs in the world, also understood this was an important thing for the country. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Great. That answers my question. Well, let’s see. As assistant manager for operations, I had responsibilities that extended beyond the test site to places like the kinds of things that were going on in the Pacific at the time— Johnston Island and the cleanup operations out in the Marshall Islands, and a growing program in responding to nuclear incidents and accidents, and nuclear accident exercises. And I was the assistant manager for operations when I got involved in Kosmos 954, in the Russian nuclear- powered satellite that reentered and crashed in Canada. And so I was up in Canada, up in the Northwest Territory, and my boss at the time, the deputy manager, was Don Kerr, who later was director of Los Alamos— and who, by the way, is going to be our annual speaker at the [ Nevada Test Site] Historical Foundation’s banquet. Don Kerr was the deputy manager and Ink [ General Mahlon] [ 00: 40: 00] Gates was the manager. And Don went off to Washington to be a deputy to General [ Alfred Dodd] Starbird, who headed up the Washington— we were ERDA at the time of Dodd Starbird. And what had been a temporary assignment of Don Kerr to Washington became a permanent assignment. And so I was sitting up in the command post in Edmonton, Alberta [ Canada]. Ink Gates called me and he said, Hey, congratulations. And I said, What for? And he said, You’re the new deputy manager of the Nevada Operations Office. And I knew the position was empty and I knew that Ink was interviewing. He never interviewed me, but now I’m the deputy manager. So, let’s see, that happened in the late seventies— Now, at some point along here, you move out of the GS [ government service] system and into this other higher system of government? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 No, I was still in the GS system. As deputy manager, I’m a GS- 17, which, when I first became aware of the civil service ratings, the GS- 17 was very close to God— awfully close to God. If you went down to Sandia base and you went to the officers’ club at Sandia base and you were waiting for your table in the dining room, they called you by rank, and the loudspeaker would click on and they would say, Major General Smith, your table is ready. GS- 17 Wade, your table is ready. For real? Yes. Again, back to this quasi- military organization called the Atomic Energy Commission. That changed. That was, some would say, eroded— I wouldn’t say that it was changed— as we made the transition from AEC to ERDA and to— we became much more the civilian agency and got away from a lot of the military stuff. But anyway, I became deputy manager in, I think, ’ 77