Interview with Robert Nelson, June 30, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Robert Nelson June 30, 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 Robert Nelson June 30, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: born Evanston, IL ( 1941), early life in Chicago area, move to Phoenix, AZ and Los Angeles, CA, education, military service ( communications, USN, 1960), selected for NESEP ( 1962), graduates from UNM, receives commission, USN ( 1966) 1 Military service: assigned to ADM Hyman Rickover at Division of Naval Reactors, Washington, D. C., works in nuclear submarine program 6 Transfers to nuclear power station, Shippingport, PA as officer in charge 7 Leaves USN, moves to AEC office, Shippingport, PA ( 1972) 8 Goes to work for Federal Energy Administration ( 1974), later DOE ( 1977) 9 Takes job as Branch Chief, Radioactive Waste Studies with NVOO ( Las Vegas, NV, 1978) 10 Married ( 1964), involved in church activities, ordained Episcopalian priest ( 1987) 11 Becomes Assistant Manager for Operations, NVOO ( 1981), elected to Episcopal Church Diocesan Council ( NV) and ordained as Episcopal priest ( 1987) 12 Reflects on conflict between Christian calling and nuclear weapons work at NTS 14 Relationship with NVOO manager Tom Clark, becomes Assistant Manager of Administration for NVOO 16 Becomes Deputy Manager under Nick Aquilina ( 1987- 88) 18 Promoted to Manager, Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, CO, assigned as officiating priest to Holy Comforter Episcopal Church, Broomfield, CO ( 1990) 20 Talks about participation in JVE ( 1988) 26 Returns to NVOO, becomes Manager of Yucca Mountain project ( 1993), and then Manager of NVOO ( 1994), retires ( 1995) 32 Talks about work with NEST 33 Discusses work as consultant for DOE on security ( beginning 1995), and talks about relationships among various employees and agencies in the test program 36 Importance of safety in the testing program 41 Conclusion: how government employment has changed through history 46 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Nelson June 30, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Mary Palevsky: OK, we’re going. Robert Nelson: I was born in Evanston, Illinois, July 8, 1941. And my family lived in the Chicago area, on the north shore of Chicago, and so all of my early years were in Wilmette. My family lived in Winnetka, Kenilworth, in that area. The church I attended in those days was Holy Comforter in Kenilworth, which turns out was the most affluent parish in one of the most affluent dioceses of the Episcopal Church. Much later, like today, I have gone back to that church as a priest and actually done a service there, a memorial service for my cousin’s husband who died of cancer. I learned at that time that the gift that that parish gave to its diocese, that one little parish gave to its diocese, was about equal to the entire budget of the diocese of Nevada, something over $ 300,000 a year. So it is a very affluent parish. I never thought of that as I was growing up. But I was very active in the church as a child. Went every Sunday. My parents were of that type that took me to church and dropped me off, along with my brother and sister, and then came and picked me up. They weren’t regular attendees, but the family was, and much of the family went to that parish, and still today obviously some of the family who’s still there goes to that parish. During World War II, my father was in the Navy, was an officer in the Navy, served on the USS Hancock. And my uncle was in the service, and I honestly don’t remember what branch. But my mother and her sister lived during World War II with their mother in a very lovely house in what I believe is Winnetka, adjacent to Wilmette where we lived. But what that meant was UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 that my cousin and I are about the same age and grew up during those war years pretty much as brother and sister. And what that’s done is it’s made us very close all of our lives. We’re still very close. There was a third child that my uncle, who was also in the service, and as a result of becoming a casualty, at least severely injured or possibly killed, as a result of that he became an Episcopal priest and was the rector of a parish in the Chicago area, in what’s called Western Springs, Illinois. And his children, although not growing up with us in the same manner as my cousin Susie and I, also have been very close. So that branch of cousins, if you will, remains close even today, and we have an annual family reunion which rotates around the country, wherever any of us are. This last Thanksgiving— we do it over that Thanksgiving weekend— last Thanksgiving it was in the Chicago area. This next November, it will be here in Las Vegas, and I’ve actually arranged for a bus and I’m going to take the entire family— there’ll be close to fifty people who come to that— [ 00: 05: 00] to the test site. This is kind of— I’ve seen other families of people at the test site do this. I look at it as kind of the transition. You kind of turn things over to another generation of people and talk about what you did and why you did it, and in my family now, the family has grown, of course, and there will be about fifty people we’re expecting. And my work, of course, involved a lot of security stuff through the years. My sister, who is just three years younger than I am— I’m the oldest of the three— my sister along the way married a Russian, which caused some consternation when I reported that in my security background stuff. And there were questions about whether or not he had family in the old country, which he did not and was a long- time American citizen and actually served in the U. S. Army. But it was always interesting when I reported things that my sister’s name was Provokoff UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 and usually it used to raise some eyebrows at times. But anyway, one of the children from that family, a child of a previous marriage of Vladimir Provokoff, who is just probably only ten years younger than I am, is also Vladimir Provokoff, and he is obviously born in the United States, U. S. citizen, no ties to Russia, but tremendously interested in the history of the test site. So he is a great proponent of this family reunion this year and is helping to organize the tour of the test site. So anyway, I grew up into— I was just about a teenager in the Chicago area with that background. We moved to Phoenix, Arizona for my family’s desires. My dad at that point wanted to open a business of his own and did so. And so we worked that, in sheet metal work. I learned a lot about sheet metal work at that time because I used to work summers while finishing sixth and seventh and eighth grade and then doing high school in the Phoenix area. About my senior year of high school, we moved to Los Angeles, in Glendale actually, the Los Angeles area of California, and I actually graduated from Glendale Hoover High School, and went a year to UCLA [ University of California, Los Angeles], and at that point decided school was not really my great desire in life. So I enlisted in the Navy and got into a wonderful field. I was what was called a communications technician. Communications technicians were the spooks of naval service, and my responsibilities included maintaining equipment. I was an electronics maintenance type. But I served in some really interesting functions, doing electronic intercept work for the Navy on things like Soviet submarines and other naval targets, if you will, of interest. Let me just interrupt for a second. This would be the late fifties? Yeah, I enlisted in the Navy in 1960, so my high school, I graduated in the class of 1959 and went in the Navy in 1960. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 And then where were you stationed in the Navy? I was stationed first— I went through boot camp in San Diego and then electronics school on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay area, and then I went to some special crypto kinds of [ 00: 10: 00] schools in Virginia Beach, and then did a tour on Adak, Alaska, which was way out at the end of the Aleutians, and for me a wonderful tour. I enjoyed the electronics. I really loved that stuff. I loved the work we were doing. It was really exciting. It was spooky and very high priority kinds of things, and really enjoyed that. Along the way, while in the Navy, I decided that college really wasn’t so bad after all, and applied for a program called the Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program, NESEP. And went through a lot of interviews and examinations, and in 1962 was selected for that program, which meant I was taken off of Adak a little early and went to San Diego for the summer for a prep school. What they did was take sailors and marines out of the fleet and send them to a prep school which was really intensive, hard work, so that when they then went to college that fall, which would be the fall of 1962, they were really ready to go to college. And they had such a good track record in this program that if the Navy said the person was qualified, the schools accepted them, even if they in some cases did not have high school diplomas. That summer, as I say, was very intensive, and we went to the prep school, which was staffed by naval reservists who were professors in college. And we would have— let me think about it— one English class, one physics class, and two math classes every day. Five or six days a week, I guess, and lots of homework. And when we went to college, we were ready. I mean the normal college freshman who’s been a senior in high school and kind of goofed off a lot were ready for an easy semester. We were really ready for hard work, and consequently most of us UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 who went into this program— they selected roughly four hundred that year— most of us were able to test out of things like beginning English. Some would test out of the mathematics. It was a requirement that we take math or science. That was part of the program, Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program, and my selection, because of all the good times that I had had as an enlisted man on Adak and in the schools and all before that, was electronics. So there were four schools that focused on electronics engineering, and one of those was the University of New Mexico, and that’s where I was assigned. And so for four years, I went to the University of New Mexico while on active duty, being paid as an enlisted man and given the opportunity for promotion. So when I graduated from the University of New Mexico, I graduated with distinction, meaning I had pretty high grades. And I was a first class petty officer, a senior sergeant, if you would, equivalent in the Army. And then on graduation, I went directly to Officer Candidate School [ OCS] and got a commission, so I was discharged as an enlisted man and re- signed up as an officer, as an ensign. At the time of graduation, we were given what we called dream sheets, what assignment would you like to have in the Navy, and I had applied for river gunboats. Vietnam was a big [ 00: 15: 00] action at that time, and I just figured that that’s where the advancement would be, and I had done some significant sailing in the Chicago area in small boats as I grew up. And I thought, well, river gunboats is going to be exciting and probably good advancement, and so I decided to take that. But there was a little block on that dream sheet that said, Would you consider submarines? And I said, Sure, advancement is known to be good in submarines, so I said yes. What that triggered was an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover while I was at OCS. And you hear lots of horror stories of interviews with Admiral Rickover, of having to wave UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 a flag, and sitting on a chair with uneven legs, and all kinds of harassment things. I tell people that all of those horror stories happened to me. He called me in three different times and threw me out three times. One time I got to sit in a closet for an hour while waiting to be called back again. But at the end of all of that, he selected me for his staff. So I became an officer in the Division of Naval Reactors in Washington, on Admiral Rickover’s staff. And I was initially assigned to Reactor Materials, which means the metallurgy- type of work having to do with nuclear reactor design and maintenance and operation. And after a while of working in that division, I went into the refueling work, and again really focused on materials and equipment design for the refueling of submarine, principally, but all of the naval reactors. I spent a lot of time really on submarines, never on a crew. I worked at one of the prototypes in Windsor, Connecticut. I spent some time at one of the shipyards, Electric Boat, in Groton, Connecticut. And would go out on sea trials and crew quiz kinds of things on submarines for Admiral Rickover. So submarines for an engineer are just a wonderful example of good engineering, and so I learned a lot with that, and most of what I learned was how to get something done. Admiral Rickover was very good in making his staff learn how to be effective in getting things done, and that has paid off a lot through time. Let me ask you one question here, because I’m just curious, a question is raised in my mind. Nuclear powered submarines. In your education up to that point, had you learned about nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, things like that? How did that sort of fit in your—? Yeah, that’s a good point. When I went the one year to UCLA, I didn’t do very well but I got a number of classes behind me, which meant that when I went to the University of New Mexico, I had four years to go there and I didn’t need to fill four years. So rather than just take a slackened UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 course, I filled all the opportunities that I could in that, particularly the upper class years, with nuclear engineering courses. So I had had a fairly good background in radiation and nuclear theory, but also I had gone— one of the things that Admiral Rickover did for all the new engineers, at least in the years I was there— was send them to a reactor engineering school, a six- month, very intensive school at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory near [ 00: 20: 00] Pittsburgh, in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. Run by Westinghouse, which was big in the nuclear world [ and] continues to be big in the nuclear world, so I had had a pretty good background in that, and went to work again in the naval reactors program. After about three or four years there, Admiral Rickover selected me to be his representative at the nuclear power station in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Shippingport was the first commercial electric generating plant powered by nuclear energy, and it was built with the reactor by Admiral Rickover, with basically a submarine- size reactor, to demonstrate that electricity could be generated using nuclear energy. So it was basically a Navy reactor powering a commercial steam plant. And I became qualified as a reactor operator, an engineering watch supervisor kind of position, engineering officer of the watch, if you will, for a Navy thing, except this wasn’t Navy at all. It was really in the commercial world. And the reactor was operated by the Duquene Light and Power Company under the supervision of a group of Navy people. I was the officer in charge of that group of Navy people. All of the staff under me were— and there were up to eleven, I think, at one time— all were senior enlisted or warrant officers in the Navy and very well- qualified in the submarine. And we oversaw the operation by Duquene Light and Power to assure the safety of the public and the employees there. So I had a lot of experience at that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 In 1974, I guess— I’m trying to remember the years— I left naval reactors— well, along the way, my obligated service ended six years after my graduation in 1966. So in 1972 my obligated service to the Navy was up. And the negative of working for Admiral Rickover was that he didn’t let us do the practical things necessary for promotion in the Navy. So our naval careers were limited in terms of promotion. Although the technical side of that outstanding, the practical side was limited. What would that have been? I just don’t know what that would be, the practical side for promotion. Oh, to become a senior officer in the Navy, you need to drive a ship. OK. That’s obvious. I mean I’m a line officer. I have a star on my sleeve, which means a line officer, and if you can’t drive a ship, you just never— and there are lots of little nuances of doing that. Qualified as officer of the deck underway and those kinds of things. If you don’t do those things, you’re never going to get much promotion. Now, to get around that a little bit, he made us stop being what were called 1100 series, meaning the line officers, the ship drivers, to be a 1400 designator officer, which means an engineering duty officer. And that means you have a little bit different career path in the shipyards and you can go farther as an officer, but still the promotion potentials are very limited. So my choice at that time, after a couple years of— well, when my obligated service was up, I chose to get out of the Navy because I could continue to work for Admiral Rickover as a civilian, same desk, same job, overnight, and double or triple my pay as a civilian employee. [ 00: 25: 00] And under Admiral Rickover were two civilian employee paths. One was with the Navy Department, where I could become a civilian in the Navy Department. The other was in the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC], which was more the technical side of that. And since I was at Shippingport, which was an Atoms for Peace place, it was decided that I should go in the Atomic Energy Commission side rather than the Navy side. It would just look awkward to have a Navy civilian responsible for the commercial nuclear reactor plant at Shippingport. So I then overnight became a civil service employee in the Atomic Energy Commission at Shippingport, and continued to do the same things. Had a staff of Navy warrant officers and enlisted men, but reported to Admiral Rickover directly for all those years up there. So I then left that program in 1974 and went to work for the Federal Energy Administration. Some other people had left Admiral Rickover about that time and were senior people in the Federal Energy Administration. That was a temporary agency formed to deal with the oil embargoes that were established by the Arab countries. And my part was power plants and how to obtain the best efficiency in terms of energy usage out of both coal- fired and nuclear power plants. So I went to work for some people I had known in the naval reactors program, but in a civilian agency, and got a lot of experience in both nuclear and coal- fired power plants in those couple years. In 1977— I think that’s the right— the Department of Energy [ DOE] was formed and the Federal Energy Administration was eaten up into and incorporated into the Department of Energy. And so whenever that occurred, I became an employee of the Department of Energy. But I was in a part called the Economic Regulatory Administration part of DOE, but a part that was almost solely political, and it had to do with establishment of regulations, but there was another part that dealt with a very similar subject called FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Administration, which I believe still exists today. It does. FERC does. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Yes, FERC does. But ours was the Economic Regulatory Administration and it had some overlapping areas, but in my mind was not a place for a hardware kind of engineer. It had no hardware. You didn’t do anything other than manipulate paper and studies and regulation proposals and things like that, and I felt very uncomfortable as someone interested in hardware and operations, which was my background. So I started looking for opportunities to move. I’d grown up in Phoenix, felt very close to that, gone to the University of New Mexico, and so I started looking at radioactive waste disposal jobs. The Albuquerque Operations Office [ ALOO] of the Department of Energy— I was now a Department of Energy employee, and the Albuquerque office of DOE had a project called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [ WIPP] on the drawing boards in those days. It’s now an operating facility in southern New Mexico. And I applied for that and other things out west where I really felt more comfortable, but that was a principal interest of mine and I managed to [ 00: 30: 00] get an interview with a man named Don Schueler who was the project manager in Albuquerque of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Don had been a senior person here in the Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] but had moved over to Albuquerque to take on that job with WIPP. Had a good interview with Don but did not get the job I was seeking. And Don, kind of with his knowledge of the situation in Nevada, really, without even my knowledge, had sent my résumé, the government Standard Form 171, to Nevada, who was also looking for someone to become a branch chief and lead the effort in this, the southern Nevada area, to build or to look for a site for a radioactive waste disposal site. And lo and behold, I got a call while in Washington: Would I be interested in a job in Nevada? And I said yes, and I was selected. So without really ever applying for it, I was offered a job here in Nevada. I was at that point in the government civil service situation. I was a GS- 15 in Washington. I took a downgrade to a fourteen to come to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Nevada and become the branch chief for radioactive waste studies. It actually made me money because, while it was a fourteen, they gave me a very advanced step, so I didn’t lose any money in making that change. So anyway, I became a branch chief with a very small staff, and we began the project that today is Yucca Mountain. And so went through a lot of search efforts for a site. And you’re located at this point here in Las Vegas. I moved to Las Vegas. Spent a lot of time each week out at the test site, but my office was downtown in Las Vegas. And what’s the status of your family at this point? Oh, well, I had gotten married while in college. I didn’t mention that part. Well, we can go back and get some personal stuff but— Yes. I was married in 1964. My wife went with me all the various places and she came out here with me in 1978 when I was selected for the job with the Nevada Operations Office. Lived in Las Vegas. Began going to the church that I’m still a member of today. Kind of a humorous part of that, in the years I went to the Federal Energy Administration, starting in ‘ 74, I’m sure, something like that, I started becoming very active in the church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Ascension Chapel, now called Church of the Ascension. And [ I] was elected by the church folks there to be senior warden at a time the rector or the priest in charge of the parish died. And when that happens in the Episcopal Church, the wardens become the authority in the church, and so it was like taking on a second full- time job, being responsible for that church and having my own regular job. When I moved out here, the junior warden became senior warden and probably has never forgiven me since that. I moved out during that year, and my wife and I really were kind of burned out from doing church things. And my wife, whose name is Kathy , would every week UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 when we would go to this parish, All Saints Parish here in Las Vegas, she would introduce herself with a different name so that no one would remember who she was and ask her to do something. And people still call her Priscilla or— I mean she did that for a while. [ 00: 35: 00] Then I got active in that parish and ultimately was a warden and vestry member and search committee member and ultimately was ordained to the priesthood through that parish. So anyway, we came out here, and [ I] got very involved in radioactive waste disposal work. Did some big projects that have national significance. Storage of some spent fuel underground and studies of how the spent fuel elements would interact with the rock and the radiation and heat and stuff. Some really noteworthy studies. In 1981, I was moved by the manager of the Nevada Operations Office, at that time Mahlon Gates was the man, Ink Gates was what he was called, who was a retired brigadier general in the Army. He was the manager. He moved me into the defense world, away from waste management, and I became the assistant manager for operations at that time, following a man named Bob Newman who had really grown up, I think, with the Manhattan Project, at least the latter parts of that, at Los Alamos, and had come to Nevada and become an assistant manager. So I replaced him in that role of assistant manager. And he really taught me how to fire a nuclear test. As assistant manager for operations, he was the senior what was called “ test controller,” responsible for firing a test, and really took it on himself to be my mentor and teach me how to do that. And I spent about a year doing that. About that same time, I had been elected in the Church to the diocesan council. The state of Nevada is the diocese of Nevada, and there is kind of an elected board of people who are responsible for the program, and that’s the diocesan council. And I had been elected to that and through that had met and become pretty friendly with the bishop of Nevada, whose name was UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 Wesley Frensdorff, probably the most anti- nuclear person I have ever met. Wes was— let’s see, we don’t— we have pictures of him here somewhere, but he was a real visionary in the Church. And [ he] saw the Church, particularly in a rural area like Nevada, moving back toward the type of church that was encountered by Saint Paul in the very early days of Christianity, in which Saint Paul went out and effectively developed leadership in each parish and then turned them loose to be in charge of the parish, and he went on and did other things. So Wes Frensdorff and a few other leaders of the Episcopal Church got that style of authority, if you will, really dating back to probably the period of greatest growth in the Christian faith, authorized for places like Nevada. And what that did was allow parishes to identify from within their congregations people who would be their leaders and be ordained as clergy. And my parish went through that very intense process of kind of Christian education and understanding of really what they were doing, and then identifying people, and I was identified. And I was absolutely blown away by the call I got from the bishop, who I saw as really almost an adversary in terms of the work that I did, both on weapons and waste, and nuclear power that I had been involved with before. Wes called and said [ 00: 40: 00] I had been commended and he thought I would make a great priest and did I feel that calling? And I responded, I was almost speechless at the time, but I said I’d call him back, and I did and said, yes, I did. And so under his tutelage, I went through about a three- year process and became ordained actually in 1987 as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Through that period and parallel with all the work I was doing really on my own time to study and learn about what it meant to be a priest, and all of the theology and the other things that I had to go through, I became the lead test controller and was very active in firing many nuclear tests at the test site. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Could I ask you something? And in as much detail as you’re able to give me, but it’s such an interesting thing that you just said, because here you have the man who was your mentor, has this model for this Pauline, or whatever you want to say, Christian development in this state, which in itself is fascinating and would be really interesting to talk about, and there the person that’s chosen from the parish sounds like maybe it might be someone who he wouldn’t choose because of his anti- nuclear views. And obviously deeply held, and then he mentors you. So the question arises for me that— I have to think a second on how I want to say this. There’s something essential in both your minds about [ what] that calling is and what Christianity is that is not in conflict when it comes to this very deep and troubling question about weapons and weapons development and nuclear weapons, and I wonder how that plays out. Well, and I think it comes down to I can say it in one little anecdotal perhaps kind of story. But it becomes important to me over and over and over, even as I mentioned last week, when I did a tour of the test site for a bunch of Church people from around the whole country. I think kind of the key concept is Jesus never spent His time with Church people. He always spent his time with the others. I mean if you really look at what he did. And there’s a great story of Cornelius, the centurion who was baptized by Paul. Again, not what you would think of as the wardens of the Church or whatever. That was not the focus of early— of any real Christian effort. It’s really Middle Ages before the Church got very exclusive. And certainly what Wes Frensdorff saw, and we have tried to embody that, even now two bishops later, is an inclusive Church that is open to all. And I think the role I’ve played in that is a bridge builder between people of differing views that really tries to focus on the issues involved rather than the people involved. And an example of that, again I used last week, when there were protesters at the test site, the parish I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 came from seemed to have half its people either working at the test site or in defense- related or casino kinds of things, things that some people think are wrong. The other half were protesters. So when I would go out to the test site and there were protests, I would go walk both sides of the [ 00: 45: 00] line. Really, my view was that we ought to focus our protests and our protection, if you will, focus at the national policy of having a nuclear deterrent, not at the people who are carrying out the poli