Interview with Troy Ernest Wade II, July 7, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Troy Wade July 7, 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 7, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. Wade shares his family history and memories of growing up in Cripple Creek, Colorado during the 1940s. 1 Work in mining at age 16, his father’s involvement with uranium mining, his work in Utah uranium mine. 4 In 1958, Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company [ REECo] hired Mr. Wade to work at the Nevada Test Site. 6 Mr. Wade worked as a mining superintendent in NTS Area 12 during some of the early underground nuclear tests. 8 The lasting impression of witnessing atmospheric nuclear tests at the NTS and the view that this later made him a better government official and arms control negotiator. 10 Initially, many Nevada Test Site workers were there for jobs. As the Cold War intensified, however, most began to realize that their work played a role in strengthening national security. 13 Mr. Wade discusses how workers at the NTS and the laboratories coped with the moratorium on nuclear testing. 14 Mr. Wade describes the process of re- entry mining and the risks faced by miners at the test site. 16 After the moratorium ended, Mr. Wade is hired by Livermore laboratory as a high explosives technician. 17 Conclusion: Livermore “ loans” Mr. Wade to the Atomic Energy Commission’s [ AEC] newly- established Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] in Las Vegas to help write Nevada regulations on nuclear safety. 22 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Troy Wade July 7, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Troy Wade: Well, my name is Troy Ernest Wade II, and I was born in Cripple Creek, Colorado— a little mining town up on the side of Pike’s Peak— on July 18, 1934. So I’m coming up on a major step here in my life [ 70th birthday]. I was named Troy E. Wade II because my mother didn’t want anybody to call me Junior. My dad’s name was Troy Wade, and so I was named Troy Wade II so I wouldn’t be called Junior. However, I did have an uncle who thought Troy Ernest Wade II was kind of a heavy name for a little kid to be blessed with, and so he called me Tim— Tiny Tim— and that name stuck with me. And so I can readily identify a phone call whose genesis was pre- 1958 because they will call me Tim. If it’s after 1958, they call me Troy. So I have that way to identify phone messages and letters. Anyway, I was born in this little mining town, very famous gold mining town. I have a younger sister and a younger brother, both alive and well. My sister lives in Denver and has for many, many years. And my brother lives in Pittsburgh, and flits around as a very successful investment banker. My father was a man of many, many talents. When I was first born, he had everything from insurance agencies to mining investment interests in Cripple Creek. He later bought hardware stores in both Cripple Creek and Victor, which is a little town very close to it. And a well- educated man. I think very early on I learned from him the importance of knowledge and of managing it right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 My father’s family all came from Missouri. My mother’s family, also in the mining business, came from Virginia, to Texas, to Cripple Creek. And it was interesting that here’s my mother, in this little mining town, who was a graduate of the University of Texas and also a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music. And so I grew up in a house full of music. Mary Palevsky: What kind of music? Piano. She played the piano. And my father worked his way through college, playing the C- melody saxophone in a little orchestra that he had. Where did he go to college? Colorado College in Colorado Springs. And what was your mother’s maiden name? Hill. My mother was Grace Patricia Hill. And her father, Ben Hill, my granddad, was a very well- known mining engineer in Colorado, and elsewhere, for all that matter. So I grew up at ten thousand feet altitude. Cripple Creek, like all mining camps, goes through cycles. And when I was born in 1934, things were good because gold mining is a depression business, and so Cripple Creek was doing well. Things begin to decline in the late thirties. And then when World War II started, the government in its wisdom passed a law. It was [ 00: 05: 00] War Production Board Order Number L- 208, which declared precious metal mining as a nonessential industry. And it essentially shut down my town, shut down all of the mines and the mill. And that happened in many places in the United States. The justification was that the government wanted highly skilled miners mining things that were needed for the war, like copper and lead. So L- 208 shut down Cripple Creek, and it never recovered from that. Never recovered. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 My wife was also born in Cripple Creek. Childhood, high school sweetheart. Her father— an interesting sort of side bar— when this order came along and the mines were shut down in Cripple Creek, the government recruited a lot of men, including my father- in- law, to go to the island of Hawaii, where they spent two or three years mining out the inside of Red Hill— which is the big mountain that’s right adjacent to Pearl Harbor— so that they could put all the petroleum stores needed to maintain the U. S. fleet underground, so that there would never be another Pearl Harbor kind of disaster. So that’s the kind of things they wanted good hard rock miners to do, and that’s what my father- in- law did. And his name was, or is? His name was Aaron Beltz. And so that’s your wife’s maiden name. That’s my wife’s maiden name, is Beltz. OK. And her name is Mary, isn’t it? Mary, yes. My father and my father- in- law both died in the same year, 1979. My mother passed away in 1993. And Mary’s mother just celebrated her ninety- ninth birthday in a nursing home in Arizona, but doing remarkably well. So I grew up in a very depressed business environment. The mines were shut down. When mines are shut down, people don’t buy things from hardware stores. And a lot of people were leaving. Flash forward to this time and you’ll find some mining resuming in Cripple Creek. The ironic thing is that Cripple Creek is one of the three little Colorado mining towns where gambling is allowed. The Colorado legislature, many years ago, passed a bill that allowed what they call limited gaming in Cripple Creek, Black Hawk, and Central City. And so it did great UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 things for my home town but it didn’t do much for me because I live in a gambling town and I hate to go back and visit a gambling town, so things have changed. Things have changed. My family was always very knowledge- prone, education- prone. My mother was a schoolteacher, history teacher, and I look back and think of all the remarkable things that I learned and sort of things and ideas that stayed with me because of the environment that I grew up in. Like what would be something like that? Well, interest in history, for example, not just [ as] something that you were required to take, but to understand history. And, for example, when we, many years later, moved to Washington, I knew a little bit more about history and the role that Washington, D. C. had played than most because of [ 00: 10: 00] my mother’s insistence that we needed to understand the history of this country. Played well with me. Helped me a lot. And interesting, you know, I’ve been to Europe several times where history is centuries. In the United States, history is a few hundred years. And in Las Vegas it’s ten years. If you don’t like a hotel here, you just blow it down and build another one. That’s the history of Las Vegas. So let’s see, I went to high school. I worked in the mines. I worked in my father’s hardware store, and then when I got to age sixteen I worked in the mines, underground in the mines, which was legal in those days. It’s not now. My dad didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to work in the hardware store just because kids don’t like to work for their dads. So I worked in the mines in the summer, and he supported that. He, I think, was never terribly happy about it, but he supported it. He got involved in uranium mining when uranium was discovered in what’s called the Colorado Plateau. He got very involved in that, and he also was the genesis of my love for UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 railroads. When I was born in Cripple Creek, there was a railroad still operating. Long gone now, but I grew up in the era of steam engines. And my father, one time, when he was off in the western slope of Colorado looking at his uranium mining interests, came home and advised us that he’d bought a caboose. And sure enough, a few weeks later a narrow gauge caboose arrived and was set up in the back yard of our house in Cripple Creek. My dad turned it into kind of a little summer house, bar. And the thing that made it so unique was that this narrow gauge caboose had been used in the movie Ticket to Tomahawk. And so instead of being a Denver and Rio Grande Western caboose, which it was, it still had the movie paint on it and it said Tomahawk and Western, the Route of the Bloody Basin Cannonball. And that sat in our back yard, and it’s now at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden. My dad gave it to the museum. So he invested in uranium mines, is that what you’re saying? Yes. OK. How big of a community was Cripple Creek at that time, would you guess? This is something we can look up, but are we talking about a small city or really more of a town or—? Well, we’re talking about probably maybe twenty- five thousand people when I was born. And when I graduated from high school, it was probably twenty- five hundred. So your high school class was small by this time, I would imagine. Yes, my high school class was thirteen. My wife’s class the following year was very large; it was seventeen. Amazing. That small. And what about religious background? Was it a religious family or just churchgoing, as families were in those days, or—? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 I think churchgoing. We were Episcopalians, and my mother played the organ at the Episcopal church, as you would expect. Her mother, by the way, and my aunt played the piano in silent movies in Texas and in Colorado. So music kind of was what came in that side of the family. Yes, we were Episcopalians. My father was a converted Southern Baptist. His mother, my grandmother, was a very devout Southern Baptist, true Southern Baptist. So yes, we were Episcopalians. My wife grew up going regularly to the Methodist church, so we’ve always been [ 00: 15: 00] not religious zealots, but we understand who controls destiny and that it isn’t us. Let’s see, I then went on to the University of Colorado School of Mechanical Engineering. I ended up in Utah. Let’s see, this would’ve been about 1957, in Utah, down in the Four Corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and what is it, New Mexico, I guess, all come together. That’s big uranium country, and I was down there in the Four Corners area in a uranium mine. This is after you finished school? Yes. And I got a call over the radio network that came into the mining company’s radio network. Well, you know, there were no such things as— there certainly weren’t cell phones. There weren’t even phones in that part of the world. This message came in that asked me to call a particular man at a particular number in Las Vegas, Nevada as soon as I could get to a phone. So it was a few days before I got out to Blanding, Utah, where they actually did have phones. And I called this number in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it was a fellow who worked for Reynolds Electric[ al and Engineering Company], who worked for REECo. He had been given my name by a friend of his who grew up in Cripple Creek, and they were recruiting people because nuclear testing was moving underground and they wanted mining people who were knowledgeable to come out and help them, and so I was offered a job in Las Vegas. I later met this fellow. His UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 name was John Elmgren and he was a senior official for REECo. I met him in Denver and we shook hands, and in April of 1958 I arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada and went to the Nevada Test Site for the very first time. Now, have you moved here or are you just seeing what the situation is, or you had agreed to come work here? I came to work here. Now, were your children born at this time? I had two small kids, and I left my wife and the two kids back in Cripple Creek, and I came out to Nevada to see what this was all like and what this job was going to be like. In April of 1958, and it’s now July of 2004, and I’m still here. Amazing. So we hear lots of stories about how Las Vegas was so different then, but just what were your impressions? Did you fly in? Did you drive in? Drove. You drove. Of course, you drove in. So what did you see when— had you seen it before? Had you been to Las Vegas before? Never been to Las Vegas before. I’d read about it, seen about it in the movies and in the newsreels we used to have in the movies in those days, which was the best way to find out what was going on in the world. And so I had no idea what I was getting into, and I had no real vision of what Las Vegas was going to be like or what the Nevada Test Site was going to be like. When you come here for the first time, the centerpiece of Las Vegas in 1958 was Fremont Street. There were hotels on the Strip, but the place where everybody focused and all the glitz was on [ 00: 20: 00] Fremont Street. And so I went down there, like all newcomers do. Fortunately I learned very early that gambling— that you don’t keep building hotels and casinos by paying UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 very many winners. And so even though I’ve lived here now forty- plus years, I have never— I gamble a little bit, but mostly when you have company and go to casinos— I never have gambled much because I learned quickly that that was not a way to make a living. Some of my friends, by the way, who came to the test site about the same time I did, did not learn that lesson, and paid dearly for it over the years. Las Vegas was about, I think, fifty thousand people when I moved here. The end of June of 1958, I went back to Colorado and got Mary— took a bus back to Colorado— and got Mary and the two kids and everything we owned in a U- Haul trailer and headed for Las Vegas. End of June, first of July is kind of a shocker to someone who is coming from the mountains in Colorado, because it was very hot. Very hot. And we had rented a duplex in North Las Vegas that had the swamp cooler. And that’s how we began life as citizens of Las Vegas. What was it like when you first went out to the test site? What did they have you doing and what was the situation out there? Well, I’ve learned since I went out there that the nuclear nations of the world, which at that time were the United States and Britain and the Soviet Union, were sort of mutually, without any agreement, moving towards another way of testing other than atmospheric testing, because worldwide fallout was becoming a big problem. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew that nuclear tests were going to be conducted in “ underground caverns,” quote unquote, and I was brought here, along with a whole bunch of other people, to begin to do that, to set up the procedures and the modus operandi for major mining operations on the test site. I’d looked at maps, of course, but the test site was a long way from Las Vegas. It’s long today. It seemed like days when I went out there for the first time. And I spent, as I recall, a week or so going through UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 medical examinations and then a lot of training in what is radiation and the basics of what is a nuclear weapon— or atomic bombs, we called them all in those days— what are atomic bombs and why do we test them. And then I went to work. One of the tunnels in Area 12, called E Tunnel. Started E Tunnel. Portaled in E Tunnel. Interesting. So you’re a REECo employee, and is there a job title in those days that you have, or what is—? I was mining superintendent of E Tunnel. And E Tunnel is in Area 12, where all the tunnels are— most of the tunnels. Most of the tunnels. And in those days, it was— well, I later learned, of course, that in 1958 President Eisenhower and General Secretary Khrushchev had agreed to a [ 00: 25: 00] moratorium on nuclear testing, to begin October 1, 1958. And so, quite unexpectedly and quite unplanned for, the United States— who in 1958 were testing in the Pacific— moved the test series back to the Nevada Test Site so they could complete a bunch of things before they went into this moratorium. It was called Hard Tack, Phase II. And so here I am up in the tunnels, and they would tell us, Get everybody out of the tunnel at five o’clock in the morning, or eleven o’clock in the morning, and face away from Yucca Flat. And so here we were just, you know, a few miles from nuclear tests. And then I later was down in Yucca Flat, close to a nuclear test. Those were all unplanned by anybody when I took the job to go to the test site. Suddenly, all of these mushroom clouds were showing up in Yucca Flat, and that too left a lasting impression on me. Yes, talk a little bit about that. You’d been told, in theory basically, what atomic weapons are and you’d been told— of course, you know about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So what’s that like when you actually start seeing them in number out at the test site? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Well— and let me add one more component to that— I had also grown up in the mining business, and so I knew a lot about explosives and I knew what explosives could do. And I knew enough about World War II to know about the numbers of millions of bombs that were dropped by both sides with explosives in it, and you saw all the pictures of the damage. But when you saw this new thing called an atomic bomb go off for the first time, and you felt the heat from it, and you saw the light from it, and then later you felt the shock wave from it, and you saw the destruction, whether it was a big depression in the ground or whether it was one in one of the little cities that was built, it was just remarkable to see. I think, like everybody else, I was impressed and awestruck about this thing. I didn’t understand for several years exactly what I had watched and how it could be used, but I could look back now and say I think I was a better United States government executive and arms control negotiator because I had actually witnessed atmospheric nuclear tests and felt the effects and been in the radiation fields and understood what a dreadful weapon of war a nuclear weapon really is. So the fact that I was here in the very early days helped me a lot. You can assemble a room of notables these days and ask for a show of hands of people who have witnessed an atmospheric nuclear test, and there aren’t very many. I was at a big meeting at SAC, Strategic Air Command— STRATCOM as it’s now called— in Omaha last August, in a meeting whose details were classified. But here was a room full of, oh, probably a hundred experts in nuclear weapons matters from both the military [ 00: 30: 00] side and the government side, and some retired consultants such as myself, and when the question was asked of these ninety- plus people, when that question was asked, How many in this room have witnessed an atmospheric test?, there were three of us. So it left a lasting impression on me, one that has stayed with me all of this time. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Let me just ask this question here. Obviously, people who have witnessed that have different views on how that is or different stories of how that’s affected them. Some people have said, You can’t really understand it unless you see the destruction around it. But you’re saying that even the explosion itself, from what you understood of what explosions can do, was sufficient to give you a sense, in a very concrete way, of the kind of the destruction that it could cause. It sure did. It sure did. It’s the visual and sensory effects of the thing itself. Made a lasting impression on me, and then I saw destructions of things like the towns that were built, and I really was able to see firsthand what kind of destruction they would cause. And another thing that’s interesting is that later on in my life, as I began to really understand what deterrence is, I could really relate back to my early days at the test site. And you know we all worked in the nuclear weapons program because we believed that we had to arm ourselves in a way that we could defeat the Soviet Union, and that at some point in our lives there would come a point in time when we would be in a nuclear war. I certainly believed that in my early days at the test site. And I could look back, now that I understand deterrence a little better, and say I’m glad people changed from being advocates of the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of war that you would use. And so you went from that to having the fact that you have them as a deterrent that you would never use, but the other side knew you had them. Quite a change in your view of the world, to make that transition from— No, I think it’s a really important point you’re making, and important for our understanding, because sometimes when you talk to people, they’ll tell you from the outset, It was always deterrence. We had to have those weapons so that they wouldn’t be used. Because the problem, of course, is that the weapons are so horrible, why would a person work on them? That’s an outsider’s sort of question that they have. But you’re saying that you’re UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 going there at the beginning and there is this sense, We have to be able to win that nuclear war, and then that shifts to a sense of the concept of deterrence. For you personally, that is. Well, for me personally, I watched from a distance the era of mutually assured destruction, which I look back now and say, That was nuts. That was a crazy point of view for both sides to have, you know. Mine’s bigger than yours. I’ve got more than you’ve got. And I took some comfort in the fact that I didn’t believe the United States of America would ever launch first, but I did believe that the Soviets probably would. If the Soviets thought they had an edge on us, they wouldn’t hesitate, I believed, to begin a nuclear war. And so I kind of grew up in the early days of my time on the test site believing that we were preparing ourselves for that war. And then other people decided that this doctrine of mutually assured destruction was probably not the right thing to do. And thank God they did, because another thing that is remarkable when you look back and you know that in that era, both the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. That one never [ 00: 35: 00] went off for any reason, accidentally or on purpose or because of sabotage or because of— it’s just remarkable to me that that never happened. And as Tom Reed [ author of At the Abyss: And Insider’s History of the Cold War, ( New York: Ballantine, 2004)] pointed out when he was here, it is absolutely remarkable, looking back, that you had all of these thousands of nuclear weapons in the hands of a few people who were smart enough to recognize what would happen if a nuclear war started, and cooler heads always prevailed. And history has shown us that things like the Cuban crisis and things like Korea and some others, even the famous stories about NORAD in Colorado Springs thinking because they were looking at the Aurora Borealis and they thought it was a major launch, it’s just absolutely remarkable. Thank God that none of them were ever used. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 At the time, when you first get there in ’ 58, again, you’re expressing a point of view about the weapons, and I’m imagining that the culture of the test site, pretty much everyone was agreed that we were in danger of being in a situation where the Russians launched a nuclear war. Is that right? I’m asking. Well, let me back one step back away from that. I think most of the people that went to the test site, other than the lab scientists, but the construction people that went to the test site, and the support people who went to the test site, went there because it was a job. And it turns out, a very good job. It paid well and you were compensated for the fact that it was so many miles away and all that. But it was just another job. And certainly I made the transition and I saw other people make the transition from saying, This really isn’t just a job. We are doing something that is pretty important for this country. And initially it was because I thought we were going to end up in a nuclear war, we had to have more than they had so we could survive. But you’ve heard a lot of other people say this, and I believe very deeply that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people who cycled through the Nevada Test Site are among the most patriotic souls that this country had, because you get caught up in this feeling that you are actually making a difference in whether this country’s going to survive or not, and that’s a pretty important thing. So I’m wondering, are you saying that in a sense, if you go just for a job and it becomes something different, in a sense are you saying that the work itself and the importance of the work itself contributes to your patriotism in a certain way, because you’re right there in an important task? Well, it certainly did for me, but I have to be honest and say, you know, a lot of that is retrospective because— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Well, let me just say that I think that’s one of the nice things about doing this kind of conversation, is that we have the opportunity of your retrospection. We hope that someone who’s lived as long as you have will then be retrospective in a meaningful way, so don’t worry if it’s a reflection. That sort of goes with the territory. I certainly didn’t understand, for example, the 1963 treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. People were talking and negotiations were going on when I came to work in 1958, which is why this country was beginning to look at how to do underground testing. Because the politicians of the day knew that we were going to get, at some point, to an agreement with the Soviet Union, [ 00: 40: 00] which we did in 1963. And the Limited Test Ban Treaty banned testing in the atmosphere and space and under water, which of course was a very good thing for the world. I came here because the country was getting ready to do that and there were people that knew we were heading for that treaty. I didn’t understand that until much later, and I didn’t understand all the ramifications of it. I heard competent nuclear scientists at the time saying that going underground would be a big mistake, that it would limit the kinds of measurements that could be made and the understanding of the phenomena. And of course just the reverse of that was true. It turned out to be a much more technically productive way to do business. But at the time I knew that we were going to test these things underground. I didn’t know how many we had or how many kinds we had or how many we needed to have, but I clearly sensed from what we were doing that we were in a race with the Soviets. And I also saw a lot of other things going on at the test site, trying to understand the effects of a nuclear war, learning about radiation and learning about what it would do to the skin— the experiments with all of the pigs in Frenchman Flat, and the BREN Tower constructed specifically to look at, to be able to predict doses on Japanese kinds of housing, and the farm, which was established specifically to begin to understand how UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 radiation from the nuclear exchange would get into the food cycle— so you’d be able to understand that so you could protect your own people. And these were all pieces that, when you’re just working in the tunnel in Area 12, you don’t understand. But the more you were at the test site and the more— whether you were a miner or a carpenter or in the mess hall, everybody— you had to have a Q- clearance to work at the Nevada Test Site. What you knew was governed by the need- to- know principle, but everybody knew they were involved in something that was pretty important. And the longer you were there, the more you learned. And I think most people discovered that it was an important thing, and it was more than just a very good job. It was something that was good for the country. OK. Now, what are you actually physically doing on your job when you first get there? You’re excavating tunnels? You’re thinking about how this is going to be done? What—? Just excavating tunnels. Just excavating tunnels. And then along came this moratorium in the fall of 1958, and the agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States was that neither side would conduct a nuclear test. It was a bilateral agreement. It wasn’t a treaty and it wasn’t ratified in the sense that we ratify treaties, but it was an agreement between the two leaders. And the United States took it very seriously and took it for its word. And I won’t remember these numbers correctly, but on September 30 in the tunnel department of the Reynolds Electric Company were like 2,800 people, and by January of 1959, that number was about fifty. So there were major reductions in workers at the test site, major— not reductions in the laboratories, but a lot of changes in the laboratories, shifting people to other research problems and research tasks. [ 00: 45: 00] And I was one of the fortunate ones that stayed, because I had a clearance, to begin to do some reentry work in Area 12, to mine back into where a nuclear test had been conducted, to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 understand better what happens when you test underground. And so we did that at a tunnel called B Tunnel. OK, so I think Rainier is the first underground test, right, in ’ 57, I believe, so t