Interview with Richard Van Nutley, November 8, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Richard Nutley November 8, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Joan Leavitt © 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 Richard Nutley November 8, 2004 Conducted by Joan Leavitt Table of Contents Introduction: born Yakima, WA ( 1935), family background, education ( B. S., Montana State, 1959), military service in U. S. Army Reserve, goes to work for AEC, Hanford Works, WA ( Contracts Division) 1 Move to Las Vegas, NV ( 1962), works for NRDS ( Personnel Division), daily life at the NTS 2 Transfers to NASA payroll, continues to work at NTS 9 Describes NRDS complex and details a nuclear rocket test 12 Talks about incident with BREN tower at the NTS 15 Description of tests at Test Cells A, B, and C 18 Discusses Plowshare re: reactor- produced energy and people’s fear of radiation 19 Showing people around NRDS 21 Relocating jackasses from Death Valley to Jackass Flats, NTS 22 Describes TNT ( transient nuclear test) and accident at NRDS 23 Talks about expansion of NRDS to Area 26, NTS, work as safety engineer 24 Recalls visit with his son in Washington, D. C. 26 Work with LANL on NRDS test design 27 Creating an NRDS garden, stories about jackasses at NTS 28 Involvement with JVE ( 1988- 89) and visits of Soviet representatives to NTS ( also short story about Mighty Derringer) 30 Leaves NRDS, goes to work for Clark County Health District ( 1970- ca. 1978) 40 Goes to work for DOE ( ca. 1978), talks about radiation work with pig parts during atmospheric testing days, and indexing a flora and fauna collection with Martha DeMarre 40 Work on establishment of CIC and Nuclear Testing Archives 42 Discusses radiation fallout studies done by CIC 44 Talks about Mighty Derringer ( 1986) 47 Conclusion: discusses contamination and fallout studies done on the NTS 49 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Richard Nutley November 8, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Joan Leavitt [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Joan Leavitt: Why don’t we start with the things leading up to working for AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission]. Maybe you could start with your background, where you were born? Richard Nutley: I was born in Yakima, Washington on August 17, 1935. My father was a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation [ BOR]. We moved around to a lot of different spots; I went to four high schools. Upon graduation from high school I entered the University of Washington and was there for a year then got a scholarship to Yakima Valley Public Junior College, where I graduated. When I went back to the University of Washington, I was told I was going to be drafted, so I joined the Army Reserve. When I got out of the Army Reserve, I went to Montana State University in Missoula, Montana, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science. About what year was that? [ Pause— sound of papers rustling] Well, let’s see, it was in ’ 59. So you were anticipating getting drafted and going to Korea, is that what I’m hearing you say? No, I was in the Reserves between Korea and Vietnam. There were no active wars going on while I was in the Reserves for six years. That was nice, no wars. After graduation from Montana State University, I went and applied to the Atomic Energy Commission offices in Richland, Washington and was accepted. Now what exactly is in Washington up there? Is there a lab? What is it up there? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Well, it was called the Hanford Works; it was where the plutonium was produced. They had many large reactors that, “ cooked” uranium to make it into plutonium. I was in the contracts division of the AEC office there for two years. A bunch of characters came around from headquarters, AEC recruiting people, to get people to come to Nevada to work on the nuclear rocket project. They offered me a double grade raise to come and I picked up my wife and child and moved to Las Vegas. I arrived June 17, 1962; it was 117 degrees, and I knew I had gone— You had gone south. I had gone south. My wife and child stayed with her parents in Wyoming while I found a place to live. Did you find a place in Las Vegas itself? Or did you do the commute? No, I stayed at a beat- up old motel that, thank the Lord, is gone now. The doors were curtains and the bathroom was down the hall and there wasn’t even a shower in the place. I stayed there I think two nights. There were some guys at the AEC building who had rented an apartment over in the Tam o’ Shanter and they were looking for people to share the costs, so I moved in with them while I looked at housing. There just wasn’t anything I could afford or even I could get into for six to nine months. Oh! Now that’s when there was a lot of— Construction. Well, a lot of workers coming to Las Vegas. [ 00: 05: 00] Oh, yes, It was horrible. I finally found a thirty- five- foot [ long], eight- foot- wide trailer and parked it out near Nellis Air Force Base and went and got my family. My in- laws met us in the middle of Utah and we came down. My son wouldn’t go outside because of the heat. He’d been in Wyoming where it was cool. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Oh. And you probably had a swamp cooler, didn’t you? Yes. Because we didn’t have air conditioning. Actually I bought an electric in- the- window 220 unit. An air conditioner, I guess they called it. An air conditioner, yes. We lived there a little bit less than a year. I was the first one to report here for work as a government employee for NRDS [ Nuclear Rocket and Development Station]. They didn’t have anything for me to do because there was nobody here, so I went to work for AEC writing construction reports. I wrote construction completion reports and schedules and stuff like that at the AEC building. It was on Main Street; the old, old AEC building. While I was there, they put me on the payroll as an AEC employee there, the home office was Albuquerque [ New Mexico, Albuquerque Operations Office, ALOO], and the Nevada office became an operations office, a full operations office [ Nevada Operations Office, NVOO], so I sort of was at the birth of that. Then people started showing up and I started doing any administrative job that they needed done. I ended up in Personnel and hired every one of my bosses above me. You did? You hired them. Well, I handled the paperwork. You didn’t make the decision on it, then. I didn’t make the decisions about my supervisors, but I made decisions about other kinds of people, because there was no one else around. We moved the office from a warehouse down the street from the Highland AEC office out to Engine Test Stand Number One [ ETS- 1] Control Room, which is underground. And so we would ride the bus out there. Somewhere in my stuff, I have a certificate of having ridden the bus UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 250,000 miles. That was a joke at a Christmas party one day; we were all going to get together and practice by riding the bus from Las Vegas to Beatty and back with no bathrooms and a case of beer on board. That was the joke; it was kind of funny. I didn’t want to ride the bus all that time, because it took a lot of time away from my family. So my wife and I were looking at a larger trailer; half our stuff was stacked in boxes out behind the trailer. I went in one day to the trailer place and the guy said, I’ll discount that trailer for you because it’s been here a year and nobody wants it. Well, it was a twelve [ foot] wide, sixty- five footer. I mean that was heaven compared to what we’d been in. So I bought it and had it delivered at Indian Springs. I moved my little family out to Indian Springs and we started having a pleasant time out there. My wife was from Wyoming, so she liked small communities. That was, and still is, a small [ 00: 10: 00] community. My son started school out there as a kindergartener. On his birthday one spring my wife was going up to the school taking cupcakes and party favors to a party for him, and here he came. He was trucking down the road just as fast as he could go. She stopped— Away from school? Away from school. She got him in the car and she said, What’s going on? And he said, I’m not going back to that school, they aren’t teaching me anything. You teach me more at home. My wife was a schoolteacher. Well, she got him back to school and to the party. Then lo and behold, my wife decided that we were going to have another baby. We were living in Indian Springs and Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed a law that said that if you traveled from Las Vegas to the [ Nevada] test site, you got seven- and- a- half dollars a day per UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 diem, but they didn’t include Indian Springs. So I moved my family back to the present house that I’m in and traveled to the test site. Now while I was living in Indian Springs I made friends with a man by the name of Jay Hayes. Jay had a beat- up old station wagon and it would cough, sput, mutter just horribly all the way from Indian Springs to Cactus Springs. You know where Cactus Springs is? It’s about five miles towards the test site from Indian Springs; it’s a wide spot in the road. The minute that station wagon hit Cactus [ Springs] it smoothed out and everything was fine all the way to the test site and all the way back, but the minute it hit Cactus [ Springs] it’d start to sputter again. We never did figure out how it knew it was in Cactus Springs. Jay bought used tires for that vehicle and usually had three or four in the back end. We got to the point where we were very good at changing tires. I remember one time we had a bunch of guys riding with us, I don’t remember why they were riding to Indian Springs with us but they were. We had a flat tire and by the time the car stopped rolling I was at the back end getting the tire out and the jack and so forth, and these guys came around and said to Jay, How can we help? Jay said, Get out of the way, because we could change a tire in nothing flat. Part of the time I rode the bus from there and part of the time I rode with Jay. We would get up a little earlier, about a half- hour, forty- five minutes and drive to Mercury. He’d get his briefing for the day from the Mercury guard center and then we’d drive a government vehicle from Mercury out to NRDS. He worked for NRDS too, then? Well, he worked for Wackenhut [ Services, Inc., WSI] assigned to NRDS. When I moved to town, I got in with a guy who was working at NRDS by the name of Dick [ Richard] Howard. Dick and I worked out a deal where I would drive and he would sleep in UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 his Volvo. In the Volvo that he had, the rider’s seat folded down so he could lay out and go back to sleep, and I’d drive to the site. More than four to five times, I’d be walking around the office or someplace and some guy’d say, Didn’t Dick Howard come out with you today? We didn’t see him in the car. He was asleep right there beside me the whole trip. So those were kind of fun things that happened. On NRDS after I had worked for a while as the junior member of the Personnel Department, I was changed over to several other positions and ended up as Bob ( Robert) Helgeson’s [ 00: 15: 00] executive assistant; Helgeson was the manager. I remember his name in that article I think you wrote. He was a great guy. About two or three years after they closed down NRDS, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage which was a shame because he was a very intelligent man. The office at Engine Test Stand Number One underground had several things happen there. They always sent a guard in to check out the place before we got there in the morning, and lo and behold, one day the guard found a rattlesnake under a secretary’s desk which she was not too happy about. Oh my! No. Did that happen very often? It only happened twice that I knew about. But it was just because you were so far out there in nowhere that…. And I mean the snake was there before we came, that was his home territory; its home territory. But somehow it got inside the building. Well, yes, but a snake can get in places that people just don’t believe; just like a mouse, you know. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 We had a bad situation there one time. Somebody was stealing the coffee money and we didn’t know who the heck was doing it, so they put a little TV camera up in our ceiling. It was a contractor engineer who was earning twice as much money as any of us in the government, but he was stealing the coffee money. They caught him with the TV camera. Did he get fired? Yes. While I was working in Personnel one day, a secretary who shall go unnamed— actually we called her the Dog Lady. Now did she have a dog? Well, that’s why we called her the Dog Lady. She transferred over from the Air Force from the big air base just over in California. El Toro? Is it El Toro or is it—? No, that’s a Marine base. Edwards [ Air Force Base]. She came to Mercury one day and came in and said, I want to spend the night. I’m going to work. And they said, Well, you can’t take the dog on the test site. She raised holy Ned about it and finally one of the guards said they’d watch the dog for her. So then she brought the dog to Indian Springs and my next door neighbor, Bob Barney, who was an engineer with AEC at the test site, took care of the dog. Well, the dog was old, had arthritis and was miserable. It would go— at Indian Springs you built up these little mounds around the trees and put water inside— he would go lay in that water to cool off and then he was even more miserable. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Anyway, one day she came into my office while I was in Personnel and she said, I want the kind of feminine care products that I want to use put in the ladies’ room. And I said, Well, now, look, we buy those things by the carload through [ 00: 20: 00] AEC downtown. They’re used to pick up spills of radioactive material. They’re very good for that. We have no control over what brand it is. Oh, she just thought I was the worst thing coming down the pike. I said, Well, now, look, you go see the procurement officer. I shoved her off on the procurement officer. She raised Ned with him until he finally went out and bought her a box of her product and put it in the ladies’ room for her. But for the most part, we had very little trouble with people who worked out there. It was an interesting time. We would hire these guys from all over the United States: engineers, physicists, the whole group of administrative people. They’d come there and they’d go to work and their wives just could not stand this. Usually after a year to a year- and- a- half they would move home. Usually then within four months I would get a call from that individual saying, Is there a job opening? We want to move back. There were no better jobs available, is that what you’re saying? Well, partly, but partly because they got used to the Las Vegas twenty- four- hour, seven- day- a- week town of entertainment. Their wives finally decided they didn’t want to be in some Podunk place back in the East where it was cloudy all the time. So the weather was a plus, then, even with some of the families— It was a plus and particularly in the winter. I truly believe that my wife lived a lot longer because we came to Vegas and we had calmer winters than she would’ve if we’d have stayed in the Northwest. But that was something I noted as I was in Personnel. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 I went along for about a year, and NASA [ National Aeronautics and Space Administration] was raising Ned because the predominance of personnel— Now this is an interesting phrase you’re using: “ raising Ned.” You’re saying that instead of “ raising hell,” is that what I’m hearing? Well, you know. Raising Ned; making a fuss. Making a fuss. You can continue to use that term, I just wanted to make sure that we were understanding the same thing here. Anyway they were raising Ned, hell, whatever, because over three- fourths of the population of the federal workers on NRDS [ Nuclear Rocket and Development Station] were AEC employees, not NASA, and NASA wanted parity. So a group of us switched over to the NASA payroll. We didn’t change jobs; there was no— You know, you usually don’t think of NASA and the Las Vegas test site as having any kind of connection. No, you don’t. This is really interesting, that the test site was used for many, many purposes. Well, NASA funded roughly half of the NRDS project because it was supposed to be a nuclear rocket for space propulsion. The fun thing about that were the NASA rules versus the AEC rules for getting rid of surplus materials: NASA had authority to give it away to cities, towns, county governments and AEC did not. So we would figure out a way to make it NASA property if we wanted to get rid of it because we could just give a bunch of hard hats to the fire department in Beatty, for example. We did a lot of that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Did Las Vegas get any of that donation? Oh, yes. Did they? Oh, yes. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but particularly fire departments and police departments would get things. Is that because of the kind of safety equipment or—? It was that kind of thing, yes. If it was surplus to our needs, we tried very hard to give it to small [ 00: 25: 00] government units— Pahrymp, Beatty, Tonopah— because, you know, their budgets are still nothing, you know what I mean. Part of the time I was in NRDS, I was the procurement specialist in charge of surplus. What I would do is go through catalogs, Navy, Army, Marine catalogs. The best thing I ever got was stainless steel furniture for the medical center; I got stainless steel beds, stainless steel— Are you talking the medical center on the test site? At NRDS, we built our own. We built half of what we thought we needed and then waited; we never needed the other half. [ NRDS was Area 25 or 400. Area 26 or 401 was the site of the nuclear Ramjet tests.] Anyway, I got desks, I got tables, I got all kinds of stuff. And a bunch of the guys said, You know, we’ve got this nice auditorium, it was about two- thirds as wide and twice as deep as this. You could divide it off into three separate rooms for meetings. The guys wanted me to get a piano off of surplus and John Jewett who was the assistant manager for administration,— said, No way! So I never got a piano off the list. One day I was in my office and some guy called me up from the guard shack and said, Nutley, I’ve got ten trucks here of materials to be delivered to you. I said, I didn’t order any ten trucks. What in the world? Get the paperwork and call me UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 back. I went upstairs into our observation room where we could watch the tests from inside the administration building, looked out, and here, sure enough, were trucks lined up outside the gate. Well, it seems that one of our engineers was on vacation in New Orleans [ Louisiana] and he ran across some people who were bringing back the ATLAS [ rocket] surplus materials from England when they deactivated the ATLAS in England. Well, that was cryogenic material. Those were valves and piping and all kinds of things having to do with cryogenics; super cold flow oxygen- hydrogen. These vehicles were full of this stuff. Well, when I found out who had signed for them, I went to the boss and he called him in and chewed him out really well. And we debated the whole issue; all we needed to do was pay the truck transportation costs from New Orleans to the test site. We looked it over and we decided to take it, so we filled up rows and rows of bins in the storage area with these cryogenic valves. We saved the government a lot of money doing it that way but it would’ve been better if people had talked to us. Now Area 26 is up the hill from NRDS and it’s where the nuclear Ramjet tests were done. About a year and a half after— I don’t remember exactly— a year and a half after we came on the [ 00: 30: 00] test site, they deactivated the program. After a while AEC decided that we could go up there and take what we needed, except for certain things. So I was the first one on Area 26; I took office stuff: desks, chairs, tables, blackboards, electrical distribution stuff, telephones, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get my hand in that. This is all to recycle this stuff, then? Yes, you know, a desk is a desk. If you need five or six desks and you can get them off surplus, wash them up good and repaint them, who’s going to care? So that was part of what I got to NRDS. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 One of the first things I did when I got on NRDS was to watch a test. The nuclear rocket was about thirty- six inches in diameter and thirty- six inches high. That’s not the rocket, that’s the reactor; the reactor was in an aluminum container with entry and exit on each end. The interior of the reactor was made of carbon with imbedded Uranium 235 [ U235] in little beads. What happens is you take a large tank and you fill it full of hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, which is way down there near absolute zero. You pump it with a special pump built by Rocketdyne into the top of this reactor, if it’s sitting that way, but we’ve tested them upside down, so you pumped it in through the bottom. You had holes through this carbon material and the hydrogen would flow through the reactor. As it went through the reactor it gained temperature, and when it came out the bottom, you put it into a nozzle, like you would on a rocket, and it expanded in that nozzle and gave you thrust. Well, we were having all kinds of trouble: the reactor wouldn’t stay together, it’d break up. So I was sitting there watching this test and I was on the phone to headquarters, to Harry Fingers, the big boss, and I was describing what I was seeing. If I ever believed in “ don’t kill the messenger,” that was one time, because I kept saying, Flash. Flash. Flash, flash. Flash. And he kept swearing at the other end. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to hear this, because when you burn hydrogen you get water. Here’s this plume of hydrogen that’s five thousand degrees hitting the atmosphere, there’s no color, the only thing you can see is heat waves. There’s no way to tell there’s fifty thousand pounds of thrust going there. It’s just unbelievable to watch. Here are these yellow flashes as the carbon burns as it comes out the nozzle. Well, they finally solved that problem, it was a complicated engineering problem; actually what it was, was water hammer, just like you get in water pipes somehow and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 when they made a little change to how the reactor rods were held [ 00: 35: 00] together, why, it worked out fine. The control point [ CP] at NRDS is sort of in the center. You have a control point and then over here [ indicating photograph] was the MAD [ Maintenance, Assembly, and Disassembly] building, maintenance and disassembly. This was Test Cell A/ B, this was Test Cell C, and then way over here even further was the Engine Test Stand Number One. And how large an area was this? I don’t know. Now this is NRDS, then. This is NRDS. The NRDS complex? Yes. Anyway, there were control wires buried under the ground up here. This is all connected by a railroad, by the way, we called it the Jackass Flats and Tidewater. The NRDS complex? Is that—? No, the railroad was called Jackass Flats and Tidewater. It was an official licensed railroad; the State of Nevada licensed it. Anyway, these underground wires were plastic, and the antelope ground squirrels would dig down there and eat the plastic off the wires because there was salt in the plastic. We had to do redo everything with metal casings and then we didn’t have any more trouble. Did it slow things up there for a while, then? Oh, yes. How long did it take you to discover the problem and solve it? Oh, about a month. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 The other thing that was nice about the control point, the CP we called it, was it had an excellent place to eat. The chef went out of his way to be generous and to do a good job with the food. If we could eat up there, that’s where we ate because it was good. You really liked your little cafeteria there, then? We did. And you also had a medical facility there? Yes. Not at the CP, it was down at the— [ sound of drawing] down here was the administrative area where my office was; no railroad. I was in the CP cafeteria one day eating lunch with my friend Jay Hayes from Indian Springs, the guy from the guard force. He was Captain Jay Hayes, in charge of all physical security at NRDS. We walked out of the cafeteria, it was a Butler building. You know what a Butler building is? It’s a metal, cheap structure thrown up quickly, no fancy insides or anything. We walked out and here up above us was a yellow aircraft flying around. And they’re not supposed to be around, right? No way. We looked at it and it flew around us and then it went off and flew around one of the test cells and started south. Jay turned to one of the guards and he says, Keep that plane in sight as long as you can. So he took off down the gravel road, [ Sound of drawing] I think he took off like this down to what used to be called Lathrop Wells. The plane landed at the airport at Lathrop Wells. The guard drove over there and said, Did that plane land here just a few minutes ago? The guy was working on some plane there and he said, Yes. And the guard said, Well, where are the people in it? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 And the guy said, Oh, those four guys went over to the house of ill- repute. So we called the Nye County Sheriff’s Department and they arrested four Texans for over flying the test site in the house of ill- repute. And all they were trying to do was find a place to land? [ 00: 40: 00] They were sightseeing and probably had too much to drink. But I’ve often wondered how they explained to their wives how they got arrested in a whorehouse. We had another airplane come in. [ sound of drawing] Do you know anything about the BREN [ Bare Reactor Experiment, Nevada] tower? Yes. OK, the BREN tower was situated about there [ indicating on diagram]. Some kid was on his solo long distance flight to get a license, and he was headed for Tonopah. He got into a bad storm and he didn’t know what to do; he saw this cleared land over here and he landed right at the base of the BREN tower. Missed the cables and everything; oh, man, he was lucky. Close call. He was just sick. I don’t think we did anything to him. He didn’t get arrested. He didn’t get arrested, no. You just understood he was a lost soul. He was lost and he didn’t know what to do. His instructor came and got in the airplane with him and made him take it off from there and fly it out and around— Now was this before the era of protesters, so—? No. They moved the BREN tower from the northern part of NTS over to NRDS in the seventies; late sixties or early seventies. They tell stories about that; they’d have what they called a short UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 burst reactor. It was all self- contained and it had a window opening on it and you opened the window and aimed it at the target and then you turned it on and it went click and sent a burst of radiation down there. They were trying to figure out exactly how much radiation got to Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the height of the BREN tower was what the bomb went off at. Anyway, when they had that reactor up there, they had to have a guard near it. Well, here’s this thousand- plus- foot tower, you know, you’re inside the test site, nobody can get to it, but the guard’s got to be up there. Well, if there’s a storm, that tower’s going ba- a- ack and forth and back and forth. They got kind of sick and finally somebody in his infinite wisdom decided that the guard could be at the base of the tower. Oh, instead of at the top. [ Sound of pages turning] This is the area where the guard shack was. There was a fire station here and a radiation protection building here, and over here was a dog kennel [ indicating on diagram]. A couple of engineers from one of the contractors and I were going through the stuff in this. People put a lot of surplus junk in there and we were looking at it to see whether there was anything we could use. And that’s a dog house that they— Dog kennels. The dogs were gone. OK, no dogs but just a place to put stuff, then. Were there ever dogs there? Oh, yes. Oh, this would’ve been— was this during the testing of dogs? Yes, during atmospheric testing. They were used as test subjects. There were still a few there when I first got there. They were beautiful little pups; I guess they all got adopted out before I even had a chance to find out if I could get one. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 Anyway, we were going through there and we found a bucket about that big around and about that deep [ indicating size] and one of the guys said, Oh, that’s a smoke pot that you throw off a destroyer so that you see where you dropped your last depth charges on submarines. And we used them up at the test cells so they’d pull the smoke up in the plume so we could see where the plume was going. Here, [ 00: 45: 00] I’ll show you, he said, you open this area and then pull the plug. Well, you don’t open that area and pull the plug. That was the plug. So I immediately ran over to the fire station and told them, It’s just a smoke bomb. There’s no fire. There’s no problem. You don’t need to do anything. I got back to my office and Helgeson called me in, very stern; oh man, that was the sternest he was with me ever. He said, Did you put off that smoke bomb? And I said, No, sir. He said, Fine. Get out of here. Good. That’s all he wanted to know. That was all he wanted to know. So what happened to the guy who pulled the—? I don’t know. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor here. There’s times when you just don’t ask questions, aren’t there? What could you do? We always watched the tests at Test Cell C and Test Cell A from an observation room in the administration building. It was sort of a little area; it’d hold about forty people, really, standing up. But we had voice contact with the control point and TV monitors to monitor d