Interview with Peter Henry Zavattaro, May 31, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Peter Zavattaro May 31, 2005 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 Peter Zavattaro May 31, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: born Weehauken, NJ ( 1937), education Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ ( bachelor’s, engineering), hired by EG& G ( 1959) 1 Beginning of EG& G Santa Barbara, CA office, work on Z system for LANL, work with Donald Westerfeld on Vela Uniform 2 Work on Operation Dominic ( Starfish and Bluegill, 1962) 3 Program manager, Future off Continent Program ( FOC) ; work on Crosscheck 5 Move to Los Alamos, set up EG& G engineering department ( 1970) 7 Work on Umber ( 1967), support of Herman Hoerlin ( J- 10), Pinex experiments ( J- 12), and Alpha Group ( J- 14) 9 Assistant program manager ( 1975- 1978), move to Las Vegas, NV as Los Alamos program manager ( 1978- 1981), deputy general manager ( 1981), general manager of EG& G until 1983- end contract 10 Details work Las Vegas, NV in as EG& G general manager in 13 Work with Remote Sensing Laboratory ( RSL) on radiation monitoring and aerial surveys, NEST ( emergency response), building nationwide replacement facilities 14 Involvement with JVE and CORRTEX work ( 1988- 1989), visit of Soviet scientists to NTS and security concerns 16 Thoughts on end of testing ( Divider, 1992), EG& G work for DOE ( 1992- 1995), reorganization of EG& G ( after 1995) 20 Retirement from EG& G ( 1995), involvement with Atomic Testing Museum, consulting on readiness to test 24 Testing of delivery systems for bunker busters and other weapons, thoughts about politics of weapons work 26 Memories of major figures in the testing world: William Ogle, Barney O’Keefe, Kenneth J. Germeshausen, Herbert Grier, Harold E. Edgerton 27 Opinion about Yucca Mountain project 29 Conclusion: recollections of work and people at EG& G 31 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Peter Zavattaro May 31, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Peter Zavattaro, thank you so much for meeting with me today. And I thought we could begin by having you tell me a little bit about your background, starting with your full name, your place of birth, your date of birth, and something of your education and how you came to be working for EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier]. Peter Zavattaro: OK. My name is Peter Zavattaro. I was born in Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel, June 26, 1937. I went to college at Stevens Institute of Technology, which is in Hoboken, New Jersey, so I could be close to home. When I graduated from college, I was looking around for a job, like all new graduates, and EG& G came down to campus and was interviewing. This was the first time they went to a college outside of MIT [ Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. Most of their engineers came from MIT because of their association. So they hired about four of us from my graduating class at Stevens. What was your degree in? My degree was a bachelor of engineering. At Stevens you get four years of mechanical engineering, whether you like it or not, and my specialty was electronics. So instead of taking an M. E., I took the bachelor of engineering. I could have taken either degree. I was hired on at EG& G during the moratorium, so at that time they were looking to get some new blood into the system to look at commercializing some of the equipment that they used in the test program. OK, and what was the year? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Nineteen fifty- nine. I moved up to Boston and went to work for this small company. It was like a hundred engineers in total working for EG& G at the time. They had the office in Boston and the office in Las Vegas. And just as I joined EG& G, they opened an office in Santa Barbara [ California] also. The Santa Barbara office was a Barney O’Keefe idea. He found a fairly creative marketing type called Sandy [ Sanford C.] Sigoloff who wanted to live in Santa Barbara, which was the main reason why we had an office in Santa Barbara. His logic was, if I move to Santa Barbara I can hire really great people because people really like to live in Santa Barbara. So that’s how it all started. It’s a very interesting part of the history. Well, I was working on building a commercial version of our oscilloscope and some pulse generators and things, electronics things. Did a few jobs for Doc Edgerton because he was kind of outside the company and would come in and borrow people every once in a while. Shortly after I got started in this, we got involved with Los Alamos [ National Laboratory] on a project called— well, we were building a system called a Z system, and this was designed to— this was a pre- Vela [ Uniform] activity and it was designed to look at air fluorescence of a nuclear burst out of space, out in the outer atmosphere. The X- rays would impinge on the atmosphere and light it up at certain precise wavelengths. So we built this system to look at that. And it was deployed around the world. We also built some other systems, again to detect clandestine testing by the Soviets [ USSR] because everybody thought they would try to sneak in a few tests. They surprised us. They just waited till they were ready to have their test areas and said we’re going to start testing and they did. So I worked on those systems more related to Vela for several years. I got tied into Los Alamos pretty well. The lead scientist from Los Alamos was somebody named Don Westerfeld, so I worked with him forever, next thirty years or so. And we built all these systems which UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 [ 00: 05: 00] were deployed by the Air Force and eventually the designs were incorporated in a satellite by Sandia [ National Laboratories], so the Vela satellites which orbit the Earth and look over things were all part of that project. In ‘ 62 when the Russians [ USSR] broke the treaty, things got really exciting around EG& G, as you can imagine; hired a lot of people, madly went back into testing, got involved in [ Operation] Dominic and spent the next six months in the Pacific floating around and flying around. So let me understand a couple of things. The Santa Barbara office was set up, but did you go there, or you stayed in Boston? No. No, I stayed in Boston. I stayed in Boston until 1970. And at the time, a lot of the— well, in the sixties, a lot of the engineering, the senior engineering design work supporting the test program, even Las Vegas, came out of Boston. And it was more technical support in Las Vegas. Then they slowly built up their engineering capability to take on a lot of the things that were designed in Boston. But for years, people in Boston used to fly back and forth to Las Vegas on a weekly basis. So tell me a little bit about Dominic. Dominic was the Pacific test program and, was kind of a period where we tested, I guess it was over 100 tests, every day almost. And I was supporting a branch of the Air Force at the time. And we had a KC- 135 that was filled with instrumentation, cameras, antennas. We looked at electromagnetic pulses and photographed things. And we flew on the airplane. Whenever there was a test, we would fly down to Christmas Island or wherever the test was, collect data, and fly back. Lived in Oahu, so we worked out of Hickam Air Force Base [ Hawaii] for months and months. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 In July of ‘ 62, I think it was ‘ 62, [ 07/ 09/ 1962] we started the high- altitude series, which the first test was Starfish. Starfish was a large- yield device, 400 miles up or something. It’s in the book someplace. [ DOE/ NV— 209 Rev 15 December 2000] But anyway that lit up the whole sky. You could see that the sky turned green from Hawaii to Samoa. It was just spectacular. I had a copy of Life Magazine that had that on the cover and I can’t find it. I’ll make a note of it. Maybe we have it at the library. [ Life Magazine, July 20, 1962.] It would be in ‘ 62; ‘ 62 issue of Life. But after that particular test, there was concerns about what the Russians were doing, and the plane that I was supporting went to Russia. I stayed in Hawaii and took a trailer of equipment, and the government rented a freighter, a Portuguese freighter called Private Frank J. Petracka. My trailer was strapped to one of the holds on this freighter and we went down to Johnson Island, and I spent forty- six days anchored off Johnson Island looking at the rest of the high- altitude series plus some atmospheric shots. The shots down there, the famous one was Bluegill because it took them three tries to actually get that successfully fired. The first one blew up on the pad. The second one blew up shortly after launch, so there were parts of rocket motors and things falling down. And the third test was successful. Now, I know I could look this up, but you’re working for the Air Force. Are their concerns with these tests weapons effects or detection or what—? Oh, they were detection. Detection. I can’t really go into too much of it, but they were working in association with the labs, and we had a separate contract with the Air Force, and I supported them for many years building equipment and helping them with their work. [ 00: 10: 00] But after Dominic was over, I became more involved with Los Alamos. The first thing that happened after the test series was over was coming up with a readiness program for UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 resuming testing in the Pacific, and that was called the Future Off- Continent Program, FOC. And I worked on that until the program was cancelled. Basically, it was a clause in one of the safeguards, Safeguard C, that said we had to be prepared to promptly resume atmospheric testing in the Pacific. So they came up with a concept for that exercise. The concept was that to solve some of the logistics problems of the past test series— because weather in the Pacific is really spotty. You never know where you can see things. So the concept was they would have a flying experiment. They would have the drop plane fly and they would have an array of airplanes follow it and they would find some nice clear place in the Pacific and fire the test. So this was the concept, and to support that, each of the labs had designed an aircraft for their experimentation. Sandia had their own, [ Lawrence] Livermore [ National Laboratory] had their own, and Los Alamos had their own. So they modified these three aircraft, which were called NC- 135s, which were refuelable KC- 135s, at Fort Worth [ Texas]. General Dynamics modified the planes. And I supported— we would go down and we designed the camera mounts and a lot of the stuff that went on the air— a lot of the supporting infrastructure, cameras and things, that went on the airplanes. And then after they completed them, they moved them to Kirtland Air Force Base [ New Mexico]; Holmes and Narver designed an array of pad, three pads, for the aircraft, and they were stationed down there. And we had an array of trailers and we staffed it with people from Boston. The first test of this system was called Crosscheck, and we had an experiment. We went out to the Pacific and checked out with a flare and cameras and the whole nine yards to see if everything worked. And we would do these readiness exercises, which started to get boring really quick; and everybody was concerned that you wouldn’t be able to keep people in the program if they had to just go around and pull film. So the concept was we ought to do something scientific to hold UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 people’s interests. And the first experiments they had were for— if there was a solar eclipse, we went out and looked at solar eclipses, collected data on solar eclipses. And the other thing was aurora. We did a series of experiments called conjugate aurora experiments, looking at the aurora in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere at the same time and found that they were mirror images of each other. The cosmic rays would come down and would excite the atmosphere on both poles simultaneously. So we did those kinds of experiments. But it got so there wasn’t enough natural phenomena for us to look at, so we went into creating our own phenomena, and the first ones were barium thermite bombs. We would shoot it up with a rocket, a barium explosive, and we do this pre- dawn. We’d do it so that the sun would illuminate where the detonation would occur, and the sunlight would ionize the cloud, so we’d get a neutral cloud and an ionized cloud very similar to what you would have in a high- altitude test. So we did a whole bunch of barium experiments. Where was that, that you did it? In the Pacific. We did one down in the gulf. [ 00: 15: 00] The Gulf of Mexico? Yes. At Eglin Air Force Base, if I remember. But mostly we went out to the Pacific because we used Barking Sands [ Pacific Missile Range Facility] to fire the rockets from Kauai [ Hawaii]. So we did that for quite a few years. The program was really very stimulating because we designed a lot of interesting equipment to support this. We built very sophisticated television cameras which would be pretty primitive by today’s standards but back in the seventies it was pretty much state of the art. Color television for personal use was almost unheard of. It’s hard to believe where we’ve come in thirty years. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 So during the seventies, President [ Gerald R.] Ford removed the word “ promptly” from Safeguard C, and with that the funding dried up for the FOC program, so that was cancelled. At that time, I was program manager for the FOC program. And during that time, I had moved from Boston to Los Alamos. What happened in that period was we were supporting Los Alamos. I was flying to Los Alamos almost every week, spending like Monday to Friday in Los Alamos and flying home for the weekend and turning around and flying back. It was getting to be tough for the people. What was going on in Boston, supporting Los Alamos, was looking at the high- altitude data. We were digitizing all the thousands of frames of data that we had from the high- altitude tests with very sophisticated digitizing equipment at the time. And the lab felt that the arrangement was too costly to have this interface, so they wanted us to move our resources that supported them to Los Alamos, and that’s when we basically opened the office there. I moved to Los Alamos in ’ 70 to set up an engineering department; and I moved about, I think it was thirteen or fourteen people that worked for me from Boston to Los Alamos. This is a little bit of a diversion but I’m curious. So Los Alamos as a laboratory has made the decision or continues the idea that for that kind of sophisticated engineering, they would have EG& G do it rather than set something up themselves? Yes. [ Pause for telephone] So I was saying that the relationship of using EG& G engineers not for everything but obviously for certain special things. Well, at that time, you have to realize that in the sixties EG& G was almost all weapons tests, and through the sixties; into the seventies they started getting into a lot of other things, and in fact in the late sixties they started acquiring commercial companies to broaden their business base. And UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 with that, the company started looking like a different kind of company than it did earlier, so it made sense to try to separate. Both the labs and the government wanted to separate out the work supporting them from the commercial side. I understand. So through— I think it was about ‘ 72 when they finally executed the separation where we had a separate contract that was totally captive to the government. Before we would just support them as a commercial enterprise and had our own resources. So when it became captive, then we changed the character of the business quite a bit, and I moved to Los Alamos. We had a few people there, and it went from like twelve people to 150 in a year. And we rented space and caused quite a commotion in the community there at the time. Why? You have to know Los Alamos. I know it a little bit. Back in that period of time, they just didn’t want any outsiders there. We were outsiders. We were taking jobs and space in the community away from people that really belonged there. [ 00: 20: 00] Interesting. They closed a schoolhouse, and we rented that for our space, and there was protests and all kinds of things. [ Pause for telephone] I’m sure you’re going to get some calls. OK. So you moved to Los Alamos— So we moved to Los Alamos, we rented space around town, storefronts and things, and eventually we rented the Canyon School; and had letters to the editor and protests and all kinds UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 of monkey business going on with that. Finally they accepted us after a few years and we settled in. But when I was at Los Alamos, when I first moved to Los Alamos, we were still doing a lot of the scientific experiments with the aircraft. When that program ended, we got into looking at how to do things at the test site that would support the same kind of science that they were doing. Primarily the group that we were supporting and that I was personally supporting was interested in high- altitude effects. So we did a couple of underground experiments that had lines of sight to the surface. There was one experiment that I worked on for a year. In fact, that was while the FOC program was still active, I think it was 1967, called Umber [ 06/ 29/ 1967]. And I built these huge sixteen- inch- diameter telescopes that were on a station looking at ground zero where we had a line of sight to the surface and a window, and I was looking at fluorescence in that window from the X- rays that would come out. But to build all this equipment took a year because we designed special cameras, very high speed electronic cameras to photograph what we wanted to see. Now, which division or group were you supporting at Los Alamos? This was J- 10. J- 10 was the field division, the real test division, and at that time that was the biggest, the key group. It was headed up by a guy named Herman Hoerlin who was a quite famous scientist from Germany, and he was a very interesting guy. But we supported them. Some of the groups that came later were like J- 12 was Pinex experiments, which was just getting started— Pinex? Pinex is pinhole experiment, and what they were looking at, this was for underground testing, they were looking at taking a picture underground of the radiation. When they originally did UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 these, there would be a film pack with filters so they’d get different levels of intensity, and it would be in a tube filled with mud, and they would extract a capsule up through the mud so they’d have containment. And they called those the Mudex experiments, but they were really Pinex. And the things that we were working on with J- 12, which was just in its infancy, was to do it electronically, do underground Pinex experiments electronically. So we’d have a TV camera down there that would look at a floor that would be exposed to radiation and give us our image, and then we’d transmit that image up hole before the shock wave destroyed the camera, because it’s only 100 feet away. So we were working with very high speed data transmission techniques at that time that now would be a piece of cake, but again we’re talking about forty years ago. It was a different kind of electronics then. And the other group that we supported primarily— both Pinex Group, which was J- 12, and Alpha Group, which was J- 14, worked mostly with Las Vegas, and we worked mostly with [ 00: 25: 00] J- 10, which was the high- altitude stuff. So J- 14, which did alpha, most of their work was out at the test site and with the Las Vegas troops. Again, we were supporting J- 10, so when they did a few experiments at the test site, I supported those. What’s your position now [ at that time]? I was the Future Off- Continent program manager, and when the program cancelled I was— let’s see, what did I become? Nineteen seventy- eight, about three years later, I became the Los Alamos program manager and moved to Las Vegas. So between ‘ 75 and ‘ 78, I was assistant program manager or something. I forgot. I worked for a guy named Charlie Hatcher. In ‘ 78 we had a major change in management at EG& G. Previously the general manager was a guy named Gaelen Felt, who was an old- time Los Alamos scientist. And he got crosswise with the Department of Energy [ DOE] and departed the scene and they changed out a whole bunch of the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 management people. And at that time I moved. My boss Charlie Hatcher was going to be the new general manager, and that didn’t work out. And in the process of all of that I got his old job, which was the program manager for Los Alamos, and the plan was that I’d move to Las Vegas to run the program so they’d have a better coupling to what went on at the test site. So from ‘ 78 to ‘ 81 I was Los Alamos program manager, so I was responsible for all the tests we did, all the tests at the test site. And who was the head of J- Division then? It went through a few people. Herman Hoerlin, after Herman left, God, I can’t— A whole bunch of people. Don [ Donald M.] Kerr was there for a while. Hard to remember all these things. It’s been so many years. So I moved to Las Vegas and was Los Alamos program manager, so I was responsible for what went on in Santa Barbara and Los Alamos. We still had an office in Boston where we made cathode ray tubes to support the oscilloscopes. And merrily went on my way until about 1981 I became deputy general manager, and that only lasted a year and then Bob [ Robert] Hammon passed away and I became general manager. So from ‘ 83 to the end of the contract, I was general manager. And so how does that work career wise? You’re an engineer, you’re developing all this high- tech equipment. At some point you exhibit, I guess through program management you exhibit these management skills that—? Yes. I guess so. You don’t know? I’m asking from a personal standpoint. Is it conscious on your part that you like administrating or administration? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Well, I never looked at it as administration. I looked at it as running technical programs. So, it became administration when I became general manager for sure, but I got there through having fun running technical programs. And that happens, you know. It happens quite a bit. I know it does. I was just curious— But I was obviously successful enough, I exhibited the right mixture of things that I was accepted in that position. Now your family, obviously, is moving with you from— Right. We moved from Boston to Los Alamos, spent seven years in Los Alamos, and then to here. And you have children, I assume, so they’re— Right, yes, they’re all in their forties now. So they’re still in school, then, in the seventies when you moved to Los Alamos. Oh, yeah, when we moved to Los Alamos. We all liked Los Alamos. The kids had trouble [ 00: 30: 00] when they moved here, some more than— I have three girls and the transition from Los Alamos to here was really hard on them. They were very young when we moved to Los Alamos, so that wasn’t a problem. But here, one was in high school and the other junior high kind of thing. Well, I guess Las Vegas in those days was still pretty much of a small town. Oh, yeah, it was like 160,000 people or something. We lived down on the east side of town right near— what’s the school, Cimarron? Cheyenne? No. No, it was Chaparral. Well anyway, so that’s kind of a snapshot of what I did. Most of the interesting stuff was back in the seventies and early eighties. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 So let’s just talk a little bit about what you did from the time you become general manager and you’re here, and then I have some questions, we can go back to some of the earlier stuff. OK. Well, one of the things that was high on the agenda, with our growth and our change— space and facilities were a major issue because the DOE had very arcane views of how— their way of controlling the budget was to prevent anybody from getting any more space, because as soon as they got space they had people and they needed money. It’s a part of logic that if you needed space, you needed space, and they felt if you didn’t get any space, you wouldn’t need as much money. That was the basic logic, believe it or not. So we went through all kinds of things to get space. It became a real issue. We had built a building out in North Las Vegas which has that big tower, and it took us five years to get that started. And it was basically to save money because we were going to do all this site prep downtown instead of doing it out at the site, which is far more expensive. So we had that building. Prior to that, we had all commercial space that EG& G, Inc. had arranged for us. Now we were a captive contract, so it was a different situation in getting added space. But during my regime, so to speak, we added all kinds of things. We added the Nellis Air Force [ Base] RSL [ Remote Sensing Laboratory] space, and we were planning to build that on the north side of McCarran [ International Airport], but it turned out the land was tied up by Summa Corporation because it was part of the [ Howard] Hughes estate. And we played around with that for a year and a half. We had the design and everything, and we could never get release on the land. We were afraid to go to Nellis because we thought we would be second- class citizens out there, with all the activity. Turned out it was the best thing that happened because with the growth of McCarran, we’d have been really second- class citizens if we stayed on McCarran. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Tell me a little bit about the RSL because I really don’t know very much about that and what that was about. Oh, all through the history of EG& G we’ve been involved with monitoring radiation. In fact, I’ve got quite a bit of that in my history. But we would fly aircraft; we had helicopters and we had a Martin aircraft. There was a couple of missions. One mission was, we were prepared for, during nuclear tests, to track clouds. That was a big part of our mission. So if there was a venting or something, we had to be able to track the cloud, find out where it’s going, what the intensity was, to predict fallout and stuff like that. And we were also responsible for aerial surveys of the DOE sites. We surveyed all the reactor sites. We took over what USGS [ U. S. Geological Survey] used to do for the AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission]. They didn’t want any part of that anymore, so we were involved in that. We even surveyed the Sierras to look at snow pack to figure out how much water there was in the snow and things like that by looking at background radiation that’s attenuated through the snow pack. So we did all of that kind of stuff. [ 00: 35: 00] And in the seventies, we started getting involved with the NEST [ Nuclear Emergency Search Team] program, which is the emergency response. And we had already been building radiation detection equipment for our other work. And that’s our business, so we expanded on that and got involved with nuclear emergency response work. And as that grew, the space that we had on Sunset [ Road] was very inadequate. It was the old Escondido Building. So that’s why we needed this fairly new, sizeable facility, which eventually got built. At the time, when I was there, we had thirteen aircraft. We had a Citation jet and we had a whole bunch of King Airs, a whole bunch of helicopters, so we had quite a fleet. So that’s EG& G under contract with the DOE is doing this still, is that right? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Yes. And when the second runway was in at Sunset, we lost all our buildings that were on Sunset, so that was enough impetus to get some additional space. But we never could really do it, like a build- to- suit, designed- for- purpose kind of construction. We basically got the Collins Brothers to build us some buildings on a short- term lease that they could convert in case we ever leave, and we built what was called a B- complex out at North Las Vegas. But it was a strange set of buildings because they were building it like hey, in case these guys go away, we have to do something with these buildings; so it was kind of like a Las Vegas mall rather than an engineering facility. So we went through this harangue. And I built the building in Los Alamos, so eventually we got thrown out of the Canyon School because it couldn’t meet any of the DOE safety standards. So we found a builder that would build that and lease it, and a corporation took on the liability of the lease because the government wouldn’t do that. So we were going around the country building replacement facilities. We had built a facility in Woburn, Massachusetts for the CRTs cathode- ray tubes. We eventually leased space out in Santa Barbara. We built a building out in AVO. So during my— Where was the last place you said? In California, at Amador Valley, to support Livermore. See, we were in some old facilities that we leased in the early seventies, I think, near Livermore that were becoming inadequate and we needed more space, so we found a builder that would build us space to lease. But it was all outside the contract because the DOE couldn’t give us funding to build buildings, so that became strange but a big issue for us to get facilities to do our work. And the final story was that DOE bought all the buildings that we had arranged for, so they own it all now, so it’s all government. Except for Los Alamos, Amador Valley, and Santa Barbara— well, the outlying locations are still UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 leases, so I guess they’re under contract. So that was a sizeable issue. Then during my reign, we went up and down in staffing quite a bit. So it was those kinds of administrative problems we were dealing with. You mention in the book [ Zavattaro, Peter. “ EG& G: Historic Involvement in the Nuclear Weapons Program.” Las Vegas, NV: NTS Historical Foundation, 2002.] and I know from other things that we’ve done, about the JVE [ Joint Ver