Interview with William Gus Flangas, November 12, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with William Flangas November 12, 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 William Flangas November 12, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Mr. Flangas shares memories of growing up in mining towns in northern Nevada. 1 Since many miners were drafted to fight in World War II, Mr. Flangas began working in the mines at a young age. Near the end of the war, he enlisted in the U. S. Navy. 3 Mr. Flangas recalls being stationed in Japan shortly after the end of the war. 6 Upon returning to the United States, Mr. Flangas took advantage of the G. I. Bill and attended the University of Nevada’s Mackay School of Mines. He took a job with Kennecott and worked at mines in Chile and Nevada. 8 While working in mines in northern Nevada, Mr. Flangas would occasionally witness atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site. 10 Mr. Flangas initially declined offers to work at the Nevada Test Site because of concerns over radiation exposure. In 1958, however, he took a job with Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company [ REECo] to manage mining activities at the test site. 11 Mr. Flangas discusses the early stages of underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. Managers often had to mediate tensions between scientists and miners. 15 Some of the mining techniques developed for underground nuclear testing had practical applications for other types of mining projects. 19 Mr. Flangas discusses an accident that occurred during the Tamalpais test, which took place one the eve of the October 1958 moratorium on nuclear testing. 21 Mr. Flangas explains the process of re- entry mining, in which miners recover scientific instruments and data after an underground nuclear test. 31 The political views of many test site workers were influenced by their experiences during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. Mr. Flangas suggests that this patriotic mindset helped the United States to win the Cold War. 37 In 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] was replaced by the Energy Research and Development Agency [ ERDA]. Mr. Flangas explains why test site workers were frustrated by the new bureaucracy’s inefficiency. 40 Mr. Flangas describes the work environment and living conditions at Mercury. 42 Secrecy procedures were a part of everyday life for test site workers, but they sometimes made it difficult to communicate with family members and neighbors. 43 Mr. Flangas recalls an incident when he and other test site workers were ordered to drink beer to reduce the effects of tritium exposure. 44 The safety standards for miners and other test site workers improved as scientists gained a better understanding of the effects of radiation exposure. 48 Mr. Flangas discusses the sometimes tenuous relationship between labor and management at the Nevada Test Site. 50 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with William Flangas November 12, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: OK, so I want to thank you for speaking with me today, and as I mentioned, maybe we can start by you telling a little bit about your family background and your childhood in Ely, Nevada. William Flangas: OK. I was born in Ely— White Pine County, northern part of the state— in 1927. And I was raised there, educated in the White Pine County schools. My father emigrated from Greece in the early 1900s, came to Nevada. Basically he was a cowboy and a businessman. I never really got to know him because, unfortunately, my mother died when I was about six months old and then my father got killed a year later, and so I was raised by my father’s first cousin. And so I wound up with— so sometimes I interplay my two fathers. But anyway, in terms of my real father, he came to Nevada and then he served in World War I. My stepfather also came from the same area in Greece— Which was where? — and he started out as a miner. They came from a city called Lamia, which is in central Greece, which is adjacent to the pass of Thermopylae where three hundred Greeks kicked the hell out of several hundred thousand Iranians, or they called them Persians in those days. With the fact that, you know, both my immigrant parents on both sides— my stepmother who raised me, of course she came to Nevada just about the time that I was born, and so obviously she didn’t know any English. So I wound up in the first grade without knowing a word of English. And in those days— the community at that time, because it was a mining community, it attracted a great number of immigrants, particularly Greeks, Italians, Serbians, Croatians, and Japanese, etc. And UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 so it was a conglomeration of cultures. So traditionally what the system at that time did is for the kids that did not know English, they put them in the first grade for two years. And then by the end of the second year in the first grade, they were totally Americanized. And so I always [ had]— that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, you know, regarding bilingual education. And I always tell people I am eternally grateful that my parents didn’t have the political clout to get me bilingual education; I’d have been a minority for life. Before you go on, we’d like to know your birth parents’ names and then the names of your parents that raised you. OK, my birth father was named Gus William Flangas, and my mother was Polexene Flangas. And then my stepfather, who was— I guess he was really my uncle, related to my father, I’ll refer to him as my stepfather— his name was Alexander John Flangas, and my stepmother’s name was Fay Flangas. OK, great. At any rate, the community— you know, White Pine community— was a community of immigrants, a tremendous number of them, and they kind of segregated. White Pine County was a major copper producer, both underground and open pit. And the way the various peoples were segregated – and it wasn’t deliberate, it just drifted that way – the underground miners were the Greeks and the Serbians, the track gangs in the open pit were Japanese. We had a mill and a smelter in McGill which was about twenty- five miles from the mine. Now in the mill, generally the majority of the people in the mill were the so- called Anglos. They were, you know, [ 00: 05: 00] basically Mormons. In the smelter— on one side where the reverbs were— the furnaces, they were almost exclusively manned by the Serbians. And across the aisle from the ovens, in the converters, basically they were Greek. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 That’s amazing. But you said the Japanese were trackers? No, they did the track work, the railroad. Oh, the railroad track. Thank you. The railroad in the mine. Now the railroad between the mine and the mill and the smelter was handled to a great degree by the Italians. Amazing. That’s interesting. Worked out well. So what kind of population do you have up there at that time? At that time, White Pine County had about ten thousand people. OK. And most of them were working in the mine? Except for a little commercial business, that was the lifeblood of the community. Now when World War II broke out, there were something, if I remember correctly, something like up to several hundred miners working underground in White Pine County. And miners in those days were generally single and generally young. Generally they drifted from Montana to Utah to Nevada to Arizona. And a great number of them, not all of them but a great number of them, you know, they used to call “ ten- day miners.” They just kind of rotated around the various properties. So when the war broke out and they instituted the draft, the draft board just went nuts with the miners. They just drafted them, because here they were, they’re young, strong, generally single. It was just exactly what the U. S. Army was looking for. And within a couple of years, the manpower in the copper production up there was seriously impacted. And about that time, I’m a sophomore in high school, and people like me were the most eligible manpower left. So we took over the track gang, and we maintained the track between the mine and the mill and the smelter. So we would go to school five days a week, and every Saturday and every Sunday and every UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 holiday and every day of the summer, we were on the track gang. And the nice thing about it is we got the adult wages. Right. Right. So how many guys are you talking about here, would you say? Your whole sophomore through senior classes, basically, or—? During the summertime when the major repair work had to be done on the track, there were probably about 150 young men out there. During the winter months, there were probably about twenty or thirty of us that worked Saturdays and Sundays. And in fact, that’s kind of a joke with me, or not a joke but a funny story. People ask me, When did you decide to go to college? And I say, One day I was up on the high line, which is between Ely and McGill, it was forty below zero the wind was blowing, and I knew that some place on this green earth, there was something better than working on that track gang. That’s great. At any rate, we had a great school system up there, and immigrant parents particularly, they were just ultra high on education. I mean they left nothing to chance. Teachers used to get Christmas presents from the parents of their kids because they held them in high esteem. Kind of a shock, you know, compared to what’s happened since. In fact, the high school, I remember fondly, at that time there were about six hundred students in the high school. And the high school had one superintendent, one principal, one secretary, and the secretary used to utilize one or two [ 00: 10: 00] graduating seniors that had taken business courses, and that was the total overhead of the school. And out of that school, of course, all of those that were two or three years older than myself, and then I was on the tail end of World War II so I brought up the rear, but a great, great number of my class and classes before me went on to college. In fact, during summer vacations we would [ go] back to our old job working either in the mine or the mill or the track, and at one UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 time on that track gang we counted up that within a year or two there was about thirty or forty college degrees floating around there, which was a very significant number of people who went on to higher education. Right. And you attribute that mostly to the fact of the immigrant parents wanting their children to get an education? Absolutely. Yes. Did you have brothers and sisters? I had three stepbrothers. OK. And are they still alive or—? Yes, they are. One’s a lawyer in Reno, one’s a carpenter and he lives in Reno, and the youngest one is a businessman and he still lives in Ely. Oh, OK. What are their names? Just their first names. John, Gus, and Ernie. OK. Great. Great. So about the middle of my junior year, and this was 1945, ‘ 44 or ‘ 45, I got antsy and I wanted to go to where the action was, and so I enlisted in the U. S. Navy as a seventeen- year- old, and went through boot camp and out to the Pacific. And what would’ve been my first invasion would’ve been the invasion of Japan. Right. Now what was your parents’ response to that, you deciding to go ahead and enlist? Well, they were very unhappy about that. In fact, my stepfather had to sign for me because I had conned him. I had told him that I was going to go into a radio program and it was going to take a year. So I went into the radio program for about three days and then started agitating to go to the Pacific. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 So at any rate, [ President Harry S.] Truman dropped that bomb. Right. Where were you? You were in the Pacific at that time? I was assigned to it, and then within a couple or three weeks I was there. I was there for the initial occupation of Japan. Oh, OK. What did you think? It’s always interesting to me because as you said earlier, you can look back on things and realize things that you didn’t know at the time. But looking back on yourself at that time, what was the response to not only the end of the war but the fact that it was this new weapon? Did you think about it or—? I had had high school physics, and in those days they were talking about atom smashers and that if somebody succeeded in creating a machine to smash the atom, it would release [ a] tremendous amount of energy. And so when I heard about the first A- bomb, in my mind, you know, I thought well, somebody’s put together something to smash atoms. And kind of, in reality, that’s what they did, but it wasn’t a machine that churned out the— and in fact, I still remember to this day with a lot of my shipmates, you know, people were asking one another, What is an atom? What’s a molecule? And so at any rate, that was it, and the emperor came on the air and he said, The war is over. The war is over. Now unfortunately at that time in Japan, there was a very serious dysentery infection, so the Navy— I don’t remember, there were a great number of Navy ships in Tokyo Bay, so the sailors were confined to their ships. And the Army had some people on land, but they were kind of confined to their base. And the first time I got to go ashore was in November, and that was a couple of months after the surrender had been signed. And when I [ 00: 15: 00] look at it and compare it to today’s events, when I went to Tokyo for the first time, all the police on all the corners were Japanese. Whatever was running or being done was done by Japanese. Americans were not doing any of the civil work, you know, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 compared to like we see what’s happening today in Baghdad [ Iraq] and et cetera. Japanese were friendly, they were polite. In fact, for the short time that, you know, I didn’t get to go ashore too much, but they were just involved in massive cleanup. I mean that was an energetic people. So I wound up going on a couple of operations where we demilitarized some islands that were south of Tokyo. No one was sure whether they’d heard the emperor. And at any rate, they had heard the emperor, and then they were promised that as soon as the demilitarization was complete, they could go home. So we blew up the gun emplacements and blew up the radio towers and hauled off all the ammunition they had and dumped it out to sea, and so that was another interface with them. That’s interesting. So they’re there still in November, the Japanese troops. Yes, they were still in uniform. And then are they working with you to identify where these things are, or do they have to be kept imprisoned or—? No, no, they were totally in charge. We were the bookkeepers. They did all the heavy lifting. At any rate, I came back to San Diego, went down to Panama, eventually wound up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and then from there down to South Carolina, and then in late 1946 I got discharged. And then I worked for a year, and then I went to college at the University of Nevada in Reno. What was happening in Panama, just real quickly? How come they send you down there? You just sailed down there—? Well, the ship that I was on ultimately had to be mothballed on the East Coast, so we went through the [ Panama] Canal. I see. OK. That must’ve been interesting. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Yes, everything was a great adventure. Yes. Yes. So you work back in Ely, back in White Pine County, then, for a year? Yes, I went back there. In fact, I had planned on becoming an engineer and I needed another course, and so I got a full graveyard shift working on the railroad where I was what they call a hostler. We had coal- burning engines then, and so he’s the guy that takes the engine down, loads it up with coal, water, oil, whatever is necessary, and he lights the fire and gets the boiler ready, so then when they start running the train, the train’s ready to go. So I did that for a year, because I got out in August of ’ 46 and school started in three weeks, and I didn’t want to go through bonehead math at college. And besides, I wasn’t ready to go to college, you know, from one end to the other, and so I worked a year. And then I went to college, and at that time the GI Bill was out. I had heard about the GI Bill while I was in the Navy, but I didn’t believe it. Somebody was telling me that— in fact, he was an older guy, and an older guy for those of us that were my age, it was somebody that was twenty- three or twenty- four. And we had a night watch one time and he told me, he says, Hey, Flangas, he says, you’re going to go to college for free. And this was about three o’clock in the morning, and I was wondering, you know, where he found something to drink. And I argued with him, and he had a copy of the Stars and Stripes and he handed to me, he says, Here, stubborn, read it. And after I read it, I found it incredible. So when I went to the University of Nevada, of course by then I knew quite a bit [ 00: 20: 00] about the GI Bill. I went to University of Nevada. I was a native. In those days, there was no tuition for the natives of the state. And then the GI Bill, they bought all the books and they bought paper, pencils, whatever supplies you needed for your classes, and then they gave me seventy- five dollars a month in pay. I lived in a university dormitory and I ate at the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 university chow hall, and it was outrageous. It cost ninety dollars a semester for board and room, and here I was getting seventy- five bucks a month. So I went to college like a young rich kid. Yes. But what’s the deal with the high school diploma? Because you left before you finished high school, right, for the Navy? I did, and I got the diploma because— but I didn’t have all the requirements I needed to meet going into engineering college, so that’s what I did after I got out. OK, so that’s what you did then. I could’ve done that at the university but they used to have what they call bonehead English, bonehead math. Yes. Yes. Even in my day, they had that. Still, I think. Right. Probably so. So that’s amazing. And you would need to get the— just because I’m curious, to get the books and the paper, there was some sort of voucher that you signed, or how did that work, that you didn’t have to pay—? Well, when I went to the University of Nevada in Reno, the general school population then, prior to the GIs coming to college, was six, seven hundred, eight hundred total pupils. It was like a medium- size high school. And so when the GIs came, it exploded to about sixteen, seventeen hundred. But even with that explosion, seventeen hundred is not really a big administrative load. So what they did is, yes, I guess we had a card, or the prof signed a card that says, OK, give him drafting tools and give him some pencils and whatever. OK. So Reno is where the Mackay School of Mines is. Correct. That’s right. So tell me about that. You go directly into that work or you— is it that school that you’re doing your studies in? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Well, the University of Nevada at that time was made up of about three or four colleges. One was the Mackay School of Mines, and then there was the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, and I think they had a nursing college then, I’m not sure, and a College of Agriculture. And so then I just went directly into the Mackay School of Mines, and I graduated in 1951. So I graduated with a degree in metallurgical engineering. So I went to work for Kennecott, which was the same company in Ely, owned a copper smelter in Chile, so I went there for a summer and worked in that smelter. Down in Chile. In Chile. And then I came back to Nevada, and at that time they were developing what they call a Deep Ruth sinking a shaft. At any rate, at that point I changed from being a metallurgical engineer to a mining engineer, and I’ve been a mining engineer ever since. So you worked on that Deep Ruth. Yes. I was there for the sinking of the Deep Ruth shaft, the Kellinske shaft, and the rehab of the Star Pointer. So I spent eight years there, working for Kennecott. And how deep is that, the Deep Ruth? Well, the Deep Ruth, it was scheduled to go to eighteen hundred feet and I think it went down about twelve or fourteen hundred. And then we found another ore body that was out of the old Ruth Mine, what you called a Star Pointer, and we went to work on mining that one. And then the price of copper took a dive, and so they abandoned the Deep Ruth at that time. And while all of this is going on, about 1956, 1955, ‘ 56, I’d better remember because it’s [ 00: 25: 00] getting close, I met and married my wife. And then in 1958 I got a call one day— or just to precede that, prior to that, you know, they were shooting the atmospheric tests at the [ Nevada] test site. And then if I was on a graveyard shift and they published in the paper there’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 going to be a shot, well, I had the privileges of being a foreman and so I’d come up and I saw a number of those shots from two hundred miles away. What did you see from two hundred miles away? Well, it’d be pitch dark, you know, two or three or four in the morning, pitch black, and all of a sudden the entire sky would light up, and about fifteen or twenty minutes later, you know, the sound would come rumbling through. So it was impressive. So I think it was about January or February 1958, I got a call from people at the test site and they said they had gotten my name and they were looking for somebody skilled in mining and wanted to know if I would consider going to work at the test site. And I said, No, I wouldn’t. By that time I’d been married about a year- and- a- half, I had three- four- or- five- month- old son, I was educated enough to know a little bit about radiation, and I said, Thank you, no, thank you. Because of the dangers of radiation? Yes, you know, I didn’t want to get involved in that. And so then a couple of months later, I get a call and he said, Have you changed your mind? And I said, No. And then in May of ‘ 58, I got a call and it was kind of urgent and they said, Look, you know, we’re starting to dig a tunnel. We really need somebody like you. If you would just come down and just take a look and, you know, no obligation, and tell us what we ought to be doing and point out some suggestions. And they said, We’ll put you up. And [ I said], you know, OK, OK. At any rate, I went down, and they were digging E Tunnel then and they were dealing particularly with construction workers that were not miners. OK. They were digging the tunnel with construction workers, is what you’re saying? Yes. And they had a couple of miners there that knew what they were doing, but the underground operations at Ruth were world- class operations, you know, highly skilled miners. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 When I walked in there, I just could not believe what I was seeing. There were about fifty or sixty people in a tunnel when there really should’ve been only about ten or twelve. And there just weren’t any miners there. So the people that were escorting me there says, What do you think? And I says, You need some miners. You know, you can’t get any more basic than that. This was AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission] that had called you, or was it lab people or—? No, it was Reynolds Electric[ al and Engineering Company], it was the REECo people, they were the prime contractor. The DOE [ Department of Energy] people weren’t any more skilled in mining than the REECo managers. So at any rate they says, Do you know where the miners are? I says, Yes, I do. And he says, Can you get your hands on them? And I says, I think so. So I called the district attorney in Lincoln County, which is Pioche- Caliente area, and they had recently shut down a prominent underground operation there. And so I told him, How many of your miners are still hanging around there after that shut down? And he says, Well, there’s probably thirty or forty or something like that. I says, Box them up and ship them. What was that mine that had closed down, the operation—? It was called the Pioche Mine— I’ll think of it in a second. It was a lead zinc operation. OK, that’s good. We can figure it out. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 At any rate, [ I said], Send them down. And so then I called the district attorney in Nye County, Tonopah. His name was Bill Beko and he had kind of handle on what the population was. And it was an operation, I think it was a tungsten mine called Tempiute. And so I said, [ 00: 30: 00] How many of those guys are available? Because they were in the process of shutting down. It was a bad year for mining. And so he got the word out, and so within a couple or three weeks— and then plus the ones out of my operation followed me down because we were shutting that one down, too. And so we wound up putting together the crux of an underground crew. And most of those guys came down thinking they’d be there for a short time, and some of them wound up forty years, like me. Right. Now when you’re giving calls to all these different people, is this part of the world small— do you know some of these guys that you’re calling or are you—? No. You don’t. You’re just calling to see— I knew that they were qualified miners, experienced underground miners, from operations that had run for years and years, and so they were not virgins. OK. But at some point, what’s the point at which you say, OK, I’m going to actually do this thing with REECo? Because at first you weren’t going to, so do you remember when you decided OK, this looks like something interesting? Yes, about the fourth day I just got caught up in the insanity. I put it off for a few more days and a few more days. See, at the time I came down I had already separated from Kennecott and I had accepted a job in Korea. And the job that I was going to take in Korea was to be the number two— they had a minister of nonferrous metals, nonferrous meaning lead and zinc, you know, nonferrous, the non- iron, in other words. So he was heading it up for the Korean government— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 he was an American— and I was going to be his assistant. And so at any rate, on paper it sounded like a fairly decent job. And I had to have a security clearance for that. So when I did go down to Mercury, I was waiting for the security clearance to come through, which it didn’t. It hadn’t arrived at that time, and so I went down there for a few days. And then I was thinking well, OK, I’ll just stick around here for a short time and then I’ll take off on my other job. And then, as luck would have it, they had a very serious epidemic in the city that I was going to live in. In Korea. In Korea. And so then I got thinking, you know, I got a five- month- old son or a six- month- old son, you know, a country devastated by the Korean War, and so— and then the excitement that was going on with that, I just thought I’d stick around for a short time awhile, and got infected. At this point in time, which you’re talking May ’ 58, is all that stuff that I’ve heard from other people that happens later before the moratorium already in play? Are people already trying to get those tests in? [ President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had declared unilaterally that on October 31 of 1958, the United States was unilaterally going to stop nuclear testing. So he had declared it at this point. He had declared that. And so that was the panic, you know, that invited me down. OK, thanks for clarifying that. And then REECo just expanded and expanded and expanded. There was a great deal of concern about that deadline coming up and trying to get off the maximum number of events that we could. Right. Right. So again, just curiosity— because of your background and your education, and you talked a little bit about this in the other video— this whole question of going from mining for ore UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 to mining for experiments, you know, these physics experiments, these underground bombs or [ 00: 35: 00] devices or explosions. Are you thinking about that from the outset, or are you just thinking we got to figure out how to mine these tunnels, or how does that go? There were two kinds of testing going on out there, you know, the atmospheric events and then there was a testing that was done, you know, some surface events, and then of course the underground events. And the underground events were just in their early stages at that time. So the Livermore lab [ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] which was— the big gun in the Livermore lab was Edward Teller. And he had convinced, you know, going back in history, there were a lot of the people in the Los Alamos [ National] lab who, after the devastation in Japan, they were very reluctant about continuing nuclear, that maybe mankind can’t handle it. Teller was a Hungarian refugee, and he knew that there was no way that we would be the sole proprietors of nuclear weapons. And it didn’t take the Russians very long to detonate a bomb, and then after that first bomb, then the big commotion was to develop a hydrogen bomb. And so there was opposition to developing a hydrogen bomb. And then Teller convinced President Truman that we need to develop it or we’re going to be sucking back wind. At any rate, that’s when they formed the Livermore lab. Teller also accurately predicted that the atmospheric testing is going to become taboo, and it was important that we figure out a way to do it underground. And so consequently there was an awful lot of anxiety on the part of the Livermore lab to be able to do nuclear experiments underground. And that’s just about the time that I entered that equation. And as subsequent events turned out, Teller was dead right, that the world outcry and whatnot said— and then President [ John F.] Kennedy signed the test ban treaty in 1963 [ Limited Test Ban Treaty], and that was the end of a lot of things. Right. So you come in after Rainier, right, which was the first one? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Yes. Rainier was detonated in September of— Fifty- seven, I think.