Interview with Lawrence Crooks, July 21, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Lawrence Crooks July 21, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Robert Nickel © 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 Lawrence Crooks July 21, 2004 Conducted by Robert Nickel Table of Contents Introduction: birth, education, military service in World War II, marriage and family, early work in California 1 Works as mechanical engineer for California Research and Development ( CR& D) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) to build linear accelerator 4 Joins Mechanical Engineering Group at LLNL 6 Becomes LLNL Resident Manager at Nevada Test Site ( NTS) 8 Outlines responsibilities of LLNL Resident Manager and involvement in tests 10 Work on atmospheric tests in the Pacific 12 Involvement as scientific advisor in the Joint Verification Experiment ( JVE) 14 Talks about security and clearances required for working on tests. 15 Discussion of mistakes that led to accident on Peninsula test preparation ( 1975) 16 Discusses work for Division of Intelligence, Department of Energy ( DOE) 17 Thoughts on Cold War and work at the NTS 19 Son James Crooks and his work for REECo at the NTS 19 Reflects on possible reasons for strong bonds among NTS employees 20 Talks about work as scientific advisor to the Manager of the Nevada Operations Office ( DOE/ NV) 22 Conclusion: dangers in testing work 23 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Lawrence Crooks July 21, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Robert Nickel [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Robert Nickel: OK, if we could start off just talking a little bit about your background, where you were born, where you went to school, that sort of thing. Larry Crooks: I was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And I left there when I was a year old. My parents moved out to Oakland, California. And I attended the public school system in Oakland, and ended up graduating from Castlemont High School right at the start of World War II. And in fact I had put a year in at UC [ University of California] Berkeley when the war started. And I started out in chemistry back then, but when I got out of the service three years later and I returned to the university, I decided that I wanted to be an engineer, and that might have been influenced by being in the [ U. S. Army] Corps of Engineers when I was in the service. I was a squad leader with the rank of sergeant when the war ended in Europe. I had gone over to Europe. We sailed, I think, in October after the landings had occurred in Normandy, and we spent, oh, about three months in England, learned how to built floating bridges and bailey bridges, so forth. And then when we went to— it was the 284th Combat Engineer Battalion, and we landed at Cherbourg and went to a camp called Twenty Grand that was near Rouen. The camp was above the Seine River. And we went forward after a little getting used to things over there. Participated in the Battle of the Bulge. And we were mainly being used as infantry and we [ 00: 05: 00] were around the Hurtgen Forest. It was a planted forest, like many of the forests in Germany that all the trees were just planted about six feet, eight feet apart. But they were all knocked down. The artillery fire mowed it all down. I was in A Company, and B Company UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 worked on stabilizing the railroad bridge that the Germans had neglected to get completely in the water, and so the crossing of the Rhine as we went forward, certain units went across that railroad bridge. They decked it over so you could drive across it. But there were floating bridges, and our outfit went across on one of those pontoon bridges. And then the company and battalions had been assigned certain areas to go to for the first bivouac. They neglected to tell you that the Krauts were still there. You had to push them away. And then started the work of trying to open up the Autobahn for use by the U. S. The Germans had planned out when they built those where to put the explosive charges so that they could knock the overpasses down onto the freeway, if you will, and that made it a little difficult. Had to use explosives and so forth to get the steel I- beams cleared out. And so that was one of our first assignments. And then mainly a lot of keeping the roads open. So that was kind of what I did. They had a point system to get on a boat back to the States. And so I didn’t have too many points, so you got shuffled around into odd units and so forth. And you said you served for three years, is that right? No. I went in ’ 44. That’s a little fuzzy right now. Those dates are probably wrong. But towards the end of the war. Yes. Yes. Well, I remember that we were down in Marseille, France. There was an engineering depot down there where all the bridging and so forth, equipment, and they were [ 00: 10: 00] getting ready to send it to the Pacific, but that wrapped up rather rapidly, and so, I got [ back] finally on like Christmas Day of ’ 45, we sailed from Marseille and we got into New York harbor about January the fifth or sixth of ’ 46, I guess. And I went back to the university, but I decided to switch to mechanical engineering. It didn’t make too much difference because you were mainly taking the first two years of the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 scientific courses and so forth, chemistry and physics and all like that. And it was while we were both students that I met my wife [ Jean Crooks], and we were married shortly thereafter. And she graduated and got a job working as a teacher in a child care out in Richmond, California. You familiar with the Bay Area at all? A little bit. Well, Richmond is a city north of Berkeley on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, on the eastern shore. And they had a lot of Henry Kaiser shipyards up there, and they had a lot of public housing and so forth, and they had child care centers so the workers could bring their children there night or day and leave them off, and they had a system of taking care of them. And then when they were old enough to go to school, they could go to school in the daytime and come there to be watched over. That’s what she did. I went to school under the GI Bill. So I graduated with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, with a machine design option. And we started our family, and I have a son, Jim, and daughter, Kathryn. Jim worked at the test site in the operating engineers union as a [ 00: 15: 00] welder and so forth, and later he was in the heavy duty repair of the motor vehicles, and he was the foreman of that shop there in Mercury for a couple of years. It’s kind of getting out of sync here, but anyhow. Oh, no, that’s interesting. And our daughter Kathryn was born just a year after Jim was born. And she went on to university and so forth, and she’s a medical doctor now. And she presently is a physician working for the Veterans Administration here in Las Vegas. I’ll jump back to what I did after I got out of school, my work history. The first job that I had was with a firm called Grove Regulator. They were located in Emeryville, another city almost surrounded by Oakland and Berkeley. And they had a factory that had been built by the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Navy. Grove somehow, I believe, was an officer in the Navy at one time, and he developed a special regulator for steam, and it was used extensively on the destroyers. So they built a factory and he had this factory. And after the war was over, why, and the building of the ships, they switched from concentrating on steam regulators to valves and so forth for the oil industry. Like they had valves that were used to control the flow and so forth. So I took the job for them and they told me how much I’d make and that’s fine, but they neglected to say there had to be five Saturdays in a month to make that much. So after six months, why, I was looking around for a job and I got a job with the East Bay Municipal Utility District. That supplies the water to the whole East Bay. It’s the utility district and so it had like civil service and so forth. And after a couple years there, I was looking forward to my first raise and that’s when, I forget the name of it but there was some kind of a system, [ 00: 20: 00] defense system, and it was cancelled, so that meant that there was a whole lot of surplus engineers, and once again I was looking for a job. And this time, my father- in- law was a long time employee with Standard Oil of California, and he said, Well, there’s this outfit over in San Francisco and I understand they’re hiring. Why don’t you go over and talk to them? So I went over and talked to the people, and they had formed a corporation called California Research and Development [ CR& D]. And they were to be kind of the construction management of a project that was associated with what is now called Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which was run by the founder, E. O. L. [ Ernest O.] Lawrence. And the idea behind this whole project was that they wanted to use neutrons to irradiate thorium and whatever to get more plutonium. And so they had proposed building a proton linear accelerator that would use protons to hit a beryllium target, and the protons would knock neutrons out of the beryllium and they’d use the beryllium to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 irradiate the thorium to make fissile material. Now, I think that’s right, but that was my understanding of it. And so they needed a linear accelerator built at Weldon Springs, Missouri. They were going to build the facility back there because of the lots of coal- fired power plants back there. And this accelerator would be fifteen hundred feet long, fifty to sixty feet in diameter, and it would have drift tubes. So that was what they were going to build. And so they decided to build the first hundred feet of that to work out the problems and so forth before they started. And [ 00: 25: 00] the main problems would be at the front end where the drift tubes would be closer together, and because the particles would be going slower, but the electrical gradient would be more apt to spark down and short out where this narrower gap was. So they were going to build the first hundred feet of this, and they selected the Livermore site to build this. And Livermore Naval Air Station was a mile square with a center section that was, say, half a mile by half a mile, was completely paved so that you could land in any direction, no matter which way the wind was blowing. You just had to have a chalk line or a mark. So that’s where they started that, and CR& D, now, would be working with the Berkeley Radiation Lab under Lawrence, E. O. L., Ernest Orlando Lawrence. And so a group of us from CR& D were moved into the bevatron building there in Berkeley to help support the design work and so forth of this hundred- foot- long accelerator. And then after a year or so, we moved out to Livermore, and they were building this building that would house the accelerator, and got involved in that. And after working out at Livermore for a couple of years, they decided that they didn’t need to have this. The whole project was cancelled. [ They decided] that reactors were taking UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 over and going to be able to provide all of the fissile material that would be needed. So CR& D let go all of their engineers. They just shut the whole— but meanwhile, at the Livermore site, the Berkeley lab had expanded out there and the laboratory had opened up, so I went over and got a job with them, and that’s how I started with the Lawrence— it wasn’t called that then, but the Berkeley Rad Lab at Livermore. About what year was that, do you remember? Well, I went to work for them— [ sound of papers rustling]. That I should be able to find. [ 00: 30: 00] Was it the early fifties, or was it still the forties, then? No, this was ’ 53. September the sixteenth, as I recall. Yes, 1953 was when I started there. See, I went back to the university after the war. I started there in January of ’ 46 and I finished up in August of ’ 48. So when you worked at the Rad Lab, who were you actually working for? Was it the government or the university or the laboratory itself? Well, when I first went to the Berkeley lab, I was a California Research and Development employee, and we were in support of this thing that was going to be at Weldon Springs, and they were working on the injector. And I happened to be the engineer that was supporting the rad lab physicists and so forth, and so I would design what they would want, and they would take care of getting it built. And then when we went out to Livermore, why, then we got involved in projects that were more going to be— like they had this vacuum vessel a hundred feet long, I guess, and maybe it was sixty feet in diameter. It had thirty- two- inch diffusion pumps. That was the throat of the diffusion— you know what a diffusion pump [ is]? No, I’m not familiar. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Well, you want a vacuum. You want to get all the air out so the protons don’t have to run into air molecules, and also if you get the air out so there’s no humidity, then you can have greater electrical gradient. Somehow you have a loop. There’s a vacuum tube back here that’s oscillating and it’s putting out voltage and it comes down a coaxial rather than a cable. It’s two pipes, inner pipe six inch in diameter, outer pipe ten or twelve inches, and has a coaxial power feed, and it went down and it had a loop on the end, and that created this field that was running back and [ 00: 35: 00] forth in this— there’s a large vacuum container, and then in the early models there was a framework, another of— on an aluminum frame, copper sheet, water cooling pipes on the back of the pipe, copper sheet, because all this current would heat up the— and so, you know, putting water in a vacuum vessel before it can spring a leak. So we ran into structural problems where it was a cylinder, and then you had this liner inside it, and drift tubes hang down, and then there’s a tube, and you inject the protons out of the injector in, and that pulse has to get there just as the gradient comes out of the one drift tube and gets accelerated into the other one, and it goes on, keeps on going down the pipe. Well, that was what we were trying to do, and so there were lots of engineering problems and so forth. But I was, for the first like three years that you might say, I was two years anyhow an employee of CR& D, and then I went to be a laboratory employee. And like I say, I started on September 16 in ’ 53 and I retired in, I forget when. Thirty years later or more. So after I went to work for the university, or radiation laboratory, the first couple years were taken up with this accelerator project. And then they decided that the government wasn’t going to build that because they’d found other ways to accomplish getting the material they needed. And so I joined the mechanical engineering group of what’s now the Livermore laboratory. And I got involved with other activities that were going on regarding the test UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 program. And after coming down to the test site for five or six years, to come down and do experiments or participate in the tests out at the test site, why, the laboratory had a fairly large contingency at the test site. One time they had 300 employees, and that was in the days when they were working on the Rover project. You ever hear of the Rover? [ 00: 40: 00] I did. That was propulsion, right? Yes. Yes, well, I never was involved in that. In fact, that had folded. But they had a position that was called the resident manager that was the head guy for the Livermore lab down here. And after a few years, they decided to ask me to take over. And so I came down and followed the existing resident manager for a year, or six months, as his deputy, and then I became resident manager. And we had about 150 employees here, working in Nevada and Nevada residents and so forth. OK. And what were your responsibilities as the resident manager? What were you in charge of and what did you do? Well, you had to support the programs, and they expected you to look over what’s going on and if you see something wrong, even if the people in Livermore are doing it, why, you have to take care of that. Most of the time things went smoothly, but occasionally you had to kind of whistle- blow. But that didn’t happen much. So it was more of an administrative, supervising everything that was going on? Yes. Yes. We had a health and safety group and, you know, we had to be sure that we were happy with what REECo [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company] was doing in the way of personnel protection and so forth, and if we didn’t like it, why, we could bitch about it and try and get it changed and so forth. See, the laboratory at that time had a reactor out there, and it was called Super Kukla. Because of critical mass, then it would give off neutrons and they did UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 experiments and so forth with things. That was out in what is called Area 410. You ever hear of that? Yes. Originally that was just for the Livermore lab and then, I guess, as things developed later on, I think that LASL [ Los Alamos Scientific ( now National) Laboratory] now has some buildings out there. [ 00: 45: 00] What were some of the most frequent problems that would come up? I imagine there’s a lot to deal with, with all of the different laboratory people and all of the test site people and the REECo people. What kinds of things were the biggest problems? I don’t think that between the working things you— over the years, understanding developed, you know, even the union people had their prerogatives in what they wanted to do and had to do, but it never really boiled up, that I’m aware of, into like, we’re going to walk off, or whatever. I can remember, you know, one night we were trying to button up a tunnel, and I was exhausted from throwing sandbags— and that wasn’t when I was a resident manager but when I was involved in the group that put the device in the room and had to watch out for it and so forth. It became clear that in order to get the shot off, why, whoever was there had to pitch in and get it done, and we did. I imagine there’s a lot of pressure to get it done, so everybody just worked as hard as they needed to. Lots of long days, long hours? Yes. Now, as the resident manager, did you live on the test site, or did you live in Las Vegas and commute? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 I lived in Las Vegas and commuted. But, you know, I didn’t spend many nights at the test site when I lived in town. I mean when I was traveling, coming down from Livermore, why, I never went into town. They had an airplane that flew from Livermore to [ Camp] Desert Rock, and so I would rarely go into town. I would only go into town if I had to go to a meeting down at the NVOO [ Nevada Operations] office over there. Was this the kind of information you’re looking for? Oh, this is great, just getting all of your experiences. It’s just interesting to see what a typical day at work was like at the test site, because a lot of that never gets recorded, so it’s really interesting to hear. [ 00: 50: 00] Well, it always seemed like there would be something that would come up. Now, how were you involved in the tests? What would go into a test, from your standpoint? What were your responsibilities and what all had to happen in order for a test to go right? Well, throughout my career, that varied greatly. I started out with getting involved in the testing as the engineer that was designing the nuclear warhead or weapon, whatever you want to call it. It had to be built and fabricated, put together. Now, that’s what we called a device engineer. And it was a mechanical engineer, as a rule, you know, that designed it, had to get it built, get a lot of exotic materials. A lot of it was built at Y- 12 at Oak Ridge. See, they were involved in the production and fabrication of parts for the stockpile, and so they had the capability of producing what we needed. We could do it at Livermore, but these guys were the ones that were going to be doing it, and so we relied on them to fabricate the parts, and then we’d take them and put them together and so forth. Like, for instance, I was out in the Pacific and they decided they had to have a design change in some of the parts that were inside the thing. And so we had trailers out there with lathes and so forth, and so we went over and we figured out, and this was a part that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 needed machining and so forth, so we machined it out there. Then we took the part in, tore the thing down, and put it in, way in near the center of the thing. And kind of got some people upset that this is a material that is accountable and so forth, but it’s also pyroforic, and so we just took it over and threw it in the ocean and got rid of it because we never would use the material and they had plenty of it. So they got a little flak over that. [ 00: 55: 00] From who? From the government, or who was complaining about that? Well, the accountability guy. You know, I just said, why don’t we just say it was destroyed and I’ll sign it “ destroyed.” You saw it. It had been reduced to powder and so, you know…. How many tests did you work on when you were at the test site? How many tests were you involved with? Well, I couldn’t tell you. A lot? Well, we had a case where— this was when I was a device engineer. I was working at Livermore, designing things, taking them to the field. OK, we had five- hundred- foot- tall towers. You have seen pictures of those. OK, we have dry runs, OK, where we run through like a countdown and everything. And we were going to see that the firing system was going to work right, everything was going to do this, that, or the other. Well, on a shot day, they’d take the elevator hoist away and save it, use it for another one. OK, well, they had a dry run, and seeing they weren’t going to take the elevator away and bring it back, they didn’t disconnect the power to the elevator so it would be taken away, or they didn’t change— well anyway, on the dry run, there was still power and something was left plugged in, and so that caused it to be activated when it wouldn’t have been because there would be no power to where it was plugged in. Well, that screwed up the device because it transferred part of the material in and that caused it to oxidize, if you will, the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 material. And so we had to take the whole thing apart, and people had to climb up, all the way up, because the elevator was gone and wiring was fuggered up and everything. So, you know, [ 01: 00: 00] that is the kind of problems that you’d get into. People had to go up and take care of a portion of it. A gas fill of the pit. You got a chemical reaction, hydride, and that ruined the pit. But, you know, it’s just that a dry run wasn’t a dry run, and so sometimes you’d get into discussions like that. Now, when the tests were conducted, did you get to watch the tests? Well, like if you’re the device systems engineer or the device engineer. The device systems engineer, he’s in the control room, right there, watching this. As the EGG [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier] guys go through their countdown, why, you’re watching to be sure that this light comes on or whatever at the right time and so forth. You know, everybody has their own little thing that they’re wanting to be sure doesn’t screw up. Did you ever work for atmospheric tests, or were they all underground by the time you got there? Well, the early tests that were up on the towers here at Nevada were atmospheric tests. And the ones that were suspended from balloons. Did you ever hear about those? Yes. All the ones in the Pacific were atmospheric tests, when you’re testing at Bikini and Enewetak and so forth. The tests were done on barges, and the barge was as big as this room. And you could have your device and then you have your cables come and hook them up and so forth. In the towers, the cab at the top would be about as square as the width is here, about 25 feet by 25 feet by 15 feet tall, and everything had to be within there. And they were doing things to see when the shock wave and how things are performing within the device. They have windows in the case, like, so that you can see how the radiation comes down through the device, and they UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 want to look at that. You know in Area 2 where the shots were, those towers? They were looking [ 01: 05: 00] at the stuff from back by the CP [ control point], and so you have to have all these pipes come out and be lined up and all like that. There was also a bunker up by what— I forget what you call it, but the road that runs down the side of the valley. What do they call it? Red Road? We could look that up. I can’t remember either. Yeah. Well, anyhow, on the west side there’s a bunker up there and they’re looking at other things closer in. So you worked on the Pacific tests also, right? Yes. The main effort there was in Honolulu, Barber’s Point, and we’d have to assemble the thing out at Barber’s Point. I forget what they called that airport that the B- 52s took off from. But we’d have to assemble the device and so forth. That was easier because there wasn’t diagnostics. They just looked at the outside of the bomb casing or whatever, and so less complications on that. And you had to work on getting that done. But it was very straightforward. They always wanted a lab guy with a fire crew. And here you are [ drawing a diagram]. This is the runway, and if the fire chief is here, he wants you right next to him, and here comes this [ B-] 52 by. That’s really, really a sensation, to see that thing coming, and it’s coming and it’s coming. You just hope it stays over there. OK. Well, this disc is about to run out, so maybe we’ll take a break and put in a new disc. OK. [ 01: 08: 54] End Track 2, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 2. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 OK. Well, one thing that I just wanted to ask you from before, when you were doing these tests and watching, especially the atmospheric shots, I’m just wondering what your reactions were as far as what it’s like to see one of these tests? Because I imagine that’s a pretty spectacular sight. Yes, well, you have time enough to decide that you’ve cooked this side long enough and let’s turn around. That’s one thing I recall. You know, it might be fifty miles away. Some of those out in the Pacific, it was really pretty warm. The JVE [ Joint Verification Experiment, Kearsage] activities were real interesting to be involved in. I’ll bet. And how were you involved with the JVE? The Joint Verification Experiment, is that right? Yeah, well, I was down here as a scientific advisor, if you will, and I was working for Jim ( James) Magruder. I mean, a lawyer is scientific advisor to the manager of NVOO. That’s what they call you. It was an interesting two years. And I worked a lot with Jim Magruder, who was the assistant manager for operations, I guess. He was running the test program. And we were involved in getting all of the stuff over there [ to the Soviet Union]. And there was core barrels used in the post- shot drilling, you know? Are you aware of what post- shot drilling is? Yes. And how they go back down to get the sample and so forth. They had core barrels but they were, I forget, thirty or sixty feet long, and they needed to get some of them over there. And we were going through hoops. I mean it was going to cost us two or three— I can’t even think of it. A C- 124, I guess, or bigger airplanes, you know. Because that’s what it would’ve taken in order to get those long barrels. Well, they got threads on either end, so I said to them, go cut them in thirds. And then we shipped them over on commercial air. So that was a contribution. But lots of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 interesting problems. You heard that I had decided that I wasn’t going over there because [ 00: 05: 00] my health was starting to go down about then, and I’d heard one guy’s tale about how he got sick and so forth on the trip and couldn’t get into a decent hospital. So I wasn’t going to go over. Yes, that’s a long trip. Yes, well, it’s a long trip, and after you got there, why, I think there was several things that would make it longer. Right. Exactly. Were you involved at all when the Soviet scientists came here to the Nevada Test Site? Did you work with them at all? I didn’t interact directly because we were just kind of sitting back, watching what was going on, and those people that were in the program were the ones that had to be interacting with them, and so I didn’t have much direct interaction with them. More, you know, should we let them do this, and what should we try and get them to do? Or whatever, you know, that kind of stuff. I’ll bet there were a lot of security issues in trying to deal with that. Yes. Now, that’s another thing that I’m interested in, is obviously the work that you’re doing is very sensitive and related to national security, and I was wondering what kind of clearances you needed, both when you worked at the rad lab and when you came to Livermore and the test site, and if you could talk a little bit about some of the rules that were in place for security. Well, everything, you know, about the design and so forth of a nuclear weapon is secret. Some of it is RD [ Restricted Data], other it’s just secret. You just have to be careful and make sure you don’t discuss what is classified and so forth. Of course, a lot of it when you’re dealing with like UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 the Russians, it’s just common sense. A lot of it is. But when you get in the intelligence part of it, why, then it goes up. Now, was that ever a problem with your family? I mean you spent all this time at work and then you’d come home and there are so many things that you’re not allowed to talk about. Was that difficult, or was that just part of the job? I think you just develop, you know, just— she [ wife, Jean Crooks] doesn’t ask and you don’t. We never— [ 00: 10: 00] she never— there are certain things that, you know, like the accident. The bolts p