Interview with Troy Ernest Wade II, June 16, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Troy Wade June 16, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Joan Leavitt © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Troy Wade June 16, 2004 Conducted by Joan Leavitt Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. Wade discusses the arms control negotiations that led up to the Joint Verification Experiment [ JVE] in 1988. 1 Mr. Wade role in the U. S.- Soviet negotiations regarding the JVE. Political concerns, technological difficulties, and cultural differences made the experience very intense and demanding. 5 The presence of visiting Soviet scientists at the Nevada Test Site caused tension among test site workers. Soviet and U. S. delegations included intelligence agents. 12 U. S. delegation hosts Soviet delegation to the Nevada Test Site at various venues 14 Relationships established between Americans and Russians during the JVE were important after the collapse of Soviet Union. 16 Mr. Wade’s view that the Nevada Test Site was a battleground of the Cold War. He discusses how nuclear testing and the strategy of deterrence helped to prevent World War III. 17 Soviet concerns about the containment of underground nuclear tests 21 Views on similarities and differences between U. S. and Soviet anti- nuclear protest 22 Much of the technology developed for nuclear testing has since spilled over into the private sector. 25 Mr. Wade recalls Kearsarge test with the Soviets in 1987- 88: media attention, security concerns, protestors, and diplomatic ceremonies. 26 Recollections of swearing- in the new U. S. ambassador to International Atomic Energy Agency [ IAEA] while at the Soviet test site. 28 Long- term significance of the JVE. 31 Throughout his career, Mr. Wade frequently had to adapt to new regulations and philosophies as a result of changing arms control policies. 32 Remembering negotiation sessions in the Soviet Union, preparations for JVE agreement signing. 33 Conclusion: Mr. Wade recalls Ronald Reagan in light of his death earlier that month ( June 5, 2004). 36 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Troy Wade June 16, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Joan Leavitt [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Joan Leavitt: I’m doing research on the JVE [ Joint Verification Experiment] for part of my master’s thesis, and as I’ve done research in the archival documents I have found you mentioned in about four different places. The first one— and what we’re trying to do is fill out the things that aren’t said— one of them is in November when you called Nick Aquilina and said, The Russians are coming. Troy Wade: [ Laughter] The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. Now were you part of the summit? You were assistant secretary of energy at that time, but it seems like you were doing a lot with regard to international negotiations, and I’d like for you to kind of tell a little bit about what you were doing. Well, when I went back to Washington the second time— I was there twice in the early 1980s and then I went to Idaho, and then I went back to Washington. And when I went back to Washington in 1987, arms control topics and arms control negotiations were very high on the Reagan agenda. And they were negotiating the Intermediate [ Range] Nuclear Forces Treaty which was the very first treaty that actually reduced nuclear weapons from both arsenals. And, you know, Reagan, as a matter of policy, had said early in the 1980s or early in his first presidency that as a matter of policy the United States of America will seek a comprehensive test ban treaty. And so over the years that have passed from 1981 until I got there in 1987, there had been a lot of talk about a comprehensive test ban, but it was Reagan’s famous mantra, Trust but verify. A comprehensive test ban treaty was thought by both sides to be unverifiable for UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 lots of reasons, lots of reasons, but just saying you couldn’t do it was not acceptable either to the administration or to the president. The president said, Find a way to do it. We clearly want to go to a comprehensive test ban. So were you working on ways to come up with mutually agreeable ways to verify? Yes. Yes. Yes. Technical schemes that would be acceptable in a world where you also had constraints about— gee, what’s the word I’m searching for? Espionage? Forgive me for stuttering here, but getting in and having access to information and secrets perhaps to which you were not entitled. Espionage or—? Espionage or just doing something that was too intrusive. “ Intrusive” was the word I was searching for. You can’t verify the yield of an underground nuclear explosion from great distances. You have to get close. Now “ close” can be several hundred, several thousand, miles if you’re talking about seismic signals. But if you really want to verify that the explosion was a nuclear explosion and get some idea of the yield, you have to be up close, and that’s intrusive. We didn’t want the Soviets at the United States, at the Nevada Test Site, and they sure as hell didn’t want us at Semipalatinsk either. And yet in one of the 1976 treaties it had language that suggested each country was to be given access to each other’s explosion sites. [ 00: 05: 00] That was the PNET [ Peaceful Nuclear Explosives Treaty]. That was the PNET. Yes, and when I read that I thought, well, who put that in and did they think it was realistic? Well, let’s talk about that for a minute because that was kind of a precursor to the JVEs. The Peaceful Nuclear Explosives Treaty, the PNET, said that it was OK to do nuclear experiments for peaceful purposes. But when people were thinking about comprehensive test bans, of course UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 you said, But you can’t do any nuclear experiments for defense purposes. And the scientists said, Wait a minute, A nuclear device is a nuclear device and you gain information from it whether it’s a Plowshare program of peaceful use, and so how can we assure that what the Soviets say is a peaceful use of a nuclear explosive is really that and not weapons development? So is the verification more than just the 150 kilotons? It was whether or not it was peaceful? Yes, that was the PNET thing. And so we had this very elaborate protocol where both sides built two complete sets of verification equipment. And the protocol said that if the Soviet Union told us that they were going to do a peaceful nuclear explosive test, we had the right to say we wanted to make measurements. They had a right of refusal— and there were lots of pieces to this— but assuming they didn’t refuse, then we sent them two complete sets of all of this diagnostic gear and they got to take it all apart to see what’s in every box and they got to select which set we could use. Now is that the JVE? No, this is the PNET. This is the agreement in the PNET then? That led to the JVE. It all started with the PNET. It all started with the PNET. OK. But they didn’t put any of that into practice. No. No. But Lord, we spent tons of money developing the pre- procedures and the protocols and the equipment. But it was in fact the first step towards real verification. Now was that all during the 1980s, or is that from 1976 on? All during the 1980s. Well, 1976 on. Nineteen seventy- six on, but it was the first real honest attempt by both sides to make measurements on nuclear explosions that could be used for verification purposes. So, you know, the idea of how one technically made those measurements UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 began with the Peaceful Nuclear Explosives Treaty. And then when we got into the late 1980s, when the president and the world really wanted a comprehensive test ban treaty, because of the PNET experiences you couldn’t just walk away. You couldn’t say, We can’t do it, because we had shown that there were technologies. And so we began to look at how you could verify that someone had done a nuclear test. And the question was different here because you know I won’t remember the numbers now but there are— well, there are hundreds of earthquakes around the globe each day, and there are thousands of high explosive blasts each day, principally associated with mining, in almost every country around the globe. And, you know, some of the places are huge and so those explosions in open pits, for example in Nevada, send a seismic signal that goes around the globe. Well now, how do you differentiate between the seismic signal from a gold mine in Carlin, Nevada and a test at the Nevada Test Site? That’s tough. That’s very tough. And so finally the [ 00: 10: 00] scientists and the diplomats got down to saying, Well, we need to make close- in measurements. We have to be right there. And that raised then this issue of intrusiveness, and that’s when the first discussions about, oh, what’s the technique, the yield measurement technique that we—? CORRTEX [ Continuous Reflectrometry for Radius versus Time Experiment]? CORRTEX. That’s when the first discussions about CORRTEX really came up. So a lot of your work in Washington, was it talking with scientists and diplomats then about—? And Soviets. And Soviets. So was that from all of the 1980s then? Yes, and when I went back there in the 1980s, you know, the Department of Energy had— and still has— the total responsibility for the research and development tests, the production of nuclear weapons in the United States, and within the Department of Energy was this operating UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 entity called Defense Programs. And within Defense Programs was a group whose business was international arms control, and the person that headed up that particular division was the lead guy for a lot of the discussions that were taking place in the early and mid- 1980s. When I got there, the president ratcheted everything up. He wanted more senior people involved, and I was the most senior DOE person in the weapons program. So suddenly I ended up sitting across the negotiating tables from Soviets, which was a marvelous experiment. Now I had a couple of names that were Soviet officials. Were they different? We had [ Igor] Palenykh and [ Yevgeniy] Kutovoy, Sergei Zelentsov, Viktor Mikhailov. I know those guys, yes. Yes. They came in January. They came for the JVEs, yes. Yes. Were these different Soviets? Different Soviets, yes. Yes. Before January of 1988 the United States State Department went to the Soviet foreign ministry and so there were career diplomats representing both countries— backed up by technical people or administration people like myself— but it was the diplomatic people that were doing the discussions. And you got to see [ Leonid] Brezhnev’s people versus [ Mikhail] Gorbachev’s people, is that right? I saw only Gorbachev’s people. See, in the late 1980s Gorbachev was there, and so when I got involved I saw principally Gorbachev and Shevardnadze was the foreign minister. Yes. Yes, [ George] Schultz and [ Eduard] Shevardnadze gave joint statements together. And I should’ve brought in to you today to show you, but I have framed at home the front page of the Moscow newspaper, Izvestia, and it’s in May of 1988 and it’s in the Kremlin. It shows UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Schultz and Shevardnadze sitting at a table and they’re signing the JVE agreement. And Gorbachev is standing behind Shevardnadze, and Reagan’s standing behind Schultz, and then those of us that were there with him that were part of this negotiation are standing behind. A very fond memory of mine and a very, very, you know— a long way from the Nevada Test Site. Really the height of what you could dream for in your career, I’m sure. But you know it began to come to a head when the diplomatic channels advised by [ 00: 15: 00] me and laboratory people and others on both sides said, OK, let’s try and make close- in measurements like CORRTEX. And we all agreed to that, and that’s when I called Nick and said, The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. [ Laughter] Did you really say that? Yes, I did. That’s what I titled my paper on the JVE. I didn’t know you had said that. I really said that. I really said that. Oh, that’s great. And then it got exciting because, you know, we said for our purposes, to make the CORRTEX measurement, we needed an instrument hole thirty meters from the emplacement hole where the Russian device was going to be tested. We needed an instrument hole thirty meters center to center. In Semipalatinsk. In Semipalatinsk, and it had to be absolutely straight. Now when they came over here they didn’t have that kind of requirement because they were using a different technical technique for their measurement. So they said to us, We can’t drill a straight hole. And we said to ourselves, Come on, this is the nation in the world that has more natural UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 resources than anybody, more drill rigs, so what do you mean they can’t drill a straight hole? So our side told their side, Drill the hole. And so they drilled it and Nick sent over people from the Nevada Test Site, the first sort of people in there— Yes, the drillers and geologists. — to see if the hole was indeed perpendicular and it wasn’t. And we said, This hole isn’t straight. And they said, We told you. So then we had this huge dilemma in Washington about What do we do next? And the Soviets finally said, We told you we couldn’t drill a straight hole. And we said, We’ve got to have a straight hole, so we’ll come and drill it. We’ll drill it ourselves. And most people, certainly Troy Wade, didn’t believe that they would accept because this whole intrusiveness thing kept creeping in and we had ongoing discussions about these measurements because, you, in fact, can use your instrumentation to make measurements which will tell you more than just the yield. That’s intrusiveness of a technical kind because that begins to look at their designs. That’s sovereign information, and they didn’t want us having that kind of information. How do you protect each side’s secret and do something like this? And we sure as hell didn’t want them having— so this intrusiveness was a big issue, and so when we said, OK, we’ll come over and drill the hole, I thought the ball game was over. I thought we would go back to square one. It was a deal- breaker. And you know they said, OK. Then that was this phone call to Nick: UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Nick, you’ve got to go to Semipalatinsk and drill a hole, and you got to take everything: the drill rig, the drill pipe, the bits, the mud, the drillers, everything. I was amazed at how heavy, how much tonnage, that was. Well, you know, I’ve known Nick forever and we had some fun conversations, you know. I bet. I bet. I wish they had been taped. [ Nick said] You got to be kidding me. [ Troy] No, Nick, you got to go to Semipalatinsk and drill a hole. Nick of course is the expert here, but it was like five C- 5s full of equipment, loaded at Indian Springs [ Air Force Auxiliary Base, Nevada], flown to Helsinki where Soviet pilots and navigators got on board. And this was another first because these were the first U. S. military airplanes ever allowed into central Soviet Union. [ 00: 20: 00] Yes, he said the young pilot who got that job was a little nervous. Hey, everybody was nervous. Everybody was nervous. Everybody was nervous, but we got it done. You know, that’s a fond memory of mine. Associated with that fond memory was the cost of it. Because of the way the United States government does business, the rest of the United States government just looked over at me and said, Go drill the hole and pay for it. Who was going to pay for this? And I said, Excuse me? [ laughter] Out of your budget, the Department of Energy’s budget. Yes. And I said, OK, there must be some special pot that I— Some magic fund in the sky. So I think drilling that hole cost like $ 12 million or something like that— if you paid, you know, the cost of the airplanes and all of that, it was very expensive. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 My other fond memory of course was in January of 1988 when the first Russians came here. And I flew up to New York with a DOE airplane and a U. S. delegation. In fact I was the senior U. S. official at that time, and we were to meet the Russians in New York and bring them to Nevada for the first time. And Palenykh, Igor Palenykh was the senior Soviet guy— “ Delegation to the nuclear testing talks in Geneva.” Yes. Yes. But he was also the senior guy coming to New York to come here for the first time. I had met him before. He was your counterpart then. For that event he was my counterpart. He was a very senior Soviet diplomat and had been in the business for many, many years. And at that point I had not met him. I knew about him. So, we go to New York and we’d made arrangements to go to the Pan American Club like, you know, the Delta Crown Room and that sort of thing. We rented the Pan American Club. The deal was that the Soviets would land at— where was this? This was JFK [ John F. Kennedy International Airport], I think, in New York. The Soviets would land and they would be escorted to the Pan American lounge, and we would meet them there and we would talk and we would have some refreshments, and then we’d all go out and get on the DOE government airplane and we’d toodle off to Las Vegas. Well, I was just as nervous as the pilot because this was certainly a grand experiment for all of us. There were people with me who were from the diplomatic corps who were used to this sort of thing. So here we are and we’re standing and, we are there and we’re in the lounge and we get the word that the Soviets have arrived. Now understand they’d flown, many of them, from Semipalatinsk to Moscow so this was twenty hours by that time. So they just by nature weren’t the happiest campers in the world. And I remember, the protocol was that I’m supposed UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 to stand by the door with an interpreter right behind me and when Palenykh comes out as the head of the delegation he’ll have an interpreter with him, and [ 00: 25: 00] we’re supposed to shake hands and kind of exchange oral credentials: How do you do? I’m Troy Wade and I’m so- and- so my job is _____ and I want to welcome you on behalf of the President of the United States. Now I’d never done anything like this before, but I’m standing there and pretty soon these guys come in and they just looked dreadful. They looked like they’d been on an airplane for twenty hours. They didn’t want to talk to anybody. And you know I’m standing there all smiley- faced: How do you do? I’m Troy Wade and I’m—. He said, I know who you are, and shook my hand and just went by. All they wanted to do was sit down. And so then we got on our airplane and headed for Nevada, which was another five hours, so these guys were— Had no sleep. No sleep. And so part of the arrangement was that on the flight from New York to Las Vegas, Mr. Palenykh and I were going to have a conversation about what we would say when we got to McCarran Airport [ Las Vegas] because there was going to be a big press conference when we got to McCarran Airport. Well, he wasn’t much interested in talking, you know. He was physically exhausted and we were all mentally on edge because this was a big deal. This was a big deal. And so I had been instructed to say, that I’m not going to talk about anything but the importance of this event and how we’re trying to work together and, please stay away from treaty violations and other Soviet— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 He said, Fine, fine, and of course paid absolutely no attention to me. And when we got here and we landed at McCarran— and at that time all of the government EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier] facilities were at McCarran. I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but where the second main runway is at McCarran, east- west runway, was where all of our facilities were, and our airplanes. They’re now out at Nellis [ Air Force Base], called RSL [ Remote Sensing Laboratory]. Anyway we landed and press conference in this hangar. This was a big deal because this was the first time Soviets had been— a delegation like this had been in Las Vegas and the first time anybody was ever going to the test site. I think Nick introduced me and I made the appropriate speech for the senior U. S. official, about how delighted we were to have them here and we were working towards this and that and yes, they’re— And then Palenykh got up and said, in effect, We really don’t want to be here, we don’t trust the United States, we don’t believe these measurements can be made. You know, it was not a [ laughter]. Not friendly— No, it was not friendly— And this was to the press? Yes. So then we loaded them all on a bus and took them to the test site. Now remember, they’d been twenty hours from the Soviet Union to New York, five hours to here, two hours on the ground, and then a two- hour bus ride, and these guys were basket cases and they were not happy campers. And then we started the next morning with an official meeting in the Steak House at Mercury, a little restaurant called the Steak House, which we turned into a conference room out at the test site. And that was where I really was first struck by the fact that, you know, here I was UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 after spending— and you’ve heard this from Nick and other people but it really struck [ 00: 30: 00] me— here I was after spending most of my professional career preparing to fight these bastards, now I’m sitting across the table from them and I’m about to take them out to show them the Nevada Test Site. And it was a very, very strange feeling. Very strange. Yes. Here I am, showing this to the enemies. Looking back, you know, it was just a wonderful opportunity for me and Nick and others, but it was really a strange feeling. It was a cultural shock. Yes. Yes. And a lot of the workers at the test site had to deal with those same feelings. And as you would expect, you know, the tens of thousands of people who’ve worked at the test site over the years have all been patriots. And since I’d had a different view from being in Washington, I knew we had to accept this and why, but there were a lot of test site workers, you know, cooks and drillers and miners and operating engineers who didn’t want these guys there, didn’t like the fact they were there. This is the enemy. So that was the beginning. That is so fascinating. I mean there must’ve been some tension for a little while from both sides. Well, huge tension, and of course we learned later, you know, one of the agreements in Washington, was that these testing teams would be drawn from the rank- and- file of the testing program, if there is such a thing. In other words, you weren’t supposed to hand- pick people to do this because you wanted the— well, we complied with that. They did not. They brought the very best people they had, like Viktor Mikhailov. Yes. I read Mikhailov’s book. [ Viktor Mikhailov. I Am a Hawk: Memoirs of Atomic Energy Minister, ( Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1996)] UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 Yes. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yes. I Am a Hawk. I Am a Hawk. Yes. Yes. And the good things that he had to say about that experience. And boy, there was no question about the fact he was a hawk, and there was no question about the fact he’d bomb us in a second if he had the opportunity. But yet he describes his intense curiosity about what the people at the test site were doing. There seemed to be the understanding that, yes, you are enemies but there was a scientific curiosity in the work that you were both doing. Very much so. Very much so. Which seemed to overpower enemy suspicion. Well, it did. Another thing that makes this such a unique event in not only Cold War history but in history is that the United States intelligence community really didn’t know very much detail about the Soviets’ nuclear weapons program. The CIA [ Central Intelligence Agency] and the FBI [ Federal Bureau of Investigation]. Is that what you’re talking about? And the DOE intelligence people. We just didn’t know very much. We suspected they knew a lot more about us than we did about them because of our open society versus their closed society. Their Livermore, Arzamus, was a closed city and their Los Alamos, Semipalatinsk, was a closed city. No U. S. people had been there or were allowed there, so we had no good human intelligence about the kinds of people or the quality of the people. And, up shows a guy like Viktor Mikhailov who was just a very high- caliber scientist. We sat back here and said, Hey, these guys are good. We ought to worry more. These guys are better than we thought they were. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 But it was, you know, really in my mind one of the signature [ 00: 35: 00] parts of the whole JVE thing was that we got our first close look at them and they got their first close look at us, at how we tested and what kinds of people we were and how good our technology was and that sort of thing. And you know, we knew they had KGB agents in this delegation. They really did? Oh yes. Oh yes. And we had appropriate people in our delegation. And it was funny, and Nick may have told you this, you know, Nick had arranged to bring all of these people down to see Siegfried and Roy. And many of them in this initial delegation, as well as most of the ones who came later to do the experiment, had certainly never been to the United States. Some of them had never been out of Semipalatinsk, for example, or their labs, and they couldn’t believe what they saw here. And when we took them to Siegfried and Roy, they thought this was all staged just for them. We had marvelous seats right down in the front. They tried desperately to not show much interest, and certainly to not show any emotion. Some of them had a lot of trouble because it was a hell of a show. And then as you may have heard, at the end of the show we stayed. Everybody else was taken out of the showroom. And we got all of these people up on the stage on risers, and out came Siegfried and Roy with a couple of white tigers, and we had our pictures taken. That’s a marvelous picture. I can show you the picture and you can see the two KGB guys there, because they didn’t want their faces in this photograph. I’ve got the picture. And they’re the ones that are kind of in the back row, kind of, you know. Really! Oh yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Because I think I have the picture in my briefcase. That’s one of the things I gathered together for my JVE first paper. And they didn’t want their pictures taken. We knew they were there. They knew tons about each one of us and we knew tons about each one of them, and it just made you nervous. Yes. Well, there was a [ Las Vegas] Review Journal article I remember that said that there was going to be KGB in the delegation. And I didn’t know if he had said that because it was paranoia or if it was fact, but it was in an editorial and it was one of the great concerns that they had. And they were there. And they were there. And they were on your chosen promised land, weren’t they? Seeing secrets that had been even kept from the press, from citizens, and all of a sudden they were there. Tough on us. I bet. Tough on us. But as Viktor said and as you’ve heard others say, it didn’t take long until we gained a great deal of respect for them and they gained respect for us. Was that living side by side and seeing things? Nick said about Frances Guinn that she would take them to different places on weekends and they got to see America. They loved Frances Guinn. Yes. They got to see— Particularly Viktor, who like girls anyway. Oh, did he? Yes. Yes. Viktor likes U. S. girls. And U. S. cigarettes. Nick said that they liked his wife too, Freda. Oh yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Yes. That they were in her home— Everybody loves Freda. Everybody loves Freda. Yes. That one of them gave her some slippers, just a present, and I guess Nick said he was in Geneva and I can’t remember who it was but he said, These are for Freda, and it was in front of everybody, and he said he was the only one who got a gift- and it was for his wife. Nick said she wore those slippers until they wore out, with fond memories. [ 00: 40: 00] Well, you know, part of the deal was that the host country would bear the expenses for these two experiments. So that meant when the Soviets were here, we paid for everything. And you were talking about approximately, the most, forty- five people at one time. Yes. Yes. It was kind of limited. But it meant that— and we tried— because we are the country we are and the society we are, you know, to take them to Nick’s house and take them to southern California. Yes. See the ocean. To see the ocean. They’d never seen the ocean before. Yes, and you know I didn’t realize at the time, I didn’t realize until later, how important those things were in terms of the relationship between our two countries. You know, let me fast- forward to the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union had collapsed and there was calamity everywhere. And almost immediately the first thing that happened was that people from Livermore and Los Alamos went over there to the closed cities where they had never, you know, U. S. people had never been allowed because they needed help. They needed help. And I think if we had not done these JVEs and had not established the trust and the communication channels UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 that we established as part of the JVE thing, that beginning to work together after the Cold War would’ve been a lot more difficult. A lot more difficult. Mikhailov writes about, I think there was a ten- year reunion of the JVE where many of them came back. In his book he talks a great deal, almost the comparison between the amount of resources that the United States had to spend on their nuclear program versus the amount that was not going into the Soviet program, the animosity towards the Soviet program for the people themselves. In fact there was one place where he said that the anti- nuclear movement w