Interview with Laurie Joe (L. Joe) Deal, September 27, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with L. Joe Deal September 27, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with L. Joe Deal September 27, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Also recorded on videotape Table of Contents Introduction: Birth, early life in North Carolina, education and study with physicist Karl Z. Morgan at Lenoir- Rhyne College 1 Graduation from college, move to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to work with Karl Z. Morgan, job at the laboratory 4 Remembers the end of World War II, post- war status of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Operation Crossroads 7 Talks about return to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and work in personnel monitoring program 11 Transfers to Brookhaven National Laboratory for six months, takes job as assistant to medical director in health physics at OROO of the AEC, and moves to AEC in Washington, D. C. as applied biophysicist in the Biophysics Branch, Biomedical Division 14 Recalls Dr. Shields Warren, foundation of AEC Biomedical Research Program, formation of ABCC and their work in post- war Japan, creation of NAS fellowships to train health physicists, and racial segregation at Oak Ridge 16 Discusses Project Gabriel, the AEC’s concern with radiation safety, public perception of the uses of nuclear energy and safety concerns, and AEC formation of Operational Safety organization 23 Talks about the AEC isotope program, problems with “ lost sources,” implementation of nationwide safety program 28 Joins radiation instrument group at NBS under Dr. Lauritson Taylor 29 Discusses inception of the NTS, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and first civil effects studies of nuclear testing 31 Talks about role in Operation Greenhouse 34 Discusses foundation of Civil Effects Liaison Group, civil effects testing with Harry Bowman, Robert L. Corsbie, and EG& G at NTS, fallout shelter studies, work with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller on civil defense studies at Oak Ridge 34 Talks about follow- up Japanese dose studies and effects tests at the NTS 44 Mentions participation in Operation Plumbbob, NTS 49 Discusses AMS- NEST program, management of program by EG& G, one- time jobs, RAP and Three Mile Island 51 Conclusion: retirement from DOE, growth of health physics discipline, formation of Health Physics Society, British Windscale reactor accident 60 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with L. Joe Deal September 27, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky Also recorded on videotape [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. L. Joe Deal: My name is Joe Deal. I was born in Hickory, North Carolina. I had a goal of being an electrical engineer, but the war [ World War II] came along and we had some family problems. My father died early. And so I didn’t quite get to electrical engineering school at North Carolina State except for one short period. Mary Palevsky: Let me ask you what year you were born. Oh, in 1924. OK, so when the war comes along you’re— Sixteen. OK. Maybe I should’ve just said that. Well, it’s OK, you’ve said it now. Yeah, I was sixteen. And my dad had died just before that and we had the usual problems families had during the Depression. There was a small college in town called Lenoir- Rhyne. It was two words. It was a Lutheran school. And my mother insisted that I go to college, so I went on to Lenoir- Rhyne and entered there; I was taking math and science so that I could hopefully transfer and did transfer once to North Carolina State to the engineering school. I spent my years there at Lenoir- Rhyne. Our physics professor was a young man whose father was the— the school was a Lutheran school, belonged to the Lutheran Church, and his father was a Lutheran minister. He had been designated to be a Lutheran minister but he didn’t UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 like it, so he went off to school at the University of North Carolina and on to Duke [ University] and had become very much interested in cosmic ray research. Dr. Karl [ Z.] Morgan was his name. In my second year in the school, I worked in the laboratory helping the students in the health physics lab. I was a first- year student and the junior people came in and we showed them how to do the lab work and so forth. And I got to know Dr. Morgan quite well. He knew my family, too, from my grandparents particularly. He was an excellent teacher and, as I said, had a lot of cosmic ray instrumentation and research and we fiddled with it and knew what it was all about. Now just let me interrupt you for a second. This is now during the war that you’re there or when? I guess I should’ve told you, I graduated when I was twenty; I started, I think I was sixteen or seventeen. But in those days you went straight through your college. You went summer and winter. There wasn’t any break. So I finished in three years, so I would’ve been, what, seventeen— yes. Dr. Morgan gave excellent lectures on modern physics and things like that— which were just coming in, but that was the cosmic ray stuff and things— and we fiddled with his instruments and learned a lot about them. I went off a second year. I finally transferred for summer quarter to North Carolina State. This was at the end of my second year in Lenoir- Rhyne. And I realized when I got to North Carolina State that with the war on and my being sixteen or seventeen, I was draft material. I did have one call- up but I don’t think it had come that time because they usually gave the students in particularly science time to finish up. I didn’t realize that electrical engineering would be a five- year course; in any event, I figured I’d never make that one through, so I went back to [ 00: 05: 00] UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Lenoir- Rhyne to finish. And when I got back, Dr. Morgan had disappeared. He was no longer the professor there and he was gone and nobody quite knew where he was. They said he was doing war work somewhere. During that period he contacted me once. We found out later and he told me he was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee [ Clinton Laboratories]. We knew Oak Ridge was a big processing facility but we didn’t know anything else. If you are familiar with the Manhattan District Project, the Oak Ridge Lab had the big reactor, the only big reactor, and they were the training point for the Hanford [ Works, Washington, Manhattan Project site] crews. Right. So you knew something was happening there but did you have any inkling about—? No, not at the time, but there was one kind of interesting story. Because when he called me he just says, I want you to go on and send me some of my instrumentation. He told me what it was. He says, Don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. And he says, It’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the school. And that’s when he gave me the Oak Ridge address and I took it down. I did it. I took it down and mailed it to him, put it in the mail. And I found out later, after he wrote his book, why he wanted this equipment. I didn’t know at the time, and this is kind of an interesting story. They were concerned about radiation in the reactor and this was the first one that had been built, the big reactor, this one, the first big reactor. And so they were concerned about possible leakage of high- energy gamma rays and so forth. So he was talking to Fermi one day and Fermi says, Why don’t you get some of your old cosmic ray equipment and make some measurements about it and see what it was? Now I didn’t find out about that until I read Dr. Morgan’s book later. [ The Angry Genie: One Man's Walk Through the Nuclear Age, with Ken M. Peter, University of Oklahoma Press]. He told the story but I didn’t know what it was— kind of an interesting thing. That is interesting. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 But I finished in August of ’ 44 and immediately went to Oak Ridge. I think I left the next day. We were on the rail line to Knoxville, Tennessee, from Washington [ D. C.] to Knoxville, the Southern Railway, so I got on the train the next day and went to Oak Ridge to work for Dr. Morgan. So he told you to come? Yes, he had called me and asked me to come over and work. That was the second phone call I got from him. So I went over and we were told right away what was going on. Ninety- five percent or more of the people in Oak Ridge had no idea what they were doing. They had these huge cyclotrons and things but people didn’t know what they were. They knew they were handling some yellow cake or whatever you call it, I don’t know what they called the product, and they had no idea what it was. But he told us. They had to tell us. We knew what they were working on because radiation was what we were doing. Dr. Morgan had just taken over the Health Physics Division at Oak Ridge from Herbert [ M.] Parker if you’ve ever heard of Herbert Parker. Herbert Parker was brought into the Manhattan District and he was a hospital physicist. He was an expert in handling radium samples and doing radium stuff. Actually he was an Englishman. He came over from England and he worked and he headed— moved from Oak Ridge to Hanford. And Dr. Morgan’s job had been during that period basically to train the young engineers that DuPont was bringing in to work in the Health Physics Division. They were mostly chemical engineers. There were a few electrical and so forth. And K. Z. [ Morgan] had a regular training program for them. He had a course thing. One day I was pawing around in some of the cases and found a whole training program written out. And we looked at it from time to time. It was very good. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Let me ask you a question here. Do you recall when he explained to you what was happening? What kind of words did he use? Well, he didn’t talk to us. This crazy security guy did. And he started out and he was kind of, I shouldn’t say crazy but he was a kind of an oddball, and he started out about all this secrecy and [ 00: 10: 00] You can’t tell anybody anything, particularly in Oak Ridge, and so forth and so on. And we had a little disadvantage. We couldn’t even mention radiation. Radiation instruments and the stuff about them was essentially classified. But around the lab, everybody was cleared at least to know all this, so the workmen and everybody knew there was something, they didn’t know what it was, and we had to be careful how we dealt with it. Dr. Morgan had a job for me to help maintain the instrumentation that they were using to protect the people. They had a group of military noncoms [ noncommissioned officers], what do you call them, sergeants, and he had trained them and they kept instruments in the various locations around the lab. The chemistry group were always spilling something and spreading radiation around, and the noncoms would be there with them to find out what had spilled and arrange for cleanup; also to help them when they were working with something that was really more radioactive than you like to have around and they would help and say, Hey, you can’t stay but ten minutes in here and so forth. My job was to keep those instruments working and calibrated. We didn’t do the repair. The instruments we maintained were ion chambers. The electronic instruments were just being developed. We had a good engineering instrument group starting up but they didn’t have them then in those days. I guess what I’m curious about is did they say you’re making this weapons- grade uranium for a bomb? Did you know that much specificity there? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 I don’t remember whether they mentioned “ bomb” or not. They talked about uranium and of course we knew that was what it was. And we knew about Los Alamos and we knew about Hanford. And as I say, my job was to keep the instruments working and available to the military noncoms. Actually it was a pretty simple thing. We had a young lady— actually she’d been a schoolteacher in Tennessee— and she drove the car around and every day she’d go to where these guys were located, take their instruments down, and calibrate them, and I would come along. If something didn’t work right, then my job was to get her the right instruments and see what was happening. It was a very simple arrangement but it was effective. We used radium sources calibrated by the National Bureau of Standards [ NBS] in order to provide the calibrations for the instruments. Dr. Morgan had been known because of his work in cosmic ray research and he had known Arthur Compton for example who was the head of the Manhattan plutonium project program at the time. And they knew about Dr. Morgan’s cosmic ray work, so that’s why they drafted him into [ University of] Chicago. That’s how the whole thing started. He started out in Chicago, moved his family there first, and then they moved to Oak Ridge when Oak Ridge was completed. When the war ended, nobody was sure what was going to happen. They were talking about the lab closing down. What do you remember about when the war ended? What do I remember? You mean the day? Yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 I remember that there was a huge party in Oak Ridge because the people there learned what they were working on. Most of them didn’t know, you see. And they had some tennis courts in the back of the dorms and somebody brought music out there and they had dancing, they had the biggest time you’ve ever seen. It was a real blowout for, oh, I guess a day [ 00: 15: 00] or so they had this thing going. It was kind of that simple. We heard, I guess, the surrender and heard the drop of the bomb and heard all that stuff like everybody else did. And I think a lot of it was coming from the New York Times reporter [ William L. Laurence] who did the write- up. Well, we continued on. At first they weren’t sure they were even going to keep the lab working, and they had a couple of contractors run it. Initially the lab was run by a joint venture between the DuPont Company who was building Hanford and the University of Chicago. And the University of Chicago people weren’t interested in running the facility in Oak Ridge for a long time because they were getting ready to build their own reactors in Chicago. And so the question as to whether the lab would stay in business and all that finally was settled some way. The lab was kept in business and they brought in a couple of contractors. The one I remember was Monsanto Chemical Company came in towards the end, and I don’t know who else they had in there. Eventually Union Carbide took it over because they were running everything else in Oak Ridge. They were running the production facilities. But it started out with Monsanto Chemical Company. And then they made Karl the head of the Health Physics Division at that time when they were doing all this switching around. By that time everybody and their daddy wanted to come down and see the place and see how it worked and of course see the reactor and how you did your work and so forth, so we spent a lot of time entertaining visitors. And there was also a lot of good work going on. People were coming up with good development, particularly in instruments and so forth. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Early after the war there was a controversy between the [ U. S.] Air Force and the [ U. S.] Navy. The Air Force said we did not need the Navy. I don’t know whether you recall this or not but, well, the Air Force generals were out talking about how there wasn’t any Navy needed anymore. It was all a battle, you know, all battling for money— and so that’s why they held the [ Operation] Crossroads experiment, by the way— to allow the Air Force to drop a couple of bombs on some of the ships. Well, they dropped one, I guess, one was underwater and they dropped one, and that was all set up to see where it was really that bad or what it was, of course, and they needed to learn information. They got a great deal of information out of it. Karl came in and said— well, they had set a date for the Crossroads experiment and that they had moved the date up. The president moved it up for some reason, I don’t know what. And we knew by then he wanted us to go out for it. He took a team of six of us out to fit into this already big health physics program they had to protect against radiation. So I got to go see the Crossroads underwater shot. We were really treated royally because we got first- class accommodations on the airplanes and General [ Leslie R.] Groves had the place well organized. Everywhere we went one of his officers, usually a colonel, would meet us and see that we got through the red tape and onto the next plane we were going on. It was a military plane. And we didn’t have anything remarkable happen to us at Crossroads. We had a lot of freedom and we looked around and saw a lot of the damage and so forth. You know what they did. They assembled a whole bunch of U. S., Japanese, and German ships and fighters and all and put them in the little Bikini lagoon. The bomb missed its point on the air drop. Somebody screwed around [ 00: 20: 00] with the, what do you call it, the bombardier’s equipment. He had it all set up and somebody screwed around with it the night before, reset it. He didn’t know it. He claimed he didn’t know it anyway. And so when he dropped they were several hundred feet off. The target ship was the USS Arkansas. And UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 so then we got there in time for the underwater burst. And that for me was an experience. I was a young kid here almost. And we got word that this thing had been moved up and we were going to have to leave. Originally we were going to fly to the West Coast from Oak Ridge and pick up military transportation from there, but we didn’t have time for all that, so they put us on the trains, which was the way people traveled. We got an overnight train from Knoxville to Washington and some Navy officer met us the next morning and took us down and checked us in the Willard Hotel, then he took us over to the Navy’s— were you ever in Washington? The Navy building was down there. It’s no longer there. It was one of the World War I temporary buildings. It was down about where the Wall [ Vietnam Memorial] is now, but on Constitution Avenue, and they had some medics there who gave us a bunch of shots and talked to us a little bit and checked us over to see that we didn’t have something wrong with us. And then they took us over, put us on an airplane at National Airport, and we flew to the West Coast. It was a military plane, one of their big four- engines. They were just beginning to fly them nonstop. But ours, we had engine trouble, so they had to land first in Kansas. And then we started going from there to— and in Kansas they changed planes and put us on another one, and they took us to San Francisco. And the Manhattan District, General Groves, that was a takeoff point for all of the shipping and everything that went there. We left all our clothes over at a military base there and got Army uniform types. We didn’t have any insignia but we just had uniform types. And took the next plane, I guess, overnight to Hawaii, and then from Hawaii over. And unfortunately the plane that was supposed to pick us up was delayed and so we actually sat up all night in the terminal waiting until they finally brought another plane in to go to Hawaii. And that was sixteen hours. I don’t know, it was a long flight, and when we got there, of course, we thought, well, they’re going to let us go to bed. And they said, you’ve got time enough to go down and take a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 shower if you want to but we’re going to leave so- and- so, so we didn’t have much time in Hawaii that time. And I was on the USS Haven [ AH- 12] which is a hospital ship and that’s where the Manhattan District had all of its safety and radiation stuff under the medical director. Of course he had been a professor at the University of Rochester in radiology, Dr. Stafford Warren, and Dr. Warren had brought a lot of his friends who had worked with the thing and we were all living in various quarters around the ship. It was the best ship to be on. They also had members of Congress, some of the VIPs up there, so they took the nurses’ quarters over. And we were there part- time, and the other time I was out on a destroyer. And we were assigned to different ships. But they were concerned about the water contamination, as they knew they would have some from the underwater shot particularly, so we’d follow the way the path was supposed to go and check it out, and we had some oceanographers with them. I [ 00: 25: 00] don’t know where they were from but they had some instruments and they would make measurements and we’d check what they brought up to see if there was any radiation in it and radio the information back to the Haven and they kept track of it. We never saw anything out there particularly. We were out there for several days floating around. But it was an interesting experience. You can just imagine, a young kid out here on an adventure. Yes! I don’t know that much about Crossroads, so with the underwater shot, what do you see? Where were you? Well, have you seen— in some of that material it shows a picture in the shot of it [ indicating personal documents and photographs]. It shows a ship. It was completely upended. A big ship. It was, not a tanker but something like a tanker. It was a merchant ship type thing. And they had a lot of contamination on the ships because of the water. The neutrons from the bombs activated UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 the sea water, the elements in the sea, so there was all kind of radioactivity. One experience was it turned out that some of the guys sleeping on the top bunks, we had to move them because the water lines went under the floor board on top of the bunks; and they pumped salt water throughout the ship because they used salt water for everything, so they were bringing in contaminated water. They had evaporators to make clean water, and they were very effective. In fact one of the jobs we had was to go down— one day they were repairing one of the evaporators— our job was to go down and follow the health physics side of it and be sure the guys didn’t get too much radiation and all; they had to take all this contaminated salt and all the other stuff out of the water and get rid of it and keep the evaporator working. We found out one thing that was kind of interesting. They were using salt water to clean the tables in the kitchen and so they had to stop that kind of stuff. But that’s the kind of thing you ran into. There wasn’t any real harm by it because they had enough guys running around with instruments to see, and you could get fair instrument readings almost anywhere on the ship, certainly on the outside, but it didn’t last long, a couple of days maybe, two or three. When I came back from Crossroads, I spent some time with— Dr. Morgan had put me in— one of the military guys had to be transferred to another job and so I took over what was then the personnel monitoring program. Personnel monitoring was the film badges and the pocket chambers. Everybody that entered the lab had to have a pocket chamber and a film badge, which was part of the identification system. And they had a little gatehouse- type thing and that was the clock alley. Everybody had to go through the clock alley and pick up their instruments, and if they were going into the forward area where the reactors and everything was, that was separate. You still had to go through another guard check and that’s where they really checked them to see that they had their instruments and their badges. And we had some trained people. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 This guy did a marvelous job of setting it up. He had some young ladies, yeah, they were all young ladies who would come in on the afternoon shift and they would read the pocket chambers and the film dosimeters. If there was anyone that showed up more than they should, we would go out the next day and say hey, what’d you do yesterday? and how’d you do this? and so forth and so on. What’s the difference between a pocket chamber and regular dosimeter? A pocket chamber was a small— they looked about the size of that pen you got, a black little chamber, graphite- coated. The pen was made out of plastic coated inside with graphite, and they [ 00: 30: 00] put a charged wire down the middle of that and that was electrostatic and it would hold, and whenever radiation would hit it, it would cause it to discharge and you had an instrument that you put that into and it would measure the discharge over the— and that was kind of the early instrumentation was based on that because that’s the way they did it. And the chambers weren’t so reliable, so we usually had to have everybody had to wear two instead of one. And then if the pocket chambers, if both of them showed doses, then we would process the film that night. Otherwise we’d do the film once a week because that was a much more reliable method of what the radiation dose was. So I was working on that program and we spent a lot of time— we began to look into how— what long- term, was there enough exposure, people getting enough exposure to cause any troubles. We had some statisticians and they had what they called a tolerance dose of so much, I think it was 100 millirem [ mrem] a day, at first, and then it was reduced. I don’t know what it is now but it’s gotten much lower. But we actually didn’t have many people who got much radiation. Every once in a while there’d be a big surge, somebody’d do something they shouldn’t do, a lot of them also would hang up their instruments before they’d go into the hot cells, there UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 was some of that went on. And sometimes you’d catch it; sometimes you didn’t. But I never heard of anybody on the staff really having a serious problem. In other places they did but we didn’t really have them there. And we got concerned about how good our calibrations were and how the instruments performed in different situations because they were energy dependent. If they were working with radium, they had one energy, basically, they’re working on. If they’re working on others, it’d be a mixture and the instruments would actually respond more to one than the other because of the energy dependence of the radiation that was coming off. So we decided we really didn’t know a lot about that and we didn’t have a good system for it. So Dr. Morgan took some of us to Washington— and it was right after the war and I’m sorry, I don’t remember the date— but Washington and the National Bureau of Standards were where the radiation safety had begun. And they had equipment and sources and all that stuff, so we made arrangements with the head of the X- ray Section, Dr. Lauritson Taylor, who I’ll tell you more about later, to come up and use his equipment and they did the measurements and all. I made several trips to Washington with suitcases full of instruments, we’d take them up there and expose them and take them back to Oak Ridge and process them and so forth. So it was just a way of being sure our instrumentation was— well, we were doing the best we could with the state of the art. And I did that, and then the boss came in one day and said that they wanted somebody to help them get started at this new laboratory in New York. They had set up the Brookhaven lab [ National Laboratory]. New England universities had all gotten together. You know the history of Brookhaven. So he wanted to know if I wanted to go up there and I said, Well, I don’t want to move out of the South. My home was only a few hours away from Oak Ridge and I could go home even on weekends and things if I had to. So I said, No, I don’t want to go UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 up there part- time. I’ll go up for a while. He said, Well, why don’t you go up for six months? So that was in 1946, I guess, ’ 47, and I went up that summer and spent six months in [ 00: 35: 00] Brookhaven and came back to Oak Ridge. And of course the job I had, somebody else was working on. And I stayed there a while and then I got an opportunity. The Manhattan District had been dissolved and the AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission] was taking over at that time, and they had followed the organizational structure of the— in the beginning, you know, the field offices— you know what the field offices do. The field offices, they administer the contracts. And the field office had a medical director, and then he kept in touch with the medical people and all. He wanted somebody to help him in the health physics area. So I decided I’d leave the lab. I wasn’t really set up to be a lab researcher, which if you want to continue you’d have to go back to school and all that. At this time I was sure I didn’t want to do that. So I took the job with him and I was there for a few months. This is the field office in Oak Ridge? Yes, Oak Ridge Operations Office [ OROO]. And then Dr. Taylor showed up. He was brought in by Dr. Shields Warren, if you know the two Warrens, who was the director of the AEC Biomedical Program. And they talked Dr. Taylor into leaving the Bureau of Standards on a leave of absence for a year or so and to come over and work for the AEC and help get the program started. And he’s well known in X- rays and radiation safety work and standards. So somehow out of the course of his [ work]— he was sent down to Oak Ridge to look into something and I of course was escorting him because I was the one that knew the place and I knew around everything. So somehow the idea got planted and I helped plant it to some extent that maybe I should go to Washington and work with him. And so soon after that the boss came in one day and he says, Hey, I got a request from headquarters to transfer you to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Washington. So on October 22, 1948 I got transferred to Washington and was there for the rest of my career in Washington, AEC, various places in Washington. And it was a very fascinating period. They were doing— the AEC was— first they started out that anything the Manhattan District had done was wrong. Then they kind of changed their mind and there was a little bit if that, not too much, because too many of the key Manhattan District people were also taken into the AEC— all the management, most of the guys, the colonels and all, the en