Interview with Joseph C. Behne, Jr., July 22, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Joseph Behne July 22, 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 Joseph Behne July 22, 2004 Conducted by Joan Leavitt Table of Contents Introduction: family background, military service in U. S. Navy, education, early work for Standard Oil and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL), finally moving to the AEC and the Nevada Test Site ( NTS) 1 Competition between LLNL and Los Alamos National Laboratory ( LANL), work at LLNL on nuclear ram jet engine 5 Transfer to weapons design work at LLNL, discusses how nuclear weapons are designed by mechanical engineers and how engineers and physicists work together in design 8 Outlines steps in weapons test design and execution 11 Baneberry: safety and containment, and formation of Containment Evaluation Panel ( CEP) 12 NTS: importance as an underground test site 14 Discusses importance of placing of diagnostic equipment, preparation of ground zero, and surface conductor in testing 16 Participation in the Joint Verification Experiment ( JVE): importance of using cables to collect data, experiences at Kearsarge ( U. S.) and in the USSR 19 Observations in the USSR prior to and after the fall of Communism 21 Recalls participation in the JVE at the NTS: acted as Test Director on Kearsarge, details work of Test Director and Test Controller, enumerates steps leading up to a shot 26 Talk about “ building the device” and work done by the laboratories and the NTS 34 Discusses evolution of Department of Energy ( DOE), compares it to the Atomic Energy Commission ( AEC), remarks on how presidential administrations affect evolution with regard to testing 36 Reflects on testing and the end of the Cold War 39 Post- shot work at the NTS: radiation monitoring, containment, measuring shock waves and debate over effectiveness of seismometry ( JVE), post- shot drilling to obtain samples 40 Conclusion: final thoughts on the JVE, opinion on the labs, analysis of shot results, evolution of diagnostics 45 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Joseph C. Behne, Jr. July 22, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Joan Leavitt [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Joan Leavitt: Maybe you could give me a little bit of your family history background, maybe your mother’s background? Joseph Behne: My mother’s family were residents of Texas from the time it was the Republic of Texas, about 1836. That’s where I was born, in Abilene, Texas. Deep roots in Texas, then. Right. On my mother’s side. My father’s side were immigrants from Germany who started out in the northern parts of the Great Plains, up in Nebraska, and migrated a little bit further south every few years. They wound up in Texas so my background is Texas. Both mother and father, then. Right. Deep roots there. You were born in Abilene. Did you have any siblings? I have a brother. Did you grow up there in Abilene, too? Until I was about ten years old, and then we moved to Dallas. But [ you] still pretty much stayed in Texas. Yes. And did you have any particular role models that maybe geared you towards engineering? No, it’s just something I always wanted to do. You saw a lot of oil drilling. Did you have any early work in that area at all? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 No, not early work, but I was a drilling engineer before I went to the [ Lawrence Livermore National] lab, for the Standard Oil Company of California. You had a number of different engineering— Right. Oil drilling and mechanical—? Well, I was originally interested in aeronautical engineering. In the [ U. S.] Navy I was sent to school to learn electronic engineering. When I went back to the university, I didn’t see any reason to study either one of those, since I’d already done it, so I changed to mechanical engineering, which is the broadest discipline of engineering. I went back into the Navy again and when came back I decided that I was really interested in the oil fields. So I went back to school and studied petroleum engineering. I had a little time left on my GI Bill and I was interested in physics, so I went to University of Colorado for a while and studied physics. My work jobs were first in aviation – then, of course, Navy work, if you consider that employment, the oil fields, Lawrence Livermore [ National] lab and then I associated with the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] for the rest of my career. And you came to them in 1956. Right. So that was just a couple of years after Nevada Test Site [ NTS] was set up. About the same time. Yes. It was a few years later. You spent two periods of time in the Navy? Right. I was in there right at the end of the Second World War, and then I was called back for the Korean War. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 It sounds like you got, between the GI Bill and— was it Navy training that also had you in the engineering- type work? Well, the first time I was in the Navy, they sent me to electronics school, and I got a very thorough education in electronics, strictly electronics, but in- depth because I worked in aviation radar. The Navy had shipboard radar and they had aviation radar. Since I was interested in aviation, I opted for the aviation electronics. And was that where you were acquainted with microwaves and radio waves? Yes. Because very uniquely in your video you talked about why you suggested the use microwaves instead of hardware. Right. And it just seems like you have such a, as you said, a generalist background that that brought a creativity to ask questions that some people hadn’t thought about. Right. I was always interested in the big picture, but besides the big picture, I could also get deeply interested in the details from time to time. Can you remember how you felt about the test site before you came to work at it? Did you even know it existed? [ 00: 05: 00] Well, yes and no, because at that time everybody knew that atmospheric testing was going on. The pictures were in Life magazine. Everybody knew that we were doing nuclear testing. I call it atomic testing, and it’s really nuclear testing. I knew that they were doing tests in Nevada, I knew they were doing them in the Pacific, and I knew about Los Alamos [ National Laboratory] because that was a story that everybody was hearing at that time. So did you apply for the lab and how did you find your way there? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 I was working in the oil fields in Kettleman Hills, California, in the Central Valley of California. It turns out that Lawrence Livermore lab was operated for two years by the California Research and Development Corporation, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, who was my employer at that time. That organization lost the contract for the Livermore site, and the University of California won the bid. They took over the Livermore site, and that was the beginning. They called it University of California Radiation Lab then. You talked about the different names that it went through over the years. Yes, about four different names. But there were a few people that were employees of the California Research and Development Corporation that wanted to stay employed by Standard of California. Some of them were reassigned to the oil field where I was working and they mentioned this place, Livermore, which I’d never heard of. I thought it was a strange name. But they told me about this research lab and as they described it, I knew it was very similar to Los Alamos. I was also interested in physics and doing big scientific experiments. Actually I applied for a job at Los Alamos first and they offered me a job, which I accepted. The oil business in 1956 was going through some worldwide disruptions. That’s when they had the war in Egypt and they sunk a lot of ships in the Suez Canal. People said the Suez Canal was going to be blocked for years. It was having drastic effects on the oil business that were not favorable to my career unless I wanted to go overseas. If it had only been me I would have been willing, but I had two young sons, about three and four years old. And if I took one of these foreign assignments in the petroleum business, there would have been no way I could have taken my family with me. That was just not an option. I was going to stay in the United States while my children were young. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 And so I looked around at other things to do. Aviation was kind of in a slump then. In fact, in 1956 a lot of things were in a slump. The Second World War had been over in 1945 and so things had been changing through those years. Was that when the boys were coming home from Korea, ’ 56? No, the war in Korea was still going on, technically. We had an armistice; we never settled it. But the fighting went on from 1950 to 1953. So yeah, that affected things. But anyway, I decided that maybe working at Los Alamos would be fun. I went up there and applied for a job. They made me an offer and I accepted it. I knew it was operated by the University of California and just before I was going to report to Los Alamos for work, I saw this ad in the San Francisco paper about the University of California Radiation Lab that was looking for engineers to work in Livermore. It said it was operated by the University of California so I made an assumption that it was just another branch of Los Alamos. I was totally wrong on that. I went to Livermore. In fact, I phoned them up and I told them, I’ve just accepted this job at Los Alamos and I wonder what the chances would be of being assigned to Livermore rather than Los Alamos. There was a long silence. [ 00: 10: 00] There was competition even then. Oh, there was fierce competition. And the guy said, I think we could work that out. And so I went to Livermore for an interview and they said, Yeah, sure, we can work this out. You can come here instead of Los Alamos. So I phoned Los Alamos to the guy I’d been coordinating all this with and I said, Well, I talked to your branch down in Livermore and they told me that I can get an assignment down there. And then there was another long silence and this guy says, Those blankety- blank, blankety- blank, blank. They didn’t like each other, did they? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Well, Livermore was being built at that time to be a competitor of Los Alamos. To make a long story short, Los Alamos at that time was still a government town. You could not own a private home at Los Alamos at that time. It was all government housing. And Livermore wasn’t. Livermore was a civilian town. And what I wanted to do was to build a house. I wanted to do it myself, and I could do that in Livermore and I couldn’t do it in Los Alamos. That was probably the main reason that I decided to take the job in California instead of New Mexico. That’s an interesting reason to do that. You had said that part of the steps of a nuclear test, one of the first ones, is physics Right. So were you involved in most of these steps, then? Well, from one time or another, but actually the first step is a need. Yes. You have to have—? Assignment. A job. Well, somebody has to need it. In the beginning it may have been just to see if it was physically and scientifically possible, but later on somebody in the government had to decide that they needed an answer to a problem for military reasons, for national security reasons. After that was decided, like needing a certain kind of weapon that met certain specifications, then the next step is physics, or to design the whole thing. Livermore did the physics part of it and there were other companies that did other things. So Livermore did that? And Los Alamos. Both of those. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Los Alamos and Livermore did the physics design for nuclear weapons. You said that that had to be done on computer and on paper. Well, you could do it without a computer. All the original calculations were made before computers were invented. They did them with slide rules. How long did you work on the designing physics end of things? When I first went to work at Livermore, I didn’t get into nuclear weapons immediately. I went there to work on nuclear rockets and nuclear ram jets. I was still interested in aviation then, so I didn’t go to the lab to work on weapons. But they had just started to design a nuclear rocket, with the idea of going to the moon with it. That sounded like fun so I started out on that project. After we’d been working on it a short time, the AEC decided to give the entire— Los Alamos was working on it, too— on a lot of things. Both labs started working at the same time in competition to see which one would come up with the best answer. But after Livermore had been working on it six months after I got there, the lab director told us that the entire project had been transferred to Los Alamos, but he said, But there’s another project they want us to start on from scratch, and that was a nuclear ram jet aircraft engine, which to me was a lot more interesting than the nuclear rocket. So Los Alamos did work on the nuclear rocket and they completed it and they tested it at the test site, and at the same time Livermore worked on the nuclear ram jet engine, which we designed and built and tested at the NTS. So my first work at the NTS was testing this nuclear ram jet engine that we designed and built in Livermore. [ 00: 15: 00] To step back just a second, you said that the test site did some experiments that had to do with the space program? Did I hear that right? Right. They tested a nuclear powered rocket engine that had to do with the space program. Did they do very much of that? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Well, they tested it until they proved that they had an engine that would do it. They proved that their engine would work. But we were working on a nuclear ram jet engine, and a ram jet requires air to operate, so it is a non- space machine. It has to stay in the atmosphere. We developed it and tested it and it worked nearly perfectly. I mean it met all the specifications. But about that time – by then it was about 1964 – the government decided that they wanted to put all their their money, all their effort, into space. So they cancelled all projects that had to do with engines that required air to operate. That was the end of the nuclear ram jet program. But we had completed our testing successfully, and so they either had to decide to go on to phase two or not do anything, and they decided not to do anything. Those assignments probably came more from the [ U. S.] Air Force, didn’t they? Right. And so there were about 250 people at the Livermore lab that had been working on this ram jet engine for years who suddenly didn’t have any assignment, and I was one of them. And what they did is they needed people in the weapons program. Some people were not interested and they left the lab. I decided I would give weapons a shot, and so one day I put everything in my briefcase and I walked from one end of the lab to the other and I was out of the ram jet business and into the weapons business. It’s nice that you could stay in the same building. Right. Well, not the same building but the other end of the lab. It turned out that is one of the nice things about the lab. I worked on quite a few different projects at the lab that in most cases I would have had to leave one company and go to another company, move to another town, but at the lab they had a lot of projects going on. You could change projects without having to change your employer or your work site, and so that was nice. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Did you continue designing weapons, or did you move into mechanical engineering somewhere along the way? Well, mechanical engineering is design of weapons. The physicists do all their calculations to determine what the nuclear weapon should look like. They physically define it. But that’s just a design on paper. Somebody has to convert that paper design into hardware, and that’s where the engineers come in. Usually physicists and engineers worked together as a team. The physicists would be doing the calculations of what they wanted the parts to look like, and the engineers would be trying to determine how and if these parts could be made – some of them out of very ordinary materials, other parts out of very exotic materials. The physicist was not restrained in any way and should not have been. They came up with whatever they thought would work best. And the mechanical engineers pretty much have to tell them this is not going to work? Occasionally, but it was amazing how many times we could do these things or suggest another idea, hey, we can do that if we really have to, but if you changed it a little bit, it’d be a lot easier for us, and would it still work for you? And sometimes they’d say yes and sometimes they’d say no. And this was something that went on for days and months and years because when the [ 00: 20: 00] physicists and the engineers would finally agree on what could be built, we would build it and take it to the test site and test it. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it barely worked. And so to design these weapons involved a number of tests because you would do one test and then you look at the results and you tweak the design and you build another one and you do that one. And you might do this quite a few times before you came up with what you thought was the best to optimize the design between physics and engineering, to come up with what could actually be built by the thousands and put into the stockpile. A lot of them never got to production. The ones that we tested were all, you might say, homemade. They UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 were made one part at a time and put together, because if we did that test and we wanted to change something, there was never any reason to build the first model, mod- 1. You didn’t have to build that again, but if the test came to a successful conclusion and the government still needed it by that time— sometimes by the time you finished, they decided they didn’t really need that; they wanted something else. But when the design was finalized and accepted, it would be sent to somebody else to put into production. What they called the physics package was what the lab designed. Other contractors for the Atomic Energy Commission would build the physics package, which is actually what you’d call the warhead or the bomb. Somebody else had to build the ICBM [ intercontinental ballistic missile] or whatever that you were going to put this thing into to deliver it. The delivery system was other people. Other contractors built the delivery system. Even today there’s a big difference between having a bomb— if you have a bomb, you still have got to have a way to deliver it. And in fact in most of the nuclear treaties that we have today, it’s really not a limitation on the number of bombs you have. It’s a limitation on the number of delivery systems you’ve got. Kilotons. The kilotons of it? No, that doesn’t matter. The limitation is on the number of ways you have to deliver it: how many bombers you have to deliver it. How many ICBMs you have to deliver it. If they limit you to a hundred ICBMs, you can still have as many bombs as you want in your bomb warehouse. The treaties have never tried to limit, as far as I know, what we call the physics packages, they limited delivery systems. I have been focusing a little bit more on the various tests, but it sounds like you’re talking about tests that might not be listed— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 They’re all listed. They all had a name. Every test had a name, and the name stayed with it forever. And so there’s a book which the DOE [ Department of Energy] has published, and it’s public information. It has the name of every test we ever— Of all of the tests. But some of these are weapons tests that were—? Right. We have done over a thousand tests, I think, and they’re for different reasons, and this catalog, you might say, tells in very general terms the purpose of the test, and it gives in a bracket the range of the yield of the test. All right. Because I have seen that book and now I’m trying to visualize the different columns, and that’s starting to be a little bit more meaningful to me. Right. One of the things that Nick Aquilina had mentioned was that in the earlier years, to go from the beginning planning stages of a test to execution maybe took three or four months, but towards the very end the planning and the execution could take several years to actually do. Did you see that progression? Yes. One test I was involved in took about eighteen days – I don’t have the exact number – about [ 00: 25: 00] eighteen days from the day they said they wanted to do this test until the day we did it. Towards the end, these things got so involved it took about three years. And depending on where you start to measure time, because when we were doing active testing, we had what you might call a stockpile of holes out at the test site. We drilled them in advance, and that might be done a couple of years before. We would drill the hole without any specific test assigned to it because we knew we were doing a certain number of tests a year and so we would speculate how deep these holes should be. This way we could keep the drillers employed year round rather than calling them in every time we needed a hole. And so depending on whether you include that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 drilling time or not, most tests I would say right now would take about three years. In fact, with so many regulations now, and so many reviews that have to be made, it would probably take a year or a year- and- a- half to go through all the reviews to get approval to do the shot, even if you were ready in three weeks. You had also listed the next step of a nuclear test as designing the diagnostics. Did you ever do anything with them? Oh, yes, I worked with them. Not in depth. When I was in the bomb design, I didn’t get involved with the diagnostics very much. As I moved on through other stages of nuclear testing, and especially when I became a test director, then I got deeply involved with the diagnostics because I had to be aware of what diagnostics were going to be on the test and who was going to do it and what facilities were needed to support these diagnostics. The diagnostics were very similar to the electronic work I had done in the Navy. In the Navy, I had worked on radar, which is basically the displays on a cathode ray tube, and early diagnostics, most of the diagnostics was displayed on cathode ray tubes. So that fit in with my experience that I’d had in airborne electronics in the Navy. You probably had experience in every single one of these steps, didn’t you? Most of them, yes, which made it fun. You really had this clear idea of where everybody was coming from and what everybody needed. Now these were just notes that I took from your video. But the next step, as I recall, was that it had to go through a containment evaluation. Well, that was later on. See, testing evolved. Testing went on for about forty years, and it changed a lot from beginning to end. And in the beginning there were hardly any rules or regulations, and the people that were working on it were all pretty young, most of them around UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 twenty- five or thirty years old. Forty years later, they are all sixty- five or seventy years old. Same people, a lot of them. But the main thing that changed was going from having no rules at all to having so many rules that it takes longer to show compliance with the rules than it does to do the test, and probably costs almost as much money in some cases. Now was this their effort to be safer? Right. All of this was safety, which is very important. I’m not saying it’s not important, but some of it started to get pretty redundant. But anyway, when we were doing underground tests, the whole idea is to keep all the radiation underground. We did a test and we had a bad vent. A vent is when the hot gases and radiation comes— Baneberry. You saw that one? That was an event called Baneberry. And so everybody realized that was unacceptable and we had to do more. We had done many, many tests that didn’t vent. This one vented, and the big question is, why did this one vent and none of the rest of them did? Why did it? It had to do with the geological [ conditions]. There was probably an underground fissure that we [ 00: 30: 00] didn’t realize was there, and so when the bomb went off it put all this high- pressure gas into a crack in the world that had been there for thousands of years but we didn’t see any evidence on the surface. On the other hand we weren’t looking for it because we’d never run into one of those at the test site. But this is when they decided that we did have to look for those kind of things in the future. Is that when they brought in geologists? Or had geologists been involved before? We had geologists around before but their task was different then than it was afterwards because when they formed this Containment Evaluation Panel [ CEP] that was physicists and geologists. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Physics is involved in all engineering and in most sciences. So we had geologists and physicists working together. And we had to take a lot more information when we drilled the hole and after we drilled the hole to supply to these people on the Containment Evaluation Panel. They had to do two things, of course. They had to determine what the forces would be when the bomb went off, and that’s kind of where the physicists got into it. And then whether or not we would contain them, and that’s where the geologists and the engineers got into it. So containment evaluation became a project that was almost as big an effort as anything else on the test. It took six months or a year to – do, from the time we took the data, evaluated it, and then we had independent evaluations. Each test would have a review by the Containment Evaluation Board, and they would write down their opinions about how successful the containment plan was going to be. If there was not enough confidence in it, they would send people back to the drawing board and say, We don’t think this should be approved. The laboratory who was going to do the test were the ones that were responsible to come up with a containment design, and if their design was unacceptable, it was up to them to modify it in whatever way it needed to be until it was acceptable. And then after each test, there were a lot of diagnostics on the test to determine how well the containment had worked. That’s what these other diagnostics are for. Yes, and so that’s another research and development program, because for this panel to be able to continue to do the best job they could of evaluating containment, they had to get data from each and every shot as to how well the containment plan worked. You had said that picking a location for a shot was extremely important, and you had also said something interesting about the Nevada Test Site area, that it had a very, very deep water table and that it allowed you to do shots that was unique at the Nevada Test Site. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Right, and that was just luck. When the Nevada Test Site was chosen, it was chosen as an atmospheric test site. Nobody gave any thought to underground testing. But we couldn’t have found a better place, geologically, to do underground tests. Now the Russian test sites are wet. In fact, most other test sites in the world, except the Nevada Test Site, you drill very deep and you run into water. The Soviets had to do many of their tests under water. Does that spread the contamination faster? No, I can’t say that. I don’t know if it does or not. If there is water there, you have to be concerned about whether the radioactivity is going to move when the water moves. And we did do some shots below the water table at the test site. And [ 00: 35: 00] there is concern today about where is it going? That’s another thing that’s unusual about the test site That water table – when you finally get to it, which is sixteen hundred feet deep in the flats and twenty- two hundred feet deep up on the mesa – that water seems to be almost stagnant. So it’s not very good water. Well, I don’t know if it’s good or not. It’s just not going anywhere. I don’t think it’s connate water. I don’t think it’s salt water. I never looked at the water analysis. I’m going to go look that up as a curiosity thing. Because there actually are a lot of springs, like in Lincoln County. You don’t have to go very far from the places where we did the testing at the test site and the water table is only sixty feet below the surface. A few miles away where the nuclear rocket test facility was the water table over there is only sixty feet below the surface. In Pahrump Valley, it’s about sixty feet below the surface. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 That is unusual, then, that the test site is so deep compared to areas that are not that far away from it. Right, and even though the surface of Nevada is, for the most part, very dry, it does have a lot of good subsurface water. But at the NTS, we were very fortunate that it’s not there. It was interesting when you said that a location has to be looked over for artifacts. Do you know about what year that that requirement came up? I’d be guessing. It’s not important. I would say it was at least twenty years ago. Twenty, twenty- five years ago. When you started bringing in archaeologists who would—? Well, there were amateur archaeologists that used to go out there and do it for their own amusement. But I don’t know when it became a government requirement. Probably came along with the other environmental laws or something. You said that the placing of the trailer part diagnostic equipment was also a very, very important part of the decision of location. Right. Yes. And then you talked about preparing ground zero. You just said a few minutes ago that the drillers could drill holes even if they hadn’t specifically planned a test at that time. That could be done in advance. Right. We stockpiled holes out there. You had talked about the surface conductor. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Right. That��