Interview with Robert W. Taft, August 5, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Robert Taft August 5, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Suzanne Becker © 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 Robert Taft August 5, 2004 Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Introduction: establishment of AEC ( 1946), goes to work for Security at Los Alamos laboratory ( 1947- 1952), family background 1 Radiation safety work at Enewetak and Bikini ( 1952- 1957) 2 Promotion to engineer at AEC Los Angeles office ( 1957), return to Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] Test Planning Branch ( 1962), work with NTS Planning Board 6 Job changes with Limited Test Ban Treaty ( 1963), becomes Chief of Test Planning Branch ( 1966) 8 Becomes director of Plans Division and executive secretary of NTS Planning Board ( 1968), impressions of Plowshare programs 9 Evolution of AEC to ERDA ( 1975) and then DOE ( ca. 1977) 10 Becomes assistant manager for divisions of Plans and Budgets ( 1977) 11 Becomes assistant manager for Energy and Conservation ( 1981) 12 Becomes assistant manager for Engineering and Safety ( 1984), later detailed as assistant manager for science at the NTS ( 1987) 13 Retirement ( 1988), consulting work on Johnston Atoll 14 Farming background in Iowa, military service ( U. S. Navy), examination for and work in security at Los Alamos 15 Work as senior executive advisor in Washington, D. C., impressions of atmospheric tests 16 Involvement with testing and cleanup in Amchitka, AK 17 Work with testing and cleanup on Enewetak and Bikini 18 Involvement with Baneberry ( 1970) 20 Evolution of changes in radiation safety measures 21 Discussion of waste disposal and Yucca Mountain project 23 Review of photographs and discussion of weapons stockpile 24 Thoughts on the future of the NTS, work with Desert Research Institute re: educating the public on testing 26 Impact of presidential administrations on weapons testing and antinuclear movement 29 Education ( engineering and science, Iowa State University, Notre Dame, and Northwestern) and military service 30 Conclusion: reflections on career 31 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Taft August 5, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 1, Disk 1. Bob Taft: The AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission] was established in 1946, and I went to work for security at Los Alamos, and they selected 350 people from thirty thousand for this particular group of people. And one of the things they did that really didn’t make any sense, they were much too selective and they went for much more qualified people than made any sense that eventually wound up being the guard force at Los Alamos. And our supervisors were all from the Massachusetts State Police. Suzanne Becker: In Los Alamos. No, from Massachusetts, and they brought them to Los Alamos to supervise this force. And they were not particularly well suited to work with that because they went and picked the smartest 350 people out of about thirty thousand that took the examination, and these people, a lot of them, weren’t really capable of handling that sort of thing. So they had a rough few years. I served in the horse patrol, in the jeep patrol. I flew in the air patrol in the airplanes. And then I messed around with various guard posts and stuff up there. And this was in Los Alamos? And that was from 1947 until 1952. OK. Can I stop you for a minute? Sure. What were you doing prior to that, before you went out there? Well, I went back to the farm in Iowa, which incidentally I just sold this year, a few months ago. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 So you’re from Iowa. I’m originally from Iowa. I was there only about a year. My father and mother were alive, and my sister, then. And I went and took this test and took the job, and I wound up with forty- three years which I’ll generally describe. Little did you know. And while we were at Los Alamos, a very strange thing happened. They gave all the people there in the guard force the Army General Classification Test, and they were going to use it to qualify them afterward and try to find a proper level to do it. And I scored 156 on this test, which is the highest they’d ever tested at the time. An unusual thing. And I have no idea how or why it was so high or that sort of thing, but that’s the way it worked. You were obviously well suited for it. And in 1952, the Albuquerque Operations Office [ ALOO] sent me to Enewetak. And the job was principally radiation safety. And I arrived two days after the Ivy/ Mike shot, which was an eight megaton; the last one there and the eight megaton shot that they fired on the north end of the atoll. OK. So you were there for the testing during that— Well, not that time. I wasn’t there for the testing in 1952, but I was there for nearly all the overseas testing afterward. I did not go to Christmas Island, where the testing was done there, but I did nearly all of it at Enewetak and Bikini. So how was that? What were your impressions of it then? Well, I didn’t think it was all that bad and I still don’t. But we displaced all those people at the time and moved them to other places and took them off of this island and really tore their atolls all to pieces. And then they eventually brought some of them back now. And I don’t care to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 particularly get involved in the righteousness of removing those people and doing all these things. As a matter of fact, we exposed a lot of those people rather significantly from the island we moved them to and not from where we were. So there was more exposure from the testing on the islands where they were relocated to? Well, there was a very high exposure from one test at Bikini. They got hit with one test at Bikini [ 00: 05: 00] which caused us to move them all again. And I wound up doing a bunch of looking at the exposures and doing the things with these people, and also going into their islands after they had been taken away. And we wound up for one phase, we caught a pig that was left there and lived and brought it back, and another gentleman who just died here, oh, about a month ago, named Henry Slacks. He took this pig and took it back to the United States, where they did a bunch of things with it. And it lived on one of the contaminated islands. So they did that sort of thing. To check for contamination and that kind of thing? And I didn’t think that the contamination there was enough to cause terrible problems, although it is many, many times what’s allowed today. My personal exposures during this period of time— I was looking at them the other day and only about half of my total exposures are listed, because for one reason or another, back in the old days, some of it was lost. But my total exposure was between 20 and 30 R, and my real lifetime exposure is probably on the order of 40 to 50 R, which is quite high by the standards you look at today. And we were then limiting ourselves to 15 R per year. So you were significantly over. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 But 15 R per year, and I never went over the quarterly or the yearly limits, but I worked at those levels for quite a period of time. And I’m reasonably sure that it has had no great effect on my life. The argument is made now that that’s clearly enough to affect some people. Right. Yeah, there are definitely reports where people say they are sick. And I try not to sound to pro one way or another on this, because I have no intention of ever filing any claims or doing anything. That’s a little crazy, as old as I am now, to believe that it has ever hurt me, even though some people— there aren’t many people left alive in the world today with as high exposures as I have had. But that doesn’t mean anything in particular. That just means that they all got old and died. Right. Or you have very good genetics. Well, that’s hard to say. So you were out there. You got out there right after Mike. Right after Ivy/ Mike. I took over the radiation function and I wound up doing surveys of the island and the atoll, outfitting people who had to go collect samples, and I collected samples. I supervised the collection of about twenty tons of debris that came off of the Ivy/ Mike shot, and we shipped it back to— it went back to Livermore, and Dr. [ Glenn T.] Seaborg, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, who later became the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He arranged to separate from this stuff we sent back, he separated and named the element lawrencium, and this is up past the hundred mark on the chart, which they’ve gone well beyond today with these various artificial ones. But that’s the first time they’d found laurencium, and he found it and named it from this debris. And what is that exactly? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Oh, it’s just a heavy element, is all, and it’s not within my capability to understand what it is and how it works. But it had never been produced, as far as they know, and so he found it and got it from that. [ 00: 10: 00] And I stayed at Enewetak and Bikini off and on from 1952 to 1957, with only about 20 percent of the time spent in the States in between various periods of time from four to— my longest stay was nine months. But I’d come back for a month or so and then go back out. And so I spent a lot of time at Enewetak and Bikini. So you went out there primarily as— Radiation safety. Right. And cleanup. But I also wound up, in the later years of that, being the project engineer on some islands, if we didn’t happen to have one out there at the time ( an engineer). So we lived in aluminum buildings at Enewetak. We lived in tents at Bikini. Wow. Well, they were nice tents, though. It wasn’t a bad way of living. In the surveys, we mostly used helicopters, but sometimes boats. They were the early days of the helicopters, and I wound up in several helicopter incidents and accidents, but none of them hurt me or none of them were fatal. Yeah? What were some of those? Well, they just had engine failure and we went in, that��s all. A little frightening, I would imagine. But the helicopters then weren’t as reliable as they are today. Right. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 And in 1957, I was promoted to the job of engineer at the Los Angeles branch office [ AEC] in California. And mostly we overviewed the management of H& N [ Holmes and Narver], which were the architect/ engineers for much of the work of the test site, but they also were the managers of Enewetak during those years. Right. And is that Holmes and Narver? That’s Holmes and Narver. In 1962, I came back to the Nevada office, and I moved into an old office down on Main Street. It’s a little, bitty, small building down on Main Street. Is it still there? Well, I think the building might be still there. I haven’t looked in years. But we were only there for a few years. And I was working for the Test Planning Branch for the project office. And the major work was we wrote the authorization for NTS [ Nevada Test Site] programs. We provided the funding for the programs. And we controlled the program size and cost, or tried to. And mostly we did well. I began at that time working with NTS Planning Board, which is a board of people, at that time chaired by Dr. Alvin C. Graves. Vice chair was Roger Batzel from Livermore. And they were the people who looked, as an advisory role, to the manager of Nevada, who at that time wasn’t the same level as the manager is now or was the last ten or twenty years. And each of these people were the head of their test group that did tests at the test site. But here they were sitting as an advisory group to the manager of NVOO, to help him tell how to balance the program; and how to put the thing together so that they could do most of all of what they want to [ 00: 15: 00] do and still live within the functions and the money that was appropriated on any individual year and that sort of thing. And they also looked into safety studies, and they did a lot UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 of things. It was a very difficult thing to do because these people did not in any way feel they were subservient to the government or anybody else. They were very high level people in their laboratories. They did a really marvelous job. There was a considerable amount of dissertation that went on during the meetings, but when they all finished…. Then I wound up from about that time on for years writing the minutes to these meetings, and managed to get them to agree to all the stuff. I managed to sort everything out and get all the things they agreed on and put it together. And I did that for a number of years. And I later became executive secretary of that planning board when I became a division director. So essentially, during that time, that board advised the test site or the managers of the different tests. Advised the manager of the test site. And because of the unusual way that I got— the executive secretary at that time was a guy named Bob Miller. He’s a very old guy. I think he’s down to his last year or so in life, and he lives in Oklahoma. His wife died a year or so ago. And I worked for him for a lot of years. He was a very interesting guy and turned out to be a fairly controversial guy in this office. How so? Well, he pushed his weight around and he had the ear of the manager, and a lot of people didn’t— not everyone liked him, but I think he overall did a pretty good job. But he did well for a bunch of years, and then he quit and finally wound up working for Holmes and Narver. And then he wound up working for other companies in Oklahoma. Doing similar things? No, no, working on regular engineering jobs and things. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 To give you an idea of how much I thought of Al Graves, who was the chairman of this board, he’s one of the few people that I have a portrait of in my office. Right now, there’s something in front of it, but I have a portrait of him. I showed you a couple of pictures of him that were there with Jim Reeves. He was just a marvelous person and I wound up thinking a lot of him. During all the years of his life, I wound up fairly close in working with him and his things. After Graves, Batzel chaired the planning board, and after Batzel, it was a guy named Bill Ogle, which is the guy that took the job that Graves had before he died. William Ogle. He’s dead now, too. He died up in Alaska. He was married to the daughter of the guy [ who owned Reeve Aleutian Airways]— she’s still alive, and she’s the principal owner of Reeve Aleutian Airways now. And I visited her when I came back to Alaska from the Aleutians, just to stop and say hello. Well, I flew in on one of her charter airplanes. In 1963, in August, the Limited Test Ban Treaty came to be. And that was the treaty that [ 00: 20: 00] limited everything we had been doing, partly atmospheric, for all the prior years—[ it] all went underground. And it was in August they passed it, and effective in November, all tests went underground. In 1966, that’s four years later, I became chief of the Test Planning Branch. And I supervised all of the branch effort and continued the planning board support. Can I ask a quick question? I’m wondering how your job changed, or if it did at all, with the Limited Test Ban Treaty, when things went from atmospheric to underground. It didn’t change a great deal. It became more difficult because we went onto testing year round under those kind of circumstances, and we had a yearly program to manage and fund. It became more difficult to live with the funds that we had in any particular year than it had during the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 periods that we got all the money and DoD [ Department of Defense] and AEC got together and did a test and then quit for a while. They were only testing about a third of any year back in those days. So you were able to get money and then put that into testing, whereas when it went underground, it was more continuous? It was more continuous and it became a different type of management problem, but it wasn’t that much more difficult. It was a lot more difficult early on for the people doing the testing, the laboratories. They’d done a few underground tests and they were learning how to diagnose them and how to get things from them. But they eventually wound up being able to get as much from that as they did the others. Well, I was only two years the chief of that branch, and then in 1968 I became the director of Plans Division, which is the division— this was one of the branches. And at that time, I became the executive secretary of the planning board. And the director of the Plans Division, the people who worked for me had wound up doing all the things I’d done in all those years. But in addition to that, we had the Plowshare programs and all the other various programs that the NTS— what I’d been involved in before. What did you think of the Plowshare programs? What was your impression of that? Well, it was a very interesting program. They did a few atmospheric nuclear tests in the early days, and they did underground tests at various places, including southern New Mexico and one in northern Nevada, one in northern New Mexico, a gas stimulation thing. And they did a bunch of things and they looked all right, but it became fairly obvious that they weren’t going to use nuclear weapons at this point in our life; at least, they weren’t going to use nuclear explosives to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 produce gas and things like that, even if they worked. And it became consistent with the general feelings of the world over the effects of nuclear debris and nuclear things on people. They were sort of gauging, in general, the populations’ attitudes toward it at that time? Well, the whole world’s attitude towards exposure and doing things related to nuclear had changed. You have only lived long enough, I believe, to see it since it’s become a very restrictive thing. It became restrictive during all these years that I was working. And I think that by and [ 00: 25: 00] large, it was probably the right thing to do, but I’m not an adamant believer in everything being as safe as we are today. I support it, but I’m not sure it was all entirely necessary. You think we’re over- precautioned right now? Well, maybe we aren’t, too, you know. Maybe you’ll have to live a few hundred years to know. Not live that long, but you’ll have to put a hundred years or so of things behind you to know whether there was any real effects of this. Most of the effects that you hear being blasted by the radio and by the politicians and everybody trying to either promote, or the other case, the ones that want to stop all the things we’re doing now, I figure that most of those are just pushing political positions that are not particularly related to reality. But again, it’s not my business to say anymore. In 1975, AEC became ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration [ Agency] for two years. And two years later, they became the Department of Energy [ DOE]. And ERDA was an interesting experiment, as far as I could tell. By then I was going to Washington and doing a lot of things, and I got to be back there while all the change was taking place. And since it didn’t last very long, I believe that ERDA was not the sensible solution. DOE was the sensible solution, and eventually it became that way. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 What was ERDA like for those two years? Oh, it was pretty much just renaming the AEC but slipping a few other jobs into it. In many ways, it wasn’t much different, but they tried to bring all the new things that had come about by limiting testing and the way they were doing business, and it became a more complicated way of running the business. And ERDA never really became a very formidable agency, just because it didn’t have time to grow and become one. And as I said, two years later the Department of Energy came to be. And in 1977, I became assistant manager for Plans and Budgets. And that was the first super grade job. I think that was a grade 16 and that was a super grade job before they had the SESs [ Senior Executive Service]. Super grades now are SESs, but back in the old days, they used to have all of the people in government service were somewhere between GS- 1 and GS- 18. And GS- 16 was only two from the top, as high as you could go in the professional services of the government. At that time, I had working for me the Plans Division, which is what I’d had before, which is all the planning business. We did all the authorizations and all the programs, [ and] the Budget Division, which is the one that provided the funds that the Planning Division wound up authorizing and putting together. And at that time, I also got E& C Division. And what is that? That was Engineering and Construction Division. It was an engineering division. And also I had the Peaceful Application Division, which was the division that did Plowshare. I also had the Classification Office, for no other reason than I messed around with classification half [ 00: 30: 00] my life and nobody else wanted the job— or you couldn’t get anybody else to take it. In 1979, I converted to SES, which is an SES, Level 4. In the senior executive service, there’s levels one through six. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 So you were pretty up there. Yeah. It’s the same idea and the same money and everything about it is generally the same as the grade 16 was, the level 4. But they just call it something— Well, you could’ve kept the grade 16 if you really wanted to, but I think it would have been limiting on your career. They were trying very hard to get rid of the GS super grades, as they called them. In 1981, I became assistant manager for Energy and Conservation. And I wound up with the Geothermal Division; I handed the geopressure program, which was looking for gas in the high pressure water in the high pressure programs of the Gulf; Waste Isolation Division; I had decon and decommissioning; fossil, solar, and all the energy forms. And at that time, I had an office that worked for me in Houston, Texas, as well as the one at the test site. That was the office of a couple of guys, engineers who we had on the rigs, both offshore and onshore down there, looking at the high pressure gas and water. And there actually is still one or two of the wells that we had that are still producing down there. I’m sorry, what area was this? Near Houston. They were in Texas and Louisiana, which is the only place you have the high pressure gas in this hemisphere. And they’re still down there? Well, it had never been produced before, because you’re getting it out of water at pressures of about 5,000 psi, pounds per square inch, and depths of from eighteen thousand down to twenty- five thousand feet. And it was a horrible thing. We drilled the holes and produced all the wells. Up until that time, the main thing that ever happened, whenever they drilled into this thing, was UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 to figure out how to plug it off as quick as they could to keep it from blowing up in their face. And we were the first ones to ever try to produce the thing and deal with it. And it was a tough, tough deal. And it has not turned out to be a good source of energy, but in doing something like a dozen of the holes, we wound up with a couple of them that did produce enough over a long period of time to be capable. Because the prices of gas went up and that sort of thing. But we’ve not ever done much with that, have we? No, it’s all over with. And they try very hard to stay away from the geopressure of water, which has a tremendous amount of gas in it. But it’s terrible stuff to produce, and you have to build a very good well to deal with it. In 1984, I became the assistant manager for Engineering and Safety. I wound up having a lot of divisions working for me and about seventy- five employees. I had the Engineering and Energy Management Division, which is the outfit that, in addition to engineering things and stuff at the test site, they did all of the plant projects— where if you build a [ 00: 35: 00] building or something, they engineered it and let a contract for it. We had all of those. Health Physics Division, which is the Radiation Safety Division. And Management Evaluation Division, which had mostly the things that had been in the Plans Division and some of that sort of thing. They moved the Budget Division at that particular time, and Plans became Management Evaluation. Safety and Health Division. Waste Management Project Office. That was the one that worked on waste management projects around the country. In 1987, I was detailed to the manager as assistant manager for science. I was the only person in the job, and it was just a holding thing till they could figure out how to run me off. I had run into enough in the course of my entire life and one thing or another, as you’d expect. I had a lot of friends and a few enemies. And, you know, as administrations changed and that sort UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 of thing, sometimes people who were your friends became your enemies, and sometimes your enemies were more political than real. But it was that sort of thing— and it was time I got out of the business. I had about forty years of service before then. And so that gives you an idea of— and I retired on February 2, 1988. And I have done some consulting since then, but not more than the first three or four years. And I worked for several companies. Doing consulting locally? Well, I went back to Johnston Island, and I moved around the world a little for them and did things. I hadn’t mentioned, but Johnston Island, we’d been managing that for a bunch of years, since they did some high altitude tests there and stuff. That’s about all. That’s a rough idea of where I’ve been and gone. And I’m having a tough time remembering the details of all of this sort of thing like I used to. Like when I used to have to go give a speech on that deal of the history of the weapons program and talk about that whole thing in one set. Well, I could not do that anymore. In the first place, I don’t remember it, and I don’t have the way of finding out. Well, it’s not of interest to me anymore. And I’m far past being terribly directly interested in what’s going on now. I’m getting too old. Right. Well, it seems that it’s changed a great deal, just in the past ten, fifteen years. Oh, it’s changed a lot. Well, that’s enough on the record. Well, I can stop this at any time, too. No, no, no, that’s all right. I think that the Department of Energy isn’t as exciting nor as useful as it once was. And I may be overstating the case when I say that, but most of the people— they use a lot of people to do very little work nowadays. This seems to be a very common thread in many branches of government. Well, that’s about what I have. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Well, if you don’t mind, I have a couple of questions that I’d like to go back and just get a little more from you on. [ 00: 40: 00] Sure. First of all, I’m interested in going all the way back to when you were working security for Los Alamos. I’m just wondering, and you touched on it a little bit, if I could find out a little bit more about what were you doing prior to that? You said you were in Iowa. Well, I was on the farm. I came out of the Navy and back to the farm, and I worked on the farm for almost a year, and that’s it. OK. And then you found out about—? Well, I found out about this, and I went and took the examination and became one of the 330 selected out of thirty thousand. [ laughter] And it turned out what we got was entirely different than what we thought we were going to get out of that deal. It was a grossly oversold program that never came to pass. What initially interested you in it that made you—? I don’t know. It was just doing something different. I went through and became an officer in the Navy. And I came out of the Navy and went back to the farm. Working on a farm with my father and working for other farmers around there wasn’t particularly— didn’t seem very satisfying to me, so when I saw this examination— and [ when] they went through the spiel they went through for taking the examination, it looked like a good deal. So I went and took the examination, passed it, and wound up going to work for them. And how was it different once you got out there? Well, it never became the thing that they had mentioned when they set the thing up. It became a guard force, and while I was lucky enough to have a lot of interesting jobs in the guard force, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 like outer perimeter patrol and horse patrol and air patrol and all those things, I didn’t have to put up with the most boring part of the thing. So I worked for more years than kind of made sense. But then the other stuff started happening and I just followed the drift within the AEC. And it all worked out very well. I’ve wound up briefing the Secretary of Energy. I’ve briefed congressional— Yeah, you mentioned earlier that you spent some time in Washington as well? Well, I used to go to Washington as often as once a week. What were you doing? Oh, briefing people, and picking up information, and then briefing on things. Once you get in to become a senior executive in government, the chances are you’re going to go to Washington once a month or more, and be there as they pull your strings. I mean there’s not a lot of people above you, and they have a lot of say- so. Right. I guess the other question I had was if you could talk a little bit more about your experiences. One, you obviously saw a lot of atmosphere tests, and I was wondering, literally, what your impressions were. Just looking at pictures of them and hearing people describe them, it sounds like a very amazing and intense experience. Well, they were amazing things. And they were interesting, but we wound up doing enough of them overseas and other things that they didn’t— generally speaking, you weren’t overwhelmed by it. Then you had work to do and you went and did it. So it just became sort of run- of- the- mill. Well, it never was totally run- of- the- mill during the atmospheric days because there were difficulties. And the later years of the atmospheric program, i