Interview with Raymond Chester Harbert, April 3, 2006

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Raymond Harbert April 3, 2006 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 Raymond Harbert April 3, 2006 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: discussion of radiation exposure and claim for exposure in both NTS and the Pacific 1 Works for Holmes and Narver as chief project engineer for LLNL, works on Operation Hardtack I, then assigned to Plowshare projects in Alaska 4 Talks about Blue Sky Conferences and Plowshare projects 5 Travels to Alaska to work on Chariot ( Plowshare – harbor building) and talks about Edward Teller’s Plowshare work and various projects contemplated under Plowshare 6 Work on Gnome ( Plowshare— conversion of nuclear energy to electricity) in Carlsbad, NM 13 Talks about work with Gerald Johnson and Charles E. Violet 16 Work with Robert Petrie on Project Gnome 17 Talks about Chariot, meeting with Alaskan communities to address concerns about radioactivity, and reasons for ultimate cancellation of the project 19 Discusses disagreements with author Dan O’Neill, including consequences to native populations in Alaska, O’Neill’s remarks about Edward Teller, and O’Neill impugning their motives in Plowshare testing 21 Advocates for nuclear power plants and the place of engineers and engineering in society 26 Talks about building the camp for Chariot in Alaska, including stories and finding of artifacts in the Ogoturuk Valley 29 Describes a possible Plowshare project in abandoned Kennecott copper mines in southern Alaska 34 Description of Ogoturuk Valley, Alaska and adventure stories there 36 Talks about Gnome in Carlsbad, NM 37 Discusses Cowboy ( underground tests and seismic signal) in Mississippi, and talks about culture in Mississippi ( early 1960s) 39 Describes Vintage in Rifle, CO ( Plowshare— oil shale) 42 Talks about Edward Teller’s idea for a sea- level canal in Colombia ( Plowshare) 44 Discusses Peacock ( Plowshare— underground caverns for storage of petroleum products) 45 Conclusion: talks about true objectives of Plowshare projects and the work he did on them 47 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Raymond Harbert April 3, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Right. So when you’re looking at compensation, you’re looking for both the [ Nevada] test site and the Pacific? Is that what your claim is? Raymond Harbert: The accumulation of both. There’s not separate compensation for each one, but they have to look at the totality of the exposure. [ Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation]. So when they [ DTRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency] say they’re not ready to do the Pacific yet, they’re saying they’re still working on the— Methodology of evaluating the amount of exposure that you had, and they’re concerned with the radii that you were exposed to. If you recall in our last conversation, I talked about that individual that worked for me that died of cancer, and that it’s always bothered me because of the paper I had to write on it. And not knowing enough. I wasn’t qualified to even respond to that. All I can tell you is the type of work and where we were. So you put this claim in, you say, over a year ago? Yes. Now that I asked you the question, I’m sorry to hear that. Yes, they say, we’ve got your complete work history, we have the records that REECo [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company] keeps, the actual radiation exposure. Right, at the test site. At the test site and in the Pacific both. And in the Pacific both. OK. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 But they were rudimentary in those days, and a lot of the times you didn’t even wear film badges. You were in low- level radioactive areas and you didn’t even wear them. You didn’t wear your film badge, you’re saying? Yes. And when I went into those islands after the Bravo shot, all you wore for protection were booties. And when you came back and when you got aboard the [ USNS Fred C.] Ainsworth [ AP- 181]— they had a barge there, a RADSAFE [ radiological safety] barge— the LCM you were on tied up to the barge and you went in and took a shower, took the booties off, got back into clothes and went on back upstairs, boarded the ship and went up and jawed with the guys. And most of the people did not go ashore and stayed on board. Later, as we got ready for the next shot, I was sent over to the [ USS] Bairoko [ CVE- 115], which you couldn’t spell. Thanks for reminding me. I got you the correct spelling. I know you did. From there we flew out on helicopters to ground zero and refueled a generator just before the shot. The islands were already radioactive from the Bravo shot, and it’s because they had to get the shots off, you had to go in there; I came back one day and they said, [ You] can’t return anymore, and by that time I had recorded over about 4.5 roentgens { REM, Roentgen Equivalent Man], I guess, somewheres up in there, 4.8 roentgens. [ As of 2007, NIOSH estimated exposure of 10 REMs minimum]. Now at the time that they tell you that you can’t go in anymore, and you leave, I’m trying to connect with what it’s like then and when did you actually begin to get skin cancer? About a year later. Really! That soon. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Or maybe two years later. I started developing it— the first thing I developed after I left there was fungus in my hands. But we were in the tropical environment and everything. And I fought that for two or three years. Then, I guess it was later than that, I guess about five or six years after that. And it started on my back, not my face. And I had some, and then I got some on my arms in Tulsa. I had those removed, but I can’t get records for them, because records only [ 00: 05: 00] go back seven years. I had the same doctor that removed the last four, I had four removed about four months ago here on this side here. The side of your head. And he had removed about three or four about ten years ago, but he doesn’t have any records of that because he moved and the records had been destroyed. He only has to keep them, I think, for five years or seven years. But he did have records on one other that he removed for me, plus these four. I had two removed by the Cancer Center over here; and I had a big one on the back of my neck removed by Doctor Julio Garcia, I don’t know whether you— he’s a plastic surgeon, and he’s the one who put that guy’s ear back on that got bit off in the boxing match. But I wrote to Tulsa where I had quite a few removed back there. They didn’t even have a records center back there and I can’t find any records there. I had some removed in Burbank or Bakersfield [ California]. I couldn’t find them there. I had two cancerous growths removed in San Clemente [ California] and I can’t find any of them there. And all I can send them is the documentation I’ve got and I sent them a letter saying, you know, I had about another thirteen or fourteen removed and I don’t know. But they crop up on me all the time. I think I’m getting another one right up in here but— On your forehead. Wow. But anyway. What I thought— you haven’t started yet, have you? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 No. What I thought is— Well, I did leave that on, but let’s pause it if you want to— OK. [ 00: 07: 09] [ Pause] [ 00: 07: 12] Now we’re going. All right. My assignment with Holmes and Narver in 1957, ’ 58 after I had left Nevada Test Site [ NTS] was as chief project engineer for Lawrence Radiation Lab [ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. In that function, I handled all the criteria and converted it into construction drawings and other types of support that Livermore needed. I worked with an engineering group up there headed by Cliff Bacigalupi and Bob Petrie. And I would go up there for meetings. The project I immediately was involved in was the next series of the tests in the Pacific, which was [ Operation] Hardtack. Hardtack I, I guess. Hardtack I, and we went out there prior to the first shots to make sure everything was coordinated and they had all the support that they needed. So I went with Cliff and Bob Petrie and a couple of the Livermore people to the Pacific. I was there for about ten days. I returned with Rube Alvey, our vice- president, engineering at Holmes and Narver. When we got back to Los Angeles, I was called into Chuck Kelly’s office, the vice- president of operations, and Chuck Kelly said, We would like you to head a new project that Livermore has. And I asked him what it was and he said, A program that was near and dear to the heart of Dr. Edward Teller and it was called Plowshare, peaceful applications of nuclear energy, and because you know all the engineers there and most of the scientists, we think you’re the ideal man to handle this, so you’ll be chief UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 project engineer and program manager for Plowshare for Holmes and Narver, and you leave tomorrow to go to a meeting at Livermore, at which you will represent the company. They’re getting ready for the first project, which will be in Alaska, and it is called Chariot. So I packed my bag and went up to Livermore and was briefed on what was happening and what the schedule was. A little more I learned up there was that they wanted me to participate in what are called [ 00: 10: 00] Blue Sky Conferences. These are conferences that are not limited in scope or practicality but could use the phenomenology of nuclear detonations to the benefit of mankind. When they discuss the phenomenology, they’re talking about pressure from the explosion, shock waves, they’re talking neutron bombardment, they’re talking about the immense heat that comes off a nuclear— capturing those elements of the nuclear detonation and using it to help mankind. It really thrilled me because I had come from a war [ WW II], I was involved in the Cold War for nuclear testing, and now I could do something really meaningful for mankind, and I was thrilled by it. It was probably the most rewarding assignment I’ve ever had in my life, was working with it, and having a chance to work with Dr. Teller and his people who were great. Some of the programs in the first Blue Skies Conferences they were talking about were developing a canal across the Boothia Peninsula which is in the northern part of Canada, which when completed would open up the Northwest Passage to shipping. That was a possibility. Another program was at the atoll of Kapingamarangi in the Pacific, and the problem they wanted to solve there, Kapingamarangi Atoll has no deep water passages to allow ships to enter the lagoon and is pretty much locked away from the sea. The Polynesian’s main product in dealing with the commerce of the world was copra, the fibrous husk from the coconut trees there they would harvest the copra, but then they would have to lighter it on the open seas out to the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 ships. A lighter, it’s like heavy canoes or some other thing to take it from the shore to the ships at sea. The problem with that was that storms would come up while they were out there and many of them were getting killed, so the concept was to open up a passage in the reef which would allow the ships to come into the protected harbor, and then they could onload there. Another one was— I didn’t get involved in this, but it was an early one— opening up the Nile. The Nile was not navigable up too far, and this was before the Aswan Dam was built, and they were talking about using small nuclear detonations along the way to open up the rapids so that commerce could go up and down the Nile River. Those were the type of projects that were discussed in Blue Sky. My job was to work with the engineers from Livermore and the scientists to see what the practicality would be and what the support they would need to carry out those projects. As it turned out, Chariot was the first project, and I was told we were to leave in about a week, ten days, and to go home and pack and get everything ready. I flew up to Seattle [ Washington] and I got on a plane and I was with Dr. Teller and his wife. The flight was from Seattle to Anchorage. And I had a very interesting conversation with them. It was enjoyable. You can’t— when you’re in the presence of a mind like his, you’re just overwhelmed— so I did more listening than I did talking. When we got to Anchorage, Teller left for a meeting with Mike Stepovich, I believe that’s his name. He was the governor of Alaska at that time. That was while it was still a territory. And he flew over to meet with him at the capital at Juneau. In the meantime, the rest of the [ 00: 15: 00] entourage I was with, Sam Howell was with me from my company and there were a couple of scientists from Lawrence Radiation Lab and Cliff Bacigalupi, we met with the [ U. S. Army] Corps of Engineers in Anchorage and briefed them on what we were doing. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 The next day, I flew with that group to Nome. Let me stop you for a second. I want to go back to the conversation with Teller because you said— I’m just curious. What were you all talking about or what was he talking about? Everything. Everything? Yes. Range of subjects which I had never— I was curious about, but had never— because my background as an electrical engineer tend towards the practicality of it. His mind worked to basic matter and how it worked, things far beyond things I’d ever contemplated. And so this opened up really a new world for me. When we did fly up to Nome— one of the interesting things that happened, we were on I think it was Alaskan Air— there was an Eskimo woman going back to Unalakleet, and she had been sick; they lowered the seat back and her head rested in my lap all the way to Unalakleet. And we left from Unalakleet and then went into Nome. And the next day in Nome, Dr. Teller spoke before the Chamber of Commerce. And it was interesting. He talked about the project that we were contemplating, and of course a lot of people were sitting there watching him. Anyone who has been around Dr. Teller, when he speaks— he’s got large dark eyebrows and his eyebrows move up and down, and you have a tendency to lose your concentration on what he’s saying, watching his eyebrows. But they did ask some interesting questions. One of the questions dealt with, could they use nuclear explosions to surface- strip on iron ore fields? Out on the Seward Peninsula, there’s apparently a large ore field of iron, and to be profitable, the topsoil has to be removed. I guess it’s forty or fifty feet deep till you can get to the ore, and then they would mass- mine the ore. And so he UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 discussed that with them, the businessmen there, and said, that’s real practical, they could, that’s something quite conceivable. From there, we flew up the next day to Kotzebue and from Kotzebue we got on separate planes and I went into the site at Cape Thompson. Dr. Teller went on to Point Hope. And at Point Hope, he spoke to the natives there, told them what we were going to do, and then he flew back to the camp site and we had a meeting there and he discussed his conversation with the governor of Alaska. And the governor would question whether it really made any sense to build a harbor on the northwest coast. One of the requirements of Plowshare was that you could show that the project was economically feasible and would bring economic benefits to an area. Dr. Teller apparently had told him that there’s a lot of coal in the northwestern quadrant of Alaska. Outcroppings showed that between the Point Hope area on the edge of the Alaska Naval Petroleum Reserve that could be profitably mined and brought down and shipped out of a harbor there at Ogoturuk Creek where we were contemplating this harbor. [ 00: 20: 00] The Governor asked Dr. Teller, Could you build a canal across the Alaskan Peninsula? One of the problems we’re having is that the fishermen go into the bay up there and they catch their harvestable crop and then they have to go clear around the peninsula and come back up to where the fish processing plants are. And a lot of the seamen were losing their lives because it’s very treacherous seas up there. And if you could build a canal across there, it would shorten their trip about 400 miles. So Dr. Teller turns to Sam Howell, my boss, and he said, We’d like Ray and Cliff Bacigalupi to go down, fly down to Cold Bay, and at Cold Bay, go up to Portage Pass, is where they were contemplating it, and run a preliminary survey, even a fly- through, and evaluate the area. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 So that was our assignment. We left the next day, flew into Nome, caught a Wein flight to Fairbanks got in there late in the evening, and we rented a car and headed for Anchorage. And from Fairbanks to Anchorage, I guess, is about 400 miles. We got down as far as Paxton and we had to gas up, and it was about midnight then. We were tired. We went in and had a cup of coffee at Paxton, gassed up and we started down the highway. We had driven about twenty minutes when Cliff thought the hood of the car was loose, so we stopped. And I said, Well, I’ll get out. He was driving. I’ll get out and I’ll put the hood down. So I got out and put the hood down, but I left my door open, and you had the lights on in the car, and there must’ve been a million mosquitoes come into the car. And so I got in, and we swatted mosquitoes damn near all the way to Anchorage. That car must’ve been a real mess when we turned it in. When we got down there, we went to Reeve’s Airline [ Reeve Aleutian Airways], checked in first at a motel so we’d get a little sleep, checked with Reeve’s Airline and made arrangement with [ Bob] Reeve to fly us down on the next flight, and also to arrange for a Grumman Goose to meet us there and fly us through Portage Pass, which is about— What is that, a Grumman Goose? That’s an amphibian airplane. Oh, it’s a Grumman? It’s a pontoon plane. It’s a seaplane. And that would allow us to land at each end and we could take a look at it and where we need to. It has wheels on it which can land on either land or sea. And so we flew down to Cold Bay, and our pilot was on the next segment, next flight to come down. Cold Bay was a refueling station for Northwest Orient Airline. So they put us up. Cold Bay had served as a military base during World War II and so we stayed in a room in an UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 old barracks that had two cots in it and had a cord with a light bulb on the end of it. And of course Northwest had a kitchen there, and we were able to eat at the kitchen. Of course we had to pay for it but we were able to eat there. We waited about three days there, and our pilot never showed up. The flight he was coming down on had engine trouble; they turned around and went back to Anchorage. We never saw the guy. So after about three days, Cliff and I decided we had to get out there, so we went down and they made arrangements for us to get on the next flight going back up the Alaskan Peninsula to Anchorage. [ 00: 25: 00] And it stopped along the way and picked up— they were building the White Alice [ Communications System, WACS] stations, they’re the radio stations, and also the radar stations. We were in the Cold War, as you recall. And so we landed at Point Moller. And there were some workers who had been on contract for six months, and they’d thought they’d get on the plane, but the plane was full. And Bob Reeve was on the plane and he wouldn’t let them kick us off. He knew we were something, but he didn’t know what we were. We couldn’t tell him we were associated with the AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission] because everything was hush- hush at that time. Even on Plowshare. Oh, yeah, you still had to have those big clearances and everything else. So anyway we ended up flying there and then back to the main forty- eight states, and began planning to return to Cape Thompson shortly. I had a project engineer assigned to the project. His name was Ralph Chase and he was to run Chariot on a day- to- day operation. So let me understand, this other business about the canal just gets put on hold because you guys didn’t get out to look at the areas you needed? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Yes. [ But later Cliff prepared a project plan and statement of work for Holmes and Narver support.] And now we’re back on Chariot. Yes, we wrote a report on it, but that was the extent on it; and we said [ that] another survey trip will have to be made. Our trip was fruitless, but this is what we found out, and we brought back maps of it and all that sort of stuff so it’d be easier for the next group. We returned to Los Angeles and began to make some plans. We had to get a company that could cater for us up there and had a guy that knew how to build camps and tents and all that sort of stuff, and I forget the company’s name. I think it was Hutchinson or something like that but I don’t recall it in detail. And we flew into Kotzebue and he met us there, and then we flew into Cape Thompson. We conducted our survey. We had been asked to survey the entire Ogatruk valley or a large segment of the valley, prepare a topographical map where the harbor would be built. We also conducted a hydrographic survey of forty square miles off the mouth of the creek, four miles deep and ten miles long along the coast. When we got there, I decided that the camp be set up on a little island in the creek. There was a berm that would protect us from winds coming off the sea. I thought in my stupid mind that was a smart thing to do— as many books have been written will tell you that we got flooded out— that the rains came and the rains whooshed and we scrambled and had to relocate our camp. And of course, being the guy responsible, the old- timers gave me a few laughs, and they remembered it. Yes, they never forgot, right? That’s right. So it’s interesting though how you conduct a hydrographic survey four miles at sea and ten miles long, and you’ve got a survey crew. I hired a tug run by Eskimos down in UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Kotzebue from B& R Tug, and we got a hydrophone put on it with sonar attachments, [ 00: 30: 00] and we set up a survey crew along the ten- mile stretch of the coast. And what we would have them do, we had walkie- talkies on both shore and on the tug, and we would have a level pointed on the azimuth we wanted, and then we would talk the captain into staying on that line. At the meantime, we had another survey instrument up there and we would cut the angle, and as we cut the angle, he would give us a reading on the fathometer. And so from that, we were able to plot it. The next summer when we came back up, we had a U. S. Navy icebreaker come in, and they ran a more detailed hydrographic survey. That was overlaid our survey, and we married the two of them, so we had a pretty good comprehensive. But that was the next summer of ’ 59. That phase of the program ended just as summer ended there in September because the sun begins to disappear, and of course that was a phenomenon we’d never even anticipated, never thought of because when we first got there, the sun went around us. You could see it twenty- four hours a day. We actually had snow on the fourth of July up there. But it was an interesting experiment. When we left, we flew down to Kotzebue and then we flew from Kotzebue into Fairbanks. And an amusing incident had occurred. As we got on the plane, the cook from Rotman Hotel, which was the only hotel in Kotzebue, was getting on. She was a Norwegian lady and she was their cook. I believe her name was Olga. And she had a bowl in her arms with a cloth over the top of it. And Ralph said to her, Olga, you got a bomb in there? Of course that sent the crew crazy. That was the wrong thing to say. They forgave him. But what she had was her sourdough starter. She was taking it down to Seattle with her, and I mean I don’t know how old the starter was but it kept many generations going. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 How interesting. We got home and our task when we got there was to plan for the next year. When I got back, I was called into my boss’s office and he said, Ray, I want you to sit down with Hal Perla. He’s going to brief you on the potash mines down in Carlsbad, New Mexico. [ That was my introduction to the next project, Project Gnome.] Now “ back” is in California, right, at Holmes and Narver. Yes. Down on Broadway. The office was on Broadway at that time. And so I went in the conference room and for four hours I picked his brains over how mine shafts were sunk in that area, the problems they had, because one of the major problems were the aquifers cutting across the area. The project as conceived, and I talked to Lawrence Radiation Lab about it over the phone, was to set off a nuclear detonation in an elastic medium, and in so doing you would create the heat. In this case we’re looking at salt; and they go back to the Rainier, what happened in Rainier. Rainier when you have this nuclear detonation, the first thing that happened was [ 00: 35: 00] that it blows a sphere, the area is a sphere; and at the Nevada Test Site, because it was in volcanic tuff, it became glass, and it supported itself with the pressure inside until it began to cool and the pressure dropped, and then it collapsed and did what’s called chimney. They took that type information and applied it to a salt mine. And when that would happen you would have this sphere develop, the back would break and drop down there into this molten salt; then you would put in two drill holes and you’d pump in an inert material from one area so it wouldn’t affect the salt, and take it out through the other, run it through a heat exchanger, and use that heat exchanger to generate electricity and light a light bulb or whatever you want to do with it, a form of converting nuclear energy to electrical energy. So off I go the next day. Flew into El Paso and then flew up to Carlsbad [ New Mexico] and met up there with the project team LRL [ Lawrence Radiation Laboratory], AEC and the U. S. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Bureau of Mines. We put out for bids at drilling a pilot hole to log the geology. We had about three different bids. The lowest bid was bid by a local florist, a guy who owned a floral shop there in Carlsbad. He proposed to use a churn drill rather than a rotary drill. And we went to the AEC and said, We don’t think you should award it to the low bidder because you’re going to have trouble maintaining the clear passageway because a churn drill will go towards the path of least resistance. And the AEC said, No, you’ve got to go with the lowest bidder. So we got this churn drill out there and we kept banging away at it, banging away at it. This was late winter at the time we were down there. I kept getting pressure from Livermore, from Cliff Bacigalupi and Chuck [ Charles E.] Violet to get the hole completed, and we weren’t making that good a progress. So I called my boss Chuck Kelly and said, Chuck, I’m going to have to pull this guy’s contract. Have our lawyers take a look at it and make sure I have authority to pull it, then we can pull his bond on it. We had to pull his bond. So I got the OK to go ahead and pull it, and went up to Roswell [ New Mexico] and hired a regular driller, and then I went back with my project manager. My project manager there, his name was Mike Bickers, and Mike and I went up and wrote a contract on the back of a piece of paper and had this guy move in within twenty- four hours. Then we went out to the field and told this churn rigger, he’s got eight hours to move his rig off. There was a fallout to this. The florist challenged my credentials because I was an electrical engineer, not a drilling engineer. So he went to his senator in Washington [ D. C.]. The senator in Washington then contacted the AEC and contacted my bosses. And so the senior vice- president wrote him back a letter. And of course in the senator’s letter he’d cited all of these, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. And he stayed away from the technical aspects of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 it and said I was the senior manager there and I made a management decision based on a contractual document. End of conversation. And that was that. That was the last of that. [ 00: 40: 00] Now a couple of questions. Now this is Gnome, right, this is— This is called Project Gnome, yes. So just on the technical aspects of it, they’re not going to bring drillers that they know what they’re doing down from Nevada. You have to hire the local contractor? We had to hire the local contractor, and this was a precursor to sinking the shaft, because you’ve got to know what type of material, where the aquifers are, as you go down so you can plan your mine shaft. There was one other political ramification. There were seven potash mines in the area. They were concerned collectively about a nuclear explosion in the area which could drop the backs of mines, because they do pillar- and- post mining there, and they were afraid that the vibration would knock it. They were also concerned about the Carlsbad Caverns. So that came into play. We met several times with the engineers from the mining group and we think we succeeded in finally allaying their fear, but they fought it as much as they could. Now at that point, do you feel like you have supporting engineering or science that can answer those questions, or is it really an unknown? It’s an unknown. They knew the size of the yield they were talking about, and they knew how it diminished as you got further and further away from ground zero. There was another series of problems in there. That is oil well country, too, and there were oil wells in the area, and they were concerned about temporarily shutting them down during the detonation. The report I got afterwards, because I left the project before the detonations ever UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 occurred, was that one oil well sealed up, or at least lost its productive capability for a period of time. None of the mines were damaged, and none of the stalactites fell. In Carlsbad Caverns. [ Recording paused and resumed mid-