Skip to main content

Search the Special Collections and Archives Portal

Interview with Barbara Germain Killian, September 20, 2005

Document

Document
Download nts_000142.pdf (application/pdf; 339.01 KB)

Information

Date

2005-09-20

Description

Narrator affiliation: Physicist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Digital ID

nts_000142

Physical Identifier

OH-03070
    Details

    Citation

    Killian, Barbara Germain. Interview, 2005 September 20. MS-00818. [Transcript]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1x63bh47

    Rights

    This material is made available to facilitate private study, scholarship, or research. It may be protected by copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity rights, or other interests not owned by UNLV. Users are responsible for determining whether permissions are necessary from rights owners for any intended use and for obtaining all required permissions. Acknowledgement of the UNLV University Libraries is requested. For more information, please see the UNLV Special Collections policies on reproduction and use (https://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/research_and_services/reproductions) or contact us at special.collections@unlv.edu.

    Standardized Rights Statement

    Digital Provenance

    Original archival records created digitally

    Date Digitized

    2005-09-20

    Extent

    64 pages

    Language

    English

    Format

    application/pdf

    Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Barbara Germain Killian April 4, 2005 Albuquerque, New Mexico 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 Barbara Germain Killian April 4, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: birth in San Diego, CA ( 1935), family background, childhood during the Depression, education at San Diego State University, marriage to Patrick Crowley ( 1956), work at Convair Astronautics 1 Takes job as junior physicist in Experimental Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) 8 Graduate school in aeronautical engineering, University of California, return to LLNL, meets Larry Germain 10 Work atmosphere at LLNL and life in Livermore in the 1950s 11 Consulting work for Plowshare and work for Plowshare Division ( Palanquin, 1965) 13 Robert Fox and nuclear ramjet program 15 Talks about John Foster, director of LLNL 17 Nuclear shock tube experiment with David Glenn ( Marvel, 1967) 18 Miners and women at the NTS 22 Describes change of culture in lab pre- and- post ERDA and DOE 26 Talks about Baneberry and need for containment and CEP 27 Marriage to Larry Germain ( 1975) 32 Transfer to and work at Los Alamos National Laboratory ( LANL) ( 1976) 34 Don Kerr and matrix management at LANL 37 Cultural differences between LLNL and LANL 39 Relationship with Robert Campbell 40 Work at the NTS: fiber optics, chemical tracers 42 DoD weapons effects testing at the NTS 44 Work as technical advisor for Committee on Disarmament ( Geneva, 1977- 1978) 45 Thoughts on ratification of CTBT and need for testing 48 Moves into program development work with Rosemary Harris at LANL, attends Robert O. Anderson School of Management at University of New Mexico for master’s degree 50 Leaves LANL, goes to work for California Research and Technology, moves to R& D Associates to support DNA, work on Misty Echo ( 1988) and JVE ( 1988- 89) 51 Retirement ( 1993) and consulting work, Work with John Hopkins on book about the NTS, talks about NTS and testing in the 1950s 56 Conclusion: discussion of experience as a woman in science 60 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Barbara Germain Killian April 4, 2005 in Albuquerque, NM Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: I thought we could start by you telling me something of your background, your full name, place of birth, date of birth, and how your life path got you into the world of science. Barbara Germain Killian: I was born November 25, 1935 in San Diego [ California]. I was named Chu- Teh, C- H- U- hyphen- capital T- E- H, Barbara Killian. Chu- Teh, it turns out, I went through school with that name. My dad had gone to a Catholic school when he was a young man, a German Catholic school in St. Paul, Minnesota. And [ he] had a classmate, who became a Maryknoll missionary and wrote about Chu- Teh, who was one of the individuals on the Long March with Mao and felt he was a very fine man. My mother wanted to name me Suzay and Dad convinced her that Chu- Teh was close enough and I should be named Chu- Teh. So I went through high school with the name Chu- Teh and I would find myself being assigned to a boy’s gym class or something like that on occasion because they weren’t quite sure what sex Chu- Teh was. So you were called Chu- Teh. Yes, and then all my friends— when I went back to the fiftieth high school reunion, all my friends know me as Chu- Teh and they still call me that. Wow! And when I graduated from high school and was getting ready for college, that was 1953, things were rather tense with Russia at the time, so Dad told me to have my name changed, which I did, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 so I dropped Chu- Teh and went by Barbara Kathryn at that point. I became Barbara Kathryn Killian until I was married to Pat Crowley. Now let me back up a little bit. So were you raised in the Catholic faith, then? Your dad was a devout Catholic? Or…? No, he was not devout at all. He was quite the roustabout. As a young man, he would come to visit my mother in Huron, South Dakota by parachuting out of an airplane onto her front lawn. And he always had a sports car or an airplane or something like that. And he just enjoyed doing those sorts of things. He was a welder and later became a tool- and- dye maker. I was an only child. I was going to ask. And I think my father had a great deal of influence upon my going into science. I have talked with other girls who had similar experiences, ladies in the technical areas, a number of them that I have known have had strong influences from their father. And their fathers, how did that play out during, say, your high school career? How would that manifest, that kind of support? Well, I was the most spoiled person you could possibly imagine, but he had a couple of rules, and one of them was that you never tell me a lie. If you ever tell me a lie, you’re out of here. If you ever get in trouble with the police or anything like that, you’re out of here. The other one was, you have to be home before I wake up in the morning, which was usually between three or four o’clock in the morning. And you try to let me know where you’re going to be, and if you’re ever in any trouble, you call me. But there were no restrictions on what I did or anything. But I knew that I had to do that, I knew I had to make my grades in high school, or he would’ve tossed me out. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Literally tossed you out? Oh, he would have. There was no question in my mind. And he loved me very, very dearly, but he wanted me to know that there were rules and they were pretty liberal but they were there. That’s so interesting. And I think it was a great way to grow up. I really do. I was just terrible. Anything I wanted, he would get me, and he could ill afford it, but would really go out of his way to do it. And my mom was the same way. And I loved them both very dearly. [ 00: 05: 00] Yes, I imagine. Now where did you grow up? You grew up in—? Grew up in San Diego. During the Depression, my mom and dad traveled a great deal because jobs were very scarce, and he was a welder, primarily, and body- and- fender type of person, and so he would find jobs here and there and they would travel. When they first came to San Diego, they camped out on the beach because that’s what they could afford and lived off of fish and had a little tent. That was the way life was. He got very upset because the Catholic hospital wouldn’t take my mother and she had to go to the county hospital, where she got excellent care, but that, I think, kind of drove him even farther away from the Church. I see. I was not reared as a strict Catholic, although my parents were both Catholic. They would take me to every church in town. They had the Mormons come to the house. They went to the I Am Church, which you have probably never heard of. No. People stand up and holler, I am! I am! Oh, I Am Church. Yes, I have heard of that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 I had friends in the Lutheran Church and I’d go with them, or Presbyterian Church, whatever. And so finally Grandma was putting a little bit of pressure on me to go to the Catholic Church, and so I tried it and I was finally baptized at about the third grade or something. If I wanted to go to church, Dad would take me, or Mom would come along, or sometimes he would even go, but there was never any pressure one way or the other to do that or not to do it. Interesting. Yes. Chu- Teh. So what happens when you get to the decisions about college? Well, I knew in high school or even grammar school that I was interested basically in science and mathematics. Because they came easy. And so I knew it would be something along those lines. And no one on either side of the family had ever been to college before. And I was thinking about going away. Dad said, Why don’t you spend your first year or two at San Diego State and then if you want to go away, I’ll do everything I can if you make the grades to get you into someplace. And he died in my sophomore year, and so that wasn’t possible. And that was what year? Let’s see, I graduated from high school in ’ 53. It was ’ 55. Nineteen fifty- five. But I knew that I would be in one of those kinds of areas, and at the time I kind of thought, well, maybe teaching is the thing to do. My second semester at State, or my second year at State, I was told, Well, don’t you think you ought to take an education class? And I went to one of them once, no, twice— I think I went to two of them— and decided that I’m not cut out to run a movie projector, if you remember the old- time movie projectors. And so I decided I wasn’t going to be a teacher. That’s hilarious. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 And I don’t regret that at all. I just don’t have the patience, I don’t have the— I’m just not cut out to be a teacher. I have tried to teach people things, the people who’ve been working for me and I enjoy that, but on a rigorous, repetitive kind of scale, I couldn’t do it. Yes. So then what happens on your career path in college? It was a toss- up if I was going to major in physics or mathematics, and I ended up with a major in physics and minor in mathematics and astronomy. At the end of, or the second semester in college, my first math course was kind of a disaster, analytic geometry. I was kind of active in school things, trying to work and a bunch of stuff, so I didn’t do very well in this first math class and got a “ D” and had to repeat it. Well, I always wore a big brown alpaca coat, which my dad could ill afford but he got for me. One of the fellows in the class who was also repeating the class, Patrick, [ 00: 10: 00] wanted to see what was underneath this alpaca coat; took me out, and so we ended up getting married between our junior and senior year, and he was also a physics major. There were three of us— Pat, myself, and a fellow named Bob Combs, who ended up being the best man at our wedding— who were not veterans. Everyone else was a Korean veteran. Now you come out of high school and high school wasn’t all that easy for me. Some people say how easy high school was. Well, it wasn’t that easy for me and I did have to work, even in high school. But here were guys, four or five years older that we. They’d been around the circuit a little bit. Many of them had children, many of them had wives working, many of them were working nights at the aircraft factories and things like that. And you come out and know that they really mean business. It was competitive, there’s no question about that, but once you made friends with them and once they found out that you were willing to work and could help them and they could help you, you developed some very good relationships. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 But it was quite a change from high school. I went essentially inactive in the sorority I had joined. I had to work to some extent, probably twenty hours a week. And I don’t regret that at all. It made things kind of tight time- wise but I think I learned a great deal from doing that. What kind of jobs did you have? I worked. I had a really nice job as a cashier and gift- wrapper at a place called Dohrman’s which was a china- silver shop; then I had a job at the library, the public library where I went after school in grammar school; then later on I got a job as a reader for the astronomy professor, which was very nice. That must have been a nice job. Yes. One summer, I worked at Convair Astronautics in San Diego. Pat worked there, too, and another girlfriend. So jobs were available in those days, and two dollars an hour didn’t sound like an awful lot, but it went quite a ways in those days. And they were hectic times. I always had a car, and my mom always sewed my clothes. I remember once I said, No, I don’t want you to sew for me anymore, and so Daddy took me shopping and I got a skirt. I went to school and someone else had on the same skirt. And it was a girl who didn’t have a very good reputation; I came home and said, Mother, would you please sew for me again? And she did. That’s a nice story. So you marry in fifty…? Six. Is that right? Yes, we married between our junior and senior year. And we were both working at Convair that summer, and we wanted to get married before school started because things got pretty hectic then. And so my mom was back in South Dakota visiting her sister, and I call her up and say, Pat and I are going to get married. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 And I didn’t realize what she had said but she said, Do you have to get married? And I said, Yes, we have to get married. I didn’t understand what she meant. So she come charging out to San Diego and goes critical. And [ I said], No, no, we have to get married before school starts because we want to be settled. Well, she made the wedding dress and we had a nice little ceremony. So that’s when you move out of your parents’ home? Yes, we got a little apartment near school. And I was working as a reader then for the astronomy professor and Pat continued on with twenty hours a week at Convair Astronautics. So between those two jobs, we were able to pay our tuition and our books and our rent and food. What kind of work would you be doing at Convair? It was before computers really took place and we had these calculators called Marchants [ 00: 15: 00] and just a lot of hand calculations to the things that you can just do with a couple of commands on the computers today. And I remember one of the hottest things alive was when they finally brought out the square root Marchant, or the square root Friden [ Friden SRW]. It was a big calculator. To be able to take a square root was just the cat’s meow. I mean it probably took, even then, five seconds or so for it to crunch on through. There’s just no comparison to what you can do today. So then you finish at San Diego State with a major in physics, is that correct? Yes. We started interviewing. People would come to campus to interview and we talked to our professors and we both wanted to go to graduate school but we knew we’d probably have to work for a little while first and so. I remember an interview with Westinghouse, and talking about there not being very many women in the field at the time, and this fellow was talking with me and— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Interviews were typically for a half- an- hour, and fifteen minutes into the interview, I’d asked him a couple of questions which he kind of skirted, and so I finally said, you know, What would I as a person fresh out of school be doing in Westinghouse? And he said, We have never hired a woman in physics or in the technical professions, but we’re very interested in your husband. And I got up and I said, Excuse me. I shall relay that message to him. And Pat didn’t show up for his interview. So it was just right out there. Yes, it was. We just don’t do that. But that’s the way times were then. So then what? We had an interview with a fellow named Bill Thompson who was in the Personnel Department at Livermore at the time. And a very presentable young man at the time. He’s still a very nice fellow. We ended up becoming friends. You know, none of that nonsense. He said, Well, we’ll let you know in about a month or so, after the interview, and we told him we were interested. And Pat’s acceptance came in the mail on Friday. Mine didn’t come. I was just really downcast. And so we were creating all these plans, oh, we’ll live here, oh, we’ll do this or that or whatever. And so mine came on Monday. Good. And what were the positions at that time? Junior physicist. Pat went into the Theoretical Department and I went into the Experimental Department. And what we did is— he was in the Theoretical Department, but the Experimental Department had a whole bunch of divisions. Art Hudgins was the head of Personnel at the time and he said, Well, now, you go out to these different divisions, and he set up some appointments for me, and talk with these people and tell me which one you want to end up with. And so I did, came back, and said my first choice is to go to work UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 with Bob Fox. I always sort of saw him as the technical brains behind a guy named Ted Merkle who was very personable. Merkle was kind of like [ E. O.] Lawrence; Lawrence, very personable, very— he was fast on his feet, had a lot of those same traits, and people just liked him. Bob was a little more reserved, a little more quiet. But they had been through graduate school and things together and they had worked fairly closely for a long time. And Ted Merkle, at the time, was head of the nuclear ramjet project, and Bob had this little project off on his own for a thorium breeder [ 00: 20: 00] reactor. And anyway, I ended up going back— I liked the things that Bob was doing. I liked a couple of the other things, too, but I went back [ to Art Hudgins] and said, Here’s my priorities. And he said, Oh, Bob wouldn’t have you because you don’t have a Ph. D. And I said, Well, fine, you know, you asked, here’s what I came back with. And he calls me back a half an hour later and he says, Bob wants you to come to work for him. So it worked out real well, yes. So at this point, when you’re looking at these jobs, you’re still thinking that you’re going to go to graduate school? This is a job you’re going to do in the interim to save money, or…? Once you hit Livermore, what’s your mindset there? Well, our mindset is— well, first of all, to do a good job and to learn things on the job. By that time, you could take classes at Livermore through the University of California; which later became— and then I think it got— University of California through primarily Berkeley and then they transferred it over to Davis and it became what they called “ Teller Tech.” And so we were taking classes like that, and that was possible, and you could probably go through a master’s degree. If you showed a lot of promise, then they would maybe help you through your doctorate. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 As things later evolved, both of us felt that the work was so interesting at Livermore that it was just— you couldn’t really be a graduate student and still work at Livermore. Some people did and some people did it very well, but I just always found the things I was doing at work so interesting, I never wanted to put them down. And so we both ended up quitting the lab for a couple of years, or for a year is what it was, really, and going back to graduate school in aeronautical engineering at Cal [ University of California, Berkeley]. We weren’t that keenly interested in basic, basic physics; we were more interested, both of us, in the more mathematical aspects of it. And the Mathematics Department was just way too out in the fuzzies for us. I don’t know. I like to build bridges rather than philosophize. That’s just a difference in approach. So that’s a master’s, then? I never did get a master’s I had to finish a thesis, but I ended up just liking the stuff I did at the lab, so I never did get an advanced degree, technically; but had probably about three years’ worth of coursework between being at Livermore and when I quit that year. So I have had the coursework but never settled down long enough to do what I was doing at work plus write a thesis. Right. So what happens after Cal? You…? Come back to the lab. You did come back to the lab. Yes. In fact, that’s where I first met Larry [ Germain]. We were coming back to the lab and Pat was brought right in. It turns out that the division in which I had been had a ceiling on it and were overstaffed and so they were trying to get rid of people. So again I was told to go out and interview, which I did; turns out that Larry worked for what was called B- Division, which is UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 essentially primary devices. And I interviewed with him, and he was at the time the assistant division leader. And the division leader was Chuck McDonald, six- foot- two, big, strappling guy. Lots of people liked him but, loud and just— he would not interview women. And so it fell to Larry to interview women. Oh, so it wasn’t that he wouldn’t hire women. He would just not interview women. Right. And so Larry told me that Chuck came by after he had interviewed me that evening and said, Well, what’d you think of that woman you interviewed? And [ 00: 25: 00] Larry’s response was, She’s a smartass and she won’t come to work for us. He’s never changed his opinion of me, either. So anyway, that was quite a few years before we started going together and stuff. I remember when we first came to the lab, the first time, I think it was, and I went over to work with Bob Fox. I was asked point- blank, by one of the group leaders, not Bob, Are you a woman or a physicist? And I said, Well, I happen to be both. And they just didn’t know how to quite cope with that. Bob was just great, he really was, and there was never a problem with him. And there wasn’t a problem with coworkers. And I wouldn’t say there was a problem, but there was always kind of this feeling, Are you really going to make it? And you just do your best and do what you can and see what happens. Right. Generally, what was it like to be at Livermore in those days, the feeling, the work atmosphere, what kind of work environment was it? Well, where we were working was in some so- called temporary buildings. They were barracks buildings, and upstairs- downstairs in sort of an “ H” shape, I think. And there was no air conditioning in them. I almost got murdered when I came back from a two- week vacation, having left some fruit in my drawer. They closed the door and were all standing the hallway UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 looking to see me open the door when I came back. It was terrible. And so it was kind of uncomfortable in the afternoons, but it wasn’t bad. One guy would run around without a shirt. A lot of the people wore shorts. It was— women didn’t. Women always wore skirts and stockings, and you wouldn’t go without stockings and stuff. In a way, it was informal, and people in general kind of pitched in. And it was easy to make friends. It was easy to make contacts. Some really lasting friends were made at that period. We were all young, at least there was a group of junior physicists, about a half- a- dozen of us at that time in that general division area. And you got support. If you needed something, you got it. When I was starting to— wanting to do some things on the computer, I was assigned a programmer right away. Bob said, you know, You’re supposed to do physics and we’ll get someone to do the programming for you. The secretarial support was always good. Pat and I always tended to work when we needed to work, and so we would frequently go in, in the evenings. We would frequently go in on the weekends. You just worked that way. And you just never thought anything about it. It was a small town in those days, and we rented a little apartment. Then we were finally able to buy a little house that had an apartment on it. We sold it when we went back to school— ended up renting from the people to whom we had sold when we returned to Livermore. It was an upstairs- downstairs kind of a thing. The apartment was upstairs and the main house was downstairs. But yes, people were friendly; they were decent. There were a lot of little parties and things like that. People tended to— I joined this thing, it was American Association of University Women. They had a group in town, and so there were dinner parties like once a month; you UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 would go to different people’s homes for them. There were a zillion clubs; a photography club, a book reading club, a number of [ 00: 30: 00] them probably, any kind of hobby you might have, there was probably a club for it in town. They had a very active small theatre group that we loved to attend. And it was just a— there weren’t very many good restaurants in town or anything, so you’d go to San Francisco, you’d go to Berkeley. It was a good way of life. It was pleasant. And you, in your job, you’re feeling challenged, this is something you want to be doing, the job itself? Oh, yes. You’d go home, think about it, and you’d come back and go, Oh, that’s how I’ll do it. There was always a challenge. We were having a difficult program, starting to see some patterns or something going on— and I had never had a course in matrices at that point— and I had essentially done a matrix type of solution. Well, Bob couldn’t understand it either, so he took it to some other mathematician and they said, Oh, what she did is to invert the matrix. [ And he said], Oh, OK. I had no idea what I was doing, but it all worked out. Now Larry says, She’ll never work for us. She’s a smartass, but did he hire you or…? No. What happened was that the thing I was working on before I left the lab and was working as a consultant while we were in school was a numerical calculation of high energy gas flow. And it turned out that this had become an area of considerable interest at the laboratory. Sometimes they had a bomb underground and a lot of pipes coming down to view or take samples or do diagnostics experiments. And there was a lot of controversy about how much energy would go into those pipes. I guess the thing that really triggered me thinking about energy flow in pipes was in the Plowshare project, which was peaceful uses of nuclear explosions; that was the division into UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 which I had gone before I left the lab. They had this concept that you put the bomb underground but— OK, I’m sorry, let’s start again. You dig a deep hole. Maybe you dig a 600- foot hole. Well, you place the bomb at something like 300 feet and then stem it above that. The idea was that the bomb goes off and it pushes all the bad stuff— the radioactive materials “ down the hole” was the term we used— and then the ground shock would come around and close off that hole. And they wanted to use that in their cratering experiments or applications. And they did a test where that was tried and it failed. The ground shock did not close off the bottom of the hole. Which test was that, do you know? It was Palanquin [ 4/ 14/ 1965]. And what happened was that it cratered. Part of the problem was the fact that it probably wasn’t stemmed very well above the device, and the other thing is that the ground— when the shock wave and the energy started going “ down the hole”, there was so much pressure in the hole, the ground shock couldn’t close it. And so there were a lot of unknowns at that time about the trade- offs between things going down the hole or in a pipe and the ground shock closing it off. And so those were some of the things we were trying to address. And the calculations on which I was working were helpful in that arena. And so one of the fellows who took an interest in what I was doing was John Nuckolls who later became lab director. And at the time, John Foster was director of the lab. And Nuckolls went to Foster and Foster essentially hired me and put me back in the same division and said, You just take her. I’ll pay for it. [ 00: 35: 00] Put you back in the…? Plowshare Division. In the Plowshare Division. Yes. And he said, Just hire her. It’s OK. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Now let me understand correctly. You had been doing these calculations as a consultant while in school. Yes. And remind me, you said it but I have to be clear, the consultant to…? It was a consultant to the Plowshare Division. To the Plowshare Division. Yes. And then you were hired by the Plowshare Division, is that right? When I came out of school. Because we had formally quit. We withdrew our retirements because we were going to live on our retirements and the sale of the house to go to graduate school. To go to school. Got it. So I started out working for Bob Fox. Then, I had quit for a short period of time, for just one semester. I spent a semester at Stanford in mathematics and decided I just didn’t like it. Even that was too far out in the fuzzies for me, so I came back to the lab. And when I did, a number of things had happened in the division. Bob had left and his project had left also. And so they wanted me to write up some reports of this guy who just was too lazy to write up reports before he left. And I didn’t want to get stuck with that, so I said, No. What were some of the issues with the ramjet that were going on? I was not really very involved with that, so I really can’t tell you. But some of the kinds of things that they were doing were basic reactor calculations, the whole fuel cycle, how the neutrons get captured and what kinds of rods you need to put in, things like that. It was a lot of neutronics, I guess a little bit of thermodynamics. They were fairly interesting kinds of calculations. And so I got involved in using some of the codes. Usually you would have someone help you set up the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 problem and then help you run it, and they were using programmers on these codes and things like that. And then I did some of my own kinds of things for Bob Fox, where we added the thorium cycle. So this is to get this ramjet to be able to operate in space, is that right, this reactor? Yes. And it was basically fairly successful. I think it could’ve been built; it probably could’ve operated, but I think that the biggest factor was probably the politics of radioactivity. By the time they forecast it could be done and whatnot— this was kind of the early sixties and a lot of the public sentiment was getting kind of scared about those sorts of things. Now one of the things, and you correct me if I’m wrong on this, because there was the reactor program, the Rover program. That was Los Alamos [ National Laboratory]. Right. And then there was the ramjet that was Livermore, in my understanding. Yes. And I have seen those two areas out at the [ Nevada] test site. But some of the— what’s said about the ramjet, it was supposed to be designed to be able to operate still after there had been some kind of nuclear confrontation. Do you know anything about this? No, I really don’t. Because I