Answer: It’s always helpful to a nation to have an enemy.
Question: Between Teller and Oppenheimer, what’s your opinion about Oppenheimer……
Answer: Openheimer was railroaded, he was ruined because of the paranoia that was going on during that time. Robert Oppenheimer to me was a hero in the scientific community and the man’s life was ruined because of paranoia.
Question: Teller was kind of a political puppet.
Answer: Edward Teller was the kind of man that would have been loyal to Adolph Hitler or to whoever was the boss, so to speak. I didn’t like the man, I still don’t like the man. He’s arrogant, he was totally unsympathetic to radiation health and safety, he was totally unsympathetic to people’s lives and he still is.
Question: I was noticing your medical ID bracelet, is that related to your work?
Answer: I have MS, I also have degeneration of the retina. It’s probably… the exposure I got, the radioisotopes I have in me, it’s very probable that my medical conditions are because of what I did. But I want to add, I knew what I was doing, I was paid very well for it and I have no regrets.
Question: This is a stupid question but when they exploded that 5 and a half million ton bomb underground, didn’t that make a tremendous noise?
Answer: That was called Box Car, the name of that device was called Box Car. I don’t know how they name those things, they all have these strange names. I was on that test. I was assigned to it. When Box Car was detonated, it was 5500 feet under the surface, 5 and a half million tons of TNT equivalent, a device the size of…that log right there. Maybe a little shorter. Ground zero lifted 400 feet for a half a mile radius straight up in the air. And then came back down. What happened then underground would be, small or large, is a cavern is created at the point where the weapon was detonated, of various sizes depending on the size of the weapon.
And then the ground starts to slough in all the way to the top – sometimes. Box Car didn’t because it was too deep, and you have a crater on top. If you were to fly over the Nevada Test Site, it looks just exactly like the moon. Precisely like the surface of the moon. There’s hundreds of craters. To give you an example, one device that was set off right after I got out there, in 1966, actually came out of the ground, on purpose. 6.9 million cubic yards of dirt came out of the ground, created a crater, in less than 2 seconds. That’s a crater a quarter of a mile across and 500 feet deep.
Question: (Unintelligible).
Answer: Yes, that’s Hattiesburg, Miss. At one point we had a project out there called Operation Plow Share. Operation Plow Share was designed to create weapons that were capable of digging another canal across the isthmus of Panama. So we dug a canal out at the test site. It’s about a mile long, a hundred yards wide and it’s probably 400 feet deep. We used 5 nuclear weapons buried at shallow depths to create this ditch, instant ditch, that’s what we used to call it. It was Operation Buggy. And not surprisingly, the people of Panama took exception to us wanting to do that so we never did it. But we tested it. That was very popular in the ’60s, we thought we could use nuclear weapons to do industrial things.
But we never could get them clean enough, we got them pretty clean but not clean enough. The clean weapon is a neutron bomb. The neutron bomb could be set off up here, 3-4 thousand feet up, we’d all die, the grass is OK, the trees are OK, the cars are OK but we are water-bearing creatures and we would absorb so many neutrons that we’d be dead, instantly.
The neutron bomb is in place, most of our intercontinental ballistic missiles have neutron bombs. While I was at the test site, Jimmy Carter promised us that… now I happen to be a registered democrat, so I’m not beating up on a democrat here, Jimmy Carter promised during the campaign of ’76 that if elected President he would never, ever test the neutron bomb or deploy it. What the American people didn’t know was that we’d already tested it. And right after he became President, in the next 4 years, we deployed it all over the world. There’s no reason to lie to people about that because the neutron bomb if you have to have a bomb, it’s a clean bomb. It doesn’t contaminate, hardly at all, it’s a very efficient killing machine, yet the Federal Government chose to lie about it. I don’t know why.
Question: Can you tell us how the chain of command goes? I mean if it’s not the president who…
Answer: National Security Council, indirectly. The National Security Council includes both the civilian and the military, the National Security Council includes the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’ve come very close folks, a couple of times, to have a military takeover in this country and I’m not one of those people who go around saying these things but that’s just a fact. The last one was when Clinton got elected, we almost had a military takeover. The test site was locked down, that’s a term they use before we had a test they’d lock the site down. You couldn’t go anywhere, for like 2-3 days. And if you were on the test you were locked within a lockdown area. After Clinton was elected president that November, the test site was locked down and stayed locked down for 3 or 4 weeks. There was no testing going on.