SO CAN YOU FIRST DESCRIBE TO US WHAT THE CRUCIAL TURNING POINT WAS AS FAR AS THE UNITED STATES ICBM PROGRAM WAS CONCERNED? WHAT MADE THE COMMITTEE DECIDE....

Well the von Neumann committee existed because it was there was a new undersecretary of Air Force Research and Development, Trevor Gardner, who believed in missiles. Up to that point the Air Force had very reluctantly gone along with the missiles. The Atlas and others were things they didn't really believe in. In fact, I once heard General LeMay in an argument that led up to the von Neumann committee say that missiles didn't have loyalty. And all the other things that a bomber pilot had. And then he went on to say something which made good sense to me but proved to be wrong and that is what, who but a goddamned fool would throw a ten story building at each other. But Gardner became convinced or was convinced by somebody, may have been von Neumann, that one of the advances in H-bombs with what we thought was a Russian development in missiles that we should put a stronger emphasis on ballistic missiles and so the so-called von Neumann committee or Teapot committee was created. We looked at the existing US missile systems. Didn't like them very much and began to speculate with a team of technical people that was run by Si Ramo and Dean Woolridge on different configurations. In fact, the record will show that had designed on paper an earlier version of the smaller missile. Von Neumann was involved in the development of the H-bomb. And believed that you could make a very small H-bomb compared to what anyone else had thought at that time. And kept insisting that we design a missile around a 1,500 lb. warhead which was very much smaller than anything that existed. And that had the advantage of allowing the small missile which a solid missile, which made for a very different kind of missile. We also made a very major change in the guidance system. In fact, I think I was responsible for that, because the Atlas and the other missile had used so-called radio guidance which was very vulnerable we thought to jamming. And I got at MIT who was then working on navigation systems for airplanes to take on the development of guidance systems for missiles.

CAN YOU BE A LITTLE LESS QUIET ABOUT IT? YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE A SPEECH TO A HUNDRED PEOPLE, BUT CAN YOU PROJECT A LITTLE BIT MORE...WHAT WAS THE CLIMATE OF THE TIME LIKE?

There were a variety of things that I believed. I believed the intelligence first of all. Later on, as I worked in, I was a young man, you have to remember that I had come out of World War II. I'd gone from being a folklore collector at the Library of Congress, to being a weapons manufacturer and developer at MIT. I went back to trying to, I had worked at Los Alamos for about a year. Things that led to the H-bomb...I came back to MIT and was trying to do civilian research using things I'd learned during the war, particularly on information theory and cybernetics with...the outbreak of the Korean War caused a tremendous fright in our country. And the people who had been advocating much larger air forces used that occasion to argue with the intelligence they had that the United States was ultra vulnerable to bombing by the Soviet Union. And I had no basis for questioning intelligence. It didn't occur I think, to most of us to question it at that time. And, so we all went to work trying to defend the country. My first efforts were on the big air defense system called SAGE that we worked on at the Lincoln Lab. Later on in early 1953, I joined the von Neumann committee and worked on ballistic missiles. I also spent a lot of time looking at Russian intelligence, or US intelligence of actually German defectors returning, ah, having been sort of debriefed by the Russians. They were not allowed to work on the systems in the way von Braun's group was here. They were sort of drained of what they knew training Russian technicians, and then sent home. And from what they said a number of us were trying to construct some model of the Russian missile. Couldn't quite believe that the Russians were making a missile that seemed to be as big as it was. But it turned out, in fact to be the case. Now, in retrospect, I've done a lot of thinking about what I thought and why I was, I was always slightly puzzled about some of the things that people were saying. I couldn't understand how the Soviet Union had been so thoroughly devastated in World War II and could be turning out hundreds of bombers when it took such a big job for us to do it. But somehow it never quite crystallized and I was in no position to ask the questions to get the answers. I was a piece of the machine and I was, ah, a pretty good technical expert...so I was invited in on all these new things and discov... so I was very deeply involved initially in the technology. The other thing I think, and I've actually argued with Russians about this was that this was the era of Stalin and I think one looks back at what Stalin was like and what Stalin did and you have to conclude that at least at the end of the war and after the war he was paranoid about the west, and did a lot of things that were frightening to us. And as I pointed out, the Russians did things that were pretty upsetting to them to so they ought to understand what happened to us. But during that period, there was a period of Stalin. It was was a period in which Judan Maser was murdered and so that I think that there were many good reasons to worry about the Soviet Union. My own view is that we went the wrong way in imagining things that didn't exist because we started an arms race, which we have had to continue to play an important part in.

CAN WE MOVE ON A LITTLE BIT LATER IN THE '50S, WHEN YOU WERE WORKING FOR THE GAITHER PANEL, AND YOU WENT ON A TRIP TO OMAHA WITH ROBERT SPRAGUE AND OTHERS, TO LOOK INTO WHETHER SAC WAS VULNERABLE TO ATTACK BY SOVIET BOMBERS. CAN YOU DESCRIBE THAT VISIT?

You know that was thirty years ago, so I couldn't describe the detail if I wanted to. But some points stood out. This visit followed an earlier one which some of, a few of our colleagues had come back and said they thought that Sprague could, Sprague... followed an earlier visit in which a few of our colleagues had returned from SAC and said that they did not believe that SAC had the capability of getting it's airplanes off the ground and in a attack condition as was generally believed by everyone, including the President of the United States. In other words, that they did not have a secure second-strike capability. And so a larger group of us went out to try to explore that. And we explored it largely by asking questions of readiness and pilot's and so on. And we concluded that it was probably so that SAC would be lucky to get a dozen properly equipped manned planes off the ground in the first several hours. And we then went to visit General LeMay and this is, of course, the interesting part of the story. I don't remember the number of us who went but I do remember the discussion in which Bob Sprague, who was the leader of our group said, "General LeMay, we do not believe that you can get the airplanes off the ground as the President does." General LeMay looked at him and said, "You're right." And Sprague said, "Well, what does that mean?" And LeMay said, "Well, my intelligence is very good. I'll know a week in advance when the Russians are going to be doing something and I'll knock the shit out of them." Alright, you want me to say something else.

JUST SAY IT AGAIN...

OK. General, Sprague said, "We don't believe you can get those airplanes off as the President does." And LeMay said, "Well, that's right but I don't really have to." And Sprague said, "What do you mean?" And LeMay's answer was, "My intelligence is so good that I'll know in a week in advance when the Russians are going to try something, and I'll knock the shit out of them." And startled, Sprague said, "That's not the President's policy." And LeMay said, "But it's my job to make it possible for the President to change his policy."

SPRAGUE SAYS THAT WHAT LEMAY SAID WAS, "IT MAY NOT BE NATIONAL POLICY BUT IT'S MY POLICY." ARE YOU SURE THAT'S NOT WHAT HE SAID?

Well, I wouldn't swear on a Bible that's not what he said, but I remember my words very vividly. I know Bob Sprague very well and he and I have talked about this incident. We've never talked in detail about the words. Um, I think I'd have been, I was shocked by this. By the fact that the President, the Congress, Secretary of State, all said we had a retaliatory policy. If the Russians attacked, we would retaliate. Now, that's not a very sensible policy. As a matter of fact, if you're open to retaliation. So it's not surprising that there might have been a private policy. Nonetheless, the discovery that the US, that had been so morally standing on a policy of second strike, I'd been spending my life trying to help reinforce and build this system and discover that it was built on a falsehood, was really very upsetting to me. Obviously, other people took different conclusions from this.

WHAT'S YOUR RECOLLECTION OF THE WAY THAT THE GAITHER REPORT AS A WHOLE WAS RECEIVED BY THE PRESIDENT AND THE NSC WHEN IT WAS FINALLY PRESENTED...

Not very enthusiastically. Actually, the President had indicated to us along the way that there were many elements of it that made no sense to him. He'd indicated at the Gaither Panel. I think he indicated it to a meeting of the whole science advisory committee once when they met. I recall his using the words, "We don't have enough, we can't have that war. We don't have enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets." I must say I agreed. The Gaither Panel conclusions were ones that were hard for me to understand the meaning of. The President had asked us to look at the following question he, along the way, he forgot how we got into this. Namely, if you make the assumption that there's going to be a nuclear war, what should I as President have done to protect the American people? Now, if you start with the assumption that there's going to be a nuclear war in three or five or ten years, you sure work single mindedly to try to minimize the results, but you're never sure. And one of the things that was point out in, by John Foster Dulles in the presentation was, you know, this makes a moral war more likely. Russians see us building all those fall out shelters, they're going to suspect we're up to something. What's more, he said very forcefully, you'll scare the devil out of our allies if they see us getting ready to protect ourselves and are unable to protect them. So there was a pretty negative reception, which I didn't find surprising because by then, I myself was very skeptical, even though I signed the Gaither Report. The Gaither Report was accurate in the sense that it answered the President's question, what should you do? And it told how many lives you would save. It didn't say we should do that. On other hand, there were enthusiasts in the Gaither Panel staff, particularly the non technical people who became so caught up in the intelligence and so fearful of Russian attack on the US, particularly from missiles but from other things, that they really became convinced that we should implement the Gaither Report. I never thought its implementation was practical.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT MEETING?

In what meeting?

WELL THE PRESIDENT HAD A WORD WITH YOU AFTER THE MEETING. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THAT?

Yes. Well, I had made a considerable amount of the presentation, the technical presentation, and there was this rather noisy dialog or discussion afterwards which just sort of faded out and it must have been pretty clear to everybody that the President himself and his principle government supporters, cabinet members were pretty much against it, and as I walked out of the office, I was, I suppose reflecting on what had happened. I must have looked very sad to him and he put his arm around my shoulder and he said, you know, if I thought this would do any good, I'd be for it. Then he said, of course the people of the United States wouldn't let me do it anyway. And I said well, I thought the people of the United States would let him do anything he wanted to do, but I wasn't recommending this. And he said, well, in good conscience, I don't believe that. And I said, well, it's true, Mr. President. And he looked at me and said, why do you think so? And I said, I think people have enormous confidence in you as a leader. And he said rather interestingly, they didn't pass my budget last year. And I said, you allowed the Secretary of Treasury to contradict you in public. Humphrey, as you may recall said that if one passed the President's budget, there'd be a depression that would curl people's hair. And I said, so the people didn't know what you really believed or what you wanted. And with that, he sort of shrugged his shoulder and I went off.

CAN YOU TELL ME AS BRIEFLY AS YOU CAN ABOUT THE CONVERSATION?

As the President must have uh...thought that I was upset by the meeting so he put his arm around my shoulder as we walked down the hall. We talked about a variety of things and suddenly he said to me, You fellows are working on the wrong problem. I'm trying to do something about the nuclear test ban and slow down the arms race. And nobody in the government will help me. The defense department isn't interested. The atomic energy commission isn't interested. Why don't you people on the science advisory committee help me with this? And I said, Well, Mr. President we will help you with anything you want. We did this job because you asked us to. He said hmmm. And it wasn't too long after that that the science advisory committee really became his main agency for getting technical uh...preparation for the test-ban negotiations in Geneva for uh...the meeting uh...on limiting the dangers of nuclear war, on monitoring in fact what went on in the Pentagon.

A LOT OF SCIENTISTS AND YOU IN PARTICULAR DID HAVE VERY MUCH A CHANGE OF HEART AROUND THIS TIME DIDN'T YOU? WHAT WAS YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE?

I...I really became very much convinced that the United States was in some sense and still is running an arms race with itself, because as I got into a position in the White House where I could ask to be uh...filled in on intelligence, I discovered that so much of the intelligence was just a reflection of what we were capable of doing, we were planning to do, or might do. In other words, we gave the Russians credit for having capabilities not unlike ours. Before Sputnik, for example, we usually thought they would do what we were capable of doing. But two years later, after Sputnik, we changed the sign and thought they would do everything before us. And I think that's demonstrated for example in the so-called missile gap. But the hard facts that were available until the U-2 began flying, for example, were essentially nonexistent. And when you dug into a piece of intelligence you usually find that the intelligence data you were given were the compromise of various Defense Department agencies vested interests. For example, if it had to do with bombers the Air Force would take a big assessment of Russian bomber capability. The navy would say it was trivial. Air...army was always in the middle somewhere between the two extremes. Uh...the defense intelligence agency was hard to predict and then the CIA and its integrated intelligence would try to bring all this together. But when you take the Air Force extreme on the one hand and the navy extreme on the other, you always got a kind of mish-mash that made for a serious effort, but never permitted one to undertake to do what the air force wanted or relax as sufficiently as the Navy would have you relax. But eventually, when I personally got to not believe any intelligence and I could always predict what the intelligence agencies of the departments were going to say by just asking myself the simple question of what is their vested interest.

AND THAT WAS A PRETTY DISILLUSIONING EXPERIENCE?

That was terribly disillusioning in that...my experience discovering that the United States was in fact maintaining a first strike capability while we were innocently saying we would never think of doing that. Many other things, but mostly I'd say the influence of President Eisenhower himself. And I think he was undergoing a change of heart from the time when he became President and was really quite hawkish, if that's the right expression, he certainly supported big military build-ups to the time when he became convinced that there was no military solution to the nuclear bomb. I think people had been saying over and over again that this is not a weapon that has a military use. And, I guess his conversion led mine in a sense, because uh... unlike most Americans I developed an enormous both affection and sense of real strength in the President...

ONE THING THAT'S PUZZLING ABOUT THE LATTER PART OF EISENHOWER'S ADMINISTRATION -- A LOT OF ATTENTION IS GOING FROM PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF AND THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF INTO THESE ATTEMPTS TO GET SOME TYPE OF ARMS CONTROL, ETC. BUT AT THAT SAME TIME BETWEEN 1957 AND 1961 THE STRATEGIC ARSENAL TRIPLED. THE SAC WAR PLANS DIDN'T CHANGE AT ALL DESPITE A GREAT DEAL OF CRITICISM. IS IT TRUE THAT THE PRESIDENT ALMOST IGNORED WHAT WAS GOING ON IN OMAHA...?

Well, of course, the...I think the history would show that the SAC build-up was really generated or created under Truman. And the big fights about how many uh...Let's stop and let's talk about this. The uh...The member of the Finlander Commission and the uh...

THE DECISION, YES, THAT MAY BE SO. BUT THE...

There...there were build-ups that were set. There were targets that were created. Now Ike certainly went along with it. Partially because they were there. Partially because he was involved in doing something about the Korean War. Partially as I said earlier, uh...because I thing he believed that this was a solution...

...WHEN YOU HAD A DRAMATIC INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF BOMBS AVAILABLE FOR SAC TO DROP AND IN FACT WAS AN OPERATION.

Well, ask the question again. Let me see if I can deal with it, because it's a little bit complicated.

WERE YOU OR ANYONE ELSE ASKED BY THE PRESIDENT...DID THE PRESIDENT SHOW A REAL INTEREST IN WHAT WAS GOING ON ESPECIALLY DOWN IN SAC?

There was some attention but not a great deal to the question of what's called SIOP, the Strategic Integrated uh...war plan.... operational plan. Start over? There was some attention to the so-called SIOP, the Strategic Integrated...Operational Plan. And most of us were rather skeptical about how much sense it made. But I think we were much more concerned with the President's concerns. We were working for him, and maybe we should have been more concerned with this, trying to rationalize how you could make a test ban that was safe for the country. The numbers changes that you talked about were also reasonably logical in the abstract. Back in the early period of nuclear weapons when first of all we had only fission weapons uh...but we didn't understand the power of these weapons, our bombers would carry 10-megaton bombs. Well, people began to realize that there weren't many targets that justified a 10-megaton bomb. And as a matter of fact you could show that if you had an area that you wanted to destroy, you were better off to hit it with a number of smaller bombs than one enormous bomb because the...the fall off of the energy was so fast that you were better off peppering the area with small bombs. So all this is all logical and while everyone knew it was going on, no one protested it. It was the conversion of large bombs to small bombs. It was the fact that we had materials plants that were turning out material, Something had to be done with them, with the stuff that was being made, and so they just went into bombs. But the number of airplanes didn't change very much. What they carried changed. And then with increased materials and we...they found their way to uh... aircraft uh... in the Navy. And they became and then made tactical weapons to put in Europe. Tactical weapons being the way we avoided putting in more troop. And every time there was a crisis we'd add a thousand tactical bombs although nobody knew what could be done with them. They sometimes reassured the Europeans. And so the material was flowing out and I guess we were all conscious of the fact that there was this big build-up. We also believed that there was a comparable build-up in the Soviet Union. At least I... if I think about what I thought.

DO YOU KNOW IF THERE WAS ANYONE AT THAT TIME MAKING CONSCIOUS DECISIONS ABOUT HOW MANY BOMBERS WERE NEEDED ETC.

Well, I suppose that the Joint Chiefs, to the degree that anyone was making decisions was doing it. Uh...the, I don't, I was not involved at all in Eisenhower's uh...national security council and I would imagine, but I can't tell you for sure, that these things must have been discussed there. Those of us who were in a sense on the sidelines even though we were working on some of the problems just thought it was ridiculous that these numbers build up in such a way. Uh... for example: One of the arguments was that a one option of SIOP was, probably still is, purely military targets. But there were 50 military targets in Moscow. So you can imagine what dropping 50 independent nuclear weapons on Moscow would do to the city even though you were not aiming at civilians. Well there were a lot of inconsistencies of this kind in the plan. But it was not my responsibility and uh... maybe I should have undertaken to understand it more. There are just too many issues people to get themselves around. If I was going through it again with what I know now, I would probably ask more questions.

THE PARIS SUMMIT IN 1960...DO YOU THINK THAT WAS A GREAT LOST OPPORTUNITY?

Well, you never can tell what's a lost opportunity I have the impression that Khrushchev was seriously intent on trying to do something. I also believe that Eisenhower was. Uh...and they were fencing in such a way that uh...trying to bring off a meeting without giving political advantage to each...each to the other. By then I think Eisenhower was convinced that the missile gap was not there or it certainly wasn't serious. I was in the Soviet Union shortly after the U-2 shoot down and on Russian scientist friend said to me, You know, Khrushchev really wanted that meeting to go on. And he said he gave Eisenhower an alibi by saying well, the President didn't really know what was going on. This was done by the military. But he said, Your President spit in his face. Now Eisenhower probably felt that he did not dare admit that he didn't know what was going on and so he took full responsibility for it. But as seen from Khrushchev's point of view, it was a... kind of a slap at Khrushchev's attempt to patch up the situation.

DO YOU THINK THAT SOME REAL BREAKTHROUGH MIGHT HAVE BEEN MADE AT THAT SUMMIT OR WAS IT...

I really can't say. I can say that I believed that Khrushchev was intere...serious. This is my personal belief. I can say that I know that Eisenhower was serious. I also know that Eisenhower had terrible opposition at home. And it's probably so from all the evidence we have that Khrushchev had equal troubles. Uh...maybe not as serious although it's hard to say. Our...in the United States, in any negotiation I was involved in either in the Eisenhower or Kennedy administration, we always felt that our toughest negotiation was at home trying to get agreement on anything that would be meaningful and acceptable to the Russians. Very frequently we'd get to a conference and find that our area of agreement where we were allowed to negotiate and the Russians were miles apart. And so...there was no...no possibility. And from it I got the impression that the Russians were having just as much trouble both sides trying to preserve maximum advantage while reaching agreement. Well, clearly that's an impossible situation.

(QUESTION INAUDIBLE)

Well, it... It was concern. Well let me try.

I MEAN THE IMPORTANT THING...

I know what your question is...but let. The answer, I believe, is that Gardner was concerned...

SO YOU WERE SAYING...

Gardner, be, I don't know why, became convinced maybe by von Neumann that the US was not taking missiles seriously enough. I think there are people who can give you the precise working statement of... of the Teapot Committee. I could probably find it in my files, but I think people at the Aerospace Corporation, there's a historian. He probably knows the full history. My recollection of the creation of the Teapot Committee was that Trevor Gardner, who was the new Assistant Secretary for Research and Development became convinced that the Russians were working very hard on missiles and the US Air Force was not taking very seriously. And I know that too be the case, because I once heard LeMay talk against missiles saying that they were...they didn't have loyalty like flyers. And a variety of other things. And besides, what nation would be foolish enough to throw ten story buildings at another nation. And this was the general attitude of most people in the Air Force. Nonetheless, we were indeed building something called the Atlas which was a very large missile. And the Teapot Committee was asked to review the US missile program and make a judgment about it. In the course of that we became pretty much convinced that the Atlas was far from what one could do, if you went all out, in a whole variety of areas. For example, an area that I was particularly knowledgeable about was guidance. And I thought the system they had was really obsolete. Von Neumann, who was the chairman of our group, was also involved in the development of the H-bomb and he was convinced that we could make small H-bombs. And it was perfectly obvious to us that the smaller the payload we had to carry, the smaller a rocket would be. And in fact, when he began to predict that we could make a 1,500 lb. warhead at a half megaton, which was a little bit unbelievable, people began to calculate what we could do and it became obvious that solid fuel rockets at that size might be feasible. There had actually been a RAND study, I think earlier, that indicated much the same thing. So while we didn't start out to design a Minuteman or anything, it became clear that there was, a rocket missile that would be a much more effective missile from the point of view of our deterrent force uh...than the Atlas.

WASN'T IT THAT COMMITTEE THAT CHANGED THE PARAMETER THE AIR FORCE HAD BEEN GIVEN TO ATLAS BEFORE, IN TERMS OF ACCURACY, RANGE, PAYLOAD...?

Well, we did. But I think, I'll speak for myself, I never took the Atlas seriously. Once it became obvious to us that we could make very much better and smaller rockets. One of the problems with the Atlas was it was so large that it couldn't be hardened. Now if you wanted a second strike weapon, you want something that can ride through an attack. And in fact, it's my view that the Russians gave up their first rocket when they discovered we had reconnaissance because it was so vulnerable that it wouldn't survive and attack with bombs landing 5 miles away. So that there were very good technical reasons if you believed that what we wanted was a second strike capability, not a first strike capability, to have something that could be protected.