ASKS HOW HE FIRST HEARD OF MX COMING.

Well I first heard about MX coming here, it was on the radio and we heard that, that the Air Force was going to build a great missile system somewhere in the West. And I just figured, just putting things together, you know, this is bound to be the place because we don't have much for population. And I said to my wife even before they announced it. I says, they're going to build that thing right here.

WHAT WAS HIS FIRST REACTION?

Well I guess I didn't really want to face up to it. My reaction when I heard that they were going to build MX, oh, I'd rather stay away from it, stay out of it. But my wife and I talked it over seriously and we realized that the serious consequences, the devastating consequences to our country, and we decided we, we'd set out to do what we could to prevent it.

HOW DID HE LEARN THE EXTENT OF THE DEPLOYMENTS IN THIS AREA?

Well we learned about the deployments actually kind of by accident as much as anything else. But someone who's opposed to the cause of building MX here got a hold of a copy of the map. And then we began to really understand the full extent of what the Air Force had in mind for us here. When we saw the map we readily recognized the incredible damage and disruption of our way of life, the destruction, ultimately the end of our way of life.

WHY WOULD IT AFFECT YOUR WAY OF LIFE?

We knew that our way of life would, could never be the same, you know, you were talking about going into these mountains and quarrying the rock out to build a railroad along the front, right out across the Salt Desert where a million pound missile would literally sink into the desert. So we know our canyons where we take picnics, our water underneath the ground here, this beautiful aquifer was going to be sucked out because they were going to need an enormous amount of water, a great volume for it. We knew there’d be disruption of the wild life here, there'd be dust in the land where we only have about five inches of rain a year. So it really didn't take an awful lot, you didn't have to stretch your imagination, just a casual observation of what was about to happen was sufficient to warn you that it wouldn't never and never could be the same.

ASKS HOW CLOSE THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN TO HIS RANCH, HOW MUCH THEY WOULD HAVE AFFECTED HIS LIVELIHOOD.

Well our livelihood would have affected,...been the most severe impact I think on our life, would simply have been the perpetual scrutiny of the Air Force itself upon everything that we did. I think that probably would have been in the long run the most severe. But a good example, to the east, right out here on the Salt Flats would have been a railroad that would have circled through Utah and all the way through, back through Nevada and that, that railroad, as I say would have been, built at an incredible expense of material and disruption to the community. But there would have been, we called them pods because there would have been 21 missile sites to each little cluster. And there'd a been a pod, several of them to the south of us here. And then I think, the most northern one would have been in this direction up here, about 15 miles north. You understand, between all of those things there would have to be ditches dug and cables would have laid, and transportation and helicopters going over, and trucks. It just had to be a terrible impact on us.

REPEATS QUESTION.

Well I think the, the deployment would have been in almost every direction around us, but the closest ones would have the one to the north, about 12, 15 miles to the north. And then starting down just south of us here, running the entire length of Snake Valley would have been, we called them pods but I guess they called the clusters of 23 missile sites to a cluster. And they would have started to the south and run all the way over into Nevada. And of course there would have been the interconnecting trenches for cables and railroad out to the east of us here. And all the comings and goings of the military and their trucks and big heavy equipment.

ASKS IF HE FELT HE WAS UNPATRIOTIC.

No I never felt the least bit of a lack of patriotism and I never have felt any lack of patriotism for my country. I couldn't wait to get into World War II, I was afraid I would get over with before I could get into it, so I volunteered when I was 17. And I've paid my taxes and worked hard in this country and my ancestors have fought in every war all the way back to the Revolution. So this is my country and I love it very much. But I'll be honest. I don't know of anything that we do to ourselves that's any worse than the bureaucracies that we create, all under the apprehension and guise that it's going to do good. And the military bureaucracy is no different at all. And I don't feel myself any less patriotic than General Eisenhower did when he said beware of the military industrial complex, it will control you. And I think that's exactly what MX was about. It had nothing to do, in my opinion, and I think I was, I shared this opinion with a great many other people who thought about it. It had nothing to do with the defense of this country. In fact it would have put in jeopardy that which the military should have been trying to protect. Which is the very heartland of our country. So their own perpetuation and self-promotion of the Air Force and the military industrial complex is the primary concern for MX.

DID HE NOT TRUST THE AIR FORCE JUDGMENT?

I would less than honest and using less than my usual candor if I said I trusted any bureaucracy. And I don't think that a citizen of this country should trust bureaucracies. I think that ultimately we should scrutinize them carefully. And of all the bureaucracies the most oftentimes dangerous one is the zealotry with which the military goes about what they are doing and what they intend to do. So yes, I think that we should watch our bureaucracies. And I think they should be subjected to the, to the will and the scrutiny of the people constantly.

CITES 10-YEAR AIR FORCE STUDY.

Well the Air Force and the excitability of the military doesn't worry me an awful lot. I guess they're sort of paid to get excited and to bring forth these marvelous things that are going to protect us. Certainly the military of the French people prior to World War II got all excited and built the Maginot Line and the German armies just simply marched around them which was the only intelligent thing to do. In my opinion this MX complex was another Maginot Line. The creation of an excitable military mind didn't bother me a little bit to say, say wait a minute. We civilians are the boss. We were set up that way in this country and that's exactly the way we should be. And you know, we can sort of appreciate your excitability alright, and you're sincere and maybe that, but we don't like. I think basically that's what the people of Utah and Nevada said is that when you consider the overall impact of this thing upon the very heart of the nation, and you have to understand that we were set up here, this was ground zero. And if they had ever been a strike against the Soviet weapons, against this country, it would have been here first, because this is what they would have wanted to knock out. Then you have to realize that the prevailing winds out of the West was going to carry all that radioactive material right across the heartland of the farmland of this country and right on straight into New England. And all you had to do was look at the map and understand.

The Soviets just don't scare me and the military just don't scare me that much. First of all there was that Sputnik thing and everybody got excited about that and said, “Oh they're so far ahead of us”. Well that turned out to be not so much. And then there was the bomber gap, the window of vulnerability. Well as it turned out they never did have a bomber that could come over here and go back to the Soviet Union. And then there was the great missile gap. Well we got all excited about that. The truth of it is, with 200 nuclear weapons dropped either on the United States or the Soviet Union would render those two countries incapable of surviving as civilized nations. And we've got 55,000 of those nuclear weapons on line, ready to deliver any time we want to. And they can do the same thing. So our vulnerability is completely explicative to me. I understand it. And I think they understand it. And the thing we had better learn to do, and I think the Soviets understand it as well as we do, is find a way to avoid nuclear war.

THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION THOUGHT WE LACKED FIRST STRIKE CAPACITY AND WOULD BE CAUGHT BEHIND.

Well as far as the Soviet's being able to blackmail us with superior weapons and fire power and overall throw weight capacity, I was never really that very much worried. And if I had a been worried very much about it, the last thing I would have picked was an extremely vulnerable system like they had devised here for MX. The first thing I would have looked at was to increase my nuclear submarine capacity because at the time and it remains to this day and would have remained in for the next 20 years for all we understood, a capability to deliver from submarines, undetected, the ability to destroy the Soviet Union completely. Many times over. And so this was an inferior method and it didn't take very much careful scrutiny at all to come up with the idea that this was nothing more than the efforts of the Air Force people to put themselves on par with the other two branches of the service. And of course you had the large companies who supply the Air Force-

ASKS WHY THIS SYSTEM WAS GOING TO BE VULNERABLE.

The system would have been vulnerable and the experts and the system, studying the system come to the conclusion that there was some 12 different ways that the Soviets would know at all time under which shelter that missile would be.

WHY WAS THE SYSTEM VULNERABLE?

Well if the MX system was the best system that the military could come up with, and I really do have a fear for the future of this country and its safety, first of all the experts who studied it, studied the MX system and the...how they were going to be deployed, came to the conclusion that there would be 12 different ways that, where the actual missile was, could be detected. One of these ways was just nothing more than the Soviet satellites that go over, that are so accurate now, that we hear so much about. The thing about it, the thing that we don't understand that's almost inconceivable and not comprehensible at all is the amount of money that would have been necessary to build this thing. In each one of those clusters there would have been 23 different missile launching pads, each one of them would have had to have been hardened to the extent that it could survive anything but a direct hit. That's the incredible expense that we're talking about here. The other thing was the MX was not a defensive weapon, it was a first-strike weapon. And we know this so is because it had terrible accuracy. The military said that it had surgical accuracy, whatever that is. But anyhow it was a very accurate thing. And the other thing was that it had tremendous firepower, way over and beyond what was needed to take out ordinary military targets. So we were talking about essentially a weapon that we didn't dare allow be in the silos to be struck but would have had to been used first. Which would have been a terrible intimidation to the Soviet military itself. They would have recognized that if you are ever going to strike this country, you'd better strike it before this thing is ever put in place because it's not a defensive weapon, it was a first-strike weapon. The very philosophy and nature of that bothered me somewhat. I guess I grew up thinking that my nation was a peaceable nation, that it sought peace, that it cherished peace. And so I was bothered by the fact that we would be building this kind of a weapon system which was not defensive by nature.

POINTS OUT THE AIR FORCE SAID IT WAS NOT FIRST STRIKE, THAT IT WAS IN THE DESERT WHERE IT COULD WITHSTAND ATTACK AND THEN ATTACK...THAT THAT MADE IT A DETERRENT FORCE.

Well certainly if that was all we were after, was simply to be able to counterattack, then we already had that capability. We had that capability in our bombers, we had it certainly in our submarine beyond any doubt. And we had it also in our Minuteman missiles. And the...the truth of that is brought about since they decided that, not to build MX, that they've now put MX in the Minuteman silos to the north of us here. So there must have been some credibility that Minuteman itself would have been sufficient to deter an attack. The point of it is we wanted to build MX because it satisfied a certain amount of political pressure from the military industrial complex.

ASKS IF HE BELIEVES POLITICAL LEADERSHIP THAT IT WAS NECESSARY FOR OUR DEFENSE.

No I think it was just exactly the opposite. I think it would put in jeopardy that which they choose, or chose to protect. The real reason for all of that and it was admitted many, many times, was simply a card to play in the overall hand, the poker hand that they were playing back and forth. It was a gesture to say that we shall be perceived as ready to fight. It was a chip. That was the common word.

A BARGAINING CHIP?

A bargaining chip.

HOW DID THE RACETRACK SEEM TO HIM AS HE DROVE AROUND THE VALLEY?

Well it's, it seemed to me like the first thing that always comes to mind when I drive up and down the valley is now that the system hasn't been built, it isn't going to be built apparently, but I'm very, very thankful and very grateful that it never will be built. But I don't feel one little bit more vulnerable that it isn't going to be built. Because I think that first of all it, it put into jeopardy the very thing that we were trying to save which is the heart of this country. It would have been so expensive in terms of just material and manpower from this country that we would have been bankrupt not just once or twice as we are now, but many, many times over. The problem more...worse than any other thing is that we would have gotten about halfway through it and decided that it was obsolete and outmoded. That we wanted to do SDI, another exercise in total futility in my opinion. And we would have abandoned this, and they would have abandoned us here, with all the harm and the extra road building that had taken place and the trenching and the quarrying and the road building. So, I guess I'm really grateful to live in Utah. I guess I'm really grateful to the people of Utah who had the innate confidence in their own judgment, in their own intelligence, not just me alone but a great majority of the people of this...really fine state. To want to protect these majestic mountains and these broad, beautiful valleys and our agricultural land and our water underneath and our way of life that couldn't be replaced anywhere or any way. So yeah, I'm really glad to be here and I'm glad we turned it down and I don't feel one little bit more vulnerable than I did before. I feel a lot safer.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT EARLIER ANSWER.

Now that we know that MX isn't going to be built or probably isn't going to be built, I certainly don't feel any more vulnerable, I don't feel like that I'm...As a matter of fact I don't feel like I'm nearly as likely to get blown away. I think the security of my country is in good shape. And I guess that I'm really glad that I live in Utah because the people here had the innate good intelligence, intelligence to turn this thing down and to see that it wouldn't in fact ultimately help defend this country.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT ONE LINE.

I felt that MX wasn't going to help defend this country, that it put it in jeopardy. And I was very glad that the people of this state had the innate good intelligence to turn it down and to see through it as essentially for what it was. That there was a way of life here that probably was more valuable to sustain the security of this country over the long haul, which is the protection of these majestic mountain ranges and these valleys and desert and grazing lands and they are good agricultural lands with water underneath it. It was ultimately of greater value in our security than any MX system could have ever been.

SHE SUGGESTS SILOS IN WYOMING ARE MORE VULNERABLE FOR BEING FIXED AND THAT CRITICS BLAME UTAH FOR NOT WANTING THEM.

Well to accuse the people of Utah of essentially not being rather conservative, mostly conservative, very concerned about their, the welfare and security of this country does a grave injustice to the Utahan, Great Basin people. Because they are probably more concerned than actually is the military itself and those proponents of the military. It doesn't take any, any great genius to rather casually observe that the first concern of the military is their own self-promotion and self-perpetuation. And most of the people in the Utah and the Great Basin are not unilateral disarmaments. You wouldn't find a one if you sorted through a whole pile of them. And I'm certainly one of them. I think that's the key to national suicide. But this also had its own elements of national suicide and it grieves me considerably, it's a considerable source of worry that the best military minds of this country could come up...with nothing better for our protection than that kind of a scheme. But let's just reduce it down to a certain basic elements once again. By any stretch of the imagination can you imagine 200 of the major cities of the United States being hit by a nuclear weapon? Can you imagine Hoover dam being hit, what it would do to the Southwest? Within three days they'd be without drinking water. Can you imagine what would happen if you hit the nuclear power plant installations with one bomb in this country? The radioactive material that would be spewed over this nation, this country. So we really are not talking about security, we're talking about the industrial military complex that Eisenhower warned us about. I think it's important to understand. The military industrial complex does not exist on a static supply of taxpayer's money. It must have, in order to grow, with its insatiable desire to consume an ever-increasing amount of taxpayer's money. Isn't it unusual that the great national debt that this country has incurred is almost precisely correlated and parallel to the amount that we've spent in wartime? And isn't it about time that we begin to sit down and considerably...

ASKS ABOUT HIS RANCH AND LAND.

Well my ranch was here and of course my livestock, my livelihood was here...

(INTERRUPTS)

This place is our whole life, of course. It's our ranch and we bought it when it was pretty run down and we took a lot of care and love for it and it's our way of life. We don't want to leave and go anyplace else. It's a little outfit, you know, it wouldn't be anything very much for the Air Force to buy it but we like it. We run 100 head of mother cows and calves and then we got a little feeder operation that we feed the calves over for awhile until spring. It's Mom and Pop but we grow most of our food and, and we're pretty self-sufficient. We don't depend on a whole lot of other things or, except ourselves, so I don't know. I'd sort of hate to see that way of life go altogether.

ASKS ABOUT PUBLIC MEETINGS.

Well when the, when the Air Force came in here and started hoping, holding difference scoping meetings around the country to tell the people what they had in store for us, why, I became immediately suspicious. At least I wanted to keep them honest if that turned out to be necessary. And it turned out to be that I finally, I wouldn't have believed them if they'd a walked in the yard and said hello. It just didn't seem to me to be real, the things they were trying to tell us. But money and planning seemed to be the panacea for all the problems that could be brought up. That could even be discussed. "Well, we will plan for this."

(NOISE INTERRUPTS). (RESTARTS HIM).

Well when we first heard that the...

(INTERRUPTIONS)

When we first heard that the Air Force was going to hold what they called scoping meetings in the various different communities around to explain what they wanted to do, why I, I don't know, somehow I just shook the lethargy and got out and went to a few of them. And I wasn't really all that happy with what I heard. In fact most of the people in the beginning were quite reluctant to challenge the Air Force and say anything about it. So I'd stand up and ask them a question or two now and then and sometimes the, I became kind of hard to bear I'm sure. But it seemed to me to worry me. And their answer to all the questions that could be brought up seemed to be was that we will plan for that, or we will throw some money at it, you know. And that just didn't seem to satisfy me. It certainly didn't satisfy the needs of a lot of people here who have known freedom, true freedom. And it seemed to me like that what we were looking at is more or less what was being described as a kind of a benign but nonetheless military dictatorship. And that just really sort of scares me.

ASKS ABOUT GENERAL HECKER.

Well, General Hecker was a kind of a con man to my way of thinking. The problem, when I, I always appreciate a good con man, I kind of like them. The problem with most con men is they eventually come to believe their own con. Then it becomes dangerous. They become zealots. I don’t know of anything that's more dangerous than a zealot because they sort of lose the thread of reason. And of course he kept, you know, telling us that this was good for us and in spite of all of our suspicions, concerns and worries and cares about our land or water or ranches in the valleys and our way of life, still this was good for us. And just relax and enjoy it. And the more that they tried to reassure us, I guess the more concerned and suspicious we came, became. And ultimately we just turned it down flat cold.

ASKS IF HE SAW PERRY OR ZIEBERG.

Well I couldn't really recall all of them but they had one thing in common when they did come. They had an incredible arrogance and that was personified by this Undersecretary of Defense named Antonia Chayes when she had the unmitigated gall and audacity to tell the people of Utah that they didn't really know what they had here. You know, we always kind of thought we did. And while I'm sure that the good lady didn't perhaps intend it all that derogatory, still it sounded that way to us.

ASKS ABOUT CHAYES.

Well Antonia Chayes at the Bill Moyers show, and I was invited to appear on that show of course, but she said that the people of Utah didn't understand what they had here. And I think she was speaking in terms of our water resource. Well if there's any one thing that the people of the desert understands it's their water resource and of course there was con...a considerable, I suppose resentment built up because of her accusations of our ignorance.

WHY DID THEY NOT TRUST THE AIR FORCE THAT IT WOULD NOT TAKE MUCH WATER?

ASKS WHY THEY DID NOT BELIEVE AIR FORCE THAT IT WOULD NOT TAKE MUCH WATER.

Well when the Air Force started talking about water, we, they were talking about the very heart of our existence, because without water in this country here and it's in short supply, why you don't have anything going for you here. What we were really hearing from the Air Force, somebody in Delta, Utah asked them, they said, "Well what happens when you build this 4,600 missile installations on our desert and the Soviets counteract it by building something to equal it, then what are you going to do?" And the General throwed up his hands and he said "Oh, we'll build 4,600 more." Well someone said, "Where you going to get the water for that?" And it became apparent in listening to the further discussion that they were going to go north clean into Oregon and bring some water down here out of their great river systems down here to the desert. This is the kind of money they were talking about. So no, they weren't talking about just taking our water from our very limited aquifers underneath this grown, they were talking about a water system clean out of Oregon. One of the things that they violated right off and they did this right over here into our neighbors in Nevada, they agreed not to drill close to other wells, existing wells, was the idea that they might dry them up. And that's the first thing they started doing was drilling close to other wells in violation of their own principle. So I wonder how much of that kind of total chaos we were talking about ultimately.

ASKS HIS FEARS FOR AQUIFERS.

Well I think if you understand a little bit of the geology you can understand how fragile our water supply is. But if you look at these mountains to the West here, this is just a big inverted reservoir. And every little storm that comes along it will milk a little water out of it and deposit it up here as snow. And the next summer when that begins to melt it gets into the gravel stratas and comes down underneath here, underneath and replenishes our aquifer. Now if you drill a big well here and start pumping all of that out, you remove the hydrostatic pressure of that water pushing against this water and then it sucks the salt water out here on the Salt Flats back into underneath our aquifer here. And you don't grow much with salt water. And we don't only know that this is a phenomenon that can occur, it has occurred. And after the Air Force had spent several millions on there environmental impact statement, far more than I care to even think about, they didn't understand that they could do that and I had to point it out to them.

ASKS ABOUT BEING UNDER SURVEILLANCE.

Well our continued existence here on the desert was put in jeopardy in two or three different ways. In the Delta meeting when the generals all came here, someone had the good sense to ask them "What about our cattle out there on the desert? With all these increased people or numbers of people around or the increased amount of theft and vandalism going to increase?" I think it was a legitimate concern. So the general said, "Say, don't you worry about your cattle getting stole because I'll guarantee that there'll be nothing move or go on out there that we won't know about." And all of a sudden it became apparent to us, that's right. Not only will the thieves be scrutinized, but big brother will be looking right now the back of our neck all the time. And that don't set right with us and it certainly didn't.

ASKS FOR CLARIFICATION.

I think that ultimately the system would have required such security, at least the suspicions of the Air Force would have been so great that we would have said you all constitute a security risk here and they would have come into the Great Basin and confiscated our ranches and, paid us for them of course, and we'd a had to move. And this whole area here would have been a come, become a vast military reservation approximately the size of Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined.

ASKS ABOUT BILL MOYERS DEBATE.

Well when we had the Bill Moyers debate, I was kind of surprised I got invited to it. Maybe I should have been. But there was a helicopter landed here in the field and the fellow got out and asked me if I was Cecil Garland and I said would I come and be on the Bill Moyer's show. Well I was pretty incensed against this whole thing so I consented to do that. So I went in, got in on the show and I had the statistics about land and water and cattle and grazing all wrote down and I was going to talk about that. But the more I heard from the world's great experts on how to kill millions and millions and millions of the people of this earth with the least cost and expense and the most efficiently, I guess I sort of became repelled by the whole idea and I just threw my statistics away. And I just said it seems to me that this discussion is degenerated into how we should deploy the missile of the three modes. The land mode, the air mode, the sea mode. I said I'd like to suggest the fourth mode which is the commode. And of course it seemed to sort of captured the imagination of a lot of people there and I was rather surprised at how well it was received.

WHAT WAS THE EFFECT OF THE DEBATE?

Well the Bill Moyer debate was the beginning of national understanding of the problem of MX. There is just no question about that. We knew that with the very small population of the state of Utah as is always the case against the great population of the East, that without their understanding we could never defeat MX. That they'd just simply roll over us. I'm sure that was the intent. But when Bill Moyers focused attention on this problem here, then we were beginning to get the understanding that we knew we had to have nationally in order to defeat it.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT.

The Bill Moyers show was, was the first great amount of national attention that was focused on the MX crisis here.

ASKS ROLE OF THE MORMON CHURCH.

Well of course the Mormon Church is, is a very prominent, powerful part of the thinking and ultimately the politics of the state of Utah. I think that’s an understood phenomenon. And as is the case of people who are conservative, and they are largely, they set back and carefully scrutinized and carefully begin to assimilate what was going on within this region that's vital to them. The important thing is that the Mormon Church in my opinion has not become so stratified and so much of a hierarchy that it couldn't respond to the people that constitutes the Mormon Church. The people who are farming, the people who have the small businesses in these small communities and live here. And fortunately after all was said and done they did respond to the concerns of the people and to me that was a very fine thing.

ASKS ABOUT 1980 ELECTION.

Well there was a good deal of concern about the politics of the time. Reagan we knew was supposed to be very conservative and...and very interested in improving the military position, financially and otherwise. We had known this from the beginning. We also know that we had a given with Carter. Carter was the one who set this thing up, set it in motion. So we were quite apprehensive about what Reagan, if he became elected, would do. And of course ultimately I think it was the Mormon Church that brought the great power, their great power of persuasion to the Reagan administration in opposition to MX.

INTERRUPTIONS.

Now there's a lot of people in the state of Utah that would prob-...perhaps disagree with this. Because there's, there's animosities. But this is honestly the way I feel about it.

ASKS ABOUT REAGAN'S OPPOSITION IN OCTOBER 1981?

Well when heard in November...

INTERRUPTS.

When we heard that fall that Reagan had decided not to build the MX of course we were really, really high on that and we were really pleased about it. And I guess our thoughts was, well, we've, we've really done what we set out to do and I was with my good friend General Thurborne and some others in Missoula, Montana on a speaking tour. So we sit down and talked it over and decided that well, we'd pretty well convinced the American people but what we should do now was go over to the Soviet Union and convince them that we had the best intentions toward peace in our minds.

WHAT WOULD YOU THINK IF THE AIR FORCE CAME BACK AND SAID WE HAVE SMALLER MISSILES, USING LESS LAND AREA, AND WANT TO PUT THEM HERE? WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?

Well if the Air Force ever decided to come back and build something here again, I think I would do just pretty much what we did the other time and what I did the other time. I would look at it, think about it, carefully study it. Judge it on its own merits. And if I thought it was wrong, not only for the people here, and for the land here, but wrong for the nation. Not conservative but far too expensive, then I would rise in opposition again. And more importantly than that I think that the people would again and I think that they would feel that it was their patriotic duty to do so.

[INAUDIBLE QUESTION]

Well any casual study of history whether it is the English occupation of the early colonies, or whether it is the various military regimes, whether you are talking about Attila the Hun or Kubla Khan or Genghis Khan or whoever. You find that ultimately a military without its inhibitors and essentially that's the essential concern of the people from which it springs, the will of those people, that military ultimately winds up as the dominant factor if not totally in control, at least tacit control of the population and their politics. That's what, not what this country is all about. That's not what I was taught to believe and that's not what my folks told me it was all about. And so I'll rise against it wherever I think that it deserves that. With the complete understanding that I believe in the defense of this country. I think it's a little bit of a concern of mine that at one time in this country we called it the Department of War. It was primarily concerned with defense. It bothers me a little bit now that we call it the Department of Defense, but it is somehow primarily concerned about war.

ASKS ABOUT USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

I don't believe it one little bit in a limited nuclear war. I think once it starts it will just be like hollering war in a horse race, there ain't nobody going to hear you. And it's going to go off everywhere. The problem with these things are that I've often thought that when we start popping these missiles out of the ground, that it's going to be like popping pop corn in an open frying pan. I don't really trust where in the heck they're all going to go. I think that our own missiles are going to kill an awful lot of us. And I really sort of come to the conclusion that a strike against the Soviets is a strike against us. And the same for them when they start striking us, even if 100 percent of their missiles got over here, this thing we call atmosphere, this thin film of what we breathe and must have to survive that carries our water and our clouds and our rain, ultimately is going to circulate that, that dirty nuclear-filled atmosphere around this whole hemisphere and life is not, if it exists at all, is never going to be the same.

CRITICS FEEL THAT SOVIETS DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THEIR PEOPLE TELLING THE MILITARY WHAT IT CAN OR CANNOT DO. OUR MILITARY FEELS THIS PUTS US IN A GREAT DISADVANTAGE. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Well I hope the people of America will carefully consider what the military says. If they are so concerned about the Soviet accuracy, the Soviet capability to destroying us, that really is their problem. My problem and the problem of the people of the country is to try to determine what amount of that is simply the excitability generated in order to promote and perpetuate themselves. Certainly with their many incidences that we've already said of there having been errors in the military's miscalculations. As for me, I'm thoroughly convinced that it only hurts the first time you've killed. After that it doesn't matter. We've got enough nuclear capacity in the 55,000 nuclear warheads that exists between the United States and the Soviet Union to kill ourselves so many times now that it's incalculable. And I'm absolutely unimpressed by this perpetual desire of the military for overkill.

We were becoming quite concerned about how much surveillance that we actually would get out here and at the Delta meeting there was one of the generals that was talking about, you know, the value of building in here. And someone had thought of the question to ask, you know, what's going to happen when we have this tremendous increase in population here. Is there going to be a great deal of stealing of our cattle, rustling cattle and vandalism occurring? And the general hastened to tell us that not to worry about that, that anything that went on out here they would know about it and they would be able to take care of that. And which immediately brought the specter to mind, were we being gradually introduced to a complete system of Big Brother-ism, was Big Brother going to be looking down over our shoulders at all times. We were pretty convinced that that was the case.

ASKS ABOUT SCOWCROFT COMMISSION SAYING IT WAS OK TO PUT THE MISSILES IN SILOS.

Well it's, it's...these fancy names that we hang onto these things, windows of vulnerability or being perceived as willing to fight, or being capable of repelling first— strike weapons and throw weights, were essentially the kind of rhetoric and discussion that I shied away from. It seemed to me to be pretty unimportant. I never particularly worried about it. Let them be concerned with their own, world of their own jargon. What I had to concern myself with was the basic overall security and well being of this nation and this country and the land that I live in. And so whatever pat phrases and supermarket labels they wanted to hang onto their apparatus didn't concern me a great deal. And it doesn't yet.

HOW DID HIS NEIGHBORS FEEL ABOUT IT?

Well I suspect that my neighbors by and large, almost without exception, were opposed to the MX. I suspect that we're sort of born to do what we do and most of my neighbors are quite conservative, oftentimes quite reluctant to challenge either their church or their state. And I don't quibble with that. I suppose it happens to be my particular lot in life to be somewhat of an iconoclast and vociferous and questioning. And I don't believe that got challenged too much either. So we all did the thing that we felt that we had to do. Ultimately it culminated in a decision making process both by government and sometimes with the Influence of church. Certainly with an awful lot of input by the people here in the Great Basin that culminated in the ultimate decision of rejecting MX. Which I thought was basically very wholesome, very patriotic, very American and damned intelligent.

AIR FORCE FELT PUTTING MX IN THE HEARTLAND MEANT THE BEST DEFENSE AGAINST RUSSIANS.

Well the concept of putting that in jeopardy which you wish to protect I am told is contrary to the very first things that they are taught in military schools. So why they were willing to reject that concept so basic to the military thinking and thought and put it right here in the middle of this country can only be explained in the fact that they viewed us as a wasteland with a very sparse population of people who were very conservative and overly patriotic and sufficiently stoic enough to permit them to do as they chose to do. That was the reason that the Great Basin was picked. Certainly the people in let us say Massachusetts or around Atlanta, Georgia wasn't going to stand for this at all. Nor would there have been the room for it. But we were picked I'm sure because of our sparse population and isolation.

AIR FORCE SAID THERE'S NOTHING OUT THERE... IT'S WASTELAND.

Well I know that we're often told to the point of possibly being propagandized that our land is a land of poverty that there isn't much out there, that certainly it's a desert and I don't think anybody really bought that too much. There's, every year mother antelopes that brings their little spindly-legged fawns to the seeps to get a drink. And there's a den of coyotes out here. And they deserve to have a place. The eagles continue their ceaseless circles above the desert floor here. The mountain lions softly pad around up here in the mountains, looking for a meal of venison. It's not a desert in terms of total absence of wildlife. It is a desert and it has a desert ecology. And it has a desert system of life. From lizards and rattlesnakes and burrowing owls that burrow in the dens of the badgers. It's a wonderful country. And when our rains come it brings flowers to the land and it brings green and our cattle find sufficient amount to live through the winter on. It's a wonderful country.

ASKS IF RACEWAY SYSTEM MADE SENSE TO HIM AS A WAY OF PREVENTING THE SOVIETS FROM KNOWING AND TARGETING EVERY SINGLE SHELTER?

First of all I don't believe that the system was sufficiently foolproof to have completely achieved what the Air Force said it would, which was to have eliminated the possibility of the Soviet's knowing where that missile was at all times. I think they would have known. I think there was far too many ways that they could have found out. Secondly there is a great hazard in this world. I am absolutely convinced that that's true. There is a hazard in trying to achieve peace but there is a greater hazard in heaping upon the people of any nation and its resources that which is incapable of expending and maintaining a proper balance between military expenditures and the economic well being of that country. This was not a conservative idea. It was basically a very profligate idea, asking the people of this country to build something that was essentially outmoded, outdated and obsolete by the time that it would have been built if not before. It was a system that at the very least was questionable in its ability to succeed to do that which it set out to do. And beyond any question, it would have placed a burden upon the people of this country and there sources of this nation beyond what it could have stood or was anywhere near reasonable.

SO HE WAS HAPPY WITH REAGAN'S DECISION?

We were happy with President Reagan and the people saying no, we will not build MX. The problem with the military is that they don't have to ever give up. They are funded with the taxpayers' money. And they perpetually and endlessly continue to promote and perpetuate and idea. What we did here was out of our own pocket, at our own expense. And we can win 50 times and they only have to win once. And they do it at our expense and this is the great fear I had. Not that Reagan stopped it, but that it may start again as it undoubtedly is. It is starting again up in the northwest, in Montana with the Midetman thing. So it goes on and on and on. And they never give up.

ASKS ABOUT USING SMALLER MISSILES THAT WOULD NOT TAKE UP MUCH LAND.

I don't like the idea of Minuteman missile one little bit. I don't like the idea of Midgetman missile, not, not a bit. Because it simply means the duplication of building ever more accurate and powerful warheads, adding to a surplus that's already too great, that we don't and cannot possibly use or need. So what's the real reason? And this is the question that you have to constantly keep coming back. What is the reason and what is the need for it?

ASKS HIM TO SHOW WHERE SITES WERE TO BE PLACED.

The missile site closest to us would have been just north of that cinder cone that you see on the horizon. And my ranch is down here to the northeast.