Engineer Memoirs
A:
That's right. He played a very substantial role in that because at the time I was the
Director of Military Application in the Energy Research and Development
Administration [ERDA], which was the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission.
I was working for [Lieutenant General Alfred] Dodd Starbird, who is another one of
my role models. Starbird, if you were a good man, never let you leave. Gribble wanted
me to be the Director of Civil Works. I had talked with him some when he had been the
Chief of Research and Development of the Army about coming to work for him. I was
interested in that.
He moved from that research and development job to be Chief, and he kept in mind that
I was interested in coming to work for him. He proposed to Starbird that Starbird
release me from the Director of Military Application to become Director of Civil
Works, and Starbird basically was stalling. He didn't want to say no, but he didn't say
yes.
I finally told Starbird that I felt my job as the Director of Military Application was a
dead end as far as my Army career was concerned and that among other things, he
might not have realized I was much more senior at the time I was in the job than he had
been when he had held the job. He had held the job back in the late 1950s, relatively
much earlier in his career. He had been, when he went to it, only a colonel and was
promoted to brigadier general as he arrived on the job. He stayed with it for almost five
years.
When I was assigned in there, I was already a major general. So I was much later in my
career. My feeling was that, in terms of the advancement of my contemporaries, if I was
going on to any more senior positions, I had to get back with the Army. I wouldn't be
able to move up from ERDA.
[Lieutenant General Joseph K.] Joe Bratton took my place working for Starbird, and
worked there for four years. He became Chief of Engineers. He was extraordinarily well
fitted for the job. But he was running out of time when he finally escaped from Starbird
and became division engineer of the South Atlantic Division. Joe did an outstanding job
in DMA [Division of Military Application], and Starbird wouldn't let him go, either.
Q:
When you met Lieutenant Colonel Gribble in 1955, this optimistic consensus about
nuclear power obviously still held.
A:
That's right. Very much so. And I will give you an illustration of it. This was a thing
that did not work out technically. They had come out with the concept that they could
have what they called package power reactors. That is, they could make a small plant
which could be carried to remote places and could function easily and would obviate
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