Engineer Memoirs
When this came out over his signature, that locked in the fact that there would be a
development program and that the Corps and the AEC would each have a piece of the
action. Then the issue was to set up the organizational arrangement for this. I proposed,
and it was approved, that we put a Corps of Engineers group at Livermore.
Then we had to work out the reporting chain. The reporting chain from that group was
to the Director of Civil Works in the Office of the Chief of Engineers. At that time the
director was Bob MacDonnell.
[Lieutenant General William F.] Cassidy had been Director of Civil Works at the
beginning of this whole thing. Then he became the Deputy Chief of Engineers for
Construction. Then he became the Chief of Engineers.
Bob MacDonnell was the director in 1962. There was no problem on that end. My
biggest problem was with the laboratory at Livermore. You may wonder why that was.
The laboratory at Livermore was very academic in its bureaucratic politics and
extremely jealous of its independence and prerogatives. When I had gone there as a
young Army officer, there had been a fetish over the fact that I worked for the
laboratory and that I could have no out-of-channels contact. They were very concerned
that if outsiders came to work at the laboratory, that could result in extracurricular
channels whereby the work of the laboratory would not always be reported through
their leadership. They were afraid that some junior military officer would tell his military
superiors that they were working on this bomb, and it would get all messed up.
I felt then and still do that this was juvenile. But in any event, there was a fetish over
the relationships. So when I proposed to go out and set up this group, I knew that there
was going to an argument over just who worked for whom and why.
Q:
This was the Nuclear Cratering Group?
A:
Yes, the Nuclear Cratering Group. I managed to work it out with them. I had friends
there and they did have confidence in me. I had an independent group with only a small
number of people.
They gave us office space. They didn't charge us rent. There was no quibble over
money. We got our relations worked out, but it wasn't easy.
Just to finish up on that point, there was a genuine need to agree on the respective roles
of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Corps of Engineers, and the laboratories in this
development program--in other words, who would be responsible for what.
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