Chris Paine interview by telephone, April 4 1995
Interviewer — Metta Spencer

Metta Spencer (MS): You’re a busy man.

Chris Paine (CP): Yes, that’s life in a big city.

MS: Let’s see, I don’t know how much I told you about what I’m doing. Do you want me to start over? Or do you sort of know?

CP: No, I don’t actually know what you are doing.

MS: I’ve been working for about five years on a book on the way the international peace movement influenced Soviet policy, primarily under Gorbachev.

CP: Influenced Soviet policy.

MS: Yes, now I was called by the Bulletin a few weeks ago, who somehow, somebody got—David Lopez got a copy of my, one of my chapters and they wanted me to write something for them and I figured that meant I also had to cover what happened in the U.S.. Actually, it turns out they’re happy with just the stuff I sent them; by chance they are going to take it. I don’t have to do anything more, however I should have called you anyway—if you want to talk about the U.S. as well that’s fine because I know you worked for Kennedy. Didn’t you?

CP: Yes.

MS: So you know a lot of the mechanism in the U.S., but my initial concern was just to try to explain how decisions were made in the Soviet Union. I sort of left the rest because David Cortright was writing a book on the same subject with respect to the U.S. and I figured it was his turf.

CP: Yes, there is another fellow who has interviewed me, who has been working on a very similar—his name is Matt Evangalista. He teaches at the University in Michigan.

MS: Yes, I’ve talked to him. I don’t know, he’s ahead of me, I think. I think he’s got a book coming out called, Taming the Bear. I know that he has….

CP: He just published a journal article about relations between the U.S. peace and arms control, disarmament organizations and similar Soviet organizations, and Soviet government officials like the Academy of Sciences, under Gorbachev.

MS: Do you know where that is?

CP: No, I don’t

MS: I haven’t talked to him in about 7 or 8 months.

CP: I just got a copy of it in the mail at home. I meant to bring it in today.

MS: Maybe you could fax me or just send me the listing. I should call him anyway, if you don’t send it to me I’ll get it from him, but I haven’t talked to him in maybe a year. He was off at Harvard for the year, I think, in Cambridge, was working on Sabbatical last year so I imagine he’s ahead of me. I’ve got, oh,160,000 words written, but I need another 60,000 or 70,000 before I’m through.

CP: That’s good, if that’s what you’re doing.

MS: Yes.

CP: ___ and you’re focusing on the relationship between U.S. NGOs and Soviet government entities or….

MS: I’m focusing on any way I can see that the international peace movement had an influence on….

CP: International as opposed to U.S., because the Europeans are also very much involved.

MS: Right. I mean international, including the U.S., but not just the U.S.. As a matter of fact, my book is much broader in that I think it’s a bit arrogant to say ‘we guys came and saved you folks.’ I start with a lot of stuff about how inside the party itself there were, kind of, hidden dissidents for many years. I go back as far as Prague spring, and so on, and talk about how there were networks already influential, or ready to be influential, when they had a chance. These actually formed the core of the people in Gorbachev’s international relations area. I don’t think he had very good people in domestic policies but—I cover a wider thing, but basically all that I omit is how the American policies were made. For one thing I assume, I’d be interested in your opinion on this, I assume—it seems to me that policies were made in the U.S. in a different way from the Soviets, where there everything tended to be top down. Here it was more influencing the public opinion which then had some political influence in a rather obscure way.

CP: That’s right, that’s how the American system works. The link between— sometimes it’s a little clearer, we can discuss some specific episodes where perhaps the policy influences are a little more direct into dealing with specific actions of individuals or groups, but in most cases it’s much more diffuse. The pattern of influencing first, a body of public opinion, then the local media opinion, then congressional, sort of, centre of gravity of congressional opinion and often times finally executive branch opinion moving in response to _______ which is what happens in the case where, you know, you have a ________ government, where the White House is in the hands of one party and the hill is in the hands of the other party. We’re seeing the inversion of that process right now in Washington, where the right wing and the grass roots have most of the momentum and is able to exert influence on a Republican controlled congress that then can push around the White House.

MS: How much do you worry about that as far as arms control goes and disarmament?

CP: It has more sort of a limiting effect on advancing the future agenda. I don’t think that the existing arms control achievements are that much in jeopardy because the Republican revolution, as it is, is mainly a domestic, you know concerns domestic policy. It impacts foreign policy in very important ways but no one’s directly gunning for overthrowing the START I or START II agreements, for example. There has been this long-standing effort to escape the ABM treaty, but that’s something that we encountered in even more virulent form in the Reagan administration. That’s not new, that’s a continuum, its not necessarily part of an issue because the Clinton administration has from the beginning shown an alarming willingness to play ball with the people who want to undermine the ABM treaty. They are advancing the agenda for the Republicans so, it’s a more complex…

MS: There was something in the Economist about really picking up Star Wars again. Of course it looked different, but does that worry you?

CP: Of course. I mean…

MS: I mean do you think that they can do it?

CP: No they can’t do it. I mean, technically, in fact, the last series of tests, it was a big failure —the navy’s tests in the Atlantic. I don’t think they can do it technically, but they will continue to waste enormous amounts of money….

MS: Well that’s what I was wondering. Can they push it through politically if they want to try?

CP: No, I don’t think they can substantially augment the program or they will continue to waste about three and a half or four billion dollars a year but I do not believe that because of the splits within the Republican party between sort of deficit hawks and defence hawks, the deficit hawks seem to be winning. There aren’t going to be any big increases for defence; defence won’t go down as sharply as perhaps as it might have under Democratic-controlled congress, but they aren’t going to get the big increases either. I don’t see the budgetary wherewithal to actually break out of the ABM treaty. What you’ll see is a steady erosion of the meaning of the treaty and you’ll see some negative effects long term, in terms of the willingness of other states to entertain very deep reductions of nuclear weapons. It’s one of an option of substantial ??strategic defences are out there, you know, as either an option for the U.S. or the Russians. The Chinese or the French, for example won’t engage in any caps on their forces.

MS: Uh, huh.

CP: And they probably won’t agree to other important arms control measures like a fissile material cut-off, because that would limit the size of the force that they could deploy against a break out, in defensive…

MS: What does this mean for CTB?

CP: It doesn’t really affect—it does indirectly affect the prospects for CTB, but the French have indicated that if the Russians were to deploy defences, they would probably have to leave any test ban treaty and test maneuvering or high speed reentry vehicles that get through defences. The ABM treaty is kind of the bedrock of nuclear arms reduction and control. It’s sort of the essential background element against which deep reductions in nuclear weapons occur. If you remove that background, there is much more uncertainty in countries; especially countries with smaller nuclear forces. They aren’t sure where they should go. We keep making this point with the Clinton administration, that they are tinkering with the future of arms control and they tinker with the ABM treaty, but it seems to be too sophisticated a point for them to absorb right now. They’re too wrapped up in the politics of trying to seem appropriately hawkish on defence to appreciate the damage that they’re doing.

MS: Well let me focus more on the Soviet side since it turns out that the Bulletin doesn’t really care whether I do any more on this side or not.

CP: You’re mainly doing—you’re talking historically rather than contemporary…

MS: I sort of washed my hands of these guys when they—when the Soviet Union broke up, but I figure that’s a logical cutting point for the end of my research.

CP: _____ on the ABM treaty, I mean if you’re looking for examples of things that really are the products of citizens or of citizen scientists diplomacy, the ABM treaty originated in discussions between private citizens in Russian and the U.S.. Russian nuclear scientists and American scientists met in a series of informal meetings in the 1960’s at Harvard.

MS: In Doty’s group.

CP: Yes, Doty’s group and that’s where the…

MS: Do you think that was more important than Pugwash?

CP: Well, the groups substantially overlapped; Pugwash and Doty’s group substantially overlapped in their membership…

MS: Because I have stories from Jo Rotblat about the— I have 200 interviews, by the way so I’ve talked to a lot of folks, but he claims that Pugwash was important. Jeremy Stone claims something for himself, but he also points to Doty’s group, so…

CP: Jeremy was part of that group on and off too I think. I think you should talk to Jack Ruina, who was very much a part of those discussions also and George Rathjens. That’s a case where a very small group of people, because arms control in the ’60s was not a matter of concern to most—there were no large public organizations involved in arms control, it was a, pretty much a matter of elite opinion on both sides. In that case the U.S. decision structure was very analogous to the Russian, or the Soviet decision structure on that issue. That sort of counter example for the U.S. case where it wasn’t moving masses of public opinion, it was a very narrow body of opinion that had to be influenced. They did have—they apparently did have a major impact on Johnson and MacNamara, particularly MacNamara and Dean Rusk in getting those discussions started, which then carried over into the Nixon administration.

MS: One of the things I don’t have any evidence about is the Soviet acceptance of the INF with a zero option and all. That turn-around was a very critical one and I don’t have any evidence of who influenced that either Soviets or foreigners. Do you have any clues on that?

CP: Um (Long pause.)

MS: I mean maybe Gorbachev just did it on his own, but what made him decide to do that?

CP: I worked at FAS during—I should tell you where I worked, or maybe just to see how the background. I started at the Federation of American Scientists in the end of 1980. I left FAS in the fall of ’83 and then worked for a year and a half, almost two years for Physicians for Social Responsibility as their Washington office director and then joined the staff of the energy and commerce committee working on nuclear non-proliferation issues in 1985 and joined— I was on a semester as guest scholar at MIT, and then I joined Senator Cary’s [Kerry’s??] staff in January of ’87. I was there until May of ’91. I joined NRDC, and I’ve been there ever since. I have kind of congressional and public policy perceptive, you know, NGO perspective on the issues. On the INF I remember working quite hard on the INF issue at FAS and we held some meetings and wrote some papers. I’d have to go back and refresh my memory on what we did at that time, but what we did was, initially we attacked a zero option as unrealistic and a non-starter politically. By the time of the first summit, you should check this with Jeremy, in 85 I think—I had left by then—FAS had shifted its position, was urging acceptance of the ______. The argument—the big debate on the Russian side was after the Star Wars speech—the big debate on the Russian side was whether American concession on ABM on constraining the Star Wars program should be linked to Soviet acceptance of reductions. There was a big debate over there about whether they would go for a package deal which tried to get rid of the Star Wars program through some sort of formal linkage to future reductions or whether they should go ahead with the process of reductions on the theory that if you could get the arms control process reinstated, that the Star Wars program would fade away under the weight of improved relations between two countries and the fact that negotiator reductions are a far more effective way than to try to shoot down missiles.

I know FAS, I don’t know about other groups, but I remember FAS very forcefully arguing with the Soviet academy of sciences, I’m trying to remember Velikhov, who was Gorbachev’s arms control advisor by that point. I remember we very forcefully argued with him that they should de-link the two and they should just go ahead and not make, not only the INF reductions but go ahead and negotiate the strategic arms reduction without any direct linkage to final outcomes of Star Wars. We were reasonably confident that Star Wars as a deployment program wouldn’t happen because of the domestic opposition and because of the budgetary implications. The U.S. defence budget in terms of real dollars peaked in 1985, there was a very steep rise in the first Reagan term. Most people don’t realize this, that the Reagan build up really only lasted a few years and then—in terms of real spending, it peaked in ’85 and then in went down after that. Once that peak was passed it was clear that they weren’t going to be able to fund a Star Wars deployment of any sizable….

MS: Because of congress?

CP: …Token kind of system that was consistent with the ABM treaty, but they were just wanting the money to do anything bigger…

MS: Was it congress that was going to stop that?

CP: Yes the congress.

MS: Reagan would have gone as far as he could, if he…

CP: No, but even there I think Reagan lost control of the program. He set it in motion but then it became a creature of programming and budgeting and the real interest in the program was the perpetual R&D program among the major constituents of it. Industrial constituency was just keep researching this and waste lots of money. Once you get into a procurement program you have to prove that the system will work, or at least you have to pretend that it will work. They hadn’t even been able to show or persuade any of the key senators, especially who worked on these issues, that the system would work. That any of the proposed systems would actually do what they were supposed to do, so they weren’t ever at a point where they could proceed into procurement and at some point in the sort of mid- to late-‘80s this program settled down into a kind of a pork barrel research program. That’s what it has been ever since.

That was our message to the Russians: basically don’t link this, because this administration will never for ideological reasons give up, formally give up the defence objective, I’m talking about the Reagan administration. I said, don’t link it formally to asking them to sort of cry uncle on the objective of Star Wars. The president will never do that, but he has made a big turn around on the prospect of reductions . The Reykjavik summit for example, in ’86 indicated that the Reagan administration was, at least the president personally, was willing to entertain very far-reaching reductions when he proposed zero Ballistic Missiles. Our advice to Velikhov, which was transmitted in numerous meetings, by that point where there were—quite close relationships started to develop especially on the defences issue. I think FAS held its first meeting with the Russians on defences in 1983. You could check with John Pike. The Soviet academy had formed a group called the Committee of Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat. We started meeting with them very early on, on defences and strategic arms reduction issues.

MS: Did Velikhov need any turning around or was he already of the same mind as you?

CP: I think he was pretty much of the same mind as us on the basic question of defences— that they were useless, to the extent that they played a role at all, they were politically destabilizing. But from a technical point of view they were infeasible, from a political point of view they were destabilizing, so he was basically against them.

MS: So you didn’t have to work hard.

CP: No, the question was, “how should they respond?” Should there be a—and Velikhov’s great contribution on the Russian side was to argue that Gorbachev did not need to respond in time with his own Star Wars program. That the answer to the U.S. Star Wars program was not a Russian Star Wars program, but rather simply to be prepared with the right kind of counter measures and secondarily to argue the unfeasibility of the whole thing and try to solve the problem politically. One of the major contributions of FAS, and I think the other groups you should look at in this period are the National Academies, CSAC. You know them; they did a committee on security and arms control, on international security and arms control, CSAC…

MS: Who are they?

CP: CSAC

MS: Who are some of the people involved?

CP: Dick Garwin, Wolfgang Panovsky, Rathjens.

MS: Garwin turned me down, he won’t be interviewed.

CP: Really, that’s strange.

MS: He said he’s busy. Who would be my second choice on that?

CP: Wolfgang Panovsky.

MS: Panovsky. OK.

CP: I think the CSAC group was pretty much delivering the same message. Frank Von Hippel, you should talk to Frank….

MS: I interviewed him for three hours.

CP: He’s closest, he was the person closest to Velikhov. John Pike, you should certainly talk to him about the defences question, but I think basically they’ll tell you, basically the same spiel I’m giving you; that the U.S. contribution at that point was to explain the domestic political situation with respect to Star Wars. Argue against any direct linkage with reductions and to press ahead with reductions on the notion that that would bring the two countries back together and working cooperatively on arms control again. That was the single best weapon we had against Star Wars, which proved to be very good advice. That’s the direction that the events took.

MS: You think that once the Star Wars decision was made it followed, as the night the day, that they would go for the INF?

CP: No, I don’t. I think the INF—I don’t know the peculiarities of the INF decision. I think that Gorbachev—that the whole INF discussion — had different roots within the Russian structure. It goes back to the whole reason Soviet foreign policy became discredited in the early 1980’s. One of the major elements in Gorbachev’s rise to power was his critique of that policy. It goes to the SS-20 decision, which produced a real crisis for Soviet ideologists. In which you had a peace movement, in both a _____ peace movement in Western Europe and a somewhat smaller, but nevertheless visible peace movement in Eastern Europe protesting the deployment of Soviet missiles, not just American missiles, but Soviet missiles. A plague on both their houses kind of argument. Within the Soviet structure that caused a major upheaval because the ideologues say, “how can this be? The peace-loving forces are attacking us, for what we’re doing and saying that we’re responsible for escalating the arms race.” You know, because all the sort of, to use the crude phrase, all the commie sympathizers—fellow traveler organizations, which the Soviets had traditionally relied on in the west, to support their point of view, were criticizing them. This was something that could not happen in official Soviet ideology. Soviets by definition were the peace loving forces _______ against the imperial forces of the west.

Gorbachev had an explanation; the explanation was, we made a mistake, we don’t need these missiles, they’re provocative, they’re contributing to an escalation of east/west tensions, they’re provoking anti-Soviet feeling. This whole thing has backfired, it’s strengthening rather than weakening NATO, it strengthened NATO. It’s brought the western governments even more under the orbit of the U.S. government. It’s forced a demonstration of NATO’s solidarity at the very moment when we were making progress in essentially weakening NATO politically. I think that—so Gorbachev had a whole, or people around him, had a pretty well developed critique of how that was, the SS-20 was a big mistake. Between that and Afghanistan they could show that the Soviet government was really just totally mistaken in its approach to foreign policy. They had to take a more conciliatory, open approach.

MS: With whom did you discuss these things and get a sense that they—my feeling is that there are not more than about half a dozen people around Gorbachev that were brokers of ideas that really had influence. I mean Arbatov, Velikhov, Shakhnazarov, etc.. And I wonder with whom you talked and whether you have any other names on that list.

CP: Our contact was with the, on this issue, was primarily with the Institute for the USA and Canada People, so that would have been Kokoshin, who is now quite an influential person. Arbatov, the elder Arbatov, the younger, Sergei Rogov, and

MS: Do you think Rogov was already influential?

CP: I don’t know. I’m just saying who we talked to. I have no idea whether they were influential. I have no idea whether Arbatov was influential, at this point, he was a candidate member of the Central Committee…

MS: He sure was influential. I can say that! He’s probably the top on the list.

CP: I think they were able to, the more sophisticated— people who had experience in the west and understood, especially the dynamics of West European politics, were able to show that this whole thing was disastrous basically for Soviet policy. It was undermining all the progress that had been achieved since Willy Brandt, since 1972. It was just the wrong thing to do. They had a good case. I think that led to a further weakening of the, sort of, the hawkish arguments on the Soviet side; the traditional military arguments. They were able to show that, absent the SS20s, NATO probably never would have been able to take this deployment. I mean, it never would have happened. They wouldn’t have had the political, they couldn’t have gotten the political solidarity within NATO to do it. I think that’s the roots of the zero option. I think they were already well on their way to negotiating a large scale reduction during Reagan’s first term with the walk in the woods and all that stuff. The walk in the woods was rejected on both sides for different reasons. Instead of a greatest common denominator reconciliation, you know, by going to say higher numbers of weapons on both sides that would have created some sort of strategic balance, Reagan was very firmly fixed on the zero option and the notion that the Russians would never buy it. Gorbachev basically called his bluff. I’m not very knowledgeable about what discussions took place on the Russian side. There are lots of, not lots of, there are a few people who are, I think who have looked at this in greater detail.

MS: You mean Westerners.

CP: Westerners, yes.

MS: Like who?

CP: There is a guy, I’m trying to remember his name. He teaches down at Duke. He’s a Russian scholar, a very well known one. You don’t know who I’m talking about?

MS: I don’t know who you’re talking about, no.

CP: Whose um.

MS: Not Shlapentokh?

CP: He’s American.

MS: All right never mind.

CP: I can’t remember his name. And then I think Matt….

MS: Oh Hough. Jerry Hough?

CP: Jerry Hough, yes.

MS: All right, OK.

CP: Jerry’s looked at it and I think Matt Evangelista has looked at it.

MS: Uh, huh. Ok. One of the other things that I came across was the fact that apparently they decided early on, at least Gorbachev decided and was very interested in the notion of, unilateral initiatives as opposed to negotiation as a way of breaking the deadlock. I asked Petrovsky about that and he said, yes, they had decided as a matter of policy to use that approach. That may somewhat explain the INF decision because it was certainly a one-sided kind of thing; it wasn’t a negotiation, as far as I can tell. I mean it wasn’t really a negotiation, it was a one sided kind of concession. Do you know anything about that? Or have you heard anybody talk about their….

CP: Well of course I have, because their next big initiative was the test moratorium, which I was very much involved in from the very beginning. As far as the origins of the INF I wasn’t really—had gone to Russia at that point, my first trip was in the fall of 1985. I think you are essentially right that it was a political call by Gorbachev to signal a major change in the Soviet Union’s approach to the West and was opening _____ on his reform program, basically. I guess, the famous conversation he had with Margaret Thatcher where Margaret Thatcher called Reagan and said, “We can do business with this man.”

MS: Yes,

CP: You know, its all about peace. He was really out to start fast and you know…

MS: Now when you went to work on the moratorium, whom were you representing? Which organization?

CP: Ok, well. I had been working on the test ban since I started at FAS in January, or December of 1980. It had been a continuing piece of work for me. The background there is that the Reagan administration abandoned any pretense of continuing the CTB talks. They decided formally in 1982 not to renew them at all and to seek further agreements on testing but first they began by talking about prospectively violating the threshold test ban. They might even have to abrogate the threshold test ban treaty. Since that had never been ratified that was an option for them. That was alarming enough.

There was a considerable amount of opposition in congress. There were resolutions urging the president to pass, both house and senate urging the president to reinstate comprehensive test ban negotiations. Reagan abandoned the notion of violating the threshold test ban and settled in on this long strategy of delay and obstruction based on punitive verification problems with the threshold test ban. That consumed a better part of the decade just negotiating a framework for resolving those alleged problems. We, of course, protested that vigorously and said that these charges of Soviet cheating were false, and were based on deliberate falsification of scientific evidence. They were based on misinterpreting or deliberately misrepresenting the nature of statistical evidence to congress and to senior government officials. There was quite a big controversy within this community of people, a pretty small community but—involving the weapon laboratories and intelligence community and right wing ideologues, at that time, arms control and disarmament agency over whether the Soviets were indeed violating the threshold test ban.

That debate kind of kept the testing issue on the agenda, on the one hand. On the other hand it kept most people away from considering the comprehensive test ban seriously. The Reagan administration bought a couple of years of additional time, but beginning with Gorbachev’s acendency_ in ’85, especially within _____ the moratorium, I guess, which came on Hiroshima Day in ’85 when the Russians announced their moratorium. That immediately put the question of comprehensive test ban back on the agenda. Yet, the U.S. government was formally committed not to—never negotiating a CTB if they could possibly avoid it. But certainly not for the indefinite future, so they had this list of criteria that would have to be satisfied before the U.S. government would enter CTB negotiations. It was such a demanding list that it was clear that they would never do it. The Reagan administration would never do it. Then the question became, ‘how do you pressure them into it?’ I started an effort in the House of Representatives to actually legislate a test ban, something that had never been attempted before. I should say…

MS: It almost succeeded didn’t it?

CP: We succeeded, in the House. What was unique about that effort was that it was—previously arms control efforts had been either hortatory or resolution urging the executive branch to negotiate something, or they had been fiscal. You know, you had been simply denied on a unilateral basis money for a given project or activity based on its arms control, its negative arms control impact. What we had done the year before, in 1984 for the first time, was a provision on anti-satellite testing and anti-satellite weapons, which was a small subset of these arms control discussions we were having with the Russians at the time.

MS: Outlawing it.

CP: Yes, the Russians proposal was to outlaw anti-satellite weapons. They had a weapons in space ban that they were pushing. It was kind of vague and not very useful. What we urged them to do was to cease testing their anti-satellite system. The previous year in the Congress we had attempted to cut off funds for the U.S. anti-satellite program and had been unable to do it. The next year, which I believe was 1985, fiscal year ’85, so that would have been in counting the year 1984, we worked on a provision that said that the U.S. would refrain from testing its anti-satellite weapon as long as the Soviet Union refrained — and that passed. That was the first time that that formulation; a sort of reciprocal contingent arms control restriction had ever been tried. I take some credit for that idea. I think I originated it.

MS: Great!

CP: It passed and then we thought: ‘Let’s do the same thing on nuclear testing.’

MS: It didn’t go through the Senate, I assume.

CP: No, but the Senate passed some sort of similar restraint. It was more hortatory and then in conference the House position prevailed, so the position on ___ASAT??_ testing didn’t prevail during that period. I have to go back and check. There was a lot of to and fro in the conference over ASAT and I’d have to go back and look at my records to see precisely what happened. I know it passed the House and I know that the Senate had some hortatory language, but I would have to go check and see. There was one— I’d have to go back and check. There were some U.S. ASAT tests in that period. What eventually happened was that the program died, so we won in the end. What happened was in 1980—in the spring of ’85, that is in fiscal year 1986 we started looking at how to control the testing issue. At that point there was another resolution running through both House and Senate, urging negotiations. Everyone said, “Let’s get that one through first, because that one won’t pass.” So we didn’t do anything in 1985 towards a binding limit on nuclear testing. In the spring of 1986 we did and….

MS: Wasn’t that fiscal more than, I mean—I remember one time when it was all budgetary, but that’s not what you’re talking about.

CP: What happened in 1986 is very interesting. The moratorium had been going, the Russian moratorium had been going—how many months by then?—it had been going six months. We tried to get the—we said, this is the ideal situation, its very analogous to ASAT. The Russians aren’t testing, but they might resume testing, so let’s formulate an amendment that says we won’t test above a kiloton (which was considered to be the verification threshold at the time, if you were using remote —stations from outside the country). We won’t test unless they test. We formulated the amendments that way—there was actually very little support among most of the arms control community for this amendment, because they didn’t think it had a chance. People sort of supported it in concept, but they really weren’t willing to get really behind it because they thought it just wouldn’t pass. It was too much. Representative Markey and myself, because I was working for him—but I believed it would because of the way we had formulated it and the experience we’d had with the ASAT amendment and one final other variable, which was that the Natural Resources Defense Council managed to negotiate an agreement to verify the moratorium and was able to install seismic stations in Russia prior to the vote on the amendment.

I was part of the—representing Ed Markey—I joined the NRDC team that went over to negotiate the agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. I was able to say, to persuade them, that if they went forward with this project, it would strengthen the hands of those in Congress who were seeking to cut off funds for U.S. testing. In fact I presented our amendments and explained what it would do if it passed. I also explained to them that I didn’t think it would pass the Senate and that the issue would have to be resolved in conference, and that it would be an unpredictable outcome, and that the president would probably veto it, even if it survived the conference so that they should not expect that the Reagan Administration would enter a moratorium. I’m not sure they listened that carefully to that part of my presentation, but I laid it all out for them. I said that an election was coming in 1988 and that it was conceivable than that a Democratic president then would terminate testing. But it was unlikely that a Senate that was still in Republican hands would terminate testing, but that we did have an election in ’86. You know, we had Congressional elections and it was conceivable that the Democrats would win back the Senate, which they did. I said—the scenario laid out was; you should go forward with this project, the House conceivably could pass this amendment. It won’t pass this year in the Senate, but the Democrats could conceivably take the Senate in the elections in November ’86 and then a Democratically controlled congress could pass this amendment the following year. Therefore it was really worth pressing ahead with this. The project had considerable momentum on the Russian side for a reason that’s only tangentially related to the politics of this moratorium. Gorbachev was anxious to demonstrate, or these people around him were anxious to demonstrate, particularly Velikhov, that the Soviet Union was opening up and that the two countries could do business with respect to verification in a way that they had never done before. Cooperative verification was possible.

MS: Was it Velikhov still that you were dealing with most on this issue?

CP: That’s right. He was the one that helped us put together this whole seismic monitoring project. Victor Mikhailov was present in these discussions, sort of incognito, as a representative of one of the institutes. And possibly representing one of the nuclear weapons establishments. We didn’t know it at the time, that he was there and who he was representing, but he was present at discussions and….

MS: Could you tell what he was—if you didn’t know who he was, I guess you weren’t paying attention to what he seemed to be saying. Or did he even say anything?

CP: He didn’t say anything. He was just there as a…

MS: So you don’t know what he was thinking about all this or whether you affected him in any way.

CP: Well, I think he was probably there to monitor the vital interests of the nuclear weapons industrial complex in this particular project. The Soviet Academy group had the momentum at the time, you know and had the ear of Gorbachev. There was an air of reform, you know, in the air. At the time, it’s interesting, at the time we also, we took as a part of our group Jack Evernden and the geological survey, who presented a proposal for cooperative deployment of stations, of U.S.G.S., United States Geological Survey, stations in Russia. When he came back his proposal got shot down immediately by the Reagan administration, but we were able to proceed with ours. We came back with an agreement to implement ours.

MS: So his would have been something quite different or….

CP: His would have been even more extensive employment of stations.

MS: Seismic monitoring?

CP: Yes, seismic monitoring stations cooperatively.

MS: But you didn’t need that for your purposes.

CP: No, ours was private, I mean they couldn’t shoot ours down. His was a government proposal, but it wasn’t, it was being presented informally, he was saying here’s how we could go ahead and do this. You should talk to Jack and he could give you the details of what he proposed. He was part of our group and we gave our presentations and we asked Jack to give his presentation. Then we went off to Leningrad for a couple of days while the Soviets mulled it over. When we came back they had signed the agreement, they had wanted to, the academy had wanted to sign, so it became an agreement between NRDC and the Soviet Academy of Sciences to set up _________.

MS: Parliamentarians Global Action were involved in that too, weren’t they?

CP: Sort of. I mean Tovish was along for the ride but they had no role ______ or technically, they had a role in the sense that the parliamentary group: the Five Continent Peace Initiative. I was a consultant to the Five Continent Peace Initiative during that whole period, so I know exactly what they did and didn’t do. Their role was the notion—they incorporated in one of their proposals the idea that there should be some kind of cooperative monitoring of the moratorium. That idea, actually the germ of that, was a meeting between Velikhov and Cochran and a number of other people at Airlie House in the spring of 1986, I think in April or May 1986. There was a meeting at Airlie House where Cochran.

MS: What is Airlie House?

CP: Airlie House is a conference centre outside of Washington where a lot of these kinds of meetings take place. It’s in Virginia, Airlie, Virginia. There was an Airlie House meeting sponsored by, I believe by the FAS and Velikhov was there and a number of other people were there. It was at that meeting that Tom proposed that there be this cooperative monitoring.

MS: Do you think the Five Continent Peace Initiative had any influence on anything? Did it ever amount to much?

CP: Well, it’s _____ issue declarations to the extent that—I don’t think it had, I don’t think it played a great role, but it certainly added to the atmospherics of the time. It kept alive the fact that while the U.S. was kind of off on this bizarre tangent, the rest of the world was fully prepared to carry through the arms control agenda that had been inherited from the previous decade and that was contained in article 6 of the non-proliferation treaty. The rest of the world wasn’t going to forget about it. The U.S. really was departing from a global consensus. I think that was the value of it, you know support, the fact that five world leaders would get together and troop around the world and issue these declarations and make visits to capitals and so forth indicated that this agenda was alive and well outside the U.S. even if the U.S. had temporarily shucked it. I think that created a certain amount of political pressure and diplomatic pressure on the U.S. government. The Russians are always, in the final analysis, are really fixed on the bilateral relationship so I can’t say that it really had much influence on the Russians. At least historically they have not paid much attention to multilateral diplomacy and aren’t very good at it. In the end they care about cutting a deal with the U.S. first and everything else has been secondary. That may change but, it may be changing, but certainly that’s been the historical pattern. I think even then the Soviet government tended to view, even during the Gorbachev years, tended to view sort of multilateral efforts with a somewhat opportunistic eye.

MS: On the multilateral thing what do you think of the amendment conference idea?

CP: Oh ah, I think again, certainly it was never taken seriously in Washington.

MS: How about in Russia?

CP: I don’t think it was taken seriously in Russia either. ____ . Gorbachev’s government did change its position on testing, you know; they reverted to a more conservative agenda. How that transformation took place and why, is interesting. I don’t know all the answers myself, but we were successful in getting the amendment through the house in the spring of 1986, actually it was the summer of 1986. The NRDC cooperative proposal monitoring played a role in the successful vote. I don’t know whether we would have had a successful vote; we might have had a successful vote without it, but it’s indisputable that it played a role. I set up this display in the Speaker’s lobby on the floor of the House, just off of the floor, showing just where the station had been installed, showing the seismograms from the first few observations in the region. Markey, who was leading the debate, for the test ban side of the debate was able to hold up a seismogram on the floor of the house, wave it around, and say that this was the first seismogram from a station inside Russia or inside the Soviet Union. The first time we’ve ever gotten cooperative monitoring data. That had a role, if you remember the atmospherics of the time; people were looking for a breakthrough at that point. They were tired of the “evil empire” rhetoric and they were excited about Gorbachev.

People were looking for a reason to believe—to vote, you know, their conscience and the NRDC project was able to give them that. It was able to show that there had been this major qualitative shift in the international environment and that a range of possibilities had opened up. In particular the verification had always been used as kind of the hobby horse against the feasibility of a test ban. That’s the thing that the opponents had always used. They never used the real reasons why they didn’t want to stop testing, they’d always just use the politically salable one, which was that we can’t verify that the Russians will stop. Here was concrete evidence, that you probably could verify. So we won, we won overwhelmingly. We won by a big margin, a margin that surprised everybody including most of the arms control groups, who didn’t think that that level of support was there.

Then we went into conference and that was the year of Reykjavik, you know, this very last minute surprise meeting. Reykjavik was in October and so the issue remained unresolved in a conference, from the defence conference from July through October. At the _____ hour the president, President Reagan, sent a letter to the Senate conferees, who were at that time chaired by Senator Goldwater, but Senator Nunn became chairman, was playing an influential role. He sent a letter promising a renewal of test ban negotiations and laying out this—a format for renewing negotiations and committing the United States to negotiate, to the process of negotiating a test ban once the difficulties in ratifying the threshold test ban had been rectified. If you read this letter it sounds as though the Reagan administration has committed the United States to a sort of orderly process of renewing test ban negotiations. This letter was used by the Senate conferees to make the House provision go away.

MS: This was the….

CP: This was the compromised outcome.

MS: This was the origin of the step-by-step kind of negotiation thing. Right?

CP: Right, the origin of it. In other words it originated because of political action that was taken by the U.S. Congress. That action was taken ultimately because of the work of hundreds of thousands of peace activists who put the CTB back on the agenda. None of this originated in the executive branch and none of this would have happened without the participation of all the NGOs and at that point a very large, agitated arms control constituency that existed in the country. That’s a very clear example of, sort of, the effects of public action and public opinion on the Congress and in turn the effect of the Congress on the executive branch. It’s quite clear that the Reagan administration never would have renewed attempting negotiations without pressure from Congress, and Congress wouldn’t have done anything without pressure from the public. It’s about the clearest example I know of—because the test ban has been the public’s, and to a secondary degree, the Congress’s arms control agenda item. It’s never been the executive branch’s item. I shouldn’t say never, I mean in recent history, not since Kennedy.

MS: Well presumably Clinton sort of wants it now. Right?

CP: Well you can go to Carter, in the Carter administration it got back on the agenda but was—very weakly and was never supported, and Carter never resolved the divisions in his own administration over it. It wasn’t supported by some of the very people that were negotiating it. The test ban had a hard time in the Carter administration, but it developed a real public and congressional constituency mostly in the House of Representatives. It didn’t get through the conference in 1986. What was extracted was this step-by-step process.

That was enough. Sort of reinstating the official step-by-step process on testing turned out to be enough for Gorbachev to abandon the moratorium. I mean he basically made the call, the political call that there wasn’t going to be an end to U.S. testing as long as the Republicans were in the White House. He made the call that in order to play ball with the Republicans and to make progress in other parts of the arms control agenda, namely, the strategic reductions, to a lesser degree Star Wars, that the test ban could be sacrificed. It was still a possibility had the Russians maintained their moratorium. The House in 1987 passed the moratorium again, and passed it again in ’88. I mean they passed it three times. It was a conference item for three years running, and it’s not inconceivable, had the United States held its ground, I’m sorry, had the House of Representatives held its ground in conference, that they could have forced the issue and gotten something in the way of a halt to the, or restriction on, the U.S. test program.

MS: It couldn’t have been the CTB.

CP: No, it could not have been a CTB. It would have been some kind of low-threshold agreement or some kind of restraint on testing, coupled to renewal of negotiations. Gorbachev, maybe he gamed it that far, maybe he didn’t. I have a feeling that he didn’t even game it that far. What he decided was that it was—you just couldn’t rely on U.S. Congress and the actions of the U.S. Congress when the bulk of the action was in negotiations with the executive branch. He also didn’t have any faith that the Democrats would win in ’88. I think his advisors told them that they would probably lose and that he would be dealing in the future with a Republican administration. He flipped over to a step-by-step negotiating process that was basically the Reagan administration’s agenda, albeit modified to accommodate the hill. It was a step-by-step negotiating agenda, essentially the Reagan agenda of working out the problems in the TTBT verification.

MS: There wasn’t anything serious about working anything out was there? I mean wasn’t that just phony baloney?

CP: No, it wasn’t—it was, technically it was phony baloney, but by that point, we’re talking 1988 now—we see some evidence of an increased role at the ministry of atomic energy in the Russian deliberations. At that point the U.S. had proposed a joint verification experiment, which was a Reagan administration’s answer to the NRDC experiment, to our joint verification experiment. In that case the Reagan’s proposal was that the two sides should essentially test nuclear weapons together and monitor them directly using this Corrtex monitoring device. I could send you some of the articles that tell you this whole narrative, and who did what to whom and what the…

MS: That would be great.

CP: ….What the arguments were. Clearly the public diplomacy types got there first, at NRDC with seismic equipment designed to monitor comprehensive test ban and under the barrage of the pressure of the congressional, the House passed amendment, and the fact that American scientist were in there running around the Soviet Union that weren’t government scientists. It was very embarrassing to the Reagan people. I raised this with Richard Perle after a hearing once. I went up to him, the same Richard Perle, and I explained to him what was going on and he goes, with quite a straight face, “You mean there are American scientists running around the Soviet Union and I don’t know about it?”

MS: Ha, ha, ha (laughter)

CP: And he was quite upset. I said yes, Richard, that’s right. That’s what we’re doing. They tried to make it difficult for us to carry out. They denied visas and so on. They tried to make it hard, but in the end a sympathetic senior official, John Whitehead, who had ties to our organization. He’s a Wall Street lawyer and a lot of people on our board are Wall Street lawyers and there was a sort of old boy’s network that we were able to work in order to get export licenses for seismic equipment, and visas and that kind of stuff. It was kind of touch and go; their answer was clearly it’s now possible to—they reasoned at that point, we had demonstrated it was possible to do cooperative verification. They cast around for a form of cooperative verification that wouldn’t involve a CTB, or even a halt to testing. They came up with the so-called Corrtex monitoring, they claim directly but it’s just another form of indirect monitoring. It involves taking measurements of the direct strong shock of the nuclear explosion, sort of measuring the direct strong shock from the nuclear explosion itself, rather than the seismic waves from the explosion.

MS: Which would be on-site then.

CP: Yes. This was very much on-site. This involved either putting sensors right down the bomb test hold or drilling a satellite hole. It involved nuclear explosions. ____ the antithesis of the test ban. Of course, they could argue that this was the most accurate way and they did argue that this was the most accurate way to take measurements of yield that would improve the monitoring of the threshold test ban. The U.S. proposed something called the joint verification experiment, the Russians accepted and they were off to the races. Essentially doing cooperative monitoring of each other’s nuclear explosions. This considerably broke the ice between the two nuclear weapons establishments. After this they got going. It did, it contributed in its own bizarre way, to a lessening of tensions because you had nuclear weapons scientists on the two sides, working side by side, blowing off nuclear weapons. It was designed to sabotage the whole proposal, was designed to sabotage a test ban. In the end it had some positive effect on glasnost between the two countries. _____ question then

MS: While also genuinely sabotaging…

CP: Oh yes, it delayed. It screwed up the negotiations for a number of years and delayed matters. All this is written down, I’ve written an article about this whole episode.

MS: I may have even read it, but I’d like to see it anyway.

CP: The article I wrote with Greg Vandervink and Science and Global Security about the whole test ban monitoring issue and how it interacted with the CTB agenda. I’ll send that to you. But what happened—some very odd things happened in the classified realm— when I was working for the government I went down to Los Alamos laboratory. I was at a classified meeting there. During a break in the meeting they showed a classified movie that they had made called (the Los Alamos Laboratory had made), about the joint verification experiment called, “Trust But Verify,” and it was narrated by Charlton Heston, of all people.

MS: (laughter) Oh my god.

CP: —who had gotten a temporary cue clearance so he could be the narrator of this movie. You know, Charlton Heston is a notorious Hawk.

MS: He’s the one on television always advertising the National Review.

CP: The National Review and the NRA, the National Rifle Association.

MS: Oh, yes, that’s true too.

CP: He narrated this movie for them. It was a very professionally produced, elaborately produced movie which, I guess, was sort of done as a feel-good record of the joint verification experiment. The thing that came through was that these guys actually enjoyed the experience. I mean here they are targeting the Soviet Union, thinking about annihilating, working day and night to annihilate these people. Then suddenly they turn around and start working side by side having a productive, cooperative scientific experience and it created all this cognitive dissonance.

It was one of the most bizarre experiences I had. These guys got up and said what a great thing the joint verification experiment had been and how everything had worked so well, how they’d, you know, trust-but-verify was really the order of the day. Where they were foreign a whole new relationship and it begged for some one to get up and say, “Well then why are you making nuclear weapons if this is what you can do? I mean if you can talk with these people, you can do scientific experiments with them, why not just stop all this?” You know that was the next logical question and of course that’s what happened. We eventually—a couple of years later we stopped all this nonsense. It was the weapons establishments way of backing into an end to the arms race. It’s how it turned out to be.

MS: Saving them some face, I guess.

CP: I’ll finish the story, bring it up to date. You know the test ban continued to be fought over for the next four years, back and forth between House and Senate. In the first two years of the Bush administration, as long as these discussions were going on at the official level, and the Bush administration [could?] claim that the Russians had not fully signed onto rectifying the problems in the threshold test ban, that prevented any more aggressive action to reinstate the test moratorium, or to actually get a test moratorium through the Senate. I moved over to the Senate in 1987. In 1987 and ’88 we tried to get the similar provisions. Provisions similar to the House provisions through the Senate, and we failed. We always got 39 or 40 votes, but we didn’t have a working majority on that issue in the Senate. I left in ’91.

What I did in ’89 and ’90, and ’91 was I—we created something called the Nuclear Test Ban Readiness Program. I couldn’t get the moratorium through the senate but we were able to get through various provisions, particularly one that directed the national laboratories to prepare for a comprehensive test ban by undertaking certain measures. These were all spelled out, what they should, you know, prepare and remanufacture weapons without tests, make sure that any safety of weapons problems had been resolved and so forth. The laboratories literally resisted this whole program because it was a slippery slope, they felt, to a test ban. It raised a number of issues, and it led to the creation of a number of reports that subsequently were very useful in finally nailing down the testing issue in 1992. Gorbachev reinstated his testing moratorium, in ’91 I guess (check if it’s the right year, he’s not sure), the Russians reinstated the testing moratorium.

MS: I can’t remember when either.

CP: It was clear because the INF was signed and then START I was signed, it was clear that, you know—the Berlin Wall came down. The embattled Soviet Union started to go away. The political conditions were created for making the final push on the CTB. That occurred after I was off the Hill. I worked very hard in devising language for the Senate amendment that actually went beyond what the House was doing at the time, which was just reinstating a one-year moratorium on tests. The preference of the Senate sponsors was, which involved Senator Hatfield and Senator Excen (?) and others, was to craft a compromise which actually didn’t just produce another moratorium but led to sort of linear progress to the CTB. By that point the non-proliferation issue started to play importantly in the debate — that is, the need to make progress in the CTB, as one of the issues under article 6 that would come up for consideration in the NPT extension conference. We were able to use that as an argument that we really had to get back to negotiating a CTB ______ we had this impending________.

MS: Well, since they’re not going to have a CTB by this month, then how much difference does it make that they’re on the way? Does it really matter that they’re not going to have the whole shebang? [I think I must have been referring to an upcoming NPT review conference here.]

CP: That’s a complicated discussion. The U.S. will have the votes to get in, I think, to get indefinite extension by a majority. The question is, ‘how large a majority?’ And whether or not they had achieved a test ban would influence a sizable majority, I think. There is going to be some considerable criticism of the nuclear weapons states for not having achieved a CTB. But moreover, there will be criticism out of the ?weapons states? for not intending to achieve a CTB. We released a report last week, if you read your New York Times…

MS: I didn’t.

CP: …On Tuesday, basically exposing the fact that Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense do not accept the goal of the CTB, and are seeking to overthrow that objective and to negotiate a low threshold test ban.

MS: Aha, now I didn’t know that it was you, but I did read something from someplace, I can’t remember where, that there’s an effort to bring in some very low yield.

CP: That’s correct, that’s our report, yes. I will send you that along with some of this other stuff. That debate is still alive. The Clinton administration is waffling, as it does on everything—the president with rubber knees, unbelievable. The end game on the test ban has not been written and may not ever be written because it’s conceivable that if the NPT is extended indefinitely, the nuclear weapons states will walk away from the CTB. It’s possible. The Russians’ position has gotten progressively worse, not better during the negotiations. U.S.-Russian relations are going downhill fast, deteriorating…

MS: In what way are the Russians getting worse?

CP: They’re seeking to test at higher yields.

MS: They are? You mean they would go with the American proposal, for a CTB that really isn’t a CTB?

CP: That’s correct.

MS: They would?

CP: Yes, at this point, I think would. They would prefer that.

MS: Oh boy.

CP: Because they, you know, the whole policy process over there has disintegrated or is in disarray and so policy really is made by the agencies concerned and so the Ministry of Atomic Energy is essentially making the policy on nuclear testing at this point. It’s something of an overstatement but they have a very large influence on it. Here in the U.S. the constituencies are split. Even the weapons laboratories —or within the weapons laboratories — are people who favor comprehensive test ban because they see their future as involved in this Stockpiled Stewardship Program.

MS: In this what?

CP: They see their future as tied up with called Stockpile Stewardship Program.

MS: Stockpiled Stewardship?

CP: Weapons physics without nuclear testing.

MS: What did you call it?

CP: Stockpiled Stewardship. There has been a lot in the Bulletin about it. Read your Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

MS: Ok, yes. I thought you were saying stooge.

CP: No, its called Stockpile Stewardship. It’s been a big debate in the U.S. as to whether the U.S. can get by without any nuclear tests. No nuclear yield at all and rely on a series of new experimental facilities to provide the data that they need to maintain the stockpile. Or whether they need to test. As I say, the divisions on this issue go down even to the laboratory level. This issue is in a considerable state of flux even in the United States. There isn’t as well-honed a position as it might appear outside. That’s where we are—eventually—in 1990 they disposed of the TTBT protocol. The thing took seven years to negotiate. It took seven years from the time that the Reagan administration said they wanted to do something about the TTBT to when they, the Bush administration finally finished the protocol. The thing was ratified in an afternoon, after virtually no debate. It took like, there was like half an hour of reading of prepared statements and the thing was ratified. It was such an anti-climax.

MS: Was it a problem—was there anything genuine about it as a problem, or was it all again, a stalling mechanism?

CP: It was mainly a stalling mechanism. There was nothing, there were some things that were some genuine problems. There were some data that we could have gotten from the Russians that would have improved cooperative seismic monitoring and improved the uncertainty band around some of our seismic measurements. You didn’t need to have this Corrtex, you didn’t need to have this elaborate TTBT protocol in order to get that data. You could just go over and get it, or swap it on a cooperative basis. It would have taken an afternoon essentially. This whole thing was a delaying tactic, but it had all these unforeseen political effects. It established a working relationship between the Russian nuclear weapon laboratories and our laboratories. That has a mixed blessing because now the two sets of laboratories are now co-conspiring to sabotage the CTB. I wouldn’t say they are doing that actively, but they—their instincts are not to have a test ban or to preserve a lot of latitude for experimentation, as much as they could get away with. It did put a human face on the opposition. It really sort of undermined the case that you couldn’t verify clandestine activities because here you are visiting their laboratories. If there is something you’re curious about you can ask them to see it. In the long run perhaps it had a beneficial effect.

MS: Fascinating. Any stories that we’ve neglected in your account?

CP: Oh I’m sure—this is a huge topic in you’re talking about. We (NRDC) conducted another experiment in 1989 which was even bigger than the seismic experiment. It was the, so called, Black Sea Experiment, where we took radiation detectors on a Soviet cruiser in the Black Sea.

MS: Oh yes. Yes Frank Von Hippel told me about it.

CP: …about the Black Sea Experiment, he told you about it?

MS: Yes.

CP: That’s another tangent in the arms control. That goes, sort of, to the current agenda about controlling warheads and fissile materials.

MS: You mean that’s still relevant today.

CP: Yes, less so in the sense that the weapons we were verifying at that time, we were very concerned about tactical nuclear weapons and the fact that they might be at risk. It would just be safer all around if we could get nuclear weapons off of ships, especially tactical weapons off of ships. Weapons that did not have any, what are called permissive action links or any control mechanisms on them. We wanted to prove that a ban, for example, on nuclear arms sea launch cruise missiles, or a ban on nuclear warheads on surface ships would be verifiable. We entered into a cooperative agreement again with Velikhov to, and the Soviet Academy, to demonstrate that.

MS: Has anything been done since then on that?

CP: In this particular area? No. That was the last large scale arms control demonstration. You’re talking about, in this case—I’ve forgotten the size of the Soviet fleet that was mobilized for this experiment. We had a whole Russian hospital ship that was our headquarters and the place where all the experimenters stayed. We had our Soviet cruiser for a couple of days. We had all these auxiliary ships carrying monitoring equipment.

MS: I guess I didn’t know enough about that.

CP: A couple of helicopters carrying neutron detectors. This was a big deal.

MS: I didn’t realize how big a deal.

CP: If you look back at the New York Times pieces, we had very good coverage. I think it was front page in the New York Times, as was the seismic experiment. It was a big operation. I think the seismic experiment was—??we raised? several million dollars. I think it was the largest cooperative, private scientific program ever conducted with the Russians up to that point.

MS: Could you send me something on that?

CP: I’ll try, I mean we’ve got—I’ll go back and—you don’t have any kind of narrative on that project?

MS: I have Frank Von Hippel’s stories and he sent me…

CP: But, I mean nothing written down?

MS: He sent me some books, but I don’t think there is anything in there about that. I don’t remember it if there is. I mean, maybe I should look again.

CP: Well look around for some narrative on that.

MS: Ok, that’s great. Thanks.