Tom Cochran Interview Mar. 28 1995
Interviewer — Metta Spencer

Metta Spencer: I don’t know what I explained to you about what I am doing. Do you want me to start over or do…

Tom Cochran: Yeah, you better start over.

SPENCER: I’m a sociologist and I teach peace studies at the University of Toronto. I have been working on a book on the way the international peace movement influenced Soviet Policy, especially under Gorbachev. I have to sort of broaden out a little bit for a special purpose. I gave somebody a copy of one of the chapters which had to do with scientists. In fact it was David Lopez at Notre Dame. He’s on the Bulletin staff, I guess. He wanted me to do a special paper on the role of scientists in ending the Cold War. I think he also intends for that to include the Western side and Western policies as well as the Soviet side. I hadn’t been handling that. David Cortwright wrote a book on that and I figured that was his bailiwick. I’m doing some more interviews and actually I should have interviewed you before because I know you did a lot on seismic monitoring business. I’ve interviewed a whole bunch of people, 200 in fact, but never got around to you. This is the time for me to try to find out what you did, and any ideas you have on what ways in which scientists have made a difference in policy.

COCHRAN: I got involved in all of this back in 1973 when I came to NRDC. I had been at Re——- For The Future for the previous two years and had written a book on the Brida [breeder??] program. I came to NRDC, spent most of the 1970s and early 80s working on eliminating, in the U.S. at least, the commercial use of weapons-usable material. We didn’t eliminate it entirely but our activities were focused on preventing the chemical separation of plutonium, reprocessing of nuclear fuel for the purposes of separating plutonium and using it as a fuel in light water reactors, also in stopping the liquid metal fast breeder reactor program of the first AC, and then the Birda (??breeder?), the department of energy. We were successful in both of those programs. When I say ‘we,’ it included coalitions with other groups. Basically President Carter adopted policies we were advocating when he took off this— stopping the licensing of the use of plutonium in light water reactors, and canceling the licensing process of the Clinch River breeder reactor. We ultimately killed the Clinch River breeder reactor in Congress in 1983, roughly. Again, a coalition of groups, a coalition of fiscal conservatives who were opposed to large demonstration plants and environmentalists.

SPENCER: Now NRDC already existed when you went there in 1973?

COCHRAN: Yes.

SPENCER: Because I don’t know anything about the history.

COCHRAN:..1970.

SPENCER: It was founded in ’70?

COCHRAN: Well it’s—the date is vague because in the early days they had trouble getting a tax exemption. Essentially we celebrate it as if it were founded in 1970. It was founded by a group of law graduates primarily from Yale, who wanted to do environmental law. They teamed up with some established lawyers in New York, who were environmentalists, and the establishments became the nucleus of the board of the directors. The young lawyers became the nucleus of the staff. I came on about 3 years later as one of the, actually the second scientist, I guess.

SPENCER: You weren’t a lawyer, yourself.

COCHRAN: I’m not a lawyer, no—and in 19__ when Reagan took office we shifted part of our work, our nuclear work, to focus on the arms race and began writing books on nuclear weapons. We wrote a series of books throughout the ’80s called the Nuclear Weapons Data Book. We published five volumes of that series.

SPENCER: I’ve seen references to that, but I don’t know what that is.

COCHRAN: It’s a reference manual of facts and figures on arsenals of U.S., Russian—well the announced nuclear power—U.S., Russia on one volume, U.K., France, and China. Then we have, we actually had three volumes on the U.S., two on the production complex, and one on the weapons themselves. We continue to—one of my colleagues, Stan Norris (who’s a political scientist) continues to collect and disseminate that kind of information. He and I just co-authored a book. It will come out in May or June on the Russian production complex, nuclear weapons production complex. That was one of the focuses of our program when we—in 1982 we started a series of law suits against the department of energy, over the way they handled environmental issues related to weapons production and won or settled a whole series of suits. Through that litigation process we forced a deal; We either comply with the environmental laws that apply to commercial programs administered by the EPA in the states…

SPENCER: That goes for nuclear weapons too. You did this with respect to weapons.

COCHRAN: With the weapons production plant, yes. Won a landmark suit at Oakridge, at the Y12 plant, which basically forced the DOE to comply with EPA regulations and got the states involved in the oversight of these facilities. That progressively has led to this major clean-up effort.

SPENCER: How much did it inhibit what they were doing? Did it make much difference to them or did they just have to clean up their…

COCHRAN: In some cases it did and in some cases it did not. It didn’t inhibit the number of weapons they made. We did, through our litigation and other people’s activities, force earlier shut down of the production reactors, particularly the Hanford Reactor, in Hanford (which was similar to the Chernobyl reactor). We weren’t litigating over—I mean we threatened litigation over the continued operation of that plant.

SPENCER: Is that after Chernobyl?

COCHRAN: Yeah.

SPENCER: The Chernobyl event gave you some material to use against Hanford?

COCHRAN: Yeah, right. We stopped the construction of a plutonium enrichment plant that they had planned to build in Idaho. It had a major impact on the DOE clean up program, which is now a 6 billion dollar a year program, to clean up these facilities. We’ve always kept one of our slots in our program for an attorney. We always keep a watch for violations of environmental laws at these facilities. Make them comply with the regulations that others have to comply with…

SPENCER: Was there ever anything parallel to that in the Soviet Union?

COCHRAN: No. The attorney who was here at the time, one of the attorneys who since left and gone to DOE (in fact there are a couple of attorneys, one of them is still here, Jacob Scherr) set up a collaboration with the law school in Leningrad, St. Petersburg too, to train environmental lawyers. We’ve attempted to influence the way the Russians handle these issues through trying to develop parallel environmental regulations and then lawyers in Russia that limit the extent. That had some success, but not as much as we would like.

In 1986 I made a proposal to the Soviet Academy of Sciences to do a joint project, whereby we would set up seismic stations around the U.S. and Soviet test sites, and demonstrate that you could verify low threshold comprehensive test ban treaty. The verification issue was a contentious issue at that time. That was in a period, ’85—Gorbachev had announced a moratorium on nuclear testing and various folks over here were trying to get the U.S., get the Reagan administration, to join in the moratorium on testing and then adopt a low threshold test ban treaty. Administration was arguing they couldn’t because you couldn’t verify. Historically that had been due to the fact that Russians wouldn’t allow U.S. seismic stations on their soil, or at least an adequate number of them. We jointly tried to demonstrate that you could set up these stations and get that data out of Russia. This wasn’t just a big propaganda stunt of Gorbachev’s. We ran that program for four years. That was the largest non-government scientific exchange with the Soviets ever.

SPENCER: I know quite a bit about that. Something I don’t know is whether there was any connection between that effort and the development of the Nevada Semipalatinsk movement. Was there any connection between what you were doing and what the ordinary folks were doing?

COCHRAN: No, the Nevada Semipalatinsk movement was started by [Olzjas] Suleimenov in Kazakhstan who was [a poet]; he was in the Supreme Soviet. An articulate person in complaining about the horrible effects of radiation on the local people near there. We worked with those people, but we weren’t responsible for their formation or growth in that movement.

SPENCER: But you had some contact with them.

COCHRAN: Oh yeah. We went to meetings and conferences they had in —Almaty— and worked closely with a person on Suleimenov’s staff, traded data, information. He ultimately, with the break-up the of the Soviet Union, was largely responsible for shutting down that test site. Our program, we turned over to the—the program still is going forward in establishing more jointly-operated stations in Russia and the United States. Chris Paine, when he was working very closely with him (he was working in Kennedy’s office), he largely was responsible for getting funding through Kennedy to continue the program, for the government to fund the program and it to be run by something called the Incorporated Research Institute for Seismology, which is a consortium of universities that operate networks of seismic stations. We did this in a way that the government could say they weren’t taking over NRDC stations. In fact they were, they simply put out instruments right alongside the ones we had put out. The same seismic team from Scripps ran them. Basically we phased out. They continued to operate with government money and they’re still operating. Hopefully that will be part of a unclassified network that will be used as part of the CTB verification.

SPENCER: I heard that you actually had all the information you needed from California. Is that right? That most of the data actually already existed.

COCHRAN: No, we ah—there were several things already going on. One is how well you can verify a test ban: down to what yield level is a function of the density of seismic stations you have in and around the area where the tests occur. Actually you don’t want them really close. If you wanted to assume that the country would cheat and build big underground cavities and explode weapons inside those cavities to muffle the sound, you would need about 25 or so stations in Russia, the former Soviet Union, to seismically verify down to something on the order of a Kiloton. If they don’t decouple ( if they don’t try to muffle the sound) you can do a whole lot better than that, seventy times better than that. One of our objectives was simply to demonstrate that you could operate these stations in the Soviet Union and get the data out; which had not been done before. Part of the co-operation was to demonstrate how you could get the data out.

Subsequently the program has evolved into one of actually putting the necessary density of stations in the former Soviet Union, to get down to, as low as one reasonably can. The programs are headed towards putting out 20 or so stations. In the earlier periods there were other related issues where the data served a useful purpose. That was the whole debate over whether the Russians were violating the threshold of the test ban treaty, which limited test to below 150 kilotons. That was an ongoing debate within the seismic community, or I should say between the department of defence and the non-government seismologists, whether there was evidence that they were cheating. Data we collected, while we had stations in Russia, were useful to pin down the parameters that go into those calculations of what the yield of Russian tests were, during the whole course of events. We set up the stations in ’86. In ’87 we took some congressmen over and demonstrated the sensitivity of the stations, with some chemical explosions a couple hundred kilometers away. On that trip we visited Krasnoyarsk radar site which was a contentious issue over whether they were violating the ABM treaty. Velikhov, who was my counterpart, took us there and we were able to demonstrate, they were clearly in violation of the ABM treaty. But we were able to demonstrate it wasn’t a battle management station. The defence department was advocating at the time…

SPENCER: Do you know anything about how that was reversed, how they decided to shut that down?

COCHRAN: After the American team went there they stopped construction on it. A couple of years later they abandoned it. They never finished.

SPENCER: Oh, I see.

COCHRAN: It was only a shell.

SPENCER: They never finished it?

COCHRAN: No

SPENCER: That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.

COCHRAN: They had the concrete structure there, some wire, and cabling, electric power into the site, but no electronics inside.

SPENCER: Do you think your visit had any influence?

COCHRAN: Yeah. I think politically, it led to shutting it down.

SPENCER: Do you know any of the steps that went on to make that happen?

COCHRAN: Largely Velikhov, who was Gorbachev’s science advisor and also subsequently part of the Supreme Soviet, under Gorbachev. He was part of that congress, whatever it’s called, I think it’s the Supreme Soviet. He was really instrumental in getting him to shut it down.

SPENCER: Does he still have any clout?

COCHRAN: No, not really with Yeltsin, no.

SPENCER: Who took, sort of, his role with Yeltsin?

COCHRAN: Nobody. I would say the ministry—you know he was basically an independent scientific advisor to Gorbachev. He could in effect, through Gorbachev, reverse bad policy coming out of the ministries. Now, basic ministries, like the Ministry of Atomic Energy, have very close ties with Yeltsin and the Academy of Sciences is out of the picture.

We also brought Russians to Nevada to set up stations over here. We had a lot of trouble with the administration over visas; over whether they would try to keep them out. We threatened to sue them.

SPENCER: Really.

COCHRAN: Also the congress changed the law, a little bit, and so they gave in.

SPENCER: It was under Reagan that you were going to sue them.

COCHRAN: Yeah. In ’89 we, Velikhov and I, did another experiment to look at the utility of radiation detectors; monitoring the presence and absence of nuclear missiles on ships. This was a verification of the SLCM issue.

SPENCER: I think that’s the thing that Frank von Hippel told me about.

COCHRAN: Frank and I, through FAS and NRDC, do an awful lot of collaboration or always end up working on the same issues. He would go on these—I’m not sure whether he went on the Krasnoyarsk trip. He says he went on the Black Sea trip. Velikhov, working very fast at the end, got the Russian Navy to provide us a cruiser with a nuclear warhead on it—spent a day taking measurements. They brought a lot of equipment, took measurements and spent about a year writing all that up. On that trip, Velikhov, ———-we took three congressmen, we again, as observers and took them to a helicopter range, took them to Chelyabinsk 65, which was sort of their Hanford. We were the first Americans to go in these secret cities and toured a couple of reactors which had been shut down. Talked about fissile cut-off; which was one of the issues that Frank had been pushing for a long time and—to back up on the Black Sea—before we left Yalta on the ship we spent some time with a man from the foreign ministry who was a negotiator on the strategic talks at the time. I was pushing to take all the tactical warheads off the ships and store them on the land.

SPENCER: I’m sorry. You went to take what off?

COCHRAN: Take the tactical nuclear weapons off the ships and store them on shore; which they did two years later, you know, Bush…

SPENCER: That was by agreement. Is that part of one of the treaties?

COCHRAN: It was by—essentially they did it by unilateral declarations.

SPENCER: The Soviets took initiative.

COCHRAN: Bush and Gorbachev basically agreed to eliminate a huge number of tactical weapons on both sides in, I think it was 1991.

SPENCER: Was this Gorbachev’s initiative? Or was this something they agreed just man to man?

COCHRAN: I don’t know. In the government how—who pushed, where it came from. I had pushed it with the Russians. I had published a paper advocating this, relating to the Black Sea and I—experiment—I talked to Powell about it. Powell wrote me a nice note back saying that it was impossible.

SPENCER: Why? What was his rationale?

COCHRAN: I don’t remember. I’d have to dig it out. No technical reasons.

SPENCER: I see, just political or in his mind.

COCHRAN: Two years later he did it, you know, so.

SPENCER: Uh, huh.

COCHRAN: So it ah—we then went from Chelyabinsk, and flew down to Sary Shagan and visited a site that DOD was advocating was sort of the premier anti-satellite facility of their Star Wars program. And it turned out to be a nothing. You know, a very low technology.

SPENCER: This is the thing that somebody said is ‘toys’ That the equipment was like toys?

COCHRAN: Yeah, well, I think, more accurately they said this could have been built in any university physics department. I mean it was at that level, not any, but I mean that was an effort by Velikhov to dampen the hype over here about Russian Star Wars program.

SPENCER: Uh, huh.

COCHRAN: That was sort of the end in 1991. You have the collapse of the Soviet Union. We had been in parallel of this, after we set up this collaboration with Velikhov. Frank also got into trying an agreement with FAS to do some workshops on fissile material control. Working with Frank we had a series of workshops with the Russians. Subsequently they were sponsored by, on our side (on the American side), jointly by the FAS and NRDC. We had a half a dozen. First it was a in a series, it was basically FAS who had published a nice little report that Frank directed on verification of warhead disarmament. We were trying to move things into getting rid of the warheads. Subsequent, from 1991 through the next several years, we continued workshops jointly with: the Russian weapons lab people, ministry of foreign affairs, warhead dismantlement and verification, deep reductions and so forth.

SPENCER: In 91?

COCHRAN: Yes. It has gotten progressively harder to collaborate with them now. There is so much in that period ’86 to ’93, there was not much government-to-government collaboration. You know, everybody stumbling over each other. You have the Nunn-Lugar program and all these other DOE programs on transparency and—there’s not the role for NGOs opening the doors necessary anymore; the atmosphere between the two governments in recent years has hardened. It’s much harder to make progress. I would say during the Gorbachev years when Reagan, and even when Bush was President here, and Gorbachev was there, we had much better access through Velikhov to the Russian decision-makers than we had over here. A lot of what we were doing, in terms of influencing policy, was done through the Russian government. Then you had a shift where Yeltsin came in over there, and Clinton came in over here. Now our major influence is through the Clinton administration. We don’t travel as much. We would if we could accomplish something over there, but it’s a lot more difficult.

SPENCER: Do you have any idea about any of the forces that may have been the impetus behind Gorbachev’s acceptance of the zero option and all, for the INF treaty? I can pin down influence for a lot of things, but I can’t identify what moved him on that.

COCHRAN: You ought to talk to Chris Paine here. He’s probably got a better memory on these things than I do.

SPENCER: I hope to—he’s at NRDC.

COCHRAN: Yeah, he’s down the hall. I think Reagan misread Gorbachev initially. The Reagan Administration saw him as just another Soviet leader; everything he was saying and doing was just more propaganda. He was cranking everything up in terms of nuclear weapons and defence in general. I think a lot of what Gorbachev was trying to do was because he was really seeking peace. I mean the conservatives over here like to think they drove him into the ground by spending him into the ground.

SPENCER: That’s exactly the reason I’m doing this book.

COCHRAN: I don’t buy that at all. Reagan lost, he eventually warmed up to Gorbachev, but he lost a couple of years because he misread him.

SPENCER: Then Bush lost a year or so, because he did the same thing. It seems to me.

COCHRAN: I think Clinton has—Bush and Clinton have badly botched what they could have accomplished after the break up of the Soviet Union, by not taking bolder initiatives. They did a lot of very good things, but on the warhead destruction, dismantlement, and securing the fissile material, they really dropped the ball.

SPENCER: And that’s still the case, you think, they’re not…

COCHRAN: Yes. I think the other thing is there was a window of opportunity there, right after the break up, that they didn’t take advantage of. They largely didn’t take advantage of it because there was attitude that the U.S. had won the cold war and, to hell with the Russians. We don’t want them mucking around with our nuclear weapons and so we’re not going to do anything that would require reciprocity in terms of transparencies and safeguards. By the time they got around to seriously moving our—I mean they still haven’t—they still do what they ought to do, but I mean by this time, they lost a lot of real opportunities because of the situation hardening over there.

SPENCER: Tell me about it from the standpoint of influencing U.S. policies. My sense is that—well, you already said it—that policies were influenced by getting straight to Gorbachev—and then, that made the U.S. eventually move. What are other ways—well, you also did tell me about one where you were suing the Government about the environmental things and so on. Are there other ways in which you made political impacts in the U.S. directly?

COCHRAN: With a big ‘we,’ I would say yes. I mean, I would say the test ban is a good example, particularly in the early part of the Clinton—Clinton took office—I think the move towards the comprehensive test ban was largely driven by the NGO community. An outgrowth of this work, that had been going on since the mid ’80’s, and the legislative efforts of Chris, on the hill, work we were doing and others. There were others advocating the CTB as well. A lot of the Nunn-Lugar program, we had a big influence on that. The minister Mikhailov, who was then minister of atomic energy, he was actually part of the original workshop when we got the agreement with the Soviet Academy.

SPENCER: You’re talking about that Soviet guy, Mikhailov.

COCHRAN: Yes. Velikhov was one we were dealing directly with. Mikhailov, at the time, was head of their Russian institute that did the diagnostics on their nuclear test. He later became, stepped up, first deputy, and then minister of atomic energy. He runs their weapons production complex. He was at one of our workshops so we took him around the hill and he was advocating, that was when he began advocating, help on storage of warheads. That led Nunn-Lugar responding and— (Metta Turns over Tape) I think we’ve had a significant influence over the fissile material control issues on the U.S. side, in terms of the U.S. policy on things like the data—Clinton’s announcement last winter, or last fall, that we would exchange data on warheads and fissile material inventory—that was something we had been advocating since about 1990.

SPENCER: He also—I don’t know if that’s the same moment, but when he said he was going to take a bunch of fissile material and I don’t know—take it out of—I don’t know what he was going to do with it. But anyway, that was kind of a gesture toward the NPT.

COCHRAN: Yes. The two hundred tons of excess.

SPENCER: Does that amount to a significant gesture? Or is that a trivial thing?

COCHRAN: It’s not trivial. There is some smoke and mirrors there, but it’s praiseworthy.

SPENCER: Will it make any difference in the opinion of non-nuclear countries?

COCHRAN: I don’t know. I think it’s just another—I think it’s helpful. I mean it’s another piece of the U.S. Administration’s efforts to demonstrate they are trying to move in the right direction and—you know the administration has been very good at defining the problem and defining, sort of, in a very general sense, what needs to be done. Where they’ve had problems, is in execution. They don’t know how to organize themselves; to do something jointly with the Russians to make it happen. Things have been very slow on the fissile material control front. They have a long way to go. From their side they would say, “we’re doing all these things, we have all these programs in place, etc.,” but all these things are either bogged down in—over issues where the major differences between the U.S. and the Russian position, like cut off on the production reactors on the Tomsk Krasnoyarsk. Two other sites like Chelyabinsk 65 where they produced plutonium. We’ve had, I think, a major influence on the testing issue, on the clean-up issue, on the fissile material control issue, data exchange and so forth.

SPENCER: What do you think is going to happen at the NPT?

COCHRAN: I think there will be a lot of noise, and then they’ll vote, and we’ll get an indefinite extension by a not so-great-margin.

SPENCER: Is that what you want to have happen?

COCHRAN: Yes, I am in favor of an indefinite extension. I think there is some—we had a press conference today because we think one of the things that’s going on is that administration is laying low until they get this behind them. Then the people in the administration are going to try to raise the threshold of permitted activities under the comprehensive test ban, so that they can do small nuclear test and call it a ‘CTB.’ We want to force them to come clean on that before the NPT is…

SPENCER: One of the pressures, now that Congress has moved to the right, how much freedom of action do the people in administration have if they want to do the right thing?

COCHRAN: It’s going to be somewhat more difficult. They’re already cutting back on some of the aid to Russia that relates to conversion of facilities in Russia on the Nunn-Lugar program. They will be adding pressure—It’ll be more difficult to get foreign aid and apply it to this issue. On the other hand conservatives are generally pretty good on proliferation issues. They will be pretty bad on reciprocity. In a way you will have to do certain things over here to get the Russians to go along. They’ll want to get—their philosophy would be more akin to “disarm the Russians and keep our nukes,” rather than “lets seek joint bilateral deep reductions of arsenals on both sides.” I think—within that, things are sort of coming to a halt. Instead of the administration advocating further reductions of the START II, they’re sort of going in the other direction. By maintaining a large reserve they can go back to START I levels very quickly, which make START II levels kind of meaningless; if you put all the warheads back on the delivery vehicles, on short order.

SPENCER: That doesn’t sound good.

COCHRAN: Do you have enough?

SPENCER: You can give me one other direction to go, though. I don’t have the sense that the nuclear winter research had any direct political impact on military advisors or planners.

COCHRAN: I don’t think it did.

SPENCER: Good. I’m glad you think that, because my impression is they just shrugged it off.

COCHRAN: They shrugged it off and eventually the modeling—I think it was oversold. Let’s not say it wasn’t an issue if you—back when you had these large arsenals, but I think—I’ll back up and say I learned a long time ago, one of the rules of effective propaganda: is you’ve got to use understatement, be convincing to your enemies and not yourself, and so forth. They, I think, overstated their data. What they had, and were talking to themselves. They ended up, first the defence department dismissed it, and secondly they—the effects went down, so the effects were milder than they previously predicted and then you had these—you know, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and major reductions in the arsenal, the issue just disappeared. I don’t think it had any impact.

SPENCER: Interesting. You don’t think the SCOPES thing—was it SCOPES? Is that what it was called?

COCHRAN: That was part of it. That wasn’t the entire thing. Jacob Scherr , here, spent a lot of his time on that issue.

SPENCER: And he didn’t think it was…

COCHRAN: Well, he’d probably give you a different view than I am. He probably won’t be as negative as I am about it.

SPENCER: I should probably talk to Turco. Is it Turco? I understand that Sagan is sick, seriously ill. Do you know anything about that?

COCHRAN: I don’t know a thing about it.

SPENCER: A friend of mine told me that she knows him and says he’s sick. I guess I ought to try and reach Turco. Do you know how to reach him?

COCHRAN: No I don’t. Jacob’s not here; he’s on vacation—Jacob Scherr.

People I would recommend you talk to first Chris, Stan Norris, a political scientist, Dick Garwin, a scientist, Frank…

SPENCER: I’ve already interviewed him, but I guess I ought to get back to him because when I interviewed him was before he worked for Clinton. What was his role in the administration?

COCHRAN: He worked for Jane Whales, who worked for—he worked in the Science Advisors Office, OSTP

SPENCER: OSTP. What’s that?

COCHRAN: Office of Science and Technology Policy.

SPENCER: He doesn’t do that anymore. Is that right? Is he back at Princeton?

COCHRAN: He’s actually in Princeton, on the weekends with his wife, but here during the week. You can reach him at FAS. He has an apartment here in town somewhere.

SPENCER: Well, I’ll get back to him one of these times. Any other advice you have about something you think I should not overlook in terms of impacts of other scientists?

COCHRAN: You may want to talk to John Holdren, CSAC

SPENCER: CSAC?

COCHRAN: CSAC is the National Academy group, that’s a little more official, that’s government funded.

SPENCER: Yes, who would I talk to there?

COCHRAN: John Holdren, Penovsky, Hanford, Garwin.

SPENCER: I was going to call Holdren with respect to Pugwash. I am sort of a Pugwashite and the last I heard he was in California. Is that not true?

COCHRAN: That’s right, he’s hard to reach but that’s where he is.

SPENCER: So, CSAC, that’s probably the next…

COCHRAN: Holden’s tied into that. He’s now the head of—I think he’s the chairman now.

SPENCER: OK, sounds good. I appreciate this.

COCHRAN: You also might try, somebody who follows these issues very closely is George Perkovic, at the W. Austen Jones Foundation?? in Charlottesville. He’s always a good one. And Stan could give you some names of people.

SPENCER: Thanks, bye.