Herbert York Interview (1988): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In your service as Director of Livermore, and then in government service, serving various committees of the Eisenhower administration, and then, finally, as Director of Research and Engineering and so on, what new insights did you get from this change of perspective on some of these problems?
It was a large change in perspective. It seemed so at that time, and, in retrospect, it still seems so. I got a bigger view, a broader view, of what national security was all about. In a period of six months or so, I came to accept, quite fully, Eisenhower's view of all of this, which was that we needed a substantial program of national security, we needed to maintain a high level of military preparedness, but that there were limits, and, in fact, it was bad to go beyond these limits. That nuclear weapons, in particular, represented such a danger for the long run that something had to be done to contain the growth of the nuclear component. And that, in addition to unilateral actions (building forces, developing new systems, and so on), it was necessary to negotiate, to use diplomacy, to explore the possibilities of arms control.
I adopted the point of view that's characterized by his farewell address, which is usually quoted wrong. Essentially, he said that we need a military-industrial complex, but precisely because we need it, we have to make sure that it doesn't go too far or develop a momentum of its own that produces results that we don't want. The same with the scientific, technological elite: he meant the people working in the security area. "We need them," he said, "but we need to make sure that they don't capture public policy as a result of the fact that we need them." So, I became a strong supporter of his approach to the whole question, including the need for a negotiated arms control, disarmament. And when I was in the Pentagon, I was one of his primary supporters within the government for going ahead with the test ban negotiations of the late fifties and with other similar measures.
Where was the primary opposition to a test ban coming from then? Was it from your laboratory, the lab that you had led?
It came from there, but it was much broader than that. It came from within the Washington nuclear establishment, probably even more importantly than from the laboratory (you know, maybe I'm not balancing that right) and from within the military, who felt that restrictions of this kind were unnecessary and of no particular value. In other words, there were people who felt that there were a lot of negative things. One is you can't trust the Russians. The other is that these inhibitions have no broad effect, really don't improve the situation, that putting inhibitions on our ourselves, even if they're bilateral, doesn't accomplish a useful result. And: we need these systems to solve the kind of security problems we foresee. So there was opposition from within the military; opposition from within the nuclear establishment. And included within the nuclear establishment was the laboratory.
The debates on these issues could be rather intense. There's an account in your book where at one meeting with some other officials from AEC and elsewhere over the question of how reliable were our means of verifying what the Soviets were doing, that you were even called a traitor.
It was even a simpler fact than that. The question was (and this was the period during the nuclear test moratorium): was there or was there not evidence that the Soviets are cheating? I think I knew everything there was to know, and my conclusion was, "No, they're not." It was the conclusion of someone else: "Yes, they are." And my saying they weren't was equivalent to treason.
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