What are you proudest of personally and professionally in your life?
Personally, I'm happy for the personality that I have. We're not interested in judging people or considering what we do as what is right or that we are the smartest people in the world. But I was born with a curiosity, particularly about science, and also sociology, also how development, biology, all kinds of little things. So I'm really happy with the working knowledge. Seventy-five years old, an engineer, and I opened up a poetry book I've had for quite a while and was looking at that again. It was very, very nice. How the English language is used. How our language developed is the greatest thing. That's a fun thing to do. So I like the life I have.
And I'm not going to be judgmental about people who are different than I am. As far as I'm concerned, they're just informing me about the breadth of life. I certainly would defend against people who would try to harm my family or me.
I'm not outside of going in a criminality sort of situation or a war situation. No, my goal is to be friendly and helpful. That's it. In the area of work, profession, I was an aeronautical engineer. They changed it to aerospace, and I don't know what the heck they are now. But we did not deal with dynamics of non-atmosphere flight or planetary motions or any of that. We were not in that thing. It didn't exist. We were making and doing things that were in the flight of normal environments, earthly environments. So that was fun. And I really did enjoy that. We worked on a lot of very good things. Of course, I had some great aunts that were very religious in a different way than I am.
They thought it was just terrible because I made weapons. And I was not worried philosophically about, oh, they might be used. I was not like that. So I made them because I wanted to make them.
Okay? And those weapons were missiles, air-to-air, air-to-ground, ICBMs, IRBMs. And we made—but the last one was very, very interesting. Great, great fun. You were more experienced as an engineer on that last group.
This was an anti-ICBM missile. It wasn't made for smaller missiles, IRBMs, Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles. It's Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. So you're hitting a missile, and a missile warhead is very small. It's not big.
At that point, it might have been about four feet tall and maybe two feet in diameter, maybe two and a half feet in diameter. And that would have a hell of a warhead on it, that warhead.
That's all that's coming in on a ballistic flight. And that warhead would take, you know, how many times better than Hiroshima and those things. Many, many times better than that. And it's coming in very fast and it's very small. So it's not like it's easy to see. You're going to eventually see it from the heat track and the shockwave it's making, but it's so small. But the missile I worked on would shoot that thing down. It would kill warheads. So it was, as I was mentioning before, it wasn't a weapon system that was made to fight the war, fight a nuclear war with the Russians. It wasn't made for that purpose. It was made for mistakes. If the Russians had a general that went crazy and had the ability to launch without authority or on his own authority, which could very easily happen, we could be talking to a Russian premier, and the premier is saying, we've had a missile launch, or several missiles launched from a farm, and they're heading to you. And we'd say, okay, we have them picked up. And he'll be confirming that those are only ones that are gonna be there. So at that point, we have maybe seven ICBMs with nuclear warheads coming our way. And then under those conditions, we could bring every one of those down. And that would be in 1967. We could bring them down. They don't really, you can't shoot them out of the air, you're not in the air, you're in space. We could go and be orbiting in a two-stage situation, which was very unusual, still unusual. You still use three stages to get up enough velocity out of each stage so that they add together to get an escape velocity.
We could get escape velocity with two stages and be orbiting if we wanted to be. And at that same time, that missile, that third stage of that missile does not push it. It pulls it. The warhead's behind the third stage.
This third stage could guide it. It could do its own guidance and hit. So you're thousands of miles out and in space, and you're picking this thing off before it's even coming on a down trajectory. So you don't blow it up. You're in space. There's no shockwave there.
There's nothing to have a shockwave. The only thing you have is particles that your bomb blows apart that make up the third stage and the bomb itself and the bomb case itself. So that isn't enough. So you say, how do you shoot it down? You don't. You shoot it down with radiation.
Nuclear weapons are not just something that goes boom. In fact, going boom in space doesn't mean much. So your nuclear weapons for fighting in space are enhanced radiation weapons. The United States wanted to give Europe what was called a neutron bomb in the 60s, early 70s. Maybe it was the 70s. And the neutron bomb, that nuclear reaction that's making that weapon produces a lot of high-energy neutrons that are going to penetrate anything on the ground and kill all mammalian life, but not hurt anything. The buildings will all still be there. Everything will be there. It's just that mammalian life won't be. And, of course, that is very good for the fact that the Russians on the East German border and Poland and whatever have tank forces, which we always like to have, that are four times greater than ours. So we can't defend ourselves against the Russian tanks. If they launch World War III and they launch those tanks crossing Germany, you don't have enough firepower to stop them in a tank-to-tank.
There are other things that you had that were unique. People don't know much about them today, but they were very unique. One was that you had, across the whole German area there and northern area you had nuclear landmines. They weren't going to get very far. You had some other weapons that would work, too. But you didn't have the tanks to stop them. So if it's a real surprise, not everything works as you think it's going to. So they're going to get across and, well, the neutron bomb would kill everybody in the tanks and eventually they'll run out of gas. But there's nobody in them to fire anything or steer or do anything. They're all dead. And nothing is disturbed. Nothing else is disturbed. But the Europeans didn't want that. It bothered their sensibilities, so they rejected that idea as a way to defend. And the United States really controls NATO at that time. So they said, OK, no, we won't do that. Instead, we had a tremendous number of nuclear weapons and storages in Europe. All heavily radiation, fighting with them will kill everybody and still blow up everything. They liked that better. They didn't want the enemy dead, they wanted everybody dead.
It was not a very, it's not an engineer way of thinking. So that, not just the fact of war as a war lover or anything like that, but you're working on things that nobody has ever done before. Nobody in the high-consequence yeah in a high-consequence area that's all very limited knowledge right of who's doing what the home and you had to have the need to know that's inherent with all military secrets or any secrets are the need to know.