Reminiscences

After finishing graduate work in a salt mine under Lake Erie in 1969, we moved to Los Alamos where I started work in Bob Keepin's new safeguards program. The group was N-6 in the nuclear-rocket division. I joined the INMM that then had several hundred members; Bernie Gessiness was President, Vince DeVito was Secretary. Our MObile Nondestructive Assay Laboratory, MONAL, first went to Rocky Flats, then to a Chicago INMM meeting; and then to National Lead of Ohio, where Bernie was nuclear accounting officer. MONAL provided a useful introduction to major AEC sites and people. One was Willy Higginbotham, who headed the safeguards program at Brookhaven. Willy had a committee visiting nuclear sites to evaluate SNM accounting procedures. I remember sitting next to him on a bus from Oklahoma City to Cimarron to visit Kerr-McGhee shortly before the Karen Silkwood incident. I learned Willy had headed the Electronics Section at Los Alamos during the war years. I vividly remember him saying, \"I've been trying to put the genie back in the bottle ever since!\"  Throughout 38 years in safeguards and nonproliferation, I worked in LASL, LANL, JRC-EURATOM (Ispra, Italy), DOE (DC), and the IAEA (Vienna, Austria). I've travelled and worked in over 50 countries, with folks from over 130 countries, and come to know many of the people who devoted their lives to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. The INMM is not well known to the general public. However, like any people and organizations in life, it and its people play an important role in world affairs. Some are at this meeting; many are officers, fellows, and major players in this field. They come from USA national laboratories, and organizations the world over. I will discuss some of the in this paper.