Kistiakowsky. The idea was to lay the so-called barrier--which had nothing to do with a fence--through the uninhabited jungles through which the Ho Chi Minh trails are cut. We were very uncertain of the feasibility of this scheme. There was a very heated internal debate in August whether we should even present the plan to Mr. McNamara.

Langer. Because of its feasibility or because of its politics?

Wiesner. Because of its feasibility. I don't think we ever argued the politics.

Kistiakowsky. You have to be aware that we thought of ourselves as what might referred to as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. We were working through the channels, within the organization, as yet. In my case it was a bitter experience, and it led me outside the channels. Our recommendation to Mr. McNamara, made about Labor Day, 1966, was to confirm our ideas by a detailed, larger study of professionals to be organized within the Department of Defense. You remember that?

Wiesner. Yes.

Kistiakowsky. It was a very emphatic recommendation. We had even outlined a plan of what the study would involve in manpower and time and so on. Mr. McNamara's feeling was that time was of the essence. He wanted to develop details of the plan concurrently with the development of special devices, the so-called sensors, and so on, and also with plans for deployment. He felt if it were done in an orderly succession, it just would be much too slow. And at the end of '67, particularly after seeing that Mr. McNamara was essentially fired from his job, I reached the conclusion that it was completely futile to continue. At that point, I resigned, and resigned in what might be called a tactless way. In other words, I didn't claim illness or family business or fatigue. I just wrote that I vehemently opposed the present Vietnam policy and could not be even a minor party to it anymore. That's all I think I can say about it.

Langer. I'd like to say that I think the question of what is public business is sort of up for grabs at this point, and the more that is public, it seems to me, the healthier things can be.

Wiesner. I think that's right, and I believe that we ought to get rid of all secrecy on such matters. I feel strongly about this. But I think that, until there is a change in the security laws, violations of security represent a form of civil disobedience, and when one undertakes to do that, he should do it for a reason. I don't think that there's an issue on this point that justifier either of us doing it.

Langer. I didn't understand that the issue was breaking a law.

Wiesner. The McNamara decision was announced in the fall of '67 and it was then that I began to oppose the ABM deployment publicly. I also stopped working within the government and started to work outside. After the so-called thin system decision, I gave up trying to convince anybody in the government to make sense on the ABM, for I regarded that as basically a political decision. There was no question in my mind that Mr. Johnson made the the deployment decision for political reasons. He still expected to run for President, and he was protecting his flank by making that thin ABM decision. At least this is my view of what he did. There was no rationale to justify the ABM that I could see, and I decided to see if this waste for political reasons could be stopped.

Langer. How do you feel about the ABM battle? What do you make of it?

Wiesner. My feelings are complicated. I'm sorry we didn't win it. I think, nonetheless, it was a vital fight.. It showed that you could make a good fight against a foolish decision.. I believe that it exposed the military issues in a public way for the first time. I think that personally I spent far too much time on it. But I never really felt we lost it, because we kept it down, we helped Congress be responsible, we helped the public become informed. I think much of what has happened since, in the way of public debate on many things like the environment and the SST, grew out of the ABM experience.

Kistiakowsky. I very much agree with Jerry on that. In a personal sense, you might say, Jerry lost; I was a much more minor character in that one, though I lost also. So did York. But in a more fundamental sense we won, because we generated a completely new phenomenon.

Wiesner. I think in a real sense the nation won. Congress looks at everything seriously now. The public will not buy...new weapons without looking at their purposes. You can't scare them by telling them the Russian's have three, as they used to do.

Kistiakowsky. The proposals of these, I might call them "hot-rod military" types, are no sacrosanct anymore. They are challenged, and the ABM debate was the first of these public debates.