The Defense Research Lab was a think tank. It took a whole day just to fill out paperwork for security clearance, various benefits, stock options, health insurance and so on and so forth. I was now a member of the largest corporation in the western world General Motors, with roughly 750,000 employees worldwide. In those days we all thought there was something reassuring about the size of a corporation. The Goleta DRL had about 1,000 employees and was involved in leading edge defense work. Few of the projects were related to automobiles....

The research activities inside this building were something out of the movie"Doctor Strangelove". The central area of the building accommodated a"hyper-velocity light gas gun" as it was called. In this "gun", scaled missile nose cones were fired down a 24" diameter and 100 ft. long steel tube,which had a lead target at the end....

To Detect two Parts in one Billion

Even the optics lab was involved in cold war research. One project was a nerve gas detector, which was supposed to detect two parts per billion concentrations of the dangerous stuff in the air...

Revisit the Old World

On Thursday, March 23, 1967 Martha and I became citizens of the United States at the picturesque Santa Barbara County Court House. In the beautiful mural room about thirty people from a dozen countries had U.S. Citizenship bestowed upon them in a festive ceremony. For Martha and me it was our fourth citizenship German, Canadian, British and now American....

The Prison Camp Called East Germany

The following day I pushed aside my aversion to the East German communist regime, and went to see the wall at the former Potsdamer Platz.We went to the observation point where President Kennedy had made political hay by announcing that he was "ein Berliner". A look over that wall should have been forced upon everybody in the world who believed in Communism. Behind the wall the city resembled a high security prison yard,as in essence all of East Germany was....

In China the cultural revolution took place under Mao Zedong and chairman Mao puts his "thoughts" into a little red book which every Chinese person was supposed to read. It was the cause of more than 300,000traffic accidents because people were reading it while on their bikes in traffic. Mao had written, "revolutions need sacrifices". In the little red book were all sorts of "wisdoms" that were supposed to solve people's problems.....

In the western world that book was the source of numerous jokes, and the"dirty capitalists" in the west also made money by printing a chairman LBJ(Lyndon B. Johnson) red book. I had to buy one. On the first page it said,"Don't spit in the soup. We've all got to eat." On page 173 Chairman Johnson said, "I am against sin, and I am against lawlessness, and Iam very much opposed to violence. I think we have to put a stop to it....."