SESSION V . 245 PSYCHOSOCIAL , ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ASPECTS LANGHAM: The Spanish wanted the burial pit finally lined with asphalt, so this was agreed to. Then they decided that they wanted a concrete slab put over it and a fence put around it, and the United States to take a lease.onit. I kiddingly asked them if they wanted the lease to run for 5 half-lives— 120,000 years. When the State Department heard we were contemplating building a monumentto this unfortunate incident, we were told to take the material out of Spain. So a barrel factory was leased in Naples, put on 24-hour duty and in 2 weeks produced 5,000 steel drums which met the specifications. When the barreling operation was complete we had packed up 4,879 barrels of this material, hauied it down to the beach and put it on board a freighter out in the Mediterranean, The next question to come up was, what do you do with it, now? The obvious thing to do was to haul it off a few miles into the Mediterranean and throw it overboard. You would be surprised how many people objected to this! [Laughter] Gen, De Gaulle's government was one, as did many others, whether or not they owned even remotely a shore on the Mediterranean, In fact, people objected who had no coastline whatsoever on the Mediterranean, The decision was made to bring it home. You may think our prob- lem ended there, but the Agricultural Department heard about it and said "That's Mediterranean fruit fly country and you can't bring it in!’ [Laughter] [tell that partly as a joke. It so happens that the Agricultural Department tid object and they did say that we would first have to sterilize it; and they suggested ways and means of doing this. After a while they did agree that if it was brought in and buried in the steel drums, there would be no possibility of fruit fly Jarvae, and so forth, getting to the surface. FREMONT-SMITH: LANGHAM: How about the Governor of the receiving state? He probably didn't like it too much, but it was depos- ited at Savannah River in the AEC's burial ground, and I guess the - To —~ Governor felt he couldn't protest too strongly. But there were protests from that area about bringing this back into the United States. Some statement was made about how the State Department's mode of operation once in a while causes trouble. The Ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, is very well liked by the Spanish people and is a very competent person, but it was just traumatic to see him try to do