Year
1969
Abstract
It is most appropriate that being the first speaker on the last day of the Institute's Tenth Annual Meeting, which is being devoted entirely to the subject of nuclear safeguards, that I at least acknowledge the historic and unique place that the State of Nevada has in safeguards. It seems that during the Civil War the Comstock lode of Virginia City was an important source of financing for the Union cause and that numerous efforts were made by southern sympathizers to divert the silver bullion, particularly while it was being transported from the Comstock lode to its ultimate Union destination. The good people of Virginia City solved that diversion threat by the use of painfully simple yet highly effective safeguards. They cast the silver into large balls, each weighing many hundreds of pounds, thus creating a package that was too big to fit into saddlebags and that was sufficiently heavy to force a hijacked wagon to move relatively slowly or to leave deep marks in the soil if the wagon were taken off the regular trails. This latter fact not only further impeded the progress of the wagon but made it extremely simple to trace the hijacked silver and achieve recovery. While it is true that solving their safeguards problem in the middle 1800's appears particularly simple compared with the problem we anticipate, there are some important lessons that we can learn from their solution. Thes-: are: 1) complex solutions are not necessarily more effective than simple one;; 2) simple systems can be highly effective by forcing the hijacker or diverter into few alternatives for transporting the material he diverted; 3) an ideal solution should have built into it the characteristic of making it possible to recover the items of concern should they be diverted, which I shall discuss a little more later on when I discuss the transportation safeguards problems as we now see them.