William E. Smith Interview, 25 August 2001(b)
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| WS: | They were motion detectors and contact alarm systems. We called them banana antennas that would focus toward one other in a triangular method, and these big things would shoot the beams, I guess, back and forth, and if you broke one of those—once you worked those things for a while you're able to make some certain decisions. If it just went off [claps hands] and came right back up within a few seconds, you probably weren't concerned with it that much. | |
| TT: | It was a rabbit or something? | |
| WS: | Some of them were very very sensitive. Sometimes a bird would start to build a nest, would set up, we'd have to go out and pull the stuff out of there. But generally, you could tell if it set up after a couple of minutes, you had to be a little bit worried, because that would give somebody time to set something else up, so we would have a certain timeframe in which the officers would have to respond to it. And we were not overly worried if the outer system was going off, because there was always something happening with that one. Now if we had two levels of alarms going off that means someone had made a contact alarm go off, and typically our contact alarms would go off in our Maintenance Bay, there was a huge Maintenance Bay with a door that opened up, [motions opening horizontal door] I think in some of the material it talks about the door would come open... um and when our teams would go out they, they would have a certain checklist, they had to call me and let me know what was going on, I could give them directions from where I was, and so we had little hand-held radios, and we could go down the...so when they first got to the site, when they first saw it they'd have to check in, when they got closer, and they would do a visual inspection of it, and then of course, you had a certain Strike... we called it the Strike Procedure. And it was a thing of beauty. It really was. These two guys following this, and in many cases uh...we had a lot of students from the local areas that would play games at certain times and we knew that and there were situations where we actually caught people on site saying "what the heck is this?," what...[laughs]... you know what's... farmers were no problem... | |
| JK: | Inside the fence? | |
| WS: | Oh, inside the fence. Oh, you bet and when you saw that— | |
| TT: | You mean they climbed over the fence? | |
| WS: | They'd climb over the fence, or they'd pull the fence up and go up under it. The alarm wouldn't go off if you just yanked on the fence. The alarms were inside, and there was a huge lock on the front. Sometimes the gates had separated a little bit where you could almost squeeze through, there were, you know, some maintenance things needed to be done, or they could pry this or pry that to get in say "what the heck is going on out here?" So we would have to arrest them and they would be charged with trespassing, because there were signs, of course, keeping people out of there. | |
| TT: | It is amazing that there's this nuclear tipped warhead just sitting there out in the middle of nowhere, and everybody's just driving by— |
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