92 Dahlgren 



installation and showed pictures of his elaborate housing. That did not exactly 

 fly. 



I didn't get on until late in the afternoon, and I was so damned tired of 

 hearing these guys go over the same thing which all of them had. You know, 

 everybody's got a comptroller, everybody's got a fine personnel department, 

 everybody's got this, and everybody's got that, and everybody insisted on 

 talking about it. So when I got my chance, I got the only round of applause. I 

 said, "We've written all of this up. It's here in this brochure. You all have copies 

 of the brochure, and I hope you read it. We've got everything that everybody 

 else does." There was no immediate result from that exercise, because von 

 Braun was quite hard to get along with. Fortunately, the JUPITER project 

 aborted, and we had, by this time, impressed sufficiently on people that we had 

 a very fine ballistics capability, and that was where we got into the Special 

 Projects. That was our real contribution to the POLARIS. As you know, it went 

 on and got bigger and bigger. As we demonstrated that we could do useful 

 things with our capability, that was the best thing of all. Once you get a foothold 

 in one of these areas, then the thing that you have to do, obviously, is deliver. 

 Proof of performance is one of the best inducements to get a sponsor to entrust 

 work on projects, and funds, and responsibility to you. So this was one of the 

 means by which we expanded the Laboratory little by little, and we were always 

 conscious of the fact that we did, after all, have a rather small operation, in 

 comparison with our rivals. 



We had lots of people at Dahlgren, but our technical staff was not as large as 

 we would have liked it to be. Sponsors have a habit of looking at you and saying, 

 "If so and so quits, what will happen to my project?" Now if you can convince 

 him that you have enough depth so that there are three or four other guys you 

 could put in place of someone who leaves, then he has a great deal more 

 confidence that he can entrust his project to you and not find himself facing his 

 superiors with a story of well-intentioned failure. One always in these cases has 

 a step-by-step struggle, and as you gain a little momentum, it becomes easier to 

 gain the next bit of momentum. But getting off dead center is the tough part. 



The Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren became the Naval Weapons Laboratory in 

 August 1959. Was this conversion to a laboratory done at the initiative of the Bureau of 

 Ordnance or Dahlgren? 



That was us. Very much. The emphasis of that came from Dahlgren. We had 

 to change the name because of our stereotype heritage. Oh yes, the Naval 

 Proving Ground. It's not the Naval Proving Ground anymore, it's the Naval 

 Weapons Laboratory. It's greatly changed. I remember we did quite a lot of 

 thinking as to what to change the name to. We didn't want to be the Naval 



