Interview focuses on De Noyer's involvement in the technical and political debates about the seismic detection of underground nuclear explosions during the 1960s. After finishing his Ph.D. in seismology at Berkeley in 1957, De Noyer began to teach at the University of Michigan. There he became involved in the Department of Defense's program for the detection of underground nuclear explosions, known as Project Vela Univorm. During the 1960s De Noyer worked on a number of major technical problems related to seismic detection. First at the Institute for Defense Analyses and later as a Vela manager for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), he studied how seismic signals from underground explosions could be distiguished from earthquakes. De Noyer, who was in favor of a nuclear test ban agreement with the Soviets, pushed for an experimental test of the decoupling theory and supported the installation of the Large Aperture Seismic Array (LASA), which became operational in 1965.
