Now, that is not quite the end of my story. As a result of this activity, and of our work with the... on the Soviet intercontinental missiles, which had been used as a launching rocket for their Sputniks, we had acquired a good deal of information, which was of great value to the important people in England who had to deal with future attacks from the Soviet Union. And I had received, one day, an invitation which I... from Sir Morris Dean, who was then the permanent under secretary to the Air Ministry, and he asked me to meet him in London and have lunch with him. I did so and it must have been in the 1950s and, I think, about 1950, in the middle of 1950, in the middle of the story I have already been relating. And he said, 'I have a small group of scientists of whom you'll know, who are acting as scientific advisors to the air staff, and we'd be very pleased if you would join that group'. So I took a bit of advice and I did agree to join this small group of half a dozen of us who were acting as scientific advisors to the chief of air staff.

Those meetings were extremely worrying, but of extreme interest, and most of them were taken by the deputy chief of air staff, who's a very nice person. He was a son of a person I had known very well earlier on and I quite enjoyed attending those meetings although they were so worrying. One learned many things, which it would have been better not to have known, such as the Soviets had 49 armoured divisions lined up against the West. Well, how would we... how could the West possibly stop them? And only one means, by using tactical nuclear power. In that case, there would be rapid escalation to strategic nuclear power and it was an uncomfortable aspect of my life to live through, but nevertheless of great interest. It became even more... even more interesting when one day, the deputy chief of air staff – this must have been 1958, or '59 – he said, 'Lovell, do you mind staying behind after we close the meeting? I have a problem', so I said, 'Certainly', and he said, 'We want your help', and look, I'm going to relate this story now because it's public property. Not many people know about it, but if only they go to the public record office, they can find the story I'm now going to tell you.