Twenty-three years ago Doug Smith '70 was a young Air Force officer sitting in a bunker 120 feet beneath the Montana plains with his finger on the button of a nuclear weapon aimed at Russian cities. He never stopped to think about who the people he might kill were or what they were like. Six months ago he found out. Smith, an optometrist in Medford, Ore., says he is purging his past by participating in a humanitarian and business exchange with some of the same people he would have wiped out a generation ago. His involvement with Rotary International has taken Smith to Siberia twice this year, and, he said, he has forged relationships with "some of the warmest people I have ever known." Smith says Russian businesspeople, many of whom come from military backgrounds, are aggressively seeking U.S. expertise on market economics as well as help in meeting their country's basic needs. In January, Smith and his fellow Rotarians traveled to Petropavlovsk, a city of 300,000 on Kamchatka Peninsula, nine time zones east of Moscow. The isolation that made it ideal as a Soviet nuclear submarine port also retarded the city's progress, resulting in severe deprivation for the populace. "We visited one hospital where eighteen women were giving birth, and there was only one attendant for all of them," Smith said. "Very basic things like analgesics--aspirin--are prized items there." The experience was profound for Smith, who says he couldn't escape the irony that these people were once the targets of his nuclear missile. "There's a lot of baggage there," he said. "I shed a lot of tears. [The trip] was a very emotional time for me." He is now corresponding with and hopes to soon meet his Russian counterpart, a former nuclear missile controller from Novosibersk, who, Smith said, "had me in his sights at ground zero." Smith says that for 10 years after he left the service he had nightmares about the nuclear holocaust scenarios he and his fellow officers were taught as part of their survival training. "I had suppressed them for years until I went to Russia and while I was there I had one nightmare. I haven't had one since," he said. Smith was involved in ROTC and majored in psychology at Colby, and he joined the Air Force planning to make it his career. "I decided about eight hours into my first day that that wasn't in the cards," he said. When his four-year stint ended in 1974, he attended Montana State for one year and then entered optometry school at Pacific University, graduating in 1979. He has had a private practice in Oregon since. Smith, who made another trip to Petropavlovsk in June, said "the infatuation [with Russia] has matured a bit and we are looking at a long-term commitment to meeting the health care needs there," he said. "Every time we go in we take five or six hundred pounds of medical gear." Smith hopes to be back on Colby's campus later this year. He and his wife, Hazel (Parker '70), have been alumni interviewers for the Admissions Office for 25 years. "I think we've netted nine kids during that time," he said. "From Oregon, that's not too bad."--Kevin Cool