The day of the Vanguard disaster, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a rare note of “non-concurrence” to the establishment of McElroy’s proposed research agency—a bureaucratic expression of extreme disagreement. Had Vanguard not just gone up in a literal ball of flames, he might have had a stronger argument. The new defense secretary held firm, and the next month Eisenhower formally approved the creation of the new agency. McElroy agreed to just one small change to his proposal: to avoid confusion with other, similarly named endeavors, like the Office of Special Operations, the new division would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.
ARPA was still an idea more than an organization, and not everyone in Washington was optimistic that a new government bureaucracy would be the solution. The frenetic days leading up to the new agency’s opening its doors were a mix of highs and lows in the space race. On January 31, 1958, the von Braun team, which had finally been allowed to join the space race, successfully helped launch Explorer 1, based on its Jupiter-C, putting in orbit the first American satellite. That success was quickly overshadowed by the second attempted launch on February 5 of the navy’s Vanguard, which broke apart just shy of a minute after launch.
On February 7, ARPA was officially founded with an intentionally vague two-page directive, which established it as an independent agency that reported directly to the secretary of defense. The directive mentioned no projects, or even specific research areas, not even space. “The Agency is authorized to direct such research and development projects being performed within the Department of Defense as the Secretary of Defense may designate,” the directive read. The only hint as to the ultimate purpose for this new agency came just weeks earlier during President Eisenhower’s State of the Union address: “We must be forward looking in our research and development to anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future.”
CHAPTER 3
Mad Scientists
The man who knocked at Oliver Gale’s stately home in Georgetown at 7:45 on Saturday evening looked as if he were arriving at an old friend’s house to stay the night. He was clutching a rather large suitcase in one hand and a briefcase in the other and smiled warmly when Gale, the defense secretary’s special assistant, opened the front door. After confirming Gale’s identity, the stranger was ebullient. “Let me dismiss my cab,” he announced.
Realizing the man was now stranded at his house, Gale was worried, not for his own safety, but for his time, which was precious. It was January 4, 1958, and the past few months in Washington had been a whirlwind of congressional hearings, many of them focused on Sputnik, and Gale had lugged home a mountain of work that he needed to finish over the weekend.
In the months following the launch of Sputnik, a procession of nuts, opportunists, and salesmen were trying to get to McElroy through Gale to sell their space and missile schemes, which ranged from nuclear-powered rockets to elaborate moon bases. All they needed was a few million (or billion) dollars of taxpayer money. But midwestern politeness is a hard habit to shake, so Gale reluctantly invited the man inside. Once ensconced in Gale’s living room, the stranger began to detail his plan for protecting the United States from a barrage of Soviet missiles. Gale listened politely for an hour, decided the man was a complete lunatic, promised finally to put him in touch with someone in the Pentagon, and sent him on his way.
More than three thousand miles away from Washington, D.C., Herbert York, the director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, had a similar encounter, except his visitor was more of a mad genius than a madman. Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek scientist at the lab, burst into York’s office yelling, “They’re coming!”
Christofilos was “basically frantic,” convinced that Sputnik was the harbinger of a Soviet takeover, York recalled. Whether the Russians were coming or not, Sputnik did prove that the Soviet Union was able to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, leaving the United States helpless to defend itself. Christofilos wanted to do something about it.
The Livermore lab was known as a place that embraced scientists with mad ideas; after all, it was founded by Edward Teller to build the “Super,” a thermonuclear weapon. But Christofilos was unique even for Livermore: he had worked for an elevator repair company in Greece before rising to the elite of nuclear scientists in the United States. His path to a nuclear weapons lab began in 1948 when he started writing letters on improving accelerator performance from his home in Greece to the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Scientists at the lab took to calling him “the crazy Greek.” Undeterred, Christofilos filed in the United States for patent protection on his ideas and eventually traveled to America. Not only did he succeed in convincing the government scientists that he was sane; he was even given a job at Brookhaven and then later at Livermore.
Christofilos was wild, known for both his drinking bouts and his prodigious ability to work for days without sleep. When he lectured he gesticulated, scribbling out numbers and ideas faster than most scientists could process. The excitement and fear generated by Sputnik and the Soviets possessed Christofilos. The energy he had once put into accelerators and nuclear energy he now channeled to weapons. His ideas were grandiose and bizarre, but usually so genius that they dazzled the physicists around him. What seemed to attract scientists was that the ideas themselves were scientifically sound but required technological miracles to make them work. In late 1957, standing in York’s office, he outlined his most fantastical idea yet.
The plan, as York would later describe it, was to create “an Astrodome-like defensive shield made up of high-energy electrons trapped in the earth’s magnetic field just above the atmosphere.” This shield would protect the planet against intercontinental ballistic missiles by essentially frying whatever attempted to pass through the band of killer electrons. “His purpose was of epic proportions,” York recalled. “He intended nothing less than to place an impenetrable shield of high-energy electrons over our heads, a shield that would destroy any nuclear warhead that might be sent against us.”
Christofilos predicted that there were some electrons already trapped in the magnetosphere, a theory that was confirmed weeks later when the first American satellites detected the trapped charged particles (this region was later named the Van Allen radiation belt, after James Van Allen at the University of Iowa, whose instrument confirmed the existence of the electrons). But the practicalities of what Christofilos was proposing were, as even one of his close colleagues called it, “nutty.” Christofilos believed that nuclear explosions could inject a much larger number of high-energy electrons in this radiation belt, and those electrons would destroy any missiles passing through the area. In other words, he was proposing an enhanced version of the naturally occurring electron belt. Rather than a Van Allen belt, it would be a death belt.
York loved the idea. The problem was that generating the shield would require exploding nuclear weapons in the earth’s magnetosphere. At the time Christofilos first proposed the idea to York, in the late fall of 1957, there was no way to carry out the necessary experiments. Satellites of the type needed to test the idea had not yet been launched, and Livermore, which was part of the Atomic Energy Commission, could not just carry out its own military experiment; that was the job of the Pentagon.
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In the early days of 1958, everyone seemed to have ideas for advanced technology, whether lone oddballs, mad scientists, or large defense companies. The pages of trade magazines like Aviation Week were filled with advertisements for “rocket stations in the sky” that would “speed man’s conquest of space,” nuclear-powered aircraft, and missiles striking the moon. It was only three months since Sputnik, and companies were ready to build a space armada. Secretary McElroy and a handful of other senior Pentagon officials were scheduled in January for a dinner set up by the Aircraft Industries Association, a trade group. The meal was to feature four different fine wines and a litany of complaints about how the Pentagon was not sponsoring advanced technologies.
McElroy nixed the wine but listened to the concerns, satisfied he had a polite way to fend off the proposals. The lunatics and the opportunists finally had a place to go with their ideas: ARPA.
In January, McElroy shopped around for someone to head the new agency. Earnest Lawrence had suggested his protégé, Herbert York at Livermore, but McElroy wanted someone from the business world with management experience. McElroy that month met with Ralph Cordiner, the president of General Electric, and Sidney Weinberg, the head of Goldman Sachs, to get their suggestions on who should head the new agency. McElroy came back from that meeting with a name: Roy Johnson, a vice president from General Electric—a charismatic businessman with a reputation as a problem solver. After briefly considering the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun for the job of chief scientist, McElroy settled instead on York. ARPA was given an impressive, half-billion-dollar budget for its first year, but the new agency would own no laboratories, would hire no permanent staff, and would not even have its own offices. ARPA, it seemed, was not part of a grand strategy to remake the Pentagon. It was an expedient solution, and a temporary measure, to show that the administration was taking Sputnik seriously.
ARPA’s first director exuded the self-confidence of a successful industrialist. At fifty-two, Johnson was described by one newspaper as “urbane and handsome,” and according to ARPA’s history he “looked every inch like a Fortune cover tycoon.” Lee Huff, one of ARPA’s earliest employees, recalled the staff being in awe of the urbane business executive. “He’d show up with these gorgeous tans and strut around,” Huff said. “He was fun to listen to. He had been in a lot of tough corporate situations solving difficult problems.” When Johnson moved into his office in the Pentagon’s prestigious E Ring in early February, just a few doors down from the secretary of defense, he thought he was the CEO of the nation’s space program. As a business executive who had dealt with appliances and electronics, Johnson knew little about science and less about space. The bigger problem, however, was that he knew nothing about government, much less government bureaucracy.
He got his first taste of Washington on February 13, less than a week after ARPA was established, when he was taken in a Pentagon sedan for a “roast” of Secretary of Defense McElroy held by the local Saints and Sinners Club. Gale, McElroy’s assistant, had been nervous about having his boss agree to participate in the fraternal club’s event, but the new defense secretary hoped it might ease his way into Washington’s social life. Gale’s initial fears were confirmed when the lunch started with a cringe-worthy striptease, followed by a skit mocking the Pentagon’s leaders. As the defense secretary and the new director of ARPA watched, “McElroy” questioned “General Medaris” on how long it would take for the Pentagon to get a space vehicle to orbit the moon. The “general” replied, “Eight years, one to learn how to do it, and seven to get the decision out of those fatheads in the Pentagon.”
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ARPA became the nation’s first space agency at a time when the United States was several months behind its Soviet rivals. The new agency had inherited the patchwork of overlapping rocket programs that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the military services had started in the 1950s. The Soviets had already launched two satellites, including a dog, while the United States had only the von Braun team’s Explorer 1, which launched just days before ARPA was founded. ARPA was now in charge of all civilian and military space programs, even though its staff on its first day of operations consisted of Johnson.
Johnson was soon joined by Herbert York, the agency’s new chief scientist. The appointment of Johnson, a business executive, and York, a physicist, set up what was to be a larger power play over the new space agency. Perennially late for work and meetings, York would show up wearing rumpled suits or even no suit. His corpulence was an affront to Johnson’s spit-and-polish business image. For his part, York thought Johnson was an affront to science. “I went over there as chief scientist, [but] I really determined the program,” York said later. Johnson, by contrast, publicly described York as his “personal consultant on scientific matters.”
The division of work between Johnson and York quickly became clear, however. Johnson was the chief spokesman for ARPA, traveling around the country to proselytize on space to church groups, professional associations, and schools. York was the scientific headhunter, recruiting the technical staff, while also guiding the direction of the various space programs.
In March, Johnson made his official announcement setting up the structure of the new agency. York, along with holding the title of “chief scientist,” served as the head of a technical division of about two dozen personnel contracted from the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded nonprofit research center. Those personnel, all essentially on loan to ARPA, were the scientific talent. By contracting them through an outside institution, the agency could afford to pay them more than their normal government salaries while also avoiding the red tape involved in hiring full-time government employees. There were also a few representatives sent over by the military services, such as Robert Truax, a navy captain who worked under official cover to help manage Corona, the CIA’s and the air force’s top secret satellite program. It, too, had been swept up in ARPA.
Beyond the technical personnel, there was minimal bureaucracy, in large part because ARPA did not even issue its own contracts, instead using the military services to handle the paperwork. Johnson had a deputy, Rear Admiral John Clark, but there were only two other organizational elements to the new agency: Lawrence Gise, a longtime Pentagon bureaucrat, was appointed as head of administration, and William Godel was named head of the Office of Foreign Developments, which would, according to early ARPA documentation, explore promising foreign research. Because it was decided from the outset that ARPA would not have its own contracting staff, paperwork was limited to brief memos, known as ARPA orders. Policies and procedures were ad hoc, largely a result of ARPA having Johnson as its head, according to Donald Hess, one of ARPA’s first employees. “Roy Johnson set the pace for the rest of ARPA and we sort of followed the Roy Johnson bible,” said Hess.
Indeed, one of the most enduring features of ARPA—and not necessarily something that was intentional in its creation—was its ability to avoid bureaucracy. ARPA could immediately fund projects that the military services might take months, or even years, to start. For example, in early 1958, two scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory came up with a novel idea for satellite navigation. They had started off tracking the position of Sputnik by measuring the Doppler shifts of its beeps. They quickly hit upon the idea that this same method could work in the inverse: a signal emitted from a satellite could help determine a precise location on earth if they knew the satellite’s orbit. Such a satellite system could potentially help submarine-launched missiles determine their exact location. The satellite navigation project, named Transit, was picked up and funded by ARPA, leading decades later to the Global Positioning System.
ARPA’s unique position in the late 1950s was the result of happenstance and necessity. The crisis atmosphere post-Sputnik meant that the Pentagon was willing to allow ARPA to make its own rules in the interests of getting things done, and placing a government neophyte like Johnson as the agency’s head meant that it was not going to function like a normal bureaucracy. Speaking to a group of scientists from ARPA and the Institute for Defense Analyses, Johnson laid out his view of the agency’s mission: “As gun powder succeeded the sword, and as the hydrogen bomb substantially succeeded the rifle, the question confronting us now is what succeeds the hydrogen bomb.”
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What could succeed the hydrogen bomb, in the view of ARPA’s first chief scientist, was a way to defend the United States from a nuclear attack. In April 1958, shortly after arriving at ARPA, York invited Nicholas Christofilos, the “crazy Greek,” to Washington to present his idea for a planetwide force field. When Christofilos first proposed his wild missile defense concept the prior
year, after the launch of Sputnik, York had not been in a position to do anything with it. Now York was at ARPA, whose purview over military satellites, missiles, and advanced research seemed tailor-made for the force field idea. Thus was born ARPA Order 4, Project Argus, a top secret program to test whether nuclear weapons exploded in the earth’s magnetosphere could create a force field that would destroy incoming missiles. It became by far the largest—and most significant—of ARPA’s early schemes. “ARPA is the only place that could pick up something like Christofilos’s [idea] and support it,” York explained later.
Nothing embodied York’s vision for ARPA better than the Christofilos missile shield: a highly speculative military scheme based on pure science. ARPA could move quickly, and that was exactly what Pentagon officials wanted because of “the possibility that events in the near future may create conditions unfavorable to the continuation of nuclear tests,” Herbert Loper, the assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, wrote to other senior military officials at the Defense Department shortly before ARPA picked up the project. Those “unfavorable” conditions included an expected moratorium on nuclear testing by the United States and the Soviet Union that would go into effect later that year, making any tests of Argus impossible. York made Argus his pet project, even handpicking the launch site, the uninhabited Gough Island in the South Atlantic, after poring over maps. Why York would select a seemingly outlandish idea to promote as one of the agency’s first major projects had to do as much with the emerging battle between White House scientists and the Pentagon as it did with ARPA and its nascent plans for space. Johnson had grandiose visions of ARPA as a permanent military space agency, but York saw it simply as a temporary mechanism for supporting scientific research. Argus, he later wrote, “was interesting science,” though he acknowledged that the idea was highly unlikely to ever work.
The Imagineers of War Page 5