The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  It was not clear, however, that there was any missile defense system better than Nike Zeus, the project the administration had just shelved. ICBMs were still relatively new, and even newer were the theoretical schemes to defend against them. There was no way, using current technology, to track and intercept a missile that took only thirty minutes to circle the earth. ARPA’s Defender program faced an even greater challenge: it was very specifically supposed to look at technology that could “protect all the United States,” and that lent itself to particularly outrageous and comical concepts involving space-based nets that would trap missiles, and the like. ARPA had to imagine futuristic technology, and pretty soon imaginations ran wild. When it was revealed in 1959 that ARPA had undertaken a broad study project named GLIPAR, short for “Guide Line Identification Program for Antimissile Research,” the agency was derided for allegedly considering “anti-gravity, anti-matter and radiation weapons.”

  By 1961, ARPA was spending about $100 million per year, or half of its entire budget, on missile defense, and yet the program was, according to Ruina, a “god-awful mess.” The agency had been inundated with fanciful proposals to shoot down ballistic missiles; one official described 75 percent of the work as outright “crazy.” A good amount of this craziness could be attributed to the cutely named ARPA program called BAMBI, short for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept. The basic idea behind BAMBI was to look at ways to intercept missiles in their initial launch phase. As BAMBI matured, it grew from ambitious to lunatic. One proposal called for orbiting battle stations—large armed satellites—that would shoot out pellets enmeshed in a giant net meant to perforate enemy warheads. No one, however, had figured out how the United States’ own satellites or missiles would avoid this net. Herbert York called this satellite swarm a “mad scientist’s dream,” and not surprisingly he blamed it on Roy Johnson, claiming one of the former ARPA director’s final acts was to foist BAMBI on the agency.

  Ruina agreed that BAMBI was a “loony idea” that needed to be canceled. “Bambi brought in all the nuts out of the woodwork,” Ruina recalled later. Yet when he first arrived at ARPA, he had to at least publicly defend the project to Congress. “Isn’t that a bit fantastic?” marveled Representative George Mahon, a Democrat from Texas and frequent critic of ARPA, upon hearing the description of BAMBI. “It is a bit fantastic, true, but so are many things,” Ruina replied. “I am sure the Venus probe seemed a bit fantastic 20 years ago. Examining this concept now, the conclusion we come to is that it is not fantastic enough to drop it.”

  It took two years of fighting off its supporters, particularly from the air force, but Ruina eventually prevailed. In 1963, he told Congress that he had slain BAMBI. Not only was it impractical, he said, but the costs of operating such a system would run on the order of $50 billion a year, about the same amount as the Pentagon’s annual budget. Even if BAMBI could be built, it would essentially be at the cost of putting the entire military out of business.

  BAMBI illustrated the fine line ARPA had to walk in many areas of technology: If its missile defense solutions were too conventional, then there was no point pursuing them. After all, the idea was to come up with technological solutions that were significantly better than what the military had already done with Nike Zeus. On the other hand, if the solutions were too unrealistic, like BAMBI, then ARPA would be accused of throwing money at science fiction. What it eventually arrived at was something called ARPA Terminal Defense, abbreviated to ARPAT. The scheme involved launching a drone “mother ship” equipped with hypersonic interceptors that would hover some sixty thousand feet above the earth. Ground-based radar would track incoming warheads and try to discriminate warheads from the decoys meant to dupe the system and then pass that information to the mother ship, which would release a hail of dart-shaped interceptors in the vicinity of the incoming warhead. ARPAT was only “kind-of nutty,” declared Charles Herzfeld, an Austrian-born physicist recruited to ARPA to run the missile defense programs. Being only “kind-of nutty” apparently gave it an advantage over most schemes, though it still cost about $20 million.

  The problem with all the proposals was that, quite simply, none of them worked particularly well. Either they were too expensive, too impractical, or a combination of both. What was needed was a way to differentiate between the scientifically speculative and the technically ludicrous. For that judgment, Ruina turned to a secretive group of elite scientists.

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  Back in early 1958, the Manhattan Project veterans John Wheeler and Eugene Wigner, along with the economist Oskar Morgenstern, had lobbied to establish a national security science laboratory, a sort of mini-ARPA for scientists. The “Princeton Three,” as they were called, had even embarked on an aggressive publicity campaign in the wake of Sputnik to promote the idea, which ended up in Life magazine. ARPA was not interested in having a laboratory, but Herbert York agreed to support an exploratory summer study led by Wheeler and gave him a small $50,000 contract for what was code-named Project 137.

  Just months after ARPA got off the ground, Project 137 gathered some forty scientists to generate ideas with the modest aim of involving a younger generation in the world of national security. The proposals for that first meeting ranged from looking at chemical sensing based on research into insects’ unique ability to find a mate to a method of communicating with nuclear-armed submarines while they prowled the seas using extremely low frequencies. Another idea floated at the first meeting involved using a particle beam to blast ballistic missiles. “If by use of high speed particles the channel can be made straight in the beginning, and the gas within heated so hot that the bulk of the impeding mass is driven aside, then the door is open to sending a quick burst of energy to a great distance,” Wheeler wrote.

  By the time Wheeler presented the results of Project 137, the idea for a laboratory was vastly scaled down. Instead, he essentially proposed a mini-ARPA for scientists—an organization that would draw on academics for temporary appointments. Even that idea foundered, in large part because Wheeler did not want to leave academia to head the new venture. In 1960, General Betts, as the interim head of ARPA, decided to continue Project 137 as an annual meeting of scientists, called Sunrise. Project Sunrise was not designed to research a specific area of science or technology. Rather, it paid simply to involve young scientists, mostly from academia, in national security issues.

  The membership read like a Who’s Who of elite physicists. Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, a former student of Enrico Fermi’s, headed the group, which included Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg, both young physicists who would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Members of the group would meet for several weeks over the summer and then report back to ARPA. With help from Charles Townes, who would also later win the Nobel Prize for his work on the maser, the group was established under the auspices of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the research institute that had been supplying much of ARPA’s technical talent. Project Sunrise met for the first time in the summer of 1960 and, at the suggestion of Goldberger’s wife, promptly changed its name to JASON, after the Greek tale of Jason and the Argonauts.

  From the start, the JASONs, as the members were known, were unique among scientific advisers: They were granted top secret clearances, which allowed them access to information that ordinary academics could never have had. Because they were not government scientists, they also had the independence to criticize projects. Though funded by ARPA, the group ran its own affairs and selected its own members. They were brilliant, patriotic, and eager to make some money, a reputation that earned JASON the sarcastic moniker of the “golden fleece.” They were also secretive; lists of JASON members were not made public, and the group frowned on scientists advertising their membership in it.

  In the early years, the JASONs worked primarily on missile defense—ARPA’s Defender project—focusing on problems at the intersection of physics and technology. The first summer, they looked at whether the Soviets might be able to “blind” early warning satelli
tes by setting off preemptive nuclear blasts at high altitude, which could hide the plumes created by ICBMs. (As it turned out, the JASONs found the concern was overblown.) Ruina soon took a liking to the JASONs and their work, describing them as “kind of a truth squad.”

  The JASONs were not above considering their own off-the-wall ideas, particularly if they came from Nicholas Christofilos, the father of Operation Argus and one of the few national laboratory scientists invited to join the group. His febrile imagination, mixed with genius, entranced the JASONs, who were typically known for their skepticism. Christofilos would dazzle fellow scientists with his frenetic work schedule and ability to generate new ideas and then go on late-night drinking benders in the bars of La Jolla, California, which became the regular meeting place of the JASONs.

  After his idea for a planetwide force field fell to the wayside, Christofilos had continued to forward ideas for protecting the nation from Soviet attack, each idea seemingly more outlandish than the last. One proposal involved building an aircraft runway stretching from coast to coast so that American bombers could evade Soviet strikes. It was wryly called a “not good” idea by an early ARPA history. Unperturbed, Christofilos turned his unbridled intellect to a new scheme for a charged particle beam weapon that would obliterate incoming Soviet ICBMs. The concept, part Buck Rogers, part Dr. Strangelove, was classic Christofilos: scientifically brilliant, but requiring a technology almost unimaginably complex.

  The particle beam, which emerged from the Project 137 summer study, was picked up by ARPA in its first year of operation. Code-named Seesaw, the particle beam became another entrant into Christofilos’s phantasmagoria of megadeath technology. It came to symbolize the type of agency that was being built in the early 1960s under Ruina, and it helped define a unique and enduring relationship between ARPA and the JASONs. At one point, ARPA was planning to spend $300 million on the particle beam weapon and a “death radar sub-system”—an astronomical figure for the time.

  Seesaw was not a JASON project, but the group became an integral part of the program over the years, reviewing the results and proposing new avenues of research in a series of secret reports. Ruina found himself, like many other scientists, enthralled with the Greek physicist. He described Christofilos as “fantastic,” in part because he lacked any self-awareness that the concepts he proposed were outrageous. “He was not ever frightened of doing an experiment that was beyond what most people could even think of doing,” Ruina said. “I mean, he would not hesitate to think: We’re going to put up a net to reflect things that’s five miles across. Why not put up a big net?” Christofilos’s imagination was not tethered to practicality, and that, combined with a sharp intellect, attracted people like Ruina and the JASONs. And that is what allowed Christofilos to think up the missile-killing particle beam.

  Particle beams consist of a focused stream of highly charged particles that, when they collide with something, transfer their energy, essentially disintegrating the target. Christofilos was proposing a charged particle beam that would travel through the atmosphere, a feat requiring immense energy and a way to keep the beam focused. It was the type of exotic physics that the JASONs enjoyed doing. ARPA funded Livermore, where Christofilos worked, to study Seesaw using a nuclear fusion reactor called Astron, which was also based on one of his schemes. In turn, the JASONs were heavily involved in reviewing Seesaw; not surprisingly, they always came out in favor of continuing the project, despite the technical hurdles. “Sometimes it was the same scientist each year proving the opposite of what he had proved the previous year,” marveled Eberhardt Rechtin, a former ARPA director, referring to the JASON reviews. He joked that Seesaw was “aptly named, because it seesawed each year from ‘it’s practical’ to ‘it isn’t practical.’ ” Rechtin said he had doubts about the propriety of the entire Seesaw business, but in the end he supported it, as did other ARPA directors.

  Seesaw faced myriad practical barriers: the tunnels needed to generate the beam would have to be hundreds of miles long. The cost of building the tunnels would be exorbitant, and no one knew how to build a power supply that could produce the high power levels needed to produce the beam, which would require a huge amount of electricity, possibly more than existed on the entire grid. “ARPA was generally of a mind that Seesaw was a bad idea,” recalled Kent Kresa, a former ARPA official. “It was too expensive and too hard.”

  Kresa decided one year to sponsor what he hoped would be the last JASON study on Seesaw. Kresa thought that by having the JASONs look at the big picture of what it would take to build a system that could protect a city from an attack—not just the scientific issues of getting a beam through the atmosphere—the scientists would see the folly of the proposal. “If you looked at that, there isn’t enough money in the world to be able to protect the United States,” he said.

  The problem was that Christofilos was on the study, and every time Kresa brought up what he thought was surely a “clear killer” of Seesaw, Christofilos would brainstorm a convoluted solution. “All the other JASONs would say, ‘Nick, God that really is neat.’ ”

  “There’s a better way to do it,” Christofilos announced, when confronted with the costs of drilling the tunnels. He would create the tunnels using nuclear weapons.

  “Think of it like a suppository,” Christofilos told the JASONs. “We would push it through the rock. As it goes into the rock, it melts the rock, it creates this perfect tube. You just have to keep on pushing it so it’s hot enough so it melts the rock. As it goes, you just push it through.”

  Christofilos did not stop with nuclear suppositories. Another question was how to power a particle beam to shoot down three thousand incoming Soviet missiles. Was there even enough electricity available in the United States to power this weapon? “Nick had the solution. I’ll never forget this,” Kresa recalled. “He said, ‘We’re going to do nuclear blasts under the Great Lakes.’ ”

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  Kresa was in shock, but Christofilos began to write out calculations, showing the volume of water in the Great Lakes and how much energy could be generated if the lakes were drained in a fifteen-minute period through a set of doors, passing through generators and then into a huge cavity carved out by nuclear explosions. “We’re going to put a generator in there, and when the war comes, we’re going to drain the Great Lakes, and that will create the energy,” Kresa said of the proposal. “Christofilos did a calculation of how much energy it would take, and it was going to work. The JASONs in the room all nodded their head and said, ‘My God, Nick, that may work.’ ”

  Seesaw never fired a single shot; the megadeath beam was never built. It was also never extravagantly funded—it certainly never got the $300 million that ARPA once planned—but Seesaw did become the longest-lasting ARPA project and continued at least through the mid-1970s. Everyone seemed to agree that Christofilos was a genius whose ideas had scientific merit, however improbable they seemed. Yet nobody, including Ruina, ever thought the particle beam would work. Seesaw was, by all accounts, a failure, yet early directors still defended it years later as research that embodied the spirit of ARPA in the 1960s: bold and scientifically interesting. “There will not be any payoff; it is not practical,” Ruina said, “but there are many good people assigned to it; there is much knowledge being developed from the effort; and it permits freedom of work in a research or laboratory atmosphere.”

  Projects like Seesaw raised a fundamental question: Was ARPA a science agency with a focus on national security, or was it a national security agency with a focus on science? Just as Jack Ruina hated Godel’s Project AGILE, Godel despised Ruina’s favorite research projects, which often had only a tenuous link to national security. Godel’s main vitriol was directed at the Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope funded by ARPA under the auspices of the Defender program. Arecibo was ostensibly for use in research related to ballistic missile defense, but everyone in ARPA from Ruina on down to the rank-and-file staff acknowledged it really had nothing to do with na
tional security. It was simply an excellent science facility that would be used by academics to study the ionosphere.

  So committed was Charles Herzfeld, the head of Defender, to protecting Arecibo for scientists that when officials from the NSA approached him about using the facility for a secret eavesdropping experiment, he initially refused them. The NSA wanted to use Arecibo to test whether it would be possible to intercept signals bounced off the moon. Herzfeld insisted Arecibo was for unclassified research, though he soon relented, likely at the behest of Godel. And when the NSA officials decided that Arecibo was not the ideal location for their research, Godel stepped in with a generous, if somewhat shocking, offer: ARPA could arrange to set off a nuclear weapon in the Seychelles for the eavesdropping agency. “A nuclear detonation would be employed, and ARPA guaranteed a minimum residual radioactivity and the proper shape of the crater in which the antenna subsequently would be placed,” Nate Gerson, an NSA cryptologist, recounted. “We never pursued this possibility.”

  One reason the NSA never followed up on Godel’s offer to nuke the Seychelles was that such testing was about to become politically impossible to do—thanks to another ARPA project under way.

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  When President Kennedy took office in 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union were still abiding by the 1958 moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, but there was mounting political pressure on both sides to resume the work. Advocates of nuclear testing, like Edward Teller, argued that no treaty would be able to prevent the Soviets from cheating. In an essay for Life magazine, Teller and his colleague Albert Latter laid out their case to the public. Published between a recipe for “tangy tuna-mac” and an advertisement for Air Wick home deodorizer, the essay argued that nuclear testing was necessary to prevent Soviet superiority, even going so far as to suggest that human genetic mutations from radiation, if they occur, may not be such a bad thing. The critical point, the two scientists argued, was that the Soviets would cheat and there would be nothing the United States could do to detect such cheating. “It is almost certain that in the competition between bootlegging and prohibition, the bootlegger will win,” they wrote.