The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  One time, for example, Godel wanted Licklider to evaluate a proposal for using mass hypnosis in Vietnamese villages to increase support for the South Vietnamese government. Licklider managed to duck out of an initial meeting with the company promoting the idea, but finally, when pressed to review the proposal, he penned a memo to the head of Project AGILE providing a diplomatic, but direct, response. “I do not want to be negative merely because it is controversial,” Licklider wrote. “I do want to argue, however, that you should investigate very thoroughly the accreditation of any people or organization you employ in the field of hypnosis and that you have the work monitored—if not actually done—by recognized national authorities in medicine and psychology.” ARPA, it appears, took Licklider’s concerns to heart and stayed out of the hypnosis business.

  There were other disturbances to his work, like the time a military contractor dropped by to show off a gun that shot micro-rockets—another Vietnam-inspired novelty. The weapon was a semiautomatic pistol that fired .49-caliber micro-rocket projectiles; it was being tested by ARPA in the United States for possible use in Vietnam. For reasons unknown, the visitor chose to demonstrate it in Licklider’s office. “These things got going and the place was left a shambles,” he recalled. Then there was ARPA’s role as a cover for the black budget; Licklider was forced to fund one project so secret that he was never told its real purpose. Years later all he could say was that his office paid “for digging a hole in Lafayette Square,” presumably a reference to a secret project conducted near the White House grounds.

  Those annoyances aside, Licklider was mostly left to do his own thing. It helped that most people at ARPA in those years did not know, or understand, what exactly Licklider was doing. In theory, Licklider was in charge of two research efforts at ARPA, one in the behavioral sciences, which apparently made him the resident expert on hypnosis, and another in the obliquely named command and control, which initially consisted of taking ownership of an expensive, but now unneeded, air defense computer. Those responsibilities belied his more ambitious reason for being at ARPA, which was to transform how people interacted with computers.

  Among his colleagues in the computer world, Licklider was known as a fervent believer in big ideas, with an easy sense of humor and undying love of corny puns. At ARPA, which was new to the computer world, his colleagues described him as nice but quiet. “I knew that he didn’t get into anyone’s business, except his own,” recalled Donald Hess, who worked at the time as a senior financial administrator for the agency. “It was as though he wanted you to stay away from him.”

  That was only half-true. Licklider did not engage in small talk, but it was usually because he wanted to avoid getting drawn into discussions of topics like hypnosis, not because he did not want anyone to know what he was doing. In fact, Hess recalled Licklider inviting ARPA employees to a meeting at the Marriott hotel near the Fourteenth Street Bridge, between the Pentagon and the Potomac River. Licklider had set up equipment to show how someone in the future would use a computer to access information. As Hess recalled, there was a demonstration of how people would have a computer console in their kitchens and use it to access a recipe from a network of connected computers. Most of the technology needed to create what the ARPA history called Licklider’s “messianic” vision was years away. Licklider, as the chief proselytizer for interactive computing, wanted people first to understand the concept. Licklider was trying to demonstrate how, in the future, everyone would have a computer, people would interact directly with those computers, and the computers would all be connected together. He was demonstrating personal computing and the modern Internet, years before they existed.

  There is little debate that Licklider’s reserved but forceful presence in ARPA laid the foundations for computer networking—work that would eventually lead to the modern Internet. The real question is why? ARPA was a military agency, so surely the network was not intended just to exchange casserole recipes. By the 1990s, however, popular news accounts were frequently repeating as accepted truth that the Internet’s origins could be traced back to ARPA’s work on creating a military communications system that could survive nuclear war. This account sparked a counter-narrative by ARPA-funded scientists who insisted that computer networking was pursued primarily for its civilian applications. The truth is more complicated, and it is impossible to divorce the Internet’s origins from the Pentagon’s interest in the early 1960s in the problems of war, both limited and nuclear. The Internet would likely not have been born without the military’s need to wage war, or at least it would not have been born at ARPA. Tracking the origins of computer networking at ARPA requires understanding what motivated the Pentagon to hire someone like Licklider in the first place. It started with brainwashing.

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  “My son! My son! Bless the lord,” shouted Bessie Dickenson, standing on the ramp of Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, as the child she had not seen in more than three years got off the plane. It was 1953, and their reunion was short-lived; twenty-three-year-old Edward Dickenson, sometimes described as a “mountain boy” by the press, would soon be court-martialed for cooperating with the enemy. Dickenson was one of almost two dozen POWs from the Korean War who initially opted to stay in North Korea, throwing in his lot with the communists. Dickenson soon changed his mind and returned to the United States, where he was initially welcomed, then called a traitor. At his court-martial, defense lawyers argued that the young man, who hailed from the almost fictional-sounding Cracker’s Neck, Virginia, was a simple country boy who had been “brainwashed” by the communists during his years in captivity. Unmoved, a panel of eight officers convicted him, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  “Brainwashing” was a new term in the early 1950s, first introduced and popularized by Edward Hunter, a spy turned journalist who wrote about this dangerous new weapon that could sway men’s minds. The communists had been at work on brainwashing for years, but the Korean War was a turning point, Hunter argued. In 1958, he told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that as a result of brainwashing tactics, “one in three American prisoners collaborated with the Communists in some way, either as informers or propagandists.” The communists were racing ahead of the United States in mental warfare, Hunter claimed, and their “new weapons are for conquest intact, of people and cities.”

  Brainwashing soon made its way into the popular imagination with the publication in 1959 of Richard Condon’s best-selling novel, The Manchurian Candidate, in which a POW, the son of a prominent family, returns to the United States as a sleeper agent, trained for assassination (the lasting popularity of the idea is seen in the modern series Homeland, which depicts an American POW “turned” by al-Qaeda).

  Whatever the truth of actual brainwashing incidents, the battle for people’s minds loomed large in the late 1950s and was the subject of serious Pentagon discussions. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an ideological—and psychological—battle. Eager to exploit the science of human behavior, as it had physics and chemistry, the Pentagon commissioned a high-level panel at the Smithsonian Institution to recommend the best course of action. The Smithsonian’s highly influential Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences was established in 1959 and tasked to advise the Pentagon on long-term research plans. While the panel’s full report was classified, Charles Bray, who headed the group, published some of its unclassified findings in a paper titled “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for Defense Use,” which outlined a broad role for the Pentagon in psychology. “In any future war of significant length, there will be ‘special warfare,’ guerrilla operations, and infiltration,” Bray wrote. “Subversion of our troops and populations will be attempted and prisoners of war will be subjected to ‘brainwashing.’ The military establishment must be prepared to assist in promoting recuperation and cohesiveness within possibly disorganized civilian populations, while attempting to shift loyalties within enemy populations.”

  Ps
ychology during the Cold War had fast become a darling of the military. “By the early 1960s the DOD was spending almost all of its social science research budget on psychology, around $15 million annually, more than the entire budget for military research and development before World War II,” wrote Ellen Herman in her survey of the field. Of course, the Pentagon’s interests, and the Smithsonian panel’s recommendations, were about more than just brainwashing. Bray wrote of applications ranging from “persuasion and motivation” to the role of computers “as a man-machine, scientist-computer, system.”

  The Smithsonian Institution panel eventually recommended to the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering that ARPA conduct a comprehensive program that would include both the behavioral and the computer sciences. That recommendation was translated by Pentagon officials into two separate assignments handed down to ARPA: one in the behavioral sciences, which would include everything from the psychology of brainwashing to quantitative modeling of society, and the second, in command and control, which would focus on computers. Though the Pentagon treated ARPA’s command-and-control and behavioral sciences assignments as distinct, the archives of the Smithsonian panel make clear that its members viewed the areas as deeply related: both were about creating a science out of human behavior, whether it was humans interacting with machines or with other people. Who better to lead those twin efforts than a psychologist interested in computers? On May 24, 1961, Bray wrote to Licklider, a PhD psychologist who was working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc., in Massachusetts, to ask him if he might be interested in a job at ARPA. The position would be to head up the “Behavioral Sciences Council,” Bray explained. “It will be obvious to you, I believe, that the position has immense potential for good and bad,” Bray wrote. The work would be “onerous and exhausting” and like most government positions of the time would not pay well either, between $14,000 and $17,000.

  Licklider’s initial field of specialty was psychoacoustics, the perception of sound, but he had become interested in computers while working at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on ways to protect the United States from a Soviet bomber attack. There, Licklider had been involved in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, the Cold War computer system that was designed to link twenty-three air defense sites to coordinate tracking of Soviet bombers in case of an attack on the United States. The SAGE computer would work with the human operators to help them calculate the best way to respond to an incoming Soviet bomber attack. It was, in essence, a decision-making tool for nuclear Armageddon, and it spawned decades of popular culture notions of doomsday computers, from the movies War Games to Terminator.

  The reality was that by the time SAGE was actually deployed, it was rendered almost obsolete by the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Still, for scientists like Licklider, who worked on SAGE, the experience transformed how they looked at computers. Prior to SAGE, computers were big mainframes that used batch processing, meaning programs were entered one at a time, often by punch card, and then the computer did the calculations and spit out answers. The idea that someone might sit daily in front of a computer—and interact with it—was unfathomable to most people. But with SAGE, operators for the first time had individual consoles that displayed information visually, and even more important, they worked directly with those consoles using buttons and light pens. In other words, SAGE was the first demonstration of interactive computing, where users could give commands directly, and time-sharing, where multiple users could work with a single computer.

  Based on his experience from SAGE, Licklider saw a future where people would interact with computers through personal consoles at their desks, rather than having to walk into a large room and feed punch cards into machines that would crunch numbers. In other words, Licklider envisioned the modern conception of interactive computing. What seems so obvious today was a revolutionary concept in the early 1960s, when computers were still large, exotic creatures housed in university laboratories or in government facilities and used for specialized military purposes. That vision meant doing away with batch processing, where a single user worked on a computer for a single purpose. Instead, users at remote consoles would be able to tap into the resources of a single computer, performing different functions almost simultaneously. Licklider’s 1957 article, “The Truly SAGE System; or, Toward a Man-Machine System for Thinking,” was one of the first manifestos outlining this new approach, and marked him as a leader of a group of scientists who wanted to transform computing.

  In 1960, Licklider took this thinking a step further with the publication of what would become a seminal paper on the path toward the Internet. The article, titled simply “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” was not the work of an ordinary computer scientist, as demonstrated by his opening lines. “The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun,” he wrote. “The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative ‘living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms’ is called symbiosis.”

  This symbiosis between man and machine was fundamentally different from a present dominated by batch-processing computers; it also differed from the hard-core artificial intelligence enthusiasts, who were pinning their hopes on thinking computers. Licklider suspected that true artificial intelligence was much further away than some people thought and that there would be an interim period dominated by this symbiosis of man and machine. The picture he painted was of people using a network of computers, “connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services.”

  Military applications were certainly high on Licklider’s list: after all, his ideas were prompted by SAGE, and his essay addressed the needs of military commanders. Yet his vision was also much broader, and in his paper he included corporate leaders in need of quick decisions and libraries whose collections would be linked together. Licklider wanted people to understand that more than any specific application, what he was describing was an entire metamorphosis of man and machine interaction. Personal consoles, time-sharing, and networking—the article essentially spelled out all the underpinnings of the modern Internet. But all it was at that point was a vision; someone had to develop the underlying technologies to make it happen. When Licklider was offered the ARPA job in 1962, the position was low pay, high stress, and at an obscure agency that was barely four years old. Employees of the agency were all temporary hires, with the expectation that they would leave after just a few years. He agreed to take the position for one year, because it offered him the opportunity to make his vision of computer networking a reality.

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  In 1960, the same year that Licklider’s manifesto on computer networking was released, Paul Baran, an analyst at the Rand Corporation in California, published “Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes.” The paper was Baran’s proposal for using a redundant communications network to ensure that the United States could still launch its nuclear weapons after an initial attack. His description, like Licklider’s, bore a lot of similarities to the structure of the modern Internet.

  Years later, as people began to explore the origins of the Internet, a debate emerged over who could rightfully be considered the originator of the idea. The problem with pinning the Internet to any one person, or idea, is that a number of people were thinking about networking computers in the 1960s. The real question is who was in a position to actually translate this vision into a nuts-and-bolts reality. Rand was a possibility: Although it was more of a think tank than a research agency, it shared ARPA’s flexibility. The air force might assign Rand broad national security problems to address, and then its analysts had relative freedom to propose solutions that might be pick
ed up by the military for funding. Rand analysts, for example, had theorized the first spy satellite, which led the air force to pursue Corona. Rand also gave great intellectual freedom to its workers, boasting some of the top nuclear theorists of the twentieth century, like Herman Kahn, whose ruminations on “wargasm,” his term for all-out nuclear war, made him great fodder for caricature.

  Baran, however, was thinking about practical solutions to nuclear war. And in 1960, the same year that Licklider published his landmark paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Baran was working with colleagues at Rand on simulations to test the resiliency of the communications system in case of nuclear attack. “We built a network like a fishnet, with different degrees of redundancy,” he recalled in an interview with Wired magazine. “A net with the minimum number of wires to connect all the nodes together, we called 1. If it was crisscrossed with twice as many wires, that was redundancy level 2. Then 3 and 4. Then we threw an attack against it, a random attack.”

  Picture the communications network as a series of nodes: If there is just one connection between two nodes and it is destroyed in a nuclear attack, it is no longer possible to communicate. Now imagine nodes with multiple connections to other nodes, providing an alternate path of communication if some nodes are taken out. The question for Baran was, how much redundancy is enough? Through simulations of an attack, Baran and his colleagues found that if you have three levels of redundancy, the probability that two nodes in the network could survive a nuclear attack was extremely high. “The enemy could destroy 50, 60, 70 percent of the targets or more and it would still work,” he said. “It’s very robust.”