The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  The Defense Department’s internal study: “The Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961–1963,” in Gravel, Chomsky, and Zinn, Pentagon Papers, 128–59.

  “clean up the Viet Cong threat”: The Kennedy Commitments and Programs, 1961, in Gravel, Chomsky, and Zinn, Pentagon Papers, 40–98.

  “wolf in sheep’s clothing”: In court testimony, Godel says the name came from “German” Q boats, but he might have simply misspoken. It also may be that Godel, a German speaker, was more familiar with the German version.

  fake supply truck: Godel/Wylie trial transcript.

  “in all truth General Taylor”: Buhl, An Eye at the Keyhole.

  “was at best quizzical”: Ibid.

  “Nothing that a good double”: Ibid.

  “American genius to work”: Lansdale, interview with Ted Gittinger, Sept. 15, 1981, National Archives, Lyndon B. Johnson Library.

  “Just stay behind”: Ibid.

  Kennedy approved Godel’s plan: Sorensen, Kennedy, 633.

  bought sporting pontoons: Buhl, An Eye at the Keyhole.

  a small, jet-powered drone: Ibid.

  “Means of Using the Montagnards”: William Godel to Brigadier General E. G. Lansdale, memo, Task Force Report on the Establishment of a Combat Development and Test Center, Vietnam, July 12, 1961, Project Agile, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.

  “fighting priest”: Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War, 54–55. The “fighting priest” attracted international attention after Lansdale, at the behest of President Kennedy, published an anonymous report about the village in The Saturday Evening Post in May 1961.

  “All I want to know”: Appendix 8 to the Taylor Report, Research and Development, by George W. Rathjens and William H. Godel, JFKNSF-203-005: Research and Development in Vietnam and the Pacific Theater, NSF, box 203, Folder: Vietnam, Subjects: Taylor Report, 11/3/61, Rostow Working Copy, Tabs 6–8.

  “something the short”: Minutes of a meeting with Viet-Nam Task Force, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 1, Vietnam, 1961, doc. 96.

  After an initial positive response: Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle program, Washington, D.C., May 15, 1967.

  “Big Ears”: Buhl, An Eye at the Keyhole. These were not the only limitation. The audio had to be picked up on a radio by someone within range.

  “If the President”: Ibid.

  “ARPA advises the chemical”: Godel to Lansdale, memo, “Task Force Report on Establishment of a Combat Development and Test Center,” July 12, 1961.

  “at the strong insistence”: NSF 194: Sept 20, 1961, memo forwarded by Robert H. Johnson to Walt Rostow containing a Sept. 13, 1961, report, Kennedy Library.

  “A covert ops guy”: Brown, interview with author.

  Warren Stark, who worked: Stark, Many Faces, Many Places, 96.

  “Harold Brown sort of foisted”: Ruina, interview with author.

  “You people did the wrong thing”: Ibid.

  “I wasn’t involved”: Ibid.

  “AGILE made Jack”: Godel, interview with Huff.

  CHAPTER 6: ORDINARY GENIUS

  “He savaged me”: Kempe, Berlin 1961, 257.

  “Whichever figures are accurate”: Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, National Defense, Feb. 29, 1960, Kennedy Library.

  Whether Kennedy really believed: Kennedy was given an intelligence briefing by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, in July 1960, at a time when the CIA was beginning to get better intelligence through U-2 flights. Dwayne A. Day, “Of Myths and Missiles: The Truth About John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap,” Space Review, Jan. 3, 2006.

  A little more than two weeks: Richard Reeves, “Missile Gaps and Other Broken Promises,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 2009.

  “all the time we need”: Ruina, interview with Kai-Henrik Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  McNamara was not invited: Ruina has repeated this story consistently in several interviews. Ruina, interview with author. A similar account of the meeting with Kennedy is described by Harold Brown in Star Spangled Security, 91.

  “The helicopter’s waiting”: Ruina, interview with Williams/Gerard.

  nationwide program for fallout shelters: Brown, Star Spangled Security, 92.

  “I don’t think we should go ahead”: Ruina, interview with Finkbeiner. Nike Zeus continued on through 1962 as a research and development program but never proceeded to deployment. The army went on to pursue Nike-X, a system that employed better radar for tracking but was arguably also unworkable.

  The highest-ranking officer: Ruina, interview with Williams/Gerard.

  “ARPA is not strong”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, IV-42.

  “my whole life would have been different”: Ruina, interview with Finn Aaserud, American Institute of Physics.

  “The only two programs”: Ruina, interview with Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  “protect all the United States”: U.S. House, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1962, Part 4: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, 82.

  “anti-gravity, anti-matter”: Associated Press, “Defense Agency to Study Missile-Defense Measures,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, March 2, 1959, 3.

  The agency had been inundated: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-18.

  One proposal called for: Bruno W. Augenstein, “Evolution of the U.S. Military Space Program, 1945–1960: Some Key Events in Study, Planning, and Program Development” (Rand Corp., Sept. 1982), 16.

  “mad scientist’s dream”: York, Race to Oblivion, 131. York might have slammed the BB-laced spiderweb that was BAMBI, yet he had single-handedly orchestrated three high-altitude nuclear explosions to test the concept of a force field.

  “loony idea”: “Kill Bambi” became something of an insider’s joke in the Pentagon. Brown, Star Spangled Security, 33.

  “Bambi brought in all the nuts”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-19.

  “Isn’t that a bit fantastic?”: U.S. House, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1962, Part 4: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, 82.

  Not only was it impractical: Ibid.

  The scheme involved launching: Jacques S. Gansler, Ballistic Missile Defense: Past and Future (Washington, D.C.: Center for Technology and National Security Policy, 2010), 38.

  “kind-of nutty”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-19.

  Back in early 1958: The National Advanced Research Projects Laboratory would be to the Defense Department, or ARPA, what the nuclear labs were to the Atomic Energy Commission, a sort of reservoir of scientific talent and idea generation. The laboratory, in Wheeler’s view, would be “much larger in size than Los Alamos or Livermore.” See Aaserud, “Sputnik and the ‘Princeton Three.’ ”

  ARPA was not interested: York, Making Weapons, Talking Peace, 212.

  The proposals for that first meeting: The idea was to alert nuclear-armed submarines of a possible nuclear launch order. It was initially called Project Bassoon and would require an eighty-five-hundred-foot-long antenna and most of the state of Wisconsin.

  “If by use of high speed”: John Wheeler, app. A-4, in Study No. 1, “Identification of Certain Current Defense Problems and Possible Means of Solution” (Institute for Defense Analyses, Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958).

  Even that idea foundered: “Wheeler judged that the immediate emergency had subsided, and that little emergencies were not the jobs of the academics.” Aaserud, “Sputnik and the ‘Princeton Three,’ ” 224.

  called Sunrise: Finkbeiner, Jasons, 38.

  promptly changed its name to JASON: Ibid., 40.

  “golden fleece”: Ibid., 39–40. Godel, in his interview with Huff, also alleged that the golden fleece joke came from the members’ starting to promote their own projects to ARPA. There is certainly evidenc
e for that allegation. The files of William Nierenberg, a prominent member of the group, intermix notes on JASON meetings with a proposal to ARPA for work on floating mid-ocean bases, which would be done at his home institution, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Nierenberg to Craig Fields, April 16, 1987, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives.

  As it turned out: Finkbeiner, Jasons, 50.

  “kind of a truth squad”: Ruina, interview with Aaserud, American Institute of Physics, Aug. 8, 1991.

  “not good” idea: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, IV-23.

  The particle beam: Ibid., IX-31.

  “death radar sub-system”: Ibid., IV-23.

  “He was not ever frightened”: Ruina, interview with Finkbeiner.

  “aptly named, because it seesawed”: Rechtin, interview with Finn Aaserud, American Institute of Physics.

  “ARPA was generally of a mind”: Kresa, interview with author.

  “There’s a better way to do it”: Ibid.

  “We’re going to put”: Ibid. Indeed the JASONs recommended continuing the laser program. JASON, Project Seesaw (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 1968), 3.

  Seesaw never fired a single shot: If one counts the start of Seesaw in 1958, that means it was funded for thirteen years, through 1972, and would still likely hold the record for the longest-lived ARPA program.

  “There will not be any payoff”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-19.

  The NSA wanted to use: “Herzfeld told us in no uncertain terms that [Arecibo] had been funded as a wholly scientific and open facility, and would not be allowed to undertake classified studies, and that it was presumptuous of us to ask,” Nate Gerson, an NSA cryptologist, later recounted. N. C. Gerson, “SIGINT in Space,” La Physique au Canada, Nov./Dec. 1998, 357. (Previously published in Studies in Intelligence 28, no. 2.) This exchange is also cited in Bamford’s Puzzle Palace.

  Herzfeld insisted Arecibo: Ibid.

  “A nuclear detonation”: Ibid.

  “It is almost certain”: Edward Teller and Albert Latter, “The Compelling Need for Nuclear Testing,” Life, Feb. 10, 1958, 70.

  The debate had become: Lawyer, Bates, and Rice, Geophysics in the Affairs of Mankind, 132.

  ARPA got the work: Charles Bates, interview with author. This view is also backed up by the Huff and Sharp ARPA history.

  Vela had three parts: The two most significant parts of Vela ended up being Vela Hotel and Vela Uniform. Vela Sierra, which involved ground-based sensors to detect nuclear tests in space, was eventually folded into Vela Hotel. Some of the Vela work, it turns out, did not really require any exotic science. For example, detecting underwater explosions required little new research. ARPA conducted some underwater tests using conventional explosives under the code name CHASE, short for “cut holes and sink ’em.” Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VII-15. “The ocean detection system was a nonproblem,” Frosch said. Frosch, interview with author.

  “mildly crazy”: Frosch, interview with author.

  “When I was sitting there”: Ibid.

  “It was literally opened up”: Ibid.

  “a bunch of incompetents”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-33.

  ARPA also encountered: Lawyer, Bates, and Rice, Geophysics in the Affairs of Mankind, 122, 178.

  “You could do things a lot easier”: Peterson, interview with Kai-Henrik Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  “too secretive”: Ruina, interview with Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  “Romney never tried to mess”: Evernden, interview with Kai-Henrik Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  Now, with the Aardvark data: Romney insisted the revisions were the result not of systemic errors but of getting more data. He had been relying on historical data of large Soviet nuclear tests and extrapolating down to make estimates about the detection of smaller tests, which might be confused with earthquakes. “The change came about as a result of additional information we got,” Romney insisted. Romney, interview with author.

  During a July 3, 1962, meeting: The President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to President Kennedy, memo, Washington, July 20, 1962, Kennedy Library.

  “withholding information”: Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Kennedy, memo, Washington, July 28, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 7, Arms Control and Disarmament, doc. 204.

  “honest mistake”: Ruina, interview with Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  “This is what can happen”: Ruina, interview with Barth, American Institute of Physics.

  “VELA seemed to indicate”: Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban, 145.

  a spectacular success: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VII-29.

  “One that Mr. Kennedy wanted it”: Ibid., VI-8.

  Plate tectonics, which had previously: Kai-Henrik Barth, “The Politics of Seismology: Nuclear Testing, Arms Control, and the Transformation of a Discipline,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (Oct. 2003): 743–81.

  “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics”: Oliver, interview with Kai-Henrik Barth.

  “almost instantaneously transformed”: Lynn Sykes, “Seismology, Plate Tectonics, and the Quest for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a Personal History of 40 Years at LDEO,” in International Handbook of Earthquake and Engineering Seismology (Amsterstam: Academic Press, 2002), 1456.

  Following Kennedy’s death: As John Dumbrell points out in his book, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2004), President Johnson approved the largest ever underground nuclear test—Operation Boxcar, a 1.3-megaton explosion—in the midst of negotiations over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

  “not because we were geniuses”: Lukasik, interview with author.

  CHAPTER 7: EXTRAORDINARY GENIUS

  “We have some big trouble”: Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, 22.

  “Those sons of bitches”: Ibid.

  The CIA had used a massive: Ibid., 16.

  “were recognized by more”: Department of Defense, National Military Command and Control in the Cuban Crisis of 1962 (Washington, D.C.: DTIC, 1965), 50.

  There, he could work in peace: Licklider, interview with J. William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, Charles Babbage Institute.

  “I do not want to be negative”: Licklider to General H. H. Wienecke (director for Remote Area Conflict), memo, April 16, 1964, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.

  gun that shot micro-rockets: It is likely Licklider was referring to the Gyrojet hand pistol, an experimental weapon that shot a small rocket. ARPA was involved in funding the weapon for use in village defense. Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Caliber .50 Gyrojet Hand Pistol,” Oct. 25, 1962, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.

  “These things got going”: Licklider, interview with Aspray and Norberg. The Lafayette Square reference is never explained in the interview, but it presumably means that Licklider’s budget was being used to hide secret funds for other projects, which was a common tactic at ARPA.

  Among his colleagues: Waldrop, Dream Machine, 2.

  “I knew that he didn’t get into anyone’s business”: Hess, interview with author.

  “messianic” vision: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-52.

  By the 1990s, however: News accounts directly linking ARPA’s work to nuclear survivability first appear in the mid-1990s. This confusion shows up even more recently, however, in an otherwise insightful computer history by George Dyson. Turing’s Cathedral, 330.

  This account sparked a counter-narrative: “ARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving nuclear war—never did,” wrote Katie Hafner, author of Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which chronicles the birth of computer networking. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 10. Unfortunately, this v
iew is true only if one ignores the underlying reasons for the Pentagon’s support of the ARPANET.

  “My son! My son!”: “POW Who Changed His Mind Meets Family in Capital,” Niagara Falls Gazette, Nov. 21, 1952, 1.

  At his court-martial: Fred L. Borch, “The Trial of a Korean War ‘Turncoat’: The Court-Martial of Corporal Edward S. Dickenson,” Army Lawyer, Jan. 2013.

  “one in three American prisoners”: Consultation with Edward Hunter (author and foreign correspondent), Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 85th Cong., March 13, 1958 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1958).

  “In any future war”: Charles Bray, “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for Defense Use,” 538.

  “By the early 1960s the DOD”: Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 128.

  “It will be obvious to you”: Bray to Licklider, May 24, 1961, Record Unit 179, Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences Records, 1957–1963, Smithsonian Institution.

  “The Truly SAGE System”: J. C. R. Licklider, “The Truly SAGE System; or, Toward a Man-Machine System for Thinking,” manuscript, Aug. 20, 1957, Licklider Papers, MIT Libraries.

  “The fig tree is pollinated”: J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (March 1960): 4–11.

  “We built a network like a fishnet”: Baran, interview with Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired, March 2001.

  “The enemy could destroy 50, 60, 70 percent”: Ibid.

  “The early missile control systems”: Baran, interview with Judy O’Neill, Charles Babbage Institute.

  “research and no development”: Baran, interview with Brand, “Founding Father.”

  “I pulled the plug”: Ibid.

  William Godel, then the deputy director: Godel, interview with Huff.

  Brown was unhappy: Brown, correspondence with author.

  One of his early program descriptions: J. C. R. Licklider, Program Plan 93, Computer Network and Time-Sharing Research, April 5, 1963, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.