by Peter Byrne
3 Ibid. 250–251.
4 The National Security Archive at George Washington University has unearthed a cache of previously classified documents, including the Pentagon’s own internal history of the creation of SIOP-62, that sheds considerable light on its birth pangs.
5 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 130. (2004). 3.
6 Kaplan, F. (1983). 269.
7 Rhodes, R. (2007). 88.
8 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 130. (2004).
9 Burke, A. “Special Edition Flag Officers Dope,” 12/4/60; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 173. (2005).
10 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 173. (2005). 1.
11 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 130. (2004). 6.
12 Twining, N. F. “J. C. S. 2056/131,” 8/20/59. 1149.
13 Burke, A. “Memorandum to Chairman of JCS from Office of Chief of Naval Operations,” 9/30/59.
14 Twining, N. F. “J. C. S. 2056/131,” 8/20/59. 1149.
15 Burke, A. “Memorandum to Chairman of JCS from Office of Chief of Naval Operations,” 9/30/59. 1301.
16 Burke, A. “Special Edition Flag Officers Dope,” 12/4/60.
17 Twining, N. F. “J. C. S. 2056/131,” 8/20/59. 1149–1153.
18 Ibid. 1153.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid. 1153–1156.
21 Burke, A. “Memorandum to Chairman of JCS from Office of Chief of Naval Operations,” 9/30/59.1304.
22 Ibid.
23 Blouin, F. J. “JCS memo SM-679-60,” 7/15/60. 7 (spreadsheet).
24 Burke, A. “Admiral Burke’s conversation with Secretary Franke,” 8/12/60.10.
25 Ibid. 4; Burke compared the Air Force command to communists: “It’s the same way as the Communists, it’s exactly the same technique. As a matter of fact their textbooks, originally about 10 years ago, were built on the textbooks of the Communists, how to control these things. They put one out by RAND, which is a good book to read. I read it … how to deal with Communists, the operations of the Politburo, but it was written in such a way that—the methods of control, how you control organizations—could be put in any organization.”
26 Ibid. 17.
27 Burke, A. “NAVAL MESSAGE TO CINCPAC,” 11/22/60; Burke, A. “U.S. NAVY EYES ONLY,” 11/24/60.
28 Blackburn, P. P Jr. & Burke, A. “EXCLUSIVE U.S. NAVY EYES ONLY,” 2.
29 Burke, A. “Special Edition Flag Officers Dope,” 12/4/60; For report on SAC’s computer use deficiencies, see: Blackburn, P.P Jr. “Office Memorandum U.S. Navy Eyes Only,” 10/26/60.
30 Kistiakowsky, G. “Annex” to “J.C.S.2056/208,” 1/27/61.1915.
31 “Memorandum for the Record, Secretary McNamara’s visit to JSTPS,” 2/4/61: Parker, Adm. “NAVAL MESSAGE EXCLUSIVE FOR ADMIRAL BURKE,” 2/6/61.
32 Shoup, D. “J.C.S. 2056/220,” 2/11/61; Kaplan, F. (1983). 270–271.
33 The revised SIOP-63 included five model strikes, escalating in degree of violence: a preemptive strike against Soviet and Chinese nuclear facilities outside urban areas and military and political control centers (ALPHA); a preemptive strike against ALPHA and non-nuclear Soviet and Chinese conventional military capability outside urban areas (BRAVO); a preemptive strike against ALPHA, BRAVO and Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapon capabilities in urban areas, plus 70 percent of the urban-industrial sector (CHARLIE); and two retaliatory strikes: ALPHA-BRAVO-CHARLIE and ALPHA-BRAVO. SIOP-63 contained limited options to withhold certain targets, but as thousands of ground zeros were pre-selected, the plan was necessarily automated and inflexible. The basic ALPHA, BRAVO, CHARLIE mixes were the only flexible responses, and they were Wargasmic. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 130. (2004). National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 173. (2005).
1 Dirac, P. A. M. (1963).
2 ADS-SPIRES Citations History.
3 Jacobsen, A. S. (2007). 3.
4 Rosenfeld, L. (1963), quoted in Jacobsen, A. S. (2007). 12.
5 Jacobsen, A. S. (2007). 14.
6 Ibid. 23.
7 Jacobsen, A. S. (2008).
8 Rosenfeld to Bergmann, 12/21/59.
9 Everett to Podolsky, 3/12/59.
10 Werner, F. G. (1962). Despite Podolsky’s precautions, The Cincinnati Enquirer got wind of the affair and ran a story headlined “They Tackle Tangled Mess, World of the Atom.” It featured pictures of the empanelled physicists and began, “‘The world of the atom is a mess,’ P. A. M. Dirac said yesterday.” CI. 10/2/62. 34.
11 Everett’s spiritually minded teacher, Wigner, we have met—the Hungarian ex-patriot who wished to treat the universe as quantum mechanical, but as a manifestation of human consciousness.
12 As a founder of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, Dirac had long been a legend. Shy and self-effacing, he seldom spoke. When he did it was usually to the point at hand and with scary precision.
13 In 1959, Aharonov co-discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect, which showed that electromagnetism was not a purely local phenomenon.
14 Furry, a Harvard professor of physics, had worked in operations research during the war. He was a political maverick in this group, having survived an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy to get him fired after he took the Fifth Amendment about his Communist Party membership.
15 Podolsky and Rosen co-authored with Einstein in 1935 one of the most famous papers in the history of physics, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” known as the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen thought experiment, or EPR paradox.
16 The conference was held several years before John Bell published his EPR-related theorem showing that quantum mechanics is self-consistent and non-local.
17 Werner, F. G. (1962). MON-AM session. 12–14.
18 Werner, F. G. (1962). Wigner paper. 12.
19 Ibid. 1–3.
20 All quotations in this section are from Werner, F. G. (1962). TUES AM.
21 This statement is akin to the so-called mindless hulk theory of Everett’s many worlds suggested decades later by philosopher David Albert, until he retracted it.
22 A property of the Schrödinger equation is the conservation of probability (called unitary evolution).
23 Quotes in this section are from Werner, F. G. (1962). TUES PM.
24 Shades of decoherence theory!
25 Werner, F. G. (1962). FRI AM.
26 Everett to Jammer, 9/19/73.
27 Tegmark, private communication, 8/18/08.
28 Saunders, private communication, 8/21/08.
29 Zeh, private communication, 8/21/08.
1 Horn, H. O. (1951). In 1951, Everett’s WSEG colleague, Herbert O. Horn, wrote a paper on T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” for an English Lit class.
2 Everett, Katharine Kennedy to Nurse Gantley. 11/22/62.
3 Hall’s classic study of the perceptual relationships between private and public space, The Hidden Dimension, appeared in 1966.
4 In Under the Radar, Cancer and the Cold War (2009), Ellen Leopold documents how during the late 1950s and early 1960s cancer treatment centers experimented on terminally ill women (without their consent) by unnecessarily administering post-mastectomy radiation treatments. Data on loss of motor skills and survival rates from varying degrees of radiation exposure was gathered for military purposes. It was applied to “radiological warfare” planning, including trying to determine if pilots of nuclear-powered airplanes could be shielded from radiation (they could not and the project was dropped). According to public records at the Department of Energy, WSEG, as a recipient of data on radiation experiments done on animals and human “volunteers”, was deeply involved in analyzing “the effects of ionizing radiation on population groups.” WSEG was a key agency in the R&D on the nuclear power aircraft. And in 1957, one of WSEG’s tasks was look at radiation data in the light of the possible “racial deterioration that may follow increases in the load of deleterious mutation” in the wake of a nuclear war
. “Thus, while military objectives are being achieved, a biological condition conceivably could be produced which would result in precipitous racial degradation and possible species disaster.” Dunham, C. L. to Henshaw, P. S. (1957). Katharine Everett’s mistreatment mirrored that of many, many women who were cruelly radiated after involuntary mastectomies, including Rachel Carson. Whether or not Everett’s mother’s treatment ended up in WSEG’s data set is unknown. See: Leopold, E. (1999).
5 Travel vouchers, basement.
6 Simmons, G. J. (1963); Gary Lucas private communication, 10/2/08.
7 Lacey, H. M. (1969). 88–89.
8 Gold, T. (1967). vii–ix.
9 Wheeler, J. A. (1962). 106.
10 Gold, T. (1967). 109.
11 Gleick, J. (1992). 126.
12 U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. (1995). 2.
13 Larry Dean, Bob Galiano, Paul Fitzpatrick, Joanna Frawley, Neil Killalea, Betty Jo Ellis; Lambda information from basement files.
14 Fromm, E. (1955). 136, 166.
15 Ibid. 166.
16 NGE dairies. Nancy had a miscarriage between Liz and Mark, so this was, technically, her third pregnancy.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 119–120.
2 The NSA says it has no records on Everett.
3 Willis interview, 2007.
4 After the conference, Everett complained to a former WSEG colleague, Joseph M. Clifford, that the Dutch prostitutes he had employed did not use condoms. Clifford interview, 2009.
5 Enthoven, A. (1966).
6 Lambda Report 3. (1966). 22–23.
7 Flanagan interview, 2007; Decision Science Applications Report 39/1038. (1995).
8 Pugh. G. E. (2005). 63.
9 Flanagan interview, 2007.
10 Lambda Paper 6. (1967). Italics added.
11 Lambda Report 5. (1967).
12 Lambda Paper 17. (1968).
13 Lambda Report 3. (1966).
14 Flanagan interview, 2007.
15 Lucas interview, 2008.
16 Reisler private communication, 3/2/2009.
17 Frawley interview, 2007.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 120.
2 Lambda Paper 34. (1969). 2.
3 Series of Barry emails to Shikhovtsev, 2002.
4 Everett had a bias for buying stock in local businesses, such as Washington Post, People’s Drugs, Giant Food, and GEICO. He also invested heavily in companies whose products he enjoyed, such as Playboy, DeBeers, Tandy, and Control Data.
5 Wallace, D. (2003A).
6 Lucas private communication, 2009; other Lucas quotes from interview, Oct. 2008.
1 Lloyd, S. (2006). 3–4.
2 Lodal interview, 2007.
3 Selin interview, 2007.
4 Basement.
5 Dickson, P. (1971). 14.
6 Basement.
7 Reisler interview, 4/7/06.
8 Dickson, P. (1971). 150.
9 Pugh, G. (1977).
10 See Wilson, D. S. & Wilson, E. O. (2007).
11 Pugh, G. E., Lucas, G., Gorman, G. (1978).
1 DeWitt, B, and Graham, N, eds, (1973).
2 Good, I. J. (1962). Wigner’s famous “Wigner’s friend” paper also appeared in this volume, which was packed with serious science.
3 Ibid. 155. Good and Everett were acquainted: both did work for IDA’s communications division in Princeton (probably cryptographic tasks for the National Security Agency). Among Everett’s papers is a copy of a treatise by Good called “The Human Preserve.” It speculates that our galaxy is secretly governed by telepathic “Chief Entities” who preserve inter-stellar law and order in what amounts to a galactic zoo. Good said that self-replicating intelligent machines would long ago have taken over the zoo were it not for intervention by the Chief Entities, whose beneficent occupation saves us from descending into anarchy. The analogy between guardianship by the Chief Entities and the American national security state’s promotion of its role as a “global policeman” was intentional.
4 Shimony, A. (1963).
5 Prof. Cooper says there is no period after his middle initial.
6 Cooper interview, 2009; van Vechten interview, 2009.
7 Cooper, L. and van Vechten, D. (1969).
8 van Vechten went on to earn her PhD in super-conducting physics. She left her work in quantum foundation theory behind because it did not pay in the job market. She supervises the super-conducting electronics program at the Office of Naval Research.
9 Cooper, L. (1976). Cooper is still working on his interpretation. He says it is not necessary to assume that any world other than the one we are in is real. The wave function allows us to calculate the probability that we will have some particular future. But it does not tell us with certainty what the future will be (nor does it tell us by itself what the present is).
10 DeWitt, B.S. (2004). 167.
11 DeWitt, B. S. (2005). 33.
12 See Chapter 19.
13 DeWitt, B. S. (2008A). 1.
14 DeWitt to Wheeler, 5/7/57.
15 See Chapter 18.
16 DeWitt-Morette interview by Kenneth Ford, 2/28/95.
17 Barrett, J. A. (1999). 166–172. Private communications with Barrett, 2008.
18 Basement archive.
19 Graham, N. (1973). See chapter 16 for a related explanation of the preferred basis problem. A basis is a vector in Hilbert space. See Albert, D. Z. (1992) for a readable, comprehensive explanation of basis.
20 DeWitt, B.S. (1967).
21 Around this time, Wheeler and DeWitt conceived a deceptively simple wave equation that symbolically represents a quantification of the energy of the whole universe. Known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, it does not tell one how to quantize gravity, but it is an equation that a successful theory of quantum gravity would have to satisfy, essentially, a universal wave function without time.
22 DeWitt, B.S. (1967). 1141.
23 Ibid. 1141–1142.
24 DeWitt, B.S. (1968). 320.
25 Ibid. 326.
26 DeWitt-Morette interview by Kenneth Ford.
27 DeWitt, B. S. (1970). 160.
28 Ibid. 159.
29 DeWitt, B. S. (2008A). 3.
30 DeWitt, B. S. (1970). 161.
31 Ibid. 163.
32 Ibid. 160. “EWG” is his acronym for “Everett-Wheeler-Graham.”
33 DeWitt, B. S. (1971). 182. Italics added.
34 DeWitt et al. (1971B).
35 One Physics Today correspondent, L. E. Ballentine, soon published a seminal paper in Everett studies. He explained Everett’s failure to solve the preferred basis problem as arising because he gave “the measurement process a privileged position over other interactions [and this] seems contrary to the spirit of Everett’s program, which was motivated in part by a reaction against the privileged status of measurement [as wave function collapse] in the orthodox interpretation.” He also critiqued Everett’s claimed derivation of the Born rule as only partially satisfactory. Ballentine, L. E. (1973).
36 DeWitt, B. S. et al. (1971B).
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Jeffrey Barrett, private communication, 2008.
41 “Counterfactuals” are considerations of that which goes on in possible worlds as indicated by such conditional terms as “if … then.” Lewis writes, “It is only by bringing the other worlds into the story that we can say in any concise way what character it takes to make what counterfactuals true. The other worlds provide a frame of reference whereby we can characterize our world.” Lewis, D. (1986). 22.
42 DeWitt, B. S. and Graham, N. (1971A). 724.
43 DeWitt, B. S. (2008A). 3–4.
44 This manuscript was sent to the AIP in 1990 by Nancy Everett and appears to be the manuscript that was given to DeWitt and Graham and later returned by Princeton University Press. Although we cannot be 100 percent sure that the corrections were made for the 1973 publication, they are far too messy to have been handed in to Wheeler as a formal dissertation in Janu
ary, 1956. The January manuscript was corrected for typos and small matters before being sent to Bohr in April, but, again, Everett had access to a typist, Nancy, and is not likely to have sent a scrawled mess to Bohr, so it is logical to presume that the changes were made for the 1973 book. See also pps 137–138.