The Pentagon's Brain (9 page)

Murph Goldberger had been involved in nuclear physics since he was twenty-two years old. During World War II, as a college student and member of the enlisted reserves, he was called up to the Army’s Special Engineering Department—the Manhattan Project—after being singled out for his scientific talent. After the war he earned a Ph.D. in physics under Enrico Fermi, the scientist who told President Truman that the hydrogen bomb was “an evil thing.” Murph Goldberger had been a key player in Project 137 at Fort McNair. At the time he was working as a professor of physics at Princeton University, alongside John Wheeler, Oskar Morgenstern, and Eugene Wigner. A
Life
magazine article about America’s most important scientists carried a photograph of the four Princeton physicists and described them with a kind of reverence. Scientists in the 1950s were seen as modern-day wizards, alchemists who could unlock the secrets of the universe. American scientists could win wars, defeat polio, even travel to the moon.

After Project 137 ended, Goldberger returned to Princeton, where he soon got an idea. He wanted to craft a defense consulting group of like-minded colleagues. Goldberger contacted four friends outside the university enclave, scientists whose areas of expertise had been entwined since the end of World War II. Kenneth Watson, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and protégé of Edward Teller, had done a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Keith Brueckner, a physicist, meteorologist, and former Los Alamos weapons developer, had studied at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory with Watson and Goldberger and at the Institute for Advanced Study alongside John von Neumann. Murray Gell-Mann, the youngest member,
had been a doctoral student of Manhattan Project giant Victor Weisskopf, and was someone Goldberger considered a prodigy. The four physicists agreed to start a for-profit defense consulting company together. Their first idea was to call it Theoretical Physics, Inc. “The idea was that we would not work simply as consultants; we’d work as a formal group, a little business,” Keith Brueckner recalled, in a 1986 oral history.

Goldberger decided to run the idea by a fourth colleague and friend, the physicist Charles H. Townes. Two years earlier Townes had published the first academic paper on what he called the microwave laser, or maser. In time the maser would become known as the laser, and it is now considered one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century, used widely in both defense and civilian work. Townes had recently taken a leave of absence from his position as a professor at Columbia University to serve as vice president of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally funded research center in Alexandria, Virginia, that served one customer: the Department of Defense. Specifically, IDA served the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). If another service wanted IDA’s assistance researching a problem, they had to secure permission from OSD or JCS first. In the early ARPA years, the salaries of all ARPA directors and program managers were paid through IDA. Townes thought Goldberger’s idea of a defense consulting group was excellent, and he suggested that Goldberger speak with Herb York. Perhaps the Advanced Research Projects Agency would fund the group itself, Townes said. He offered to find out.

“Townes called back to say [ARPA] loved the idea,” Goldberger remembered. The scientists, mostly university professors, were free to consult during the summer, as they had at the war college at Fort McNair. The group could remain flexible and independent, detached from any Pentagon mindset. To avoid red tape
or bureaucracy, they could be paid through IDA; besides, most of their work would be classified. IDA would provide the group with an administrative assistant.

Goldberger and his colleagues got to work creating a list of scientists they felt would add to their group of defense consultants. They wanted to limit membership to theoretical physicists, said Goldberger, generalists who had knowledge in a wide variety of areas and used mathematical models and abstractions to understand, explain, and predict phenomena in the natural world. “It was a very elite operation,” recalled Brueckner. “It was an honor to be asked.” Goldberger remembered that “everyone was excited, full of ideas, and very patriotic.” Murph Goldberger, Keith Brueckner, Kenneth Watson, and Murray Gell-Mann drew up a list of their most respected colleagues and asked them to participate.

The group’s first meeting took place at IDA headquarters in Virginia on December 17, 1959. George Kistiakowsky, one of President Eisenhower’s science advisors, led the meeting. Kistiakowsky kept a daily desk diary in which he recorded his thoughts. “Met at IDA headquarters with the ‘bright young physicists,’ a group assembled by Charles Townes to do imaginative thinking about military problems,” Kistiakowsky noted that day. “It is a tremendously bright squad of some 30 people.” After the first meeting Goldberger went home to Princeton University very excited, he recalled. “We knew the group could contribute significantly to the problems” of national defense.

Three weeks later, on January 1, 1960, and by ARPA Project Assignment number 11, the group became an official entity. What to call it, Murph Goldberger wondered? “The Pentagon had a machine that generated code names for projects,” he said. Whether the Defense Department naming process was random or systematic remains a mystery, but the machine decided that this scientific advisory group was to be called Project Sunrise. Goldberger felt disappointed. “The name did not fit,” he recalled. That night he
shared his feelings with his wife and fellow scientist, Mildred Goldberger; the couple had met when they were both working on the Manhattan Project during the war. “Mildred thought Project Sunrise was a dreadful name,” Goldberger recalled. This group was going to be doing dynamic problem solving and groundbreaking consulting work. Project Sunrise sounded sentimental and bland. Goldberger recalled Mildred picking up a piece of paper on the table in front of her, a document from IDA. The header included the image of an ancient Greek Parthenon-style building. Ancient Greece made Mildred Goldberger think about Jason and the Argonauts, characters from Greek mythology. Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, is one of history’s great mythological heroes, the archetype of a man on a quest. The Argonauts were Jason’s band of warriors who accompanied him on his journey to find the Golden Fleece.

“You should call yourself Jason,” Mildred Goldberger said. Which is how one of the most secret and esoteric, most powerful and consequential scientific advisory groups in the history of the U.S. Department of Defense got its name. Over the course of the next fifty-five years, the Jason group would impact ARPA, and later DARPA, with greater significance than any other scientific advisory group. Jason’s first senior advisors were Hans Bethe, George Kistiakowsky, and Edward Teller.

In April 1960, each member of Jason was granted a clearance of top secret or above. The Jason scientists’ first official meeting took place in Washington, D.C., where they were briefed on a set of challenges to consider. Ballistic missile defense was at the top of the list. The Jasons were briefed on the classified elements of the Defender program and asked to think outside the boundaries of possibility that were currently being explored by other scientists.

Two months after their first official briefing, the Jason group held a summer study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, formerly called the Rad Lab. It took place between June 1 and August 15, 1960, and there were about twenty
Jason scientists present. Goldberger recalled that during that meeting they learned that ARPA wanted them to think about measures and countermeasures, about offense and defense. The Jason scientists were briefed on the classified results of Operation Argus and the Christofilos effect. They were asked to think about new programs to be researched and developed, and also to imagine the programs that Russian scientists might be working on. The 1960 summer study produced multiple classified reports.

Goldberger described one concept in general terms. It was a variation of the Christofilos effect. “The idea was proposed to the [Jason] study group that the enemy could detonate a nuclear weapon high up [in the atmosphere] to confuse satellite detection.” The Jasons were to think about the creation of an effect similar to the electromagnetic pulse seen during Argus. One of the Jason scientists who was present at that meeting, Sidney Drell, tried to explain the concept in an oral history in 1986. “If you have a high altitude explosion of a nuclear weapon, and it makes a [cloud] of NO [nitric oxide molecules], would that cause a big enough cloud to last long enough that we wouldn’t see the missile attack launch and we wouldn’t get the early warning?” In their first summer study, the Jason scientists were asked to calculate the size of the cloud, the amount of nitric oxide in the cloud, and the rate of dispensation in the atmosphere required to negatively impact the electronics on a nearby U.S. satellite system. From their calculations, said Goldberger, the Jasons concluded that the enemy would have to explode “many megaton warheads” to have a significant effect on the signals, and that this was “impractical.” For ARPA, this was good news.

These were the kinds of hard science problems the Jasons were excellent at solving, and ARPA wanted the group to apply this type of “imaginative thinking” to the Defender conundrum. They came up with a new idea, one that involved the age-old warfare concept of using decoys—devices meant to distract or mislead—
like the mythological Trojan horse. The Jasons suggested the development of a new technology whereby American ICBM warheads could be equipped with decoys designed to evade, or trick, the Soviet’s antiballistic missile defense system. If every U.S. warhead was equipped with five or six decoys, then the entire U.S. arsenal of ICBMs would have a five or six times greater chance of getting through to a target in the Soviet Union. The Jasons called this concept “penetration aids.”

On the basis of the Jason scientists’ work, ARPA created a new program called PENAIDS, short for penetration aids. PENAIDS suggested the development of a far more aggressive offensive posture in the MAD dilemma, the inventing of new ways for U.S. missiles to outfox the Soviets’ ballistic missile defense. Starting in 1962, PENAIDS proof tests at the missile bases at White Sands, New Mexico, and at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands delivered promising results, which the Jason scientists reviewed. PENAIDS led to another ARPA study called “Pen X,” which endorsed the engineering of a new kind of advanced hydrogen bomb warhead called MIRVs, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. Their birth initiated a fierce new competition in the nuclear arms race as both sides rushed to build more accurate, more powerful, more deceptive MIRVs. The programs were initially classified, but when they were made public, MIRVs were vilified as dangerous and destabilizing because they put a premium on a nuclear first strike.

For their second summer study, in 1961, the Jason scientists met in Maine, on the Bowdoin College campus. Jack Ruina, the new director of ARPA, called Charles Townes at IDA to coordinate his attending the summer study. Ruina also wanted to bring several ARPA program managers along.

“Well, we don’t want anybody from ARPA to attend except you,” Townes told him.

Ruina was stunned. The Jasons worked for ARPA—and ARPA
only. “What do you mean, we can’t attend?” Ruina said. “We are paying for the whole thing. You can’t say you’re [going to] have a private meeting when it’s the government that is paying for it.”

“Sorry, you can’t come to our meetings,” Townes repeated.

“Charlie, you can’t do that,” Ruina told him.

Townes explained to Ruina that this was how the Jason scientific advisory group worked. The Jasons sought objectivity, and they wanted to remain free from government bureaucracy and red tape. They did not want Pentagon interference during any of their summer studies. The Jasons gathered together to solve problems related to national defense. That was it.

After some back-and-forth, Ruina and Townes reached an agreement of sorts. As suggested, Jack Ruina, as director of ARPA, could attend a Jason summer study, alone.

For the Maine summer study, the focus again was on the Defender program. The Princeton physicist John Wheeler had a summerhouse not far from the college campus, on a wooded island off the coast called High Island. Wheeler had the group out to his house for many of the meetings that summer, where the scientists held clambakes, ate lobsters, and considered another highly classified program. This one involved the concept of directed energy. “This was very exotic science,” Ruina recalled. Directed energy beams come in two forms: light, which involves lasers, and charged particles, which involve electrons or protons. “Particle beam weapons [are] esoteric weapons systems,” Ruina explained. They come with a “Buck Rogers death ray image,” noted an early ARPA summary, because they “work at the speed of light and involve instantaneous kill.”

The Jason scientists wondered if an incoming ICBM could be shot down by a directed energy beam. The conundrum, according to Ruina, “was whether you can use a particle beam, earth-based, to form a beam through the atmosphere and destroy an incoming warhead.” The concept’s originator was Nick Christofilos; he had
first presented the idea during Project 137, Goldberger recalled. Scientists at Livermore laboratory had already conducted earlier proof test experiments under the code name Seesaw. The classified results were shared with the Jason scientists, who were impressed. Directed energy weapons were well worth researching and developing, they decided, and ARPA moved forward with Project Seesaw—its first directed energy weapons program. Goldberger recalled the program being so highly classified that not even all of the Jasons were cleared for future work on it.

“Seesaw was a sensitive, limited-access project which deserves mention in the ARPA history as the most enduring specific project ever supported by the agency,” an agency review stated. ARPA’s mission was and remains getting programs up and running, then transferring them over to the military services or other government agencies for field use. Project Seesaw remained in development at ARPA for fifteen long years. Then in 1974 it was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission. Some unclassified summaries have been released. Over the next fifty-five years, ARPA’s directed energy weapons programs would develop and grow. The majority of them remain highly classified.