Finished this book titled above by the author, Ann Finkbeiner ( _http://www.amazon.com/The-Jasons-History-Sciences-Postwar/dp/0143038478 ), who is a freelance science writer on cosmology and who runs (at least at the time of this book publication 2006), the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University – her husband is a retired physicist.
From searching here on the forum, there seems to be no mention of this group, The Jasons, so I’ll try and give a brief description of them, who they were, and what they did based on excerpts from this book.
The book itself was purchased years ago on a discount rack and lay on the shelf. I flipped through it once and thought I should read it, yet I’m a scientific layperson and it would need to wait. Overall, I’m now glad I read it as it introduced some of the decision alliances and counter decision making attempts on scientific applications that I would not have realized. Of importance were also the mindsets that many of the scientists then, and even now, operate under. Some make justifications in their minds to the worldview they understand, and some more than realized the implications. From its beginning, when the atomic genie or Pandora was released and the Jasons came to be (who were many of the Manhattan Project scientists) the fight to make things right, close the box or cork the bottle with the genie back inside, or continue the escalation of measures and counter measures, is written it these pages.
Overview & Chapter One
In the opening page, Ann says that the first she heard of the Jason was in 1990, although many of their reports were either leaked (see The Pentagon Papers) or published over the last 50 odd years, with some of their concerns being a matter of public record. At certain points, like the Vietnam era, they came under great attack from within the university academia and student base.
The Jasons were a very select exclusive top-secret group (in the beginning) of academic physicist who advised the department of defense (or ARPA then DARPA). This group, unlike “white collar” (a Jason scientific term) scientists, where mostly “blue collar” scientists who met every summer for six weeks and evaluated question or created questions, from or for, their various government sponsors.
The first Jason mentioned was Freeman Dyson and John Archibald Wheeler who was their “white collar” advisor and not a Jason. Also, advising were Edward Teller (who never came to meetings), Eugene Wigner, and Hans Beth. The Jason “cream of the cream” were tenured professors (although not all) at the big research universities; Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Berkley & Caltech. The Defense departments wanted applied science that resulted in technology, while the Jasons were mostly pure scientists. Much of the book composes of interviews with a heavy leaning to the morality of their decisions to continue Jason participation or extricate themselves from the ends.
Of the Jasons reports, Ann says that “Between one-half and three-quarters are classified” and they now generally meet at La Jolla, California for these six week meetings. As said, Jasons were originally physicists (most still are), yet have now changed to include many other science disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, computer science… Many of the physicists discuss the changes and actually worked hard at understanding oceanography, biology and chemistry – the computer age brought them along into those sciences, too. Many Jasons openly give their names and some only agreed to be called Dr. X or Dr. Y for their own particular reasons.
Some of the first Jasons were ex-Manhattan Project physicists propelled to work on anti-ballistic missiles that came when Sputnik was lunched and the U.S. military began to freak out. Their value, as Ann says of one, was in “operating like logical, out-spoken, unbeholden, independent outsiders. This stance, although useful to the government, is not, as Ann says, always welcomed.
There is a section on the Manhattan Project (MP) and how the scientists reacted with each other and their families, along with some of the other scientists around the world working on studies. This was a deep time of post divide (see Franck Report) of the applied aspects of science. Of this time, also described was the day after Trinity, whereby approximately eighty-eight scientists at the MP labs (University of Chicago and Oak Ridge) signed a petition to the president urging the bomb not ever be used against Japan unless they agreed to surrender (which history shows was likely). Just after Hiroshima, a government bill, the May-Johnson bill, was put forth by Harry Truman (more likely those controlling him), which would create the Atomic Energy Commission to control research and materials. The Commission would be dominated by the then, War Department. Ann says that within two weeks the physicists went in to overdrive, “lobbying Congress and calling newspapers, protesting that the May-Johnson bill would, as Mildred Goldberger said, turn over “the whole kit and kaboodle to the Military” and would therefore throttle both basic research and international cooperation”. A year later that bill died and the McMahon bill was passed, with the AEC being placed in civilian hands. Also at this time, the atomic scientists formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists to urge control and have since spent many years trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
The pro atomic build/use camp was of course Edward Teller, and John Wheeler. Wheeler later set up Project Matterhorn and the hydrogen bomb program at Princeton – at the time, senior scientists were said to be misjudged as they passed on it, whereby it was run with “graduate students and new Ph.D’s.”, of which one was Ed Frieman (a later Jason). Richard Garwin (Jason), then a student of Femi’s and a colleague (junior) of Teller, along with Marshall Rosenbluth, all worked on the hydrogen bomb. Ed Fieman said he saw “three shots” (test names) and he said, “which, I think, to this day, still give me nightmares”. In 1954, the AEC had hearings on whether Oppenheimer could keep his designated top-secret clearances, which he did not, due to the McCarthy era taint, along with Teller testifying against him, and Fermi, Bethe, Rabi testified on Oppenheimer’s behalf. Later, when asked by Teller to work at Livermore, Frieman refused to do so because of Oppenheimer (many other physicists shared their “Teller” dislike, too). One reason mentioned in this book as stated, was that their dislike “had a second aspect, unrelated to Oppenheimer. Teller contradicted other physicists’ pragmatic approach to curiosity-sin problems: build the bomb because the other side was going to build them anyway, then work to get them banned.” Teller was for bigger, better and more bombs and against test ban treaties. Teller (physicist personification of Dr. Strangelove it was mentioned) was “credited with convincing Ronald Reagan to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).” Ann says, “I wonder if Edward Teller, whatever else he was, might also have been our collective scapegoat.”
Of the physicists and the bomb, Ann says that their “sense of responsibility never left them. Murph Goldberger, Freeman Dyson, Ken Case, Val Fitch, Luis Alverez, Pief Panofsky, Bill Nierenberg, Ed Frieman, Marshall Rosenbluth, Charles Townes and Richard Garwin all became Jasons. Teller, Wheeler, and Berthe were three of Jason’s four senior advisers; Herb York was their first sponsor.”
Chapter Two
The chapter starts off with Herb York, after his 1949 doctorate, working out of the national weapons laboratory (Livermore branch). York was the director and designed and built new hydrogen bombs (highest yield-to-weight ratio). At the same time, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union “settled into the Cold War’s terrifying gamesmanship”. Ann writes, “All sides were testing lighter and bigger bombs with yields no longer in kilotons but in megatons, and developing the missiles to shoot the bombs from one continent to the other, halfway around the world.” She says, that “all sides were, at the same time, alternately approaching and avoiding some sort of agreement about controlling the bombs or at least stopping the tests.”
On October 5th of 1957, as said prior, Sputnik was sent into orbit. People of course knew that rocket launching satellites, like Sputnik (184 pounds), would now race to launch warhead capabilities – the race was on and the funding flowed like honey. When Sputnik II launched (with the dog) it weighed 1,120 pounds, which got Eisenhower on the TV to reassure the population – the U.S. launched Vanguard with its 3.5 pound satellite, and it fell back to earth and burned. In 1958 they launched Jupiter with a satellite payload of 31 pounds (a warhead was closer to a thousand pounds). During this time, the military satellite systems were well on their way, yet because of the classifications, they could not say so, the press hammered on and congress leaped.
In 1958, the secretary of defense set up the new science-based agency – ARPA. Ann says, “the secretary had in mind “anti-missile missiles and outer space project’s, but wouldn’t rule out “highly speculative types” of weapons”. So in 1958 York decided to join the defense department, whereby Charles Townes wrote that it “surprised a lot of his colleagues”.
Defense also set up the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (ODDR&E), which York became the director of, answering directly to the White House rather than defense. Ann says, “as DDR&E, York had not only access to power but power itself” – the purse strings.
The money available was described as “the chart line of the federal money spent on research and development between 1940 to 1960 looks like a mountain you could climb. For the line from 1960 to 1968, you’d need ropes and harnesses; it’s nearly vertical. The money going into research doubled; the money going into basic research tripled. The number of doctorates earned by physics doubled; the number of universities offering doctorates in physics also doubled. (An irrelevant, but significant, aside: of 223 universities total between 1962 and 1964, the same 21 received over half the federal funds and awarded half the doctorates. The funding system was meritocratic, not egalitarian.) ”
Next, we have Jack Ruina, who left the University of Illinois to become York’s assistant director at ODDR&E – he then left to become head of ARPA a year later. Ruina say that for a time the “military was a little bit nutty. Russia making hundred-megaton bombs? We’re gonna make thousand-megaton bombs…I had no oversight-Congress never questioned about giving us what we wanted…”
Ed Frieman says of John Wheeler, he “believed in nuclear weapons, I mean, every once in a while he would say things that would absolutely scare me to death”. Wheeler later set up what was named the Wheeler-Wigner-Morgenstern (WWM) summer study group funded by York, via ARPA, which Wheeler named Project 137-1/137 is physicists’ “so-called fine structure constant, a number that quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic force on the atomic scale”.
In the summer of 1958, Project 137 hired twenty-two physicists for two weeks – as for who picked who, Murph said that (he presumed) that the big three above, WWM, made the decisions. “York said they just picked the best scientists…”
The group, amongst many others, was comprised of Murph Goldberger (Prof. Princeton), Val Fitch, Sam Treiman and Kenneth Watson. “Of the twenty-two Project 137 scientist, two were from industry and four from national laboratories: an unconventional friend of York’s , named Nicholas Christofilos {an interesting man}, was at the Livermore lab. Sixteen of the twenty-two were academics-three were chemists, two were mathematicians, one was an economist, the rest were physicists; six from Princeton. Not one was from Harvard or MIT. All likely had top secret clearances.” The group was told of the army and navies “hottest” problems, the twenty-two scientist “came up with twenty-two ideas per problem – Murph said the military briefings held were “intense”. Most of the briefings (that were liked) were with the problem of detecting enemy submarines and communications with “ours”, there was also conventional and nuclear weapons and the army’s ability to fight wars, along with the “increasing superiority of the Soviet Union in missiles and in radar and electronic equipment.
Watson had said that the “primary purpose of those briefings was education.” There is discussion from the scientist here about listening while thinking about problems the “foreground subject but in the background your brain is turning it over”, said Fitch. It goes on to say, by Wheeler of the report and summery, that “many members of Project 137 were deeply disturbed and others even shocked by the gravity of the problems with which they found themselves confronted…The group senses the rapidly increasing danger into which we are inexorably heading.” By the spring of 1959 Project 137 was over. And the beginning of Jason was being born.
Ann discusses ways the government can “get advice” from scientist on “feasibilities”. They can use the “River Charles approach” – from summer study group (what Jason came to be), the “ARPA approach” – funding of academics – multiyear studies from their own universities, the “PSAC approach” – putting academics “on-call” and not on site, and the “Project 137 approach” – academics being pulled out to national labs.
Going forward, “the national labs’ and defense industry’s approach was to pay individual academics to consult during the summer. In what York called “a process of serendipity and successive approximations,” two subgroups of people combined these approaches and, said York, “cooked up the notion of what we now call Jason.” Jason was originally called Project Sunrise by the ARPA – it was said that Murph went home to Mildred, who suggested the name Jason – “Jason and the Argonauts looking for the Golden Fleece”, said Mildred.
The group resulted in the first subgroup being made up of “three academics, and their approach was to go into the summer consulting (popular in the 1960’s) advice business on their own (Murph, Watson, Brueckner). Ann discusses how in 1960, “the average school teacher made $5,174 and a congressman just under $25,000; in 1964 full tenured professors of physics typically earned between $12,000 and $15,000.”
“On the Golden Fleece charge: it does not stand up” – 1960 per diem was $50.00 per/day – after a summer they added $4,500 to their salaries, “but it wasn’t golden.”
Of Murph and company, their business was called “Theoretical Physics, Incorporated – “a lousy name” sites Watson. The company never operated as they moved into Jason. The second subgroup included Marvin Stern and Charles Townes.
Chapter Three – The Glory Years
Jason was formed after the defunct Theoretical Physics, Incorporated business, whereby Murpy says that “in one day’s discussion we sort of flushed out the concept and I walked out of the room to go to the john and when I got back it turned out I was the chairman.” Murray and Gel-Mann were the first steering committee members.
“Perhaps twenty-two invitees came, which Breckner said was at least three-fourths of the people asked.” “It was a very elite operation. It was an honor to be asked.” “The invitees “were young and full of beans and very patriotic,” Murph said. They were also, as advertised, smart and creative: seven-roughly a third of them-later won Nobel Prizes.”
Val Fitch, Hal Lewis, Sam Treiman, and Ed Frieman were among some who attended the first meeting. On January 1st, 1960 Jason came into being.
ARPA discussed project assignments (IDA for Project Sunrise).”ARPA told Jason to hire young, smart scientists; to solve technical problems; to point out science that academics weren’t developing but the military might use; to analyze but not to experiment. It anticipated that “minimum expenditures will be made for computers [and] assistants.” The prohibition on computers was a relic of the time, the beginning of the computer age when, said Hal Lewis, a primal Jason, “we lost students to computers-they got mesmerized and forgot to do physics. You didn’t want this to be turning into a computer buffs’ organization.”
Right after the first summer session, some Jasons dropped out and others joined, such as Steven Weinberg (age 27). Another Jason was Sidney Drell (age 34). Drell had had an advisor and professor (Illinois) in Oppenheimer, going then to MIT and meeting up with Hans Beths. Drell became professor at Stanford “where he worked on the theory of quantum electrodynamics.”
Further, this chapter describes the steering committees roles and preliminary work on summer studies. Of the studies, “Jason’s followed ARPA’s missions.” Of the missions (Defender), the biggest being the development of defense against ballistic missiles – later ABM, SDI and NMD. Ann says “but the question is always the same: how to figure out what’s being shot at us and how to defend ourselves.”
Defender Studied:
• Developed phased array radars (tracking simultaneous missiles)
• Tests for measuring in-coming decoys discriminated from warheads
• Short-range, fast interceptor missiles
“ARPA historians also say that Defender had “a slightly flaky, if not outright bizarre sort of image”-studies on magnetic barriers and antigravitational devices…”
Sid Drell worked on “an example of entrapment.” This is explained, an incoming missile should be detectable by heat (infrared radiation) -simple. Drell said basically, ( a question from ARPA) what if an attack first came with a detonation in the atmosphere, which creates nitric oxide molecules (NO), “would that cause a big enough cloud..”, essentially masking in-coming warheads. “Drell and other Jasons calculated the amount of nitric oxide, the size of the cloud, the duration of the cloud, whether the wind would blow it around-“a terrific, interesting problem,” Drell said.” The result being that the plume would need too big a megaton value for it to be practical – other things came of this. What Drell was getting at with the word “entrapment” is explained by Ann. “For Drell, that combination of science and policy was “entrapment”. He felt his work was needed, he said, “and you go on from there and you get involved in other problems and pretty soon you’re trapped.’”
The Jasons in this period looked at measures and countermeasures, and did astronomical experiments along the lines of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss variant (astronomy) for measuring re-entry vehicles.
The summer of 1963 came, which saw work on directed energy weapons (Seesaw Program), which brings focus back to Nicholas Chritofilos, who created “The particle beam”. Herb York said, “Nick was a remarkable ideas man. The ideas were usually not good, but they were really remarkable in that they were the kind of ideas that nobody else had.” Of the particle beam, he worked on designs (in Greece) on an accelerator (Cyclotron) and submitted it to Berkeley lab. “Unbeknown to Christofilos, his accelerator had already been invented, so Berkeley set the letter aside and forgot about it. Two years later Christofilos wrote a second letter describing yet another, more complex accelerator; Berkeley lab couldn’t figure out what he was saying and set this one aside, too. Two more years went by, and Ernst Courant at Brookhaven National Laboratory published a paper inventing the accelerator that Christofilos had described in his second letter; Courant called it a cosmotron and Brookhaven later built it. Christofilos happened upon Courant’s paper and wrote a third letter that said that he’d already invented the cosmotron. The Berkeley scientist found his paper in their files, Courant wrote, but they “had examined it superficially and dismissed it as one of many crackpot letters that laboratories get. They and we are most embarrassed, and we published a letter in the Physical Review acknowledging Christofilos’s priority.” Christofilos was paid for his trouble and was offered a job at Brookhaven that, in 1953, he took.”
Cont…
From searching here on the forum, there seems to be no mention of this group, The Jasons, so I’ll try and give a brief description of them, who they were, and what they did based on excerpts from this book.
The book itself was purchased years ago on a discount rack and lay on the shelf. I flipped through it once and thought I should read it, yet I’m a scientific layperson and it would need to wait. Overall, I’m now glad I read it as it introduced some of the decision alliances and counter decision making attempts on scientific applications that I would not have realized. Of importance were also the mindsets that many of the scientists then, and even now, operate under. Some make justifications in their minds to the worldview they understand, and some more than realized the implications. From its beginning, when the atomic genie or Pandora was released and the Jasons came to be (who were many of the Manhattan Project scientists) the fight to make things right, close the box or cork the bottle with the genie back inside, or continue the escalation of measures and counter measures, is written it these pages.
Overview & Chapter One
In the opening page, Ann says that the first she heard of the Jason was in 1990, although many of their reports were either leaked (see The Pentagon Papers) or published over the last 50 odd years, with some of their concerns being a matter of public record. At certain points, like the Vietnam era, they came under great attack from within the university academia and student base.
The Jasons were a very select exclusive top-secret group (in the beginning) of academic physicist who advised the department of defense (or ARPA then DARPA). This group, unlike “white collar” (a Jason scientific term) scientists, where mostly “blue collar” scientists who met every summer for six weeks and evaluated question or created questions, from or for, their various government sponsors.
The first Jason mentioned was Freeman Dyson and John Archibald Wheeler who was their “white collar” advisor and not a Jason. Also, advising were Edward Teller (who never came to meetings), Eugene Wigner, and Hans Beth. The Jason “cream of the cream” were tenured professors (although not all) at the big research universities; Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Berkley & Caltech. The Defense departments wanted applied science that resulted in technology, while the Jasons were mostly pure scientists. Much of the book composes of interviews with a heavy leaning to the morality of their decisions to continue Jason participation or extricate themselves from the ends.
Of the Jasons reports, Ann says that “Between one-half and three-quarters are classified” and they now generally meet at La Jolla, California for these six week meetings. As said, Jasons were originally physicists (most still are), yet have now changed to include many other science disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, computer science… Many of the physicists discuss the changes and actually worked hard at understanding oceanography, biology and chemistry – the computer age brought them along into those sciences, too. Many Jasons openly give their names and some only agreed to be called Dr. X or Dr. Y for their own particular reasons.
Some of the first Jasons were ex-Manhattan Project physicists propelled to work on anti-ballistic missiles that came when Sputnik was lunched and the U.S. military began to freak out. Their value, as Ann says of one, was in “operating like logical, out-spoken, unbeholden, independent outsiders. This stance, although useful to the government, is not, as Ann says, always welcomed.
There is a section on the Manhattan Project (MP) and how the scientists reacted with each other and their families, along with some of the other scientists around the world working on studies. This was a deep time of post divide (see Franck Report) of the applied aspects of science. Of this time, also described was the day after Trinity, whereby approximately eighty-eight scientists at the MP labs (University of Chicago and Oak Ridge) signed a petition to the president urging the bomb not ever be used against Japan unless they agreed to surrender (which history shows was likely). Just after Hiroshima, a government bill, the May-Johnson bill, was put forth by Harry Truman (more likely those controlling him), which would create the Atomic Energy Commission to control research and materials. The Commission would be dominated by the then, War Department. Ann says that within two weeks the physicists went in to overdrive, “lobbying Congress and calling newspapers, protesting that the May-Johnson bill would, as Mildred Goldberger said, turn over “the whole kit and kaboodle to the Military” and would therefore throttle both basic research and international cooperation”. A year later that bill died and the McMahon bill was passed, with the AEC being placed in civilian hands. Also at this time, the atomic scientists formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists to urge control and have since spent many years trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
The pro atomic build/use camp was of course Edward Teller, and John Wheeler. Wheeler later set up Project Matterhorn and the hydrogen bomb program at Princeton – at the time, senior scientists were said to be misjudged as they passed on it, whereby it was run with “graduate students and new Ph.D’s.”, of which one was Ed Frieman (a later Jason). Richard Garwin (Jason), then a student of Femi’s and a colleague (junior) of Teller, along with Marshall Rosenbluth, all worked on the hydrogen bomb. Ed Fieman said he saw “three shots” (test names) and he said, “which, I think, to this day, still give me nightmares”. In 1954, the AEC had hearings on whether Oppenheimer could keep his designated top-secret clearances, which he did not, due to the McCarthy era taint, along with Teller testifying against him, and Fermi, Bethe, Rabi testified on Oppenheimer’s behalf. Later, when asked by Teller to work at Livermore, Frieman refused to do so because of Oppenheimer (many other physicists shared their “Teller” dislike, too). One reason mentioned in this book as stated, was that their dislike “had a second aspect, unrelated to Oppenheimer. Teller contradicted other physicists’ pragmatic approach to curiosity-sin problems: build the bomb because the other side was going to build them anyway, then work to get them banned.” Teller was for bigger, better and more bombs and against test ban treaties. Teller (physicist personification of Dr. Strangelove it was mentioned) was “credited with convincing Ronald Reagan to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).” Ann says, “I wonder if Edward Teller, whatever else he was, might also have been our collective scapegoat.”
Of the physicists and the bomb, Ann says that their “sense of responsibility never left them. Murph Goldberger, Freeman Dyson, Ken Case, Val Fitch, Luis Alverez, Pief Panofsky, Bill Nierenberg, Ed Frieman, Marshall Rosenbluth, Charles Townes and Richard Garwin all became Jasons. Teller, Wheeler, and Berthe were three of Jason’s four senior advisers; Herb York was their first sponsor.”
Chapter Two
The chapter starts off with Herb York, after his 1949 doctorate, working out of the national weapons laboratory (Livermore branch). York was the director and designed and built new hydrogen bombs (highest yield-to-weight ratio). At the same time, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union “settled into the Cold War’s terrifying gamesmanship”. Ann writes, “All sides were testing lighter and bigger bombs with yields no longer in kilotons but in megatons, and developing the missiles to shoot the bombs from one continent to the other, halfway around the world.” She says, that “all sides were, at the same time, alternately approaching and avoiding some sort of agreement about controlling the bombs or at least stopping the tests.”
On October 5th of 1957, as said prior, Sputnik was sent into orbit. People of course knew that rocket launching satellites, like Sputnik (184 pounds), would now race to launch warhead capabilities – the race was on and the funding flowed like honey. When Sputnik II launched (with the dog) it weighed 1,120 pounds, which got Eisenhower on the TV to reassure the population – the U.S. launched Vanguard with its 3.5 pound satellite, and it fell back to earth and burned. In 1958 they launched Jupiter with a satellite payload of 31 pounds (a warhead was closer to a thousand pounds). During this time, the military satellite systems were well on their way, yet because of the classifications, they could not say so, the press hammered on and congress leaped.
In 1958, the secretary of defense set up the new science-based agency – ARPA. Ann says, “the secretary had in mind “anti-missile missiles and outer space project’s, but wouldn’t rule out “highly speculative types” of weapons”. So in 1958 York decided to join the defense department, whereby Charles Townes wrote that it “surprised a lot of his colleagues”.
Defense also set up the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (ODDR&E), which York became the director of, answering directly to the White House rather than defense. Ann says, “as DDR&E, York had not only access to power but power itself” – the purse strings.
The money available was described as “the chart line of the federal money spent on research and development between 1940 to 1960 looks like a mountain you could climb. For the line from 1960 to 1968, you’d need ropes and harnesses; it’s nearly vertical. The money going into research doubled; the money going into basic research tripled. The number of doctorates earned by physics doubled; the number of universities offering doctorates in physics also doubled. (An irrelevant, but significant, aside: of 223 universities total between 1962 and 1964, the same 21 received over half the federal funds and awarded half the doctorates. The funding system was meritocratic, not egalitarian.) ”
Next, we have Jack Ruina, who left the University of Illinois to become York’s assistant director at ODDR&E – he then left to become head of ARPA a year later. Ruina say that for a time the “military was a little bit nutty. Russia making hundred-megaton bombs? We’re gonna make thousand-megaton bombs…I had no oversight-Congress never questioned about giving us what we wanted…”
Ed Frieman says of John Wheeler, he “believed in nuclear weapons, I mean, every once in a while he would say things that would absolutely scare me to death”. Wheeler later set up what was named the Wheeler-Wigner-Morgenstern (WWM) summer study group funded by York, via ARPA, which Wheeler named Project 137-1/137 is physicists’ “so-called fine structure constant, a number that quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic force on the atomic scale”.
In the summer of 1958, Project 137 hired twenty-two physicists for two weeks – as for who picked who, Murph said that (he presumed) that the big three above, WWM, made the decisions. “York said they just picked the best scientists…”
The group, amongst many others, was comprised of Murph Goldberger (Prof. Princeton), Val Fitch, Sam Treiman and Kenneth Watson. “Of the twenty-two Project 137 scientist, two were from industry and four from national laboratories: an unconventional friend of York’s , named Nicholas Christofilos {an interesting man}, was at the Livermore lab. Sixteen of the twenty-two were academics-three were chemists, two were mathematicians, one was an economist, the rest were physicists; six from Princeton. Not one was from Harvard or MIT. All likely had top secret clearances.” The group was told of the army and navies “hottest” problems, the twenty-two scientist “came up with twenty-two ideas per problem – Murph said the military briefings held were “intense”. Most of the briefings (that were liked) were with the problem of detecting enemy submarines and communications with “ours”, there was also conventional and nuclear weapons and the army’s ability to fight wars, along with the “increasing superiority of the Soviet Union in missiles and in radar and electronic equipment.
Watson had said that the “primary purpose of those briefings was education.” There is discussion from the scientist here about listening while thinking about problems the “foreground subject but in the background your brain is turning it over”, said Fitch. It goes on to say, by Wheeler of the report and summery, that “many members of Project 137 were deeply disturbed and others even shocked by the gravity of the problems with which they found themselves confronted…The group senses the rapidly increasing danger into which we are inexorably heading.” By the spring of 1959 Project 137 was over. And the beginning of Jason was being born.
Ann discusses ways the government can “get advice” from scientist on “feasibilities”. They can use the “River Charles approach” – from summer study group (what Jason came to be), the “ARPA approach” – funding of academics – multiyear studies from their own universities, the “PSAC approach” – putting academics “on-call” and not on site, and the “Project 137 approach” – academics being pulled out to national labs.
Going forward, “the national labs’ and defense industry’s approach was to pay individual academics to consult during the summer. In what York called “a process of serendipity and successive approximations,” two subgroups of people combined these approaches and, said York, “cooked up the notion of what we now call Jason.” Jason was originally called Project Sunrise by the ARPA – it was said that Murph went home to Mildred, who suggested the name Jason – “Jason and the Argonauts looking for the Golden Fleece”, said Mildred.
The group resulted in the first subgroup being made up of “three academics, and their approach was to go into the summer consulting (popular in the 1960’s) advice business on their own (Murph, Watson, Brueckner). Ann discusses how in 1960, “the average school teacher made $5,174 and a congressman just under $25,000; in 1964 full tenured professors of physics typically earned between $12,000 and $15,000.”
“On the Golden Fleece charge: it does not stand up” – 1960 per diem was $50.00 per/day – after a summer they added $4,500 to their salaries, “but it wasn’t golden.”
Of Murph and company, their business was called “Theoretical Physics, Incorporated – “a lousy name” sites Watson. The company never operated as they moved into Jason. The second subgroup included Marvin Stern and Charles Townes.
Chapter Three – The Glory Years
Jason was formed after the defunct Theoretical Physics, Incorporated business, whereby Murpy says that “in one day’s discussion we sort of flushed out the concept and I walked out of the room to go to the john and when I got back it turned out I was the chairman.” Murray and Gel-Mann were the first steering committee members.
“Perhaps twenty-two invitees came, which Breckner said was at least three-fourths of the people asked.” “It was a very elite operation. It was an honor to be asked.” “The invitees “were young and full of beans and very patriotic,” Murph said. They were also, as advertised, smart and creative: seven-roughly a third of them-later won Nobel Prizes.”
Val Fitch, Hal Lewis, Sam Treiman, and Ed Frieman were among some who attended the first meeting. On January 1st, 1960 Jason came into being.
ARPA discussed project assignments (IDA for Project Sunrise).”ARPA told Jason to hire young, smart scientists; to solve technical problems; to point out science that academics weren’t developing but the military might use; to analyze but not to experiment. It anticipated that “minimum expenditures will be made for computers [and] assistants.” The prohibition on computers was a relic of the time, the beginning of the computer age when, said Hal Lewis, a primal Jason, “we lost students to computers-they got mesmerized and forgot to do physics. You didn’t want this to be turning into a computer buffs’ organization.”
Right after the first summer session, some Jasons dropped out and others joined, such as Steven Weinberg (age 27). Another Jason was Sidney Drell (age 34). Drell had had an advisor and professor (Illinois) in Oppenheimer, going then to MIT and meeting up with Hans Beths. Drell became professor at Stanford “where he worked on the theory of quantum electrodynamics.”
Further, this chapter describes the steering committees roles and preliminary work on summer studies. Of the studies, “Jason’s followed ARPA’s missions.” Of the missions (Defender), the biggest being the development of defense against ballistic missiles – later ABM, SDI and NMD. Ann says “but the question is always the same: how to figure out what’s being shot at us and how to defend ourselves.”
Defender Studied:
• Developed phased array radars (tracking simultaneous missiles)
• Tests for measuring in-coming decoys discriminated from warheads
• Short-range, fast interceptor missiles
“ARPA historians also say that Defender had “a slightly flaky, if not outright bizarre sort of image”-studies on magnetic barriers and antigravitational devices…”
Sid Drell worked on “an example of entrapment.” This is explained, an incoming missile should be detectable by heat (infrared radiation) -simple. Drell said basically, ( a question from ARPA) what if an attack first came with a detonation in the atmosphere, which creates nitric oxide molecules (NO), “would that cause a big enough cloud..”, essentially masking in-coming warheads. “Drell and other Jasons calculated the amount of nitric oxide, the size of the cloud, the duration of the cloud, whether the wind would blow it around-“a terrific, interesting problem,” Drell said.” The result being that the plume would need too big a megaton value for it to be practical – other things came of this. What Drell was getting at with the word “entrapment” is explained by Ann. “For Drell, that combination of science and policy was “entrapment”. He felt his work was needed, he said, “and you go on from there and you get involved in other problems and pretty soon you’re trapped.’”
The Jasons in this period looked at measures and countermeasures, and did astronomical experiments along the lines of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss variant (astronomy) for measuring re-entry vehicles.
The summer of 1963 came, which saw work on directed energy weapons (Seesaw Program), which brings focus back to Nicholas Chritofilos, who created “The particle beam”. Herb York said, “Nick was a remarkable ideas man. The ideas were usually not good, but they were really remarkable in that they were the kind of ideas that nobody else had.” Of the particle beam, he worked on designs (in Greece) on an accelerator (Cyclotron) and submitted it to Berkeley lab. “Unbeknown to Christofilos, his accelerator had already been invented, so Berkeley set the letter aside and forgot about it. Two years later Christofilos wrote a second letter describing yet another, more complex accelerator; Berkeley lab couldn’t figure out what he was saying and set this one aside, too. Two more years went by, and Ernst Courant at Brookhaven National Laboratory published a paper inventing the accelerator that Christofilos had described in his second letter; Courant called it a cosmotron and Brookhaven later built it. Christofilos happened upon Courant’s paper and wrote a third letter that said that he’d already invented the cosmotron. The Berkeley scientist found his paper in their files, Courant wrote, but they “had examined it superficially and dismissed it as one of many crackpot letters that laboratories get. They and we are most embarrassed, and we published a letter in the Physical Review acknowledging Christofilos’s priority.” Christofilos was paid for his trouble and was offered a job at Brookhaven that, in 1953, he took.”
Cont…
