The Pentagon's Brain (20 page)

In 1950 MacDonald graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, the first ever to do so in the geology department. Despite his physical limitations, he managed to play football and row crew in intercollegiate scull racing. He was granted membership in Harvard’s legendary Society of Fellows, making him one of twenty-four scholars from around the world who were given complete freedom to do what they wanted to do, all expenses paid, for three years. He was the youngest fellow on record, and remains so to date. MacDonald traveled around the country and the world, returning to Harvard for a master’s degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics in 1954. Some of his fondest memories of that period in his life were the so-called Monday night sherry dinners hosted by the Society of Fellows. During them, he enjoyed long discussions with physics giants like Enrico Fermi, with whom he discussed the earth’s rotation, its core, and its crust—still rather mysterious concepts in 1959. “And with Adlai Stevenson, who was a candidate for president, I talked about science policy,” said MacDonald. “I became aware that there was this much larger world, other than the world of rocks, minerals, and thermodynamic relationships.” Suddenly it all “sort of fitted together.” He wanted to learn everything he could about the geophysical world, but also about how those who inhabited it used science for their own benefit.

His academic output was phenomenal. MacDonald was able to see, in ways other scientists before him had not, how elements of the earth were connected. “Paleontology is not distinct from astronomy,” he said. In an award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, he was praised for his groundbreaking studies. His work, the academy declared, “brought together very distinct parts of geophysics: meteorology, oceanography, the interior of the earth, and astronomical observations about the earth’s rotation.” In 1958 he appeared on Walter Cronkite’s program
The World Tomorrow
, in the first-ever public discussion on American
television about how man would soon be able to explore the moon. Then he became a consultant for the Pentagon, for ARPA, and for NASA. “I was very enthusiastic,” he said. “I felt we could learn a great deal about the earth by looking at the moon, and so I was eager to participate.”

As passionate as MacDonald could become about earth sciences, he could also lose interest in a subject as quickly. By 1960, he said, “I was becoming more interested in the atmosphere, working on climate problems.” The University of California, Los Angeles, was developing a program in atmospheric science, and he accepted a position there as director of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory. At UCLA he found himself working on weather and the ionosphere. This led him to become interested in climate control. In 1962 he was appointed to the National Academy of Sciences and its Committee on Atmospheric Sciences. In 1963 MacDonald was elected chairman of the Panel on Weather and Climate Modification, which was part of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1963, weather modification was still legal. The job of the panel, MacDonald wrote, was “to take a deliberate and thoughtful review of the present status and activities in this field, and of its potential and limitations for the future.” The public was told that the National Academy of Sciences was investigating weather modification for “benign purposes only,” in areas that included making rain by seeding clouds. “There is increasing but somewhat ambiguous evidence that precipitation from some types of clouds and storm systems can be modestly increased and redistributed by seeding techniques,” MacDonald wrote in a 1963 report.

At the same time, in his classified work, Gordon MacDonald was becoming deeply interested in weather modification. He told the
Journal of the American Statistical Association:
“I became increasingly convinced that scientists should be more actively engaged in questions of environmental modification, and that [the] federal government should have a more organized approach to the
problem. While research could take place in both the public and the private sector, the government should take the lead in large-scale field experiments and monitoring, and in establishing appropriate legal frameworks for private initiatives.”

At the Pentagon, where the uses of weather weapons were being explored, MacDonald had an additional job: serving as a scientific consultant. In the winter of 1965 there was a feeling of “hesitancy” at the Pentagon about how to proceed in Vietnam, and by late fall, the feeling was moving toward what he called “complexity.” Secretary of Defense McNamara and his colleagues “were searching, almost desperately, for a means to contain the war,” MacDonald told an audience of fellow Jasons in 1984. In December 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense authorized ARPA to research and develop “forest fire as a military weapon” in Vietnam.

The secret program, called Project EMOTE, was developed by ARPA, ostensibly to study the use of “environmental modification techniques.” It was conducted in partnership with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, under ARPA Order 818. The central premise of the program was to determine how to destroy large areas of jungle growth by firestorm. Jungles are inherently damp and nonflammable. In order to modify the jungle’s natural condition to “support combustion,” ARPA scientists discovered that the lush jungle canopy had to be destroyed with chemicals before it would effectively burn to the ground. ARPA already had the arsenal of chemicals to do this, from its ongoing Project Agile defoliant campaign. The herbicides, varied in composition, were now being called Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent Pink, and other colors of the rainbow. Project EMOTE called for millions of gallons of Agent Orange to be sprayed in the forests as one element of the “weather modification campaign.”

Since the earliest days of recorded history, forest fire has been used as a weapon, and the authors of the ARPA study quoted from
the Bible to make this point. “The battle was fought in the forest of Ephraim; and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword,” they wrote, citing 2 Samuel 18. In Vietnam, forests provided cover for the enemy, as they had since time immemorial. “Forests were a haven and refuge for bandits, insurgents and rebel bands,” the report stated. Leaders from “Robin Hood [to] Tito to Castro had learned to conduct successful military operations from forest lairs.” Chairman Mao boasted that insurgents were like “fish who swim in the sea of peasants,” but to the ARPA scientists working on weather modification, the insurgents were more like jungle cats, hiding in the forest to prey on unsuspecting villagers. “A recent study of VC [Vietcong] bases showed that 83 percent were located in the dense forest,” the report noted. Forests had served the enemy throughout history. Now, modern technology was working to put an end to that.

In late March 1965, the 315th Air Commando Group conducted a firebombing raid, code-named Operation Sherwood Forest, “against” the Boi Loi Forest, twenty-five miles west of Saigon. Aircraft loaded with 78,800 gallons of herbicide sprayed Agent Orange over the jungle, after which B-52 bombers dropped M35 incendiary bombs. But it had rained earlier in the day and the experiment did not result in “appreciable destruction of forest cover,” as was hoped. ARPA postponed the next test until the height of the dry season, ten months later. Operation Hot Tip, on January 24, 1966, mimicked the earlier raid but with slightly better results, mostly because there was no rain.

The first full-scale operation occurred a year later, again at the height of the dry season, and was code-named Operation Pink Rose. This time, U.S. Air Force crews, flying specially modified UC-123B and UC-123K aircraft, sprayed defoliants on a first pass, then sprayed a chemical drying agent on a second pass. Next, the Air Force flew B-52 bombers that dropped cluster bombs to ignite the chemicals. Targets included “known enemy base areas” and
also village power lines. Short of “killing” the jungle and an unknown number of its inhabitants, and starting localized fires, no “self-sustaining firestorm” occurred. There were simply too many environmental factors at issue, ARPA scientists concluded. Rain and humidity consistently got in the way.

One year later a secret operation, code-named Operation Inferno, was launched against the U Minh Forest, the Forest of Darkness. Instead of using defoliants, the Air Force flew fourteen C-130s low over the jungle canopy, pouring oil from fifty-five-gallon drums over each target area, four times. A forward air controller then ignited the fuel by sending white phosphorus rockets to each target. An intense inferno ignited and burned. But as soon as the fuel was consumed, the fire died down and went out.

ARPA’s final 170-page report, originally classified secret, is kept in the Special Collections of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Maryland. The report indicates that forest flammability depended primarily on two elements. One was weather, which could not be controlled. The other was “the amount of dead vegetation on or near the ground surface,” which scientists determined could be controlled. “Forest flammability can be greatly increased by killing all shrub vegetation, selecting optimum weather conditions for burning, and igniting fires in a preselected pattern,” ARPA scientists wrote. But to kill all shrub vegetation was too big a task even for ARPA, and the idea of using forest fire as a military weapon was shelved.

As war in Vietnam widened, the Jason scientists were continuously consulted for hard science ideas about how to defeat the communist insurgents. In 1965 they were asked to focus on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Pentagon’s name for that system of 1,500 miles of roads and pathways that stretched from North Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia, and down into South Vietnam. Some of the roads were wide enough for trucks and oxcarts; others were meant
for bicycles and feet. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) determined that each day some two hundred tons of weapons and supplies made their way down communist supply routes, from the North to the South, by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail contained storage depots, supply bunkers, underground command and control facilities, even hospitals. A top secret report by the National Security Agency, declassified in 2007, described the trail as “one of the great achievements in military engineering of the twentieth century.”

Cartographers, geographers, and map designers briefed the Jason scientists on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its terrain. The Jasons read the RAND prisoner of war transcripts, originally compiled by Joe Zasloff and John Donnell, to learn more about how things worked on the trail. ARPA’s Seymour Deitchman, still overseeing Project Agile at the Pentagon, sent the Jason scientists dozens of reports on the trail, classified and unclassified. To Jason scientist William Nierenberg, the trail seemed almost alive, “an anastomosed structure,” he wrote, like a human body or a tree, a “network of interconnected channels,” like blood vessels or branches, which depended on one another to flow. The Pentagon wanted the Jasons to figure out how to sever the trail’s arteries.

ARPA doubled the Jasons’ annual budget, from $250,000 to $500,000, roughly $3.7 million in 2015, and the scientists began working on tactical technologies they thought might be useful in obstructing movement along the trail. At least three studies the Jasons performed during this time period remain classified as of 2015; they are believed to be titled “Working Paper on Internal Warfare, Vietnam,” “Night Vision for Counterinsurgents,” and “A Study of Data Related to Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army Logistics and Manpower.” Because the contents are still classified, it is not known how they were received by Secretary McNamara. But according to Murph Goldberger, McNamara felt the ideas the
Jasons were proposing would take too long to implement. “We did our studies based on the assumption of a relatively long war lasting several years,” he said, and the secretary of defense wanted more immediate results. So McNamara asked the Jason scientists to determine if it would be effective to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Jasons’ top secret restricted data report “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia” remained classified until 2003, when the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California, obtained a copy under the Freedom of Information Act. “The idea had been discussed at the Pentagon,” said Seymour Deitchman in 2003, in response to the outrage the report created. Deitchman recalled that Secretary McNamara believed the Jason scientists were best equipped to decide if using nuclear weapons was a wise idea. “Mr. McNamara would have said, ‘There has been some talk about using tactical nuclear weapons to close the passes into Laos; tell me what you think of the idea,’” according to Deitchman, who says the Jasons were asked to determine “whether it made sense to think about using nuclear weapons to close off the supply routes [along] the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos over which the supplies and people moved.”

For a possible nuclear target, the Jasons focused on the Mu Gia Pass, a steep mountain roadway between Vietnam and Laos. Thousands of Vietcong, as well as weapons and supplies, moved through this pass, which the Jasons described as “a roadway carved out of a steep hillside, much like the road through Independence Pass southeast of Aspen, Colorado.” If nuclear weapons were to be used against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Jasons concluded, they should be tactical nuclear weapons, lightweight and portable like the Davy Crockett nuclear weapon, a mockup of which Herb York had transported from California to Washington, D.C., in his carry-on luggage aboard a commercial flight in 1959.

But the Jason scientists calculated that use of nuclear weapons to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail would not be as easy as one might think. Indeed, “the numbers of TNW [tactical nuclear weapons] required will be very large over a period of time,” the Jason scientists wrote. “At least one TNW is required for each target, and the targets are mostly small and fleeting. A reasonable guess at the order of magnitude of weapons requirements… would be ten per day or 3000 per year.” The Vietcong were tenacious, the Jasons said, and it was likely that even if the pass were destroyed in a nuclear strike, the battle-hardened communist fighters would simply create a new pass and new supply trails. As an alternative, the Jason scientists proposed dropping radioactive waste at certain key choke points along the trail, thereby rendering it impassable. But radioactivity decays, they explained, and the window of impassability would also pass. In the end, the Jasons argued against using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam and Laos. They warned that if the United States were to use them, China and the Soviet Union would be more likely to provide similar tactical nuclear weapons from their own arsenals to the Vietcong and to the government of North Vietnam. “A very serious long-range problem would arise,” the Jasons warned, namely, “Insurgent groups everywhere in the world would take note and would try by all means available to acquire TNW [tactical nuclear weapons] for themselves.”