The Pentagon's Brain (23 page)

Colonel Peterson could have been speaking about ARPA as a whole, about what it was doing and what it would do. The agency was growing used to taking old technologies and accelerating them into future ways of fighting wars. By the twenty-first century the electronic battlefield concept would be ubiquitous.

T
he downfall of the Jason scientists during the Vietnam War began with a rumor and an anonymous phone call to Congress. On February 12, 1968, Carl Macy, the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, received a tip saying that the committee should look into why the Pentagon had sent a nuclear weapons expert, Dr. Richard Garwin of Columbia University, to Vietnam. The battle of Khe Sanh was raging, the tipster said, and rumor had it that the Pentagon was considering the use of nuclear weapons against the Vietcong.

“Within a week the rumor had gone around the world and involved the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Britain and leaders of Congress in a discussion over whether or not the United States was considering using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam,” reported the
New York Times.
The White House expressed outrage, calling the accusations “false,” “irresponsible,” and “unfair to the armed services.” But there was truth behind the allegation. The tipster was likely alluding to the highly classified Jason report “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia,” in which the Jason
scientists advised
against
such use. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was not convinced and convened a closed-door meeting where senators echoed similar concerns. The
New York Times
reported that one senator “said he had also picked up rumors that the Administration was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, perhaps in defense of Khesanh if necessary to save the Marine Corps garrison there.”

The Pentagon issued a statement saying that Dr. Garwin and other scientists had been sent to Vietnam to oversee “the effectiveness of new weapons,” ones that “have no relationship whatsoever to atomic or nuclear systems of any kind.” This was true. Although the statement did not reveal the classified program itself, the “new weapons” the Pentagon was referring to were essential to McNamara’s electronic fence.

Jason scientists Richard Garwin, Henry Kendall, and Gordon MacDonald were in Vietnam to problem-solve issues related to the sensor technology. The Tet Offensive was under way, and the Vietcong were in the process of cutting off access to the Marine base at Khe Sanh. There were fears at the Pentagon that what had happened to the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 could now happen to the Marines at Khe Sanh. The similarities were striking, including the fact that the Vietnamese general who had led the communists to victory at Dien Bien Phu, General Vo Nguyen Giap, was again leading communist fighters in the battle for Khe Sanh.

VO-67 Navy squadron crewmembers were called upon to assist. More than 250 sensors were dropped in a ring around the Marine outpost at Khe Sanh in an effort to help identify when and where the Vietcong were closing in. The target information officer at Khe Sanh, Captain Harry Baig, was having trouble with the technology, and so Richard Garwin, Henry Kendall, and Gordon MacDonald were flown to the classified Information Surveillance Center at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, to help. Unable to solve the
problem from Thailand, MacDonald offered to be helicoptered in to the dangerous Marine outpost at Khe Sanh.

“It was a scary place,” MacDonald later recalled, “because you knew you were isolated. There were something on the order of four thousand Marines and to many [it seemed as if] there was little hope of getting them out. It was a dreadful situation.” What was remarkable was that MacDonald offered to be inserted into the middle of the battle in the first place. A polio survivor and now a presidential advisor, he could easily have chosen to stay in the safety of neighboring Thailand with Kendall and Garwin.

The nuclear physicist and ordnance expert Richard Garwin later stated that he was likely the source of the information leak that set off the downfall of the Jasons. “I had probably told people I was going to Vietnam, which I shouldn’t have,” Garwin told Finn Aaserud, director of the Niels Bohr Archive, in 1991. “Colleagues with overheated imaginations and a sense of mission thought someone should know about this,” he surmised.

As reporters began digging into Garwin’s backstory, the connection with the Jason scientists and the Advanced Research Projects Agency emerged. The classified report on barrier technology did not surface at this time, but the title of the Jasons’ report, “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia,” did. For antiwar protesters, this information—that the Pentagon had actually considered using nuclear weapons—led to outrage. Many of the Jason scientists held positions at universities, and they were now targeted by antiwar protesters for investigation and denunciation.

A powerful antiwar coalition called the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “the Mobe,” had been organizing massive demonstrations across the country. The previous spring, hundreds of thousands of people had attended an antiwar march in New York City, walking from Central Park to the United Nations building, where they burned draft cards. The march, which was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., made news around the world.
The Mobe’s March on the Pentagon, in the fall of 1967, had turned violent when protesters clashed with U.S. marshals and heavily armed military police assigned to protect the building. Six hundred and eighty-two people were arrested, including the author Norman Mailer and two United Press International reporters. Now, after it was revealed that many university professors were discreetly working on classified weapons projects as defense scientists, the Mobe’s underground newspaper, the
Student Mobilizer,
began an investigation that culminated in a report called “Counterinsurgency Research on Campus, Exposed.” The article contained excerpts from the minutes of a Jason summer study, reportedly stolen from a professor’s unlocked cabinet. It contained additional excerpts from classified documents written for ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center in Bangkok, Thailand, also allegedly stolen.

In March 1968, students at Princeton University learned that the Jasons’ advisory board was the Institute of Defense Analyses, or IDA, the federally funded think tank that served the Department of Defense—and that IDA maintained an “ultra secret think-tank” on the Princeton campus, inside Von Neumann Hall (named in honor of John von Neumann). Further investigation by student journalists revealed that the windows of this building were made of bulletproof glass. Student journalists broke the story in the
Daily Princetonian
, reporting that inside this Defense Department–funded building, and using state-of-the-art computers, “mathematicians worked out problems in advanced cryptology for the National Security Agency” and did other “war research work.” University records showed that the computer being used was a 1.5-ton CDC-1604, the “first fully transistorized supercomputer” in the world. When it arrived at the university in 1960, the supercomputer had a “staggering 32K of memory.” The journalists also revealed that at Princeton, IDA was working on “long range projects with ARPA—The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency… in the field of communication.”

The student journalists discovered, too, that Princeton University president Robert F. Goheen was also a member of IDA’s twenty-two-man board of trustees and that numerous current and former Princeton physics professors, including John Wheeler, Murph Goldberger, Sam Treiman, and Eugene Wigner, had worked on IDA-ARPA projects related to war and weapons. As a result of these revelations, the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society staged a sit-in, demanding that IDA be kicked off campus. The faculty voted that Princeton should terminate its association with IDA, and when university trustees overruled the demand, students chained the front doors of Von Neumann Hall shut, preventing anyone from getting in or out for several days. The issue died down until the following year. When students learned IDA was still operating on campus, protestors initiated a five-day siege of Von Neumann Hall, spray painting anti-Nixon graffiti across the front of the building, engaging with police officers, and chanting, “Kill the computer!”

Still, there was very little public mention of the Jason scientists and their position as the elite advisory group to the Pentagon, or that all their consulting fees were paid for by ARPA. But what happened at Princeton and elsewhere, as links between university professors and the Department of Defense became known, was just the tip of a very large iceberg that would take until June 13, 1971, to be fully revealed.

For the Pentagon, the antiwar protests were a command and control nightmare. For ARPA it meant the acceleration of a “nonlethal weapons” program to research and develop ways to stop demonstrators through the use of painful but not deadly force. There was a sense of urgency at hand. Not only were the protesters gaining support and momentum in their efforts, but also they were now controlling the narrative of the Vietnam War. “The whole world is watching!” chanted activists at an antiwar rally outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The phrase
spread like wildfire and drew attention to National Guardsmen, in Chicago and elsewhere, as protesters were threatened with guns and fixed bayonets. In these antiwar protests, and also in civil rights protests across the nation, state police, military police, and the National Guard used water cannons, riot batons, electric prods, horses, and dogs to control and intimidate crowds.

ARPA’s research into nonlethal weapons was classified and highly controversial. To keep this research secret, laboratories were set up abroad under an innocuous program name, Overseas Defense Research. This research took place at the Combat Development and Test Center (CDTC) in Bangkok, which had been renamed the Military Research and Development Center. Progress reports were delivered to ARPA program managers with a cover letter that stated, “This document contains information affecting the National Defense of the United States within the means of the Espionage Laws.” The program was overseen by defense contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, in Columbus, Ohio, and was considered part of Project Agile’s Remote Area Conflict program. A rare declassified copy of one such report, from April 1971, was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Nonlethal weapons are generally intended to prevent an individual from engaging in undesirable acts,” wrote E. E. Westbrook and L. W. Williams, the authors of the report. “Apart from the moral arguments in the present and future use of nonlethal weapons, public officials find it prudent to examine nonlethal force using a framework that it was keeping ‘innocent bystanders’ from being hurt.” At the overseas CDTCs, ARPA chemists examined a variety of incapacitating agents for future use against protesters, including dangerous chemical agents with a wide range of effects, from vomiting to skin injury to temporary paralysis.

Possible irritants for use against demonstrators included “CN (tear gas)… CS (riot control agent)… CX (blister agent),” also called phosgene oxide—a potent chemical weapon that causes
temporary blindness, lesions on the lungs, and rapid local tissue death. CS was seen as a viable option: more than 15 million pounds of CS had already been used in Vietnam to flush Vietcong out of underground tunnels on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. CX was also recommended for crowd control. It “produced a corrosive injury to the skin, including tissue injury,” but because the worst damage was inside the lungs, the harm would be disguised. Anticholinergics were considered, chemicals that cause physical collapse. “Probably the most promising of the anticholinergics (agents which block passage of impulses through parasympathetic nerves),” wrote the chemists, were compounds that produced “rapid heart rate, incoordination, blurred vision, delirium, vomiting, and in cases of higher doses, coma.” Emetic agents, chemicals that induce vomiting, were also recommended.

A second program involved delivery systems. Mechanisms for delivery included liquid stream projectors, able to shoot a twelve-inch-diameter stream of liquid across a distance of up to forty feet, as well as grenades thrown by hand or discharged from a small rocket. A more powerful option was the E8-CS man-portable tactical launcher and cartridge, which could be fired electrically or manually into rioting crowds at a distance of up to 750 feet. “It is nonlethal in the impact area, but its high muzzle velocity creates a lethal hazard at the muzzle during firing,” the scientists wrote.

Poison darts were discussed as a possible “means for injecting an enemy [i.e., a protester] with an incapacitating agent.” Also recommended were tranquilizing darts, historically effective in subduing wild or frightened animals. The problem, the ARPA chemists cautioned, was that “using these kinds of darts was not entirely safe as accurate dosage was based on the weight of the animal.” One advantage was that the “use of a dart allows selection of an individual target, perhaps the leader of a group or a particularly destructive person, without injuring others around him.” Further, the darts “possess a psychological advantage not shared by many
other systems,” noted the scientists. “The victim may wonder what he has been hit with and whether or not it is essential that he find an antidote.” This benefit needed to be weighed against another danger, however, which was that if someone was hit in the head or neck, it could be fatal. “Darts are not regarded by many as an ‘acceptable’ weapon,” the scientists wrote. Following the dart discussion was a long treatise on whether or not the use of the electric cattle prod against human protesters would be defensible.

The 130-page report offered hundreds of additional development ideas about how to incapacitate demonstrators without killing them, programs that were currently being researched for battlefield use but had not yet been deployed in Vietnam. “Photic driving” was a phenomenon whereby the application of stroboscopic light within a certain frequency range could cause a person’s brain waves “to become entrained to the same frequency as the flashing light.” But early studies showed that this kind of flickering light was effective in only about 30 percent of the population. Laser radiation was suggested as a potential way of temporarily blinding people, also called flash blindness. One drawback, the ARPA scientists noted, was that “the laser must be aimed directly at the eye,” which “diminishes its practicality in a confrontation situation.” Microwaves could potentially be used to incapacitate individuals by burning their skin, but the science had not yet been adequately advanced. “Surface skin burns using microwaves would not form soon enough to create tactical advantage,” the scientists wrote. Also, trying to burn someone with a microwave beam would be “ineffective against a person who is wearing heavy clothing or who is behind an object,” the scientists wrote.