The Pentagon's Brain (5 page)

Over the next two years, the United States exploded eighteen nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union exploded twenty-five. Nuclear spending was at an all-time high, and design originality was key. The Pentagon ordered hundreds of high-yield hydrogen bomb warheads, like the one detonated during Castle Bravo, but also smaller, lighter-weight tactical atomic bombs. Herb York flew to Washington, D.C., with a full-scale mockup of Livermore’s newest design, the forty-eight-pound Davy Crockett nuclear weapon, in his carry-on bag. The Davy Crockett had the same yield as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but advances in science meant that the powerful weapon was small enough to be handheld. Thanks to ambition and ingenuity, the Livermore laboratory had begun to pull ahead from behind. The computer designed by John von Neumann played an important role in allowing Livermore scientists to model new nuclear weapons designs before building them.

In the summer of 1955, John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer. He had slipped and fallen, and when doctors examined
him, they discovered that he had an advanced, metastasizing cancerous tumor in his collarbone. By November his spine was affected, and in January 1956 von Neumann was confined to a wheelchair. In March he entered a guarded room at Walter Reed Hospital, the U.S. Army’s flagship medical center, outside Washington, D.C. John von Neumann, at the age of fifty-four, racked with pain and riddled with terror, was dying of a cancer he most likely developed because of a speck of plutonium he inhaled at Los Alamos during the war. Two armed military guards never left his side.

For a while, von Neumann’s mind remained sharp, but as the end grew near, his mental faculties began to degrade. Beside him at his bed, von Neumann’s brother Michael read aloud from Goethe’s tragic play
Faust.
Michael would read a page and then pause. Lying on the hospital bed, eyes closed, faculties failing, for some time von Neumann could still pick up in the text precisely where his brother left off. But soon, even John von Neumann’s indomitable memory would fail. Friends said the mental decline was excruciating for him to endure. An atheist all his life, von Neumann used to joke about people who believed in God. In a limerick for his wife, Klara, he’d once written, “There was a young man who said, Run! / The end of the world had begun! / The one I fear most / Is that damn Holy Ghost. / I can handle the Father and Son.” Now von Neumann sought God and he called upon the services of a Roman Catholic priest.

But death grew near. In von Neumann’s final, frightened last days, even the priest could not offer a reprieve. Weeks before von Neumann died, Herb York went to Walter Reed hospital to pay his final respects. “Johnny was in a bed with high, criblike sides, intended to keep him from falling out or otherwise getting out on his own,” York recalled. “I tried to start a conversation about some technical topic I thought would interest and divert him, but he would say no more than a simple hello.” Von Neumann’s brain was failing him. Cancer was robbing him of the thing he valued most,
his own mind. Soon he would not remember. In weeks there would be nothing left of him. John von Neumann died on February 8, 1957.

He left behind a single unfinished manuscript that he had been working on in his final months of life. It was called “The Computer and the Brain.” A copy was made for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory library, where it remains today. In this paper, von Neumann draws a comparison between the computer and the human nervous system. He theorizes that one day the computer will be able to outperform the human nervous system by infinite orders of magnitude. He calls this advanced computer an “artificial automaton that has been constructed for human use.” John von Neumann believed computers would one day be able to
think.

I
t was October 4, 1957, 6:00 p.m. Cocktail hour at the Officers Club at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, or “Rocket City, USA.” Neil H. McElroy, a corporate executive soon to be confirmed as secretary of defense, had just arrived in a military jet with an entourage of defense officials from the Pentagon. Inside the Officers Club, drinks flowed freely. Appetizers were passed among the men. McElroy stood chatting with Wernher von Braun, the famous German rocket scientist who now served as director of development operations at Huntsville, when a press officer named Gordon Harris rushed into the room and interrupted the party with an extraordinary announcement.

“The Russians have put up a successful satellite!” Harris shouted.

The room fell silent. For several moments only the background music and the tinkling of ice cubes could be heard.

“It’s broadcasting signals on a common frequency,” Harris said.
“At least one of our local ‘hams’ has been listening to it.” A barrage of questions followed.

It did not take long for news of
Sputnik
to become official. The Soviet news agency, TASS, released a statement providing technical information and specifics about
Iskusstvennyy Sputnik Zemli,
or “artificial satellite of the earth.” The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space. Not since Pearl Harbor had the Pentagon been caught by a surprise of such consequence.

The nation slipped into a panic over what was seen as superior Soviet scientific prowess. Eisenhower’s attempts to minimize the significance of
Sputnik
had a reverse effect, with many Americans accusing the president of trying to conceal U.S. military weakness.
Sputnik
weighed only 184 pounds, but it had been launched into space by a Soviet ICBM. Soon the Soviet ICBM would be able to carry a much heavier payload—such as a nuclear bomb—halfway across the world to any target in the United States.

The situation was made worse when, on December 20, 1957, someone leaked a top secret analysis of the Soviet threat, called the Gaither Report, to the
Washington Post.
The report “portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history,” wrote the
Post.
“It shows an America exposed to an almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet Union.” If
Sputnik
had caused mild panic, the Gaither Report produced national hysteria.

But the Gaither Report had its own controversial backstory, one that would remain classified for decades. In the spring of 1957, seven months before
Sputnik
was launched, President Eisenhower asked his National Security advisors to put together a team that could answer one question: how to protect the American people in an all-out nuclear war. A RAND Corporation co-founder, the venture capitalist H. Rowan Gaither, was chosen to chair the new presidential research committee. Making up the body of the panel were officials from NORAD (North American Air Defense
Command), the Strategic Air Command, the office of the secretary of defense, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the Weapons Systems Engineering Group, and the CIA. There were representatives from the defense contracting industry, including Livermore, Sandia, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes, and RAND. The corporate advisors on the panel were from Shell Oil, IBM, Bell Telephone, New York Life Insurance, and Chase Manhattan Bank.

In the resulting top secret Gaither Report, officially titled “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age,” the defense contractors, industrialists, and defense scientists concluded that there was no way to protect U.S. citizens in the event of a nuclear war. Instead, the panel advised the president to focus on building up the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons. The most menacing threat came from the Soviet ICBMs, they said. The individuals who calculated the exactitude of the Soviet missile threat were Herb York, scientific director at the Livermore laboratory, and Jerome Wiesner, a presidential science advisor and MIT engineering professor.

No figure mattered more. The Soviets had just successfully launched their first long-range missile from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in what is now Kazakhstan, all the way across Siberia—a distance of three thousand miles. To determine how many ICBMs the USSR could produce in the immediate future, York and Wiesner set up shop inside the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, in the summer of 1957 and got to work doing calculations.

“The issue was both real and hot,” York later recalled. “We took the best data there were on the Soviet rocket development program, combined them with what we could learn about the availability of factory floor space [in Russia] needed for such an enterprise, and concluded that they [the Soviets] would produce thousands [of ICBMs] in the next few years.”

One Castle Bravo–size bomb dropped on Washington, D.C.,
would take out the Eastern Seaboard in a single strike. York and Wiesner’s ICBM analysis indicated that the Soviets wanted to be able to strike America a thousandfold. The information was shocking and alarming. If the Soviets were trying to produce a thousand ICBMs in only a few years, clearly there was only one rational conclusion to draw. The Soviet Union was preparing for total nuclear war.

It would take years to learn that the number York and Wiesner submitted to the Gaither Report was nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of 1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built, and in the “next few years” they would build roughly one hundred more. This was a far cry from the thousands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets would be producing in the next few years.

“The estimate was quite wrong,” York conceded thirty years later. In defense of his error, York said, “The problem was simple enough. I knew only a little about the Soviet missile development program and nothing about the Soviet industry. In making this estimate, I was thus combing two dubious analytical procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.” How could such an egregious error have happened, York was asked? “My alibi is that I was new to the subject and that, like the rest of the panel, I was an easy victim of the extreme degree of secrecy that the Russians have always used to conceal what they are doing.” York also pointed out that no one on the Gaither Report panel questioned his and Wiesner’s math. “I don’t remember [the others] arguing with our views,” York said.

When President Eisenhower received his copy of the Gaither Report on November 7, 1957, the timing could not have been worse. The
Sputnik
launch had taken place a mere month before. Eisenhower disagreed with the findings of the report. He had much better intelligence, from the CIA, but it was highly classified and no one but a small group of individuals knew about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had flown a classified mission over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane the year before. Stockman returned
from his dangerous mission with thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the Russians were not preparing for total war. There was only one person on the Gaither panel who had knowledge of this information, and that was CIA deputy director Richard Bissell. It was Bissell who was in charge of the U-2 program, which he ran out of a secret base called Area 51, in Nevada. No one else on the Gaither panel had a need to know about the top secret U-2 program and the multiple missions it had been flying over the Soviet Union. All the Gaither panel had to go by was what York and Wiesner told them, in error, about Soviet ICBMs.

After President Eisenhower rejected most of the findings of the panel, someone leaked the top secret report to the press. It was York and Wiesner’s findings about the missile threat that the public focused on, which was what caused the
Sputnik
panic to escalate into hysteria. Eisenhower responded by creating the President’s Science Advisory Committee to advise him on what to do next. Among those chosen was Herb York, the youngest member of the group. It remains a mystery whether or not the president knew that York was responsible for the most consequential error in the Gaither Report. York soon left Livermore for Washington, D.C. He would remain there for the rest of the Eisenhower presidency.

With the narrative of Soviet aggression spinning out of control, the president authorized Secretary of Defense McElroy to proceed with a bold new plan. McElroy was a master of public relations. A thirty-two-year veteran of Procter & Gamble, McElroy is considered the father of brand management. He began as a door-to-door soap salesman and worked his way up through management. In the mid-1950s, P&G had four major soap brands—Ivory, Joy, Tide, and Oxydol. Sales were lagging until McElroy came up with the concept of promoting competition among in-house brands and targeting specific audiences to advertise to. It was McElroy’s idea to run soap ads on daytime television, when many American
housewives watched TV. By 1957, P&G soap sales had risen to $1 billion a year, and McElroy would be credited with inventing the concept of the soap opera. “Soap operas sell lots of soap,” he famously said. Now McElroy was the U.S. secretary of defense. He took office with a clear vision. “I conceive the role of the Secretary of Defense to be that of captain of President Eisenhower’s defense team,” he said. His first job as captain was to counter the threat of any future Soviet scientific surprise.

On November 20, 1957, just five weeks after assuming office, Secretary McElroy went to Capitol Hill with a bold idea. He proposed the creation of a new agency inside the Pentagon, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. This agency would be in charge of the nation’s most technologically advanced military projects being researched and developed for national defense, including everything that would be flown in outer space.

“What we have in mind for that agency,” McElroy told lawmakers, was an entity that would handle “all satellite and space research and development projects” but also have “a function that extends beyond the immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the current or near future.” McElroy was looking far ahead. America needed an agency that could visualize the nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said. An agency that could research and develop “the vast weapons systems of the future.”

Congress liked the idea, and McElroy was encouraged to proceed. The military services, however, were adamantly opposed. The Army, Air Force, and Navy were unwilling to give up control of the research and development that was going on inside their individual services, most notably in the vast new frontier that was space. McElroy called the most senior military leaders into his office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon to discuss how best to handle “the new dimension of outer space.”

In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy commanders each insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the
Army, the moon was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain. General Bernard Schriever of the U.S. Air Force told the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee that he wanted to state on record his “strong negative against ARPA.”

The Atomic Energy Commission had its own idea about this new agency McElroy was proposing. Ever seeking more power and control, the Atomic Energy Commission lobbied to remove authority over outer space from the Defense Department entirely and have it placed under AEC jurisdiction. The AEC chairman had a bill introduced in Congress to establish an “Outer Space Division.” Defense contractors also lobbied hard against McElroy’s idea for a new agency. Many feared that their established relations with individual military services would be in jeopardy. Ernest Lawrence of Livermore rushed to the Pentagon to meet personally with Defense Secretary McElroy and present his alternative idea to ARPA. Accompanying Lawrence was Charles Thomas, the president of Monsanto Chemical Company, a nuclear defense contractor that would be vilified during the Vietnam War for producing the herbicide Agent Orange, and made notorious in the 1990s for being the first agrochemical company to genetically modify food crops. Lawrence and Thomas met with McElroy in his private office and shared their idea “to adopt some radical new measures… to meet the Sputnik challenge and cope better with problems of science and technology in the Defense Establishment.” They proposed that McElroy allow the two of them to create and administer a new government agency, classified top secret and modeled after the
Manhattan Project. The meeting lasted several hours before McElroy rejected the two defense contractors’ idea as “infeasible in peacetime.” Lawrence had a second suggestion. If this new agency was to work, it would need a brilliant scientist at the helm. Someone who understood how the military and industry could put America’s best scientists to work solving problems of national defense. The perfect person, said Lawrence, was Herb York. McElroy promised to give the suggestion some thought.

McElroy had one last hurdle to overcome, involving colleagues just one floor away at the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff hated the idea of an Advanced Research Projects Agency and registered a formal nonconcurrence on December 7, 1957. But the attack against ARPA by the military services was bound to fail. “The fact that they didn’t want an ARPA is one reason [Eisenhower] did,” said Admiral John E. Clark, an early ARPA employee.

President Eisenhower was fed up with the interservice rivalries. Having commanded the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the value of unity among the military services. As president, he had been a crusader against the excessive waste of resources that came from service duplication. “The Army and Air Force ‘race’ to build almost duplicate CRBMs [Continental Range Ballistic Missiles] incensed him,” wrote presidential historian Sherman Adams.