The Pentagon's Brain (6 page)

On January 7, 1958, President Eisenhower sent a memorandum to Congress authorizing $10 million in the 1958 fiscal year “for expenses necessary for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including acquisition and construction of such research, development and test facilities, and equipment, as may be authorized by the Secretary of Defense, to remain available until expended.”

In his State of the Union message two nights later, Eisenhower announced to the nation the creation of this new agency. “Some of the important new weapons which technology has produced do
not fit into any existing service pattern,” Eisenhower explained. These new weapons should “cut across all services, involve all services, and transcend all services, at every stage from development to operation.” The rapid technological advances and the revolutionary new weapons this technology was producing created a threat as revolutionary to warfare as the invention of the airplane, Eisenhower said. But instead of working together, the services had succumbed to petty “jurisdictional disputes” that “bewilder and confuse the public and create the impression that service differences are damaging the national interest.” This was why ARPA had been created, Eisenhower said, in “recognition of the need for single control in some of our most advanced development projects.”

That the president would publicly admonish the services outraged top officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “So the Agency was controversial even before it was formed,” wrote Lawrence P. Gise, ARPA’s first administrator, in an unpublished history of the agency’s origins. “Beset by enemies internally, subjected to critical pressures externally, and starting from scratch in a novel area of endeavor, ARPA was a tumultuous and exciting place to be.”

It was the second week of February 1958, and Washington, D.C., was blanketed in snow. A severe blizzard had wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital. Subzero wind chills and five-foot snow drifts paralyzed traffic. On Monday morning, the Eisenhower administration advised all nonessential government workers to stay home. Herb York received a telephone call at his house. It was the personal secretary to Neil McElroy, asking York to come to the Pentagon right away for a meeting with the secretary of defense, alone. Never mind the storm, York recalled. He was determined to get to the Pentagon.

Herb York was in a remarkable position. If he did not have
time to reflect on this now, he would pay homage to his humble background later in life. Here he was, living in Washington, D.C., and advising the president of the United States on scientific matters, when he had been the first person in his family to attend college. York’s father was a New York Central Railroad baggage man. His grandfather made caskets for a living; his specialty was lining a customer’s permanent resting place with satin bows and carved velvet trim. Herb York had been born of humble means but had a brilliant mind and plenty of ambition. To think he was only thirty-six years old.

“From the earliest times,” York recalled, “I remember [my father] saying he did not want his son to be a railroad man. He made it clear that that meant I should go to college, even though he knew little about what that actually entailed.” York followed his father’s advice, spending most of his free time at the Watertown, New York, public library reading newspapers, books, and science magazines. He attended the University of Rochester on a scholarship and excelled in the field he chose for himself, physics. Like many other top university physics graduates of his generation, York was recruited into the Manhattan Project during the war. In the spring of 1943 he traveled by bus to faraway Berkeley, California, where, as circumstance would have it, he was assigned to work under Ernest O. Lawrence. During the war, York helped produce uranium in Lawrence’s cyclotron, material that would eventually make its way into the core of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. After the war York returned to Berkeley to get his Ph.D. During his doctoral research, he co-discovered the neutron pi meson, which elevated him to elite status among nuclear scientists. In 1952 York became chief scientist at Livermore. Now, during the February 1958 nor’easter, Herb York wondered what lay ahead.

“I made my way with difficulty across the river to the Pentagon and did a lot of walking in deep snow,” York recalled. He had tried to hail a taxi, but there were none around. The parking lot at
the Pentagon was almost empty. But the man he had come to see, Secretary of Defense McElroy, was in his office, busy at work. York had a feeling he was being considered for the position of chief scientist at ARPA. Because of the snowstorm, he would benefit, he said, from having an “unhurried, hour-long, one-on-one conversation that I could not have had with the secretary on an ordinary, busy day.”

After the meeting York went home and McElroy weighed his options. There was one other contender for the position of ARPA chief scientist, and that was Wernher von Braun. Von Braun and his team had just launched America’s first successful satellite,
Explorer I,
and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.

While McElroy weighed his options for scientific director, new information came to light. Von Braun was nothing if not entitled, and in his discussions regarding the new position, he insisted that were he to transfer his services over to the Pentagon, a sizable group of his German rocket scientist colleagues would have to accompany him there. Army intelligence had classified dossiers on each of von Braun’s 113 German colleagues. They were all part of Operation Paperclip, the secret intelligence program that had brought Nazi scientists to America after the war. Many of von Braun’s rocket team members had been ardent Nazis, members of ultra-nationalistic paramilitary organizations, including the SS and the SA.

“For a while Wernher von Braun appeared to have the job but to get him it was necessary to take his 10–15 man package of [German] associates and that was not acceptable,” wrote ARPA
administrator J. Robert Loftis in a declassified report. Secretary McElroy offered Herb York the job. York accepted. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he said.

York moved into his office in the Pentagon the following month, in March 1958. He would remain on the president’s scientific advisory board. On the wall of York’s new office he hung a large framed photograph of the moon. Next to it he hung an empty frame. When people visited they would ask, why the empty frame? York told them he would leave the frame empty until it could be filled with a photograph of the backside of the moon, taken from a spacecraft to be developed by ARPA. This new agency Herb York was in charge of at the Pentagon would be capable of phenomenal things.

With his new Advanced Research Projects Agency in place, President Eisenhower was more determined than ever to put an end to nuclear weapons tests. The week after York hung the moon photograph on his office wall, Eisenhower took all of his scientific advisors, including Herb York, to Ramey Air Force Base, in Puerto Rico, to discuss banning nuclear weapons tests. The president wanted to know, was this good for national security, and if so, could it be done? Everyone voted yes on both counts, except Herb York, who abstained.

Decades later, York explained his bias. “I might well have responded ‘no’ but abstain was the most I could do under the circumstances.” Just weeks on the ARPA job, York felt conflicted. He now served the president of the United States and the secretary of defense. But he also remained loyal to Ernest Lawrence, whom he had worked for his entire adult life, and who was something of a father figure to him. Edward Teller was York’s mentor, the teacher who had taught him most of what he knew about nuclear physics. “Lawrence and Teller were all participants in the nuclear weapons program,” York later explained. “It was their ox that was about to
be gored.” If the president was able to ban nuclear weapons tests, the Livermore laboratory would most likely cease to exist.

The following day, after hearing arguments from the other scientists, York changed his position and voted in favor of a nuclear weapons test ban. It did not take long for word to reach Livermore, where Edward Teller became enraged. “Traitorous!” Teller said of York to his Livermore colleagues.

Just two weeks after the Puerto Rico trip, President Eisenhower took action. In his memoirs the president wrote, “I formally proposed to Chairman Khrushchev a measure we had been considering—a meeting of experts whose technical studies would precede any political conference.” Come summer, scientific experts from the United States and the Soviet Union would meet in Geneva to discuss how to put an end to nuclear weapons tests once and for all. The centerpiece was test detection. ARPA would be in charge of overseeing this new technology, which included seismic and atmospheric sensing, designed to make sure no one cheated on the test ban. The program was called Vela. Its technology was highly classified and included three subprograms: Vela Hotel, Vela Uniform, and Vela Sierra.

The leaders of the world’s two superpowers each had a vested interest in making this test ban happen. Each man was tired of having to live and govern under the nuclear sword of Damocles. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev would send their most qualified scientists to Geneva, with a mission to sort out any differences and to make the moratorium happen. President Eisenhower made a bold and brilliant move with his choice. Instead of sending one of his science advisors who wanted nuclear weapons tests to stop, he chose a scientist who did not: Ernest Lawrence. So committed to nuclear weapons tests was Ernest Lawrence that he had recently told Congress, “If we stop testing…. Well, God forbid… we will have to use weapons that [will] kill 50 million people that need not have been killed.”

President Eisenhower was determined to bring about a test
ban, but he was also determined to ensure that the Soviets could not and would not cheat. In sending Lawrence on his behalf, Eisenhower knew that the Soviet scientists’ intentions would be under intense scrutiny. For the first time since Castle Bravo, there was a sense of hope in the air.

Meanwhile, at ARPA, Herb York was about to get to work on the Vela programs. Vela would soon become ARPA’s second-biggest program after Defender, which was ARPA’s colossal effort to advance antiballistic missile technology. Vela was a joint effort with the Atomic Energy Commission, the Air Force, and later NASA to advance sensor technology so the United States could certify that no nuclear weapons were being detonated in secret. Vela Hotel developed a high-altitude satellite system to detect nuclear explosions from space. Vela Uniform developed ground sensors able to detect nuclear explosions underground, and produced a program to monitor and read “seismic noise” across the globe. Vela Sierra monitored potential nuclear explosions in space.

So much rested on the success of the Geneva Convention of Experts. Putting an end to nuclear weapons tests would slow the arms race and dramatically reduce the chances for all-out nuclear war. But could it be done?

F
or Herb York, the sense of hopefulness that followed him back home from Puerto Rico did not last long. Shortly after the president announced his plans for a nuclear test ban, a twenty-two-page secret document called “The Emergency Plans Book” arrived on York’s desk at the Pentagon. Its classified contents were nothing short of apocalyptic. They would remain classified for the next forty years. When, in 1998, the Defense Department learned that an author named L. Douglas Keeney had discovered a copy of “The Emergency Plans Book” inside a declassified U.S. Air Force file at the National Archives, the Pentagon immediately reclassified the report. Keeney made public the contents of the copy he had come across, but the original document remains classified.

For defense officials, “The Emergency Plans Book” served as the “only approved guidance to departments and agencies” regarding what to expect before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack on U.S. soil. Issued by the Office of Emergency Planning, a federal agency whose function was to coordinate and control wartime mobilization activities, the book was not a hypothetical war game.
It was official protocol. To those familiar with its contents, it would become known as the Doomsday scenario.

The scenario begins on a hypothetical “D-Day” in the not-so-distant future. Because of the inadequacy of U.S. capabilities at the time, the first strike comes as a surprise. Soviet sleeper cells have managed to “emplace by clandestine means” several hydrogen bombs inside the continental United States, and these weapons are the first to explode. Thermonuclear war has begun.

In quick succession, Soviet submarines swarm the Eastern and Western Seaboards, firing nuclear missiles at dozens of inland targets. At roughly the same time, the Soviets launch a catastrophic air attack against the United States using bombers and fighter jets. The U.S. Air Defense Command destroys a substantial portion of the attacking swarms, but at least half of the Soviet aircraft are able to fire off their tactical nuclear weapons before being shot down. The opening salvo comes to a climax as hundreds of incoming ICBMs, launched from the Soviet Union, reach the U.S. mainland. The majority of these nuclear-armed missiles are able to outfox the Army’s Nike-Ajax missile batteries and strike military and civilian targets across the nation. In less than one hour, 25 million Americans are dead.

The Soviets have all but decapitated U.S. military installations, write the authors of “The Emergency Plans Book,” including most atomic weapons facilities, naval bases, airfields, and Army bases. All major communication centers, financial districts, and transportation hubs have been targeted for attack, and the majority of them have suffered catastrophic losses. America’s infrastructure has been obliterated. Virtually nothing remains of Washington, D.C. Even those living in rural America experience death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale. Because of automated-targeting errors, many of the nuclear weapons miss their intended targets and instead strike at random across the heartland.

Though crippled, the U.S. military has not been destroyed and
the counterattack begins. “Notwithstanding severe losses of military and civilian personnel and materiel,” the authors predict, “air operations against the enemy are continuing and our land and naval forces are heavily engaged. Both sides are making use of atomic weapons for tactical air support and in the land battle.” Lightweight portable nuclear weapons, like Livermore’s Davy Crocket bomb, are deployed across the nation by the thousands as Soviet ground forces invade. Next comes a final full-scale nuclear exchange. ICBMs rain down from the skies by the hundreds. Coastal naval bases are pummeled with hydrogen bombs. Ports are clogged with sinking ships. Merchant shipping comes to a halt. Surface transportation and airlift capacity are nonexistent.

There are now hundreds of ground zeros across America, and everything within a five-to ten-mile radius of each one has been obliterated. The confluence of fireballs has created a series of major firestorms. Forests and cities are in flames. Those who escape being burned to death are subjected to varying degrees of deadly radiation. “The surface bursts have resulted in widespread radioactive fallout of such intensity that over substantial parts of the United States the taking of shelter for considerable periods of time is the only means of survival.”

In the document’s “Post-Attack Analysis,” things get much worse. One hundred million American survivors now live in a nation entirely without the rule of law. The government is paralyzed. Roughly 50 million people are in need of immediate emergency medical attention, half of whom will require hospitalization for up to twelve weeks. Twelve and a half million others have received lethal doses of radiation and will die in the next few days, regardless of treatment. Health resources are in a critical state. The doctors and nurses who survived the first strike cannot begin to handle what is now being asked of them. Of a pre-attack total of 1.6 million U.S. hospital beds, 100,000 remain. Radiation is but one malady. “Communicable diseases, including typhoid fever,
smallpox, tetanus and streptococcal diseases, begin to run rampant.” Day-to-day production of food comes to a halt. Most salvageable food stocks have been contaminated. Widespread looting has begun, with survivors hoarding what little remains.

The housing system has gone critical. Millions of homes were destroyed in the nuclear exchange; millions of people now have nowhere to live. Fallout has made vast portions of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable. There is no electricity, no refrigeration, no transportation, and no community water systems. Another deadly health menace emerges with the inability of the survivors to dispose of human waste or the dead bodies of millions killed in a single day. Then comes the knockout punch. “Along the coasts, bubonic plague, cholera and typhus are expected to emerge,” write the authors, “part of a Soviet biological warfare secondary attack.” The authors of the secret document clearly believe the Soviets to be the kind of enemy who will stop at nothing. Americans who managed to survive nuclear Armageddon must now prepare for the emergence of incurable diseases like bubonic plague.

By the twenty-first century, catastrophic narratives like the Doomsday scenario would become a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, films, and video games. But in 1958 this was the first and only known official document of its kind. Out in Santa Monica, RAND analysts regularly gamed out first-and second-strike scenarios as war games, which Air Force officials would then use to persuade Congress to allocate more funds for the Strategic Air Command. But “The Emergency Plans Book” was not a “what if”; it was a “here’s when.” It was doctrine. An official reference manual.

It was also not a report that could be ignored. “The Emergency Plans Book” was sent to the highest-ranking defense officials in each of the military services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of ARPA, the secretary of defense, each of the assistant secretaries of defense, and the director of the National Security Agency. In a cover letter, the director of the Office of Emergency Planning
instructed recipients to submit changes or indicate they had none. As for Herb York, when faced with this portrait of extreme cataclysm, the ARPA director did not lose sight of the agency’s mission to prevent strategic surprise. Submitting or not submitting notes to the Office of Emergency Planning was, for York, a moot point.

Herb York had another plan in play, a seemingly preposterous idea that was already several years in the making. What if ARPA could create a defensive shield over the entire United States and stop incoming Soviet ICBMs in their tracks? York believed it could be done on account of a theory that had been proposed to him by an eccentric, brilliant, and obscure scientist named Nicholas Christofilos. As York later explained, Christofilos believed it was possible to create “an Astro-dome like defensive shield made up of high-energy electrons trapped in the earth’s magnetic field just above the atmosphere.” It sounded ludicrous. Something straight out of a Marvel comic book. But York thought it just might work.

Which is why, in the summer of 1958, Herb York gathered together a group of the nation’s top scientists and had them briefed on this radical, classified idea. York wanted to know what the top men of science thought of what he called the “Christofilos effect.” The top secret program had already been given the go-ahead by the president of the United States. In March 1958 York met with Eisenhower and personally briefed him on plans for an ARPA operation to test the Christofilos effect. By summer, the idea was no longer just an idea but ARPA’s first full-scale operation. The top secret, restricted data, limited distribution Operation Order 7-58 went by the cover name Project Floral. Its real name, which was classified, was Operation Argus—for the mythological giant with one hundred eyes.

On July 14, 1958, with top secret clearances in place, twenty-two defense scientists gathered at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., with the goal of producing “ARPA
Study No. 1.” The gathering went by its own code name, Project 137. Its purpose, explained York, was “to identify problems not now receiving adequate attention” in the national security domain.

“Fort McNair was a delightful place to work,” remembered Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, one of the Project 137 scientists. The facility was one of the oldest Army posts in the nation and one of the most genteel. Each morning the scientists gathered in Roosevelt Hall, a grand neoclassical building of red brick with granite trim overlooking the Potomac. There they listened to Defense Department officials deliver briefings on America’s “defense problems selected for their urgency.” Then the scientists gathered in groups to discuss what had been said and brainstorm science-based solutions. Afternoons were spent writing. In the early evening, everyone would dine together, in the War College mess hall, and discuss Soviet threats. They were dealing with a total of sixty-eight national security problems and programs, from submarine warfare and balloon warfare to biological weapons, chemical sensing, and the possibility of inventing a laser beam weapon. But the most interesting program by far, as Goldberger recalled, was the Christofilos effect.

“Hearing about it required its own special clearance,” Goldberger said.

The Project 137 group was led by John Wheeler, a Princeton University physicist famous for coining the term “black hole.” Working alongside Wheeler were five others from Princeton, four from Berkeley, three from the University of Illinois, one from Stanford, one from the University of Chicago, and one from Cal Tech. Four scientists came from the federally funded nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Sandia. Two scientists came from the defense industry, one from General Dynamics and the other from the DuPont chemical company.

These were advanced scientific thinkers of the most serious kind. The Supermen of hard science. Among them were particle
physicists, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, chemists, mathematicians, an economist, and a nuclear weapons engineer. They were men who coined terms like hexaquark, wormholes, and quantum foam. Two of them, Eugene Wigner and Val Fitch, would win the Nobel Prize in physics. All of the scientists were experienced in Defense Department work, and many had been part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Stated requirements for membership in Project 137 were “ingenuity, practicality and motivation.”

“We listened to Nick [Christofilos] discuss the [Christofilos] effect,” recalled Goldberger. “He was a strange kind of genius.”

Christofilos’s theoretical Astrodome-like shield was the hoped-for result of exploding a large number of nuclear weapons in space as a means of defending against incoming Soviet ICBMs. By Christofilos’s count, this likely meant “thousands per year, in the lower reaches of the atmosphere.” These explosions, he said, would produce “huge quantities of radioactive atoms, and these in turn would emit high-energy electrons (beta particles) and inject them into a region of space where the earth’s magnetic fields would trap and hold on them for a long time.” Christofilos figured that this electromagnetic field could last months, or perhaps longer, and that “the trapped electrons would cause severe radiation—and even heat damage—to anything, man or nuclear weapon, that tried to fly through the region.” In short, the idea was that the arming and firing mechanisms on the incoming Soviet ICBMs would be fried.

Christofilos had presented the idea a few years earlier, back when York was the chief scientist at Livermore. “His purpose was of epic proportions,” York recalled. “His idea was the most amazing and original of all not only at Livermore but, to my knowledge, in the entire country,” a plan to create “an impenetrable shield of high-energy electrons over our heads, a shield that would destroy any nuclear warhead that might be sent against us.” But exploding thousands of nuclear weapons in space each year was an impractical
proposition. “At the time Nick presented these proposals, I could not conceive of a procedure for actually carrying them out,” said York. “In sum, there was simply no place to take an invention like Nick’s.” Then York became chief scientist at ARPA.

Nicholas Christofilos had an unusual backstory. He was born in Boston to Greek immigrant parents but at the age of seven returned with his family to Athens, where he went to school, dreamed about science, and became an amateur radio operator. He graduated from the National Technical University in Athens in 1938 and went to work in an elevator factory. His first job was as an elevator installer. When the Nazis took over Athens, Christofilos’s elevator factory was converted to a truck repair facility. Left with “very little to do,” Christofilos kept himself busy learning German. Eventually he was able to read the German-language physics textbooks and scientific journals that his new Nazi bosses left lying around the factory. According to Herb York, Nick Christofilos began “focusing his attention on the design of high-energy accelerators—cyclotrons and the like.”

With no formal training, and in a matter of a few years, Christofilos transformed himself from an elevator technician into one of the most ingenious scientists in the modern world. There are almost no details about his work during this dark time of occupation and war, but three years after the end of the war, in 1948, he wrote a letter to the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, “purporting to describe a new invention,” according to York. “The letter was, apparently, not easy to decipher.” But when a scientist at Livermore finally did “puzzle it out,” says York, “he discovered that it was only another way of describing the synchrocyclotron,” a device that had been invented independently several years before by Edwin McMillan, a chemist at Berkeley, and Vladimir Veksler, a physicist in the USSR. “Papers describing that invention had already been published more than a year before Nick’s letter arrived, so it was set aside and forgotten,” said York.
The supposition was that the letter writer could have gotten the information from the academic paper. Then, two years later, scientists at Livermore received a second letter from Nicholas Christofilos, this one describing another type of particle accelerator. “It was considerably more complex than the first,” said York, “and whoever was assigned to read it could not make out what it was trying to say.” Same as the first letter, it was cast aside.