Mad Men

On the evening of October 4, 1957, Neil McElroy was enjoying cocktails in Huntsville, Alabama, fresh from a doomsday tour of the United States. McElroy, who was about to become the secretary of defense, was chatting with the army general John Medaris and the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun during a casual reception held as part of McElroy’s tour of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. It was one of many visits the secretary designate and his entourage were making around the country as he prepared to lead the Pentagon.
Huntsville should have been the least memorable stop for McElroy, who had been traveling the past few weeks in a converted DC-6 transport aircraft reserved primarily for the secretary of defense. Along the way, he was plied with fine liquor and deluxe accommodations, all while getting a crash course in overseeing a military at the dawn of the age of nuclear Armageddon.
The new position was a big change for McElroy. His last job was heading Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. McElroy, who had no prior experience in government, was one of the “industrialists” Eisenhower had brought to the capital in the belief that business-style leadership could help straighten out government.
The media had not been kind to McElroy after Eisenhower picked him to head the Pentagon. The native Ohioan had made his name in the nascent field of “brand management,” penning a famous letter admonishing Procter & Gamble executives on the importance of promoting the company’s soaps to the proper consumer markets so that the products would not compete with each other. “Soap manufacturer Neil McElroy is president’s choice to succeed Wilson,” The Milwaukee Journal declared on August 7. Another report mocked McElroy’s experience in advertising, saying that he had been responsible for “vital activities in persuading housewives to buy one bar of soap or another.”
Now McElroy and his entourage were being wined and dined across the country by military officials pitching their soon-to-be boss on the importance of their aircraft, missiles, and bases in case of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union—all in between plenty of martinis. At Strategic Air Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, they were greeted with a table covered in whiskey, ice, and “fixings,” before being shown the control room, where military commanders could launch a nuclear attack. Later, General Curtis LeMay, the head of Strategic Air Command, personally piloted a demonstration of the new KC-135, a refueling aircraft, for McElroy and his staff.
At Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert north of Los Angeles, the group met General Bernard Schriever, the head of the Western Development Division, which was responsible for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. McElroy and his entourage took an immediate liking to the air force general, who was “extremely able” and could “shoot golf at par.” In Colorado, at North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known by its acronym NORAD, the group was assigned luxury suites at the Broadmoor, whose mountainview rooms were stocked with bottles of scotch and bourbon. The next day they were briefed on the calculus of a survivable nuclear war, where commanders had to weigh the lives of three million civilians versus protecting a key military site. It was a world, McElroy’s aide, Oliver Gale, wrote, “where horror is as much a part of the scene as manufacturing cost is in the soap business.” The final stop on McElroy’s itinerary was Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, a quiet southern town in Alabama whose economy was rapidly shifting from cotton mills to rocket production. General Medaris, commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was polite but unimpressed by McElroy. The problem with a businessman is that he can “become a sort of czar, surrounded by subordinates who carry out his orders and obey his whims without daring to question his judgment,” he wrote in his memoir just a few years following that meeting. “This gives him the illusion that he knows all the answers. He rarely does, outside his own general field.”
Neither were McElroy and his staff impressed with the army general, who sported a black mustache and was known for dressing in old-fashioned officer riding breeches. Medaris was a “salesman, promoter, who pushes a bit more than might be considered palatable,” wrote Gale, who worked for McElroy at Procter & Gamble and was following him to the Pentagon. Coming from an advertising man, the description was telling. Medaris was trying to sell the services of von Braun and his group of German rocket scientists, who were now based in Huntsville but could not seem to shake their Nazi past. “Von Braun was still wistful about what would have happened if [the V-2s] had all gone off,” Gale recorded in his journal, “not because he was sorry that Germany did not win the war (apparently) but because he was sorry his missiles, his achievements, had not been more successful.”
Even in Huntsville, the Germans found themselves stymied by the military, starved for funds, and frozen out of the space work they desperately wanted. They were stuck working, yet again, on suborbital missiles. The problem was not scientific know-how but classic bureaucratic rivalry. By the fall of 1957, von Braun’s army group had developed the Jupiter-C missile, a four-stage rocket that could have been shot into orbit, if only the army was allowed to launch it. It was not, and so the fourth stage of von Braun’s Jupiter-C was filled with sand, rather than propellant, to ensure it would not leave the atmosphere. Medaris had reason to be skeptical of the incoming defense secretary and his visit. McElroy was replacing Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, another captain of industry appointed by Eisenhower. As defense secretary, Wilson threw himself into budget cutting with a passion, carrying out Eisenhower’s New Look defense policy, which emphasized advanced technology, such as nuclear weapons and airpower, over conventional forces. Yet satellites, in Wilson’s view, were “scientific boondoggles.” He did not understand what purpose they would serve for the military. When Wilson had visited Huntsville, army officials tried to impress him with their work, only to have the money-conscious defense secretary interrogate them on the cost of painting wood in his guest quarters.
With McElroy’s visit in the fall of 1957, just days away from becoming secretary of defense, it did not seem apparent to Medaris that the new Pentagon chief would chart a different course. As Medaris, McElroy, and von Braun exchanged pleasantries over drinks, an excited public relations officer interrupted the party with news. The Russians had launched a satellite, and The New York Times was seeking comment from von Braun. “There was an instant of stunned silence,” Medaris recalled.
News of Sputnik was a surprise, but it should not have been. In 1955, the Eisenhower administration announced plans to launch a small scientific satellite as part of the upcoming International Geophysical Year, which would run from July 1957 to December 1958. Not to be outdone, the Soviets countered with their own satellite launch plans. It was always a race, but one in which the United States assumed it had a natural advantage. The Soviet Union could not produce a decent automobile; how could it possibly hope to best the United States in rocket science? In the meantime, American plans for a satellite launch had fallen behind schedule.
However flawed the Soviet Union’s consumer goods industry, the regime had an advantage when it came to military and space research. An authoritarian state could focus resources on a specific goal, like a satellite launch, without the bureaucratic wrangling or public pressures that afflicted a democracy like the United States. The Eisenhower administration, prompted by its civilian scientists, wanted to keep its scientific satellite launches separate from its missile programs, even though the underlying technology was nearly identical. That was why the White House opted instead for the navy’s Vanguard, much to von Braun’s disappointment.
Now, with the soon-to-be defense secretary in front of him, and Sputnik circling overhead, the words began to tumble out of von Braun. “Vanguard will never make it,” the German scientist said. “We have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. McElroy! Just give us a green light and sixty days!”
“No, Wernher, ninety days,” Medaris interjected.
McElroy had been the guest of honor, but now everyone circled von Braun, peppering the German rocket scientist with questions. Was it really true that the Soviets had launched a satellite? Probably, von Braun replied. Was it a spy satellite? Probably not, though its size and weight, if accurately reported, meant that it could be used for reconnaissance. And what did it all mean? It meant that the Soviets had a rocket with a sizable thrust, von Braun said.
The general and the rocket scientist spent the rest of the evening trying to persuade McElroy to let them launch a satellite. It is likely that the details were well beyond the grasp of McElroy, who had no background in technical issues. The conversation did impart to McElroy at least the importance of the satellite launch, which he might have otherwise missed. At first glance, the satellite did not seem like an immediate threat to the incoming defense secretary. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds and its sole function was to circle the earth, emitting a beep that could be tracked from the ground. For McElroy, the man most closely tied to the response to Sputnik, the launch was something of a fascinating footnote to a pleasant cocktail party. His aide, Gale, devoted more space to describing a recent evening meal of exotic seafood on the coast of California than he did to the world’s first satellite launch. Yet Sputnik was about to trigger a chain reaction that, by the New Year, would engulf all of Washington.
—
Years later, a myth emerged that the Soviet “artificial moon” immediately prompted people around the country to stare up at the sky in fear and apprehension. “Two generations after the event, words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite,” a NASA history covering the time period states. “The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria.”
In fact, there was no collective panic in the first few days following the launch. It was not immediately clear—except to a small group of scientists and policy makers—why the satellite was so important. For those involved in science and satellites, like von Braun and Medaris, the Soviet satellite circling the earth was proof that politics had hampered the American space effort. Yet for most Americans, the beeping beach ball initially produced a collective shrug.
That Sputnik failed to shake the heartland to its core was best demonstrated in Milwaukee, where the Sentinel’s bold large-type headline on October 5 announced, “Today, We Make History.” In fact, the headline had nothing to do with Sputnik but referred to the first World Series game to be played in Milwaukee. News of Sputnik was buried deep in the paper’s third section, where the reporter noted merely that news of the unexpected launch had “electrified” an international meeting in Washington to discuss satellites.
In the days following the launch of Sputnik, the Washington bureaucracy moved in slow motion. Eisenhower’s attention in the weeks leading up to Sputnik was focused on much more earthbound matters. The standoff over the first attempt to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, under court order had ended with the president’s sending in federal troops. By comparison, the launch of a satellite armed with nothing more than a beacon did not initially seem like something that was going to capture public attention. At a National Security Council meeting held on October 10, Eisenhower listened as his advisers hashed out ideas for responding to Sputnik. Perhaps the administration should emphasize “spectacular achievements” in science, like cancer research? Or the successful launch of a missile that could travel thirty-five hundred miles? Few in the administration seemed to understand what the Soviets had instinctively grasped: the psychological power of a space launch. General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the United States should not become “hysterical” over Sputnik. Eisenhower saw Sputnik as a political stunt. He also knew something that the public did not know: in addition to the military’s rocket programs, which were public, the United States had been secretly working on the development of spy satellites, which would prove much more important for the strategic balance than a silver ball beeping from the heavens. In the weeks following Sputnik, the administration’s policy was simply to downplay Sputnik’s importance. General Curtis LeMay called it “just a hunk of iron,” and Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, derided concerns over a space race as “a celestial basketball game.” The more that the administration tried to dismiss the Soviet accomplishment, the more fodder it gave for political opponents to accuse Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union. For Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Senate leader, Sputnik was an opportunity to be fully exploited. In his memoir, Johnson wrote that he got the news of Sputnik while hosting a barbecue at his ranch in Texas. That evening, he walked out with his wife, Lady Bird, to look for the orbiting Soviet satellite. “In the West, you learn to live with the Open Sky,” he later wrote. “It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed alien.” When Johnson looked up in the night sky, what he saw was not Sputnik but a heavenly political gift that would allow him to hammer the Republicans in the months, and possibly years, ahead. “Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” Johnson proclaimed. Eisenhower, who had so deftly managed his image as a political leader, found himself stumbling. From a technical standpoint, he was more right than wrong. Though the Soviets were somewhat ahead of the United States in booster technology, the United States had a number of strategic advantages that were not known to the public. In addition to the spy satellite technology being developed, the CIA the year before had begun flying a reconnaissance aircraft in the earth’s stratosphere. By flying at seventy thousand feet, the Lockheed U-2 spy aircraft was designed to evade detection by ground radar while flying over the Soviet Union and capturing pictures of military bases. The aircraft—and the flights—were top secret. Also secret was that the U-2 flights had already proved that the “bomber gap”—a suspected Soviet advantage in bombers—did not exist. With news of Sputnik, Eisenhower worried about a perceived “missile gap.”
Eisenhower refused to be swept up in mass hysteria, however. “Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota,” he told a throng of reporters, just days after the Soviet launch. The administration only helped its critics by providing confusing and contradictory statements about the importance of Sputnik. In that initial press conference, Eisenhower claimed that the “Russians captured all of the German scientists in Peenemunde.” In truth, the United States through Operation Paperclip had taken the cream of the crop, but the Germans in the United States were stuck filling the fourth stage of their Jupiter-C with sand. As the weeks passed, the staid articles about Sputnik gave way to sensational coverage. Drew Pearson, the American writer known for his influential Washington Merry-Go-Round column, claimed that “technical intelligence experts” were predicting that the Soviets might try a moon launch on November 7, to commemorate the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. “The same missile that launched the 184-pound Sputnik, our experts say, also could shoot a small rocket 239,000 miles to the moon,” Pearson wrote. “The Russians might fill the nose cone with red dye and literally splatter a Red Star on the face of the Moon.”
Pearson’s moon prediction was an outrageous conflation of conjecture and exaggeration, but on November 3, just a month after Sputnik, the Soviets indeed launched a second, larger satellite. Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika on a one-way mission to space. It was taken as purported proof that the Soviets would soon be able to launch a man in space (though unlike with Laika the dog, sending a human into space would require the ability to bring the person back safely to earth). The launch sparked panic in the United States and worldwide protests from animal lovers.
Sputnik tapped into a narrative that artfully wove Hollywood, science fiction, and good oldfashioned fearmongering. The public understood that satellites were somehow connected to the ability to launch ICBMs, but the subtleties of terms like “throw weight,” or the payload a ballistic missile could carry, were not readily apparent. It took some time, politics, and editorializing, but within a few weeks the American public’s initial curiosity and mild apprehension over Sputnik turned to full-blown panic. Eisenhower was right about the science, but he had misjudged the national mood. The administration’s response to Sputnik was a mess, but one thing was clear: the solution was going to be formulated by a soap maker from Cincinnati.
—
McElroy arrived in Washington just in time for peak Sputnik hysteria. The new defense secretary’s first few weeks at the Pentagon were marked by an endless parade of military chiefs and presidential advisers, all making suggestions about who should be in charge of space. The air force, not surprisingly, wanted to be in charge of a nascent aerospace force. The navy, which was stumbling with Vanguard, argued incomprehensibly that space was an extension of the oceans. And the army wanted to conquer the moon. Another proposal envisioned creating a tri-service organization. None of the suggestions made a particularly convincing case for ownership or offered a solution to the mismanagement that had led to the current crisis.
One meeting in particular appears to have resonated with McElroy shortly after he arrived at the Pentagon. Ernest Lawrence, the famed nuclear physicist, along with Charles Thomas, a former Manhattan Project scientist and the head of the agribusiness company Monsanto, visited the Pentagon chief and over the course of a meeting that lasted several hours proposed that the secretary establish a central research and development agency with responsibility for all space research. It was a concept that drew on the legacy of the Manhattan Project, the World War II– era government project to build the atomic bomb.
McElroy latched onto the idea, likely because it sounded a lot like the “upstream research” laboratory he had established at Procter & Gamble. Whether the visitors’ suggestion sparked the idea—or merely reinforced a thought he already had—is impossible to know. But on November 7, McElroy wrote to his chief counsel to find out if, as defense secretary, he had the authority to set up a research and development agency without seeking new legislative authorities. The answer from counsel was yes, although it was not clear Congress would agree. By the time McElroy showed up on November 20 on Capitol Hill, his idea had a name, and it was called the Defense Special Projects Agency, a space agency that would make sense of the various rocket programs and other space technology ideas. The new agency would consolidate the Pentagon’s missile defense technology and space programs while also pursuing, as the defense chief put it, the “vast weapon systems of the future.” Many of the members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee were not enthusiastic about this proposal. Fearful of military pressure to hasten an arms race, Eisenhower had purposely selected the panel to represent the interests of the scientific community over military advisers. The scientists on the committee were not necessarily against the Pentagon’s consolidating its rocket programs, though they wondered whether it made sense to place ballistic missile defense and space programs all in one agency. As one committee member put it, missile defense was an urgent priority, while there was “no urgency on Mars.”
More fundamentally, the science advisers were concerned about placing the space agency under military control. They eventually acquiesced, likely because James Killian, the president’s newly appointed science adviser, supported it. The panel did convince the president that a civilian agency, not a Pentagon agency, should ultimately be responsible for nonmilitary space programs. Eisenhower, in his approval of the new organization, made clear that “when and if a civilian space agency is created, these [space] projects will be subject to review to determine which would be under the cognizance of the Department of Defense and which under the cognizance of the new agency.”
The reception within the corridors of the Pentagon to the Defense Special Projects Agency was ice cold. The military services viewed it as an attempt to usurp their authority and steal their money. The new agency was a threat to their turf, and their budgets, and they quickly went on a public offensive to undermine support for the proposal. The air force general Schriever told Congress the new agency would be a “very great mistake.” If the military wanted to prove that it did not need a centralized agency for rocket programs, its best bet was to prove that it could launch a satellite into space on its own. To that end, in December, all eyes were on Vanguard, the navy satellite that Wernher von Braun had warned McElroy was doomed to failure.
—
On December 5, 1957, in the midst of Washington battles over the creation of a new research agency, hundreds of reporters and curious onlookers gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the launch of Vanguard. When Sputnik launched in October, John Hagen, the director of the Vanguard program, admitted the navy rocket was five months behind schedule but blamed the Soviet head start on “unethical conduct,” as if a surprise satellite launch were the equivalent of cheating at a tennis game. Now, after hurried preparations, Vanguard Test Vehicle No. 3 was ready for launch. Yet the day of the scheduled launch, technical problems kept pushing back the countdown, and America’s best hope for catching up with the Soviets became the butt of jokes. The Japanese newsmen called the rocket “Sputternik,” the Germans dubbed it “Spaetnik” (a play on the German word for “late”), and the jaded news crews from Washington, D.C., christened it “civil servant,” because it “won’t work and you can’t fire it.” Finally, the next day, December 6, the countdown to launch began. As the count reached zero, Vanguard lifted off. From beaches just two or three miles from the launch site, hundreds of eager people gathered to watch and cheered as shooting flames marked the liftoff, though giant plumes of smoke obscured their view. The few dozen or so official viewers gathered at a hangar not far from the launchpad could see exactly what unfolded: they watched as the navy’s rocket lifted a few feet up and then exploded in a massive fireball, toppling over into the sand. In a sad testament to the failed launch, the satellite itself was thrown out of the third stage of the rocket during the explosion and was found not far away, still emitting the beeping signal that was supposed to mark the United States’ first foray into space.
The day of the Vanguard disaster, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a rare note of “non-concurrence” to the establishment of McElroy’s proposed research agency—a bureaucratic expression of extreme disagreement. Had Vanguard not just gone up in a literal ball of flames, he might have had a stronger argument. The new defense secretary held firm, and the next month Eisenhower formally approved the creation of the new agency. McElroy agreed to just one small change to his proposal: to avoid confusion with other, similarly named endeavors, like the Office of Special Operations, the new division would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.
ARPA was still an idea more than an organization, and not everyone in Washington was optimistic that a new government bureaucracy would be the solution. The frenetic days leading up to the new agency’s opening its doors were a mix of highs and lows in the space race. On January 31, 1958, the von Braun team, which had finally been allowed to join the space race, successfully helped launch Explorer 1, based on its Jupiter-C, putting in orbit the first American satellite. That success was quickly overshadowed by the second attempted launch on February 5 of the navy’s Vanguard, which broke apart just shy of a minute after launch.
On February 7, ARPA was officially founded with an intentionally vague two-page directive, which established it as an independent agency that reported directly to the secretary of defense. The directive mentioned no projects, or even specific research areas, not even space. “The Agency is authorized to direct such research and development projects being performed within the Department of Defense as the Secretary of Defense may designate,” the directive read. The only hint as to the ultimate purpose for this new agency came just weeks earlier during President Eisenhower’s State of the Union address: “We must be forward looking in our research and development to anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future.”

#RocketScience #ARPA #DARPA #USA #ColdWar #history #Mcelroy

Scientia Potentia Est

Michiaki Ikeda was a chubby-faced six-year-old when the nuclear age smacked him in the face with a blinding flash of light. Just as he was stepping out of an elevator at Nagasaki Medical University’s hospital, a nuclear weapon code-named Fat Man detonated seven hundred meters away from him. The bomb had the explosive equivalent in force of more than twenty kilotons of TNT and flattened almost everything within a kilometer radius. The concrete hospital building was mostly left standing, but the majority of the people inside were killed. The steel elevator shaft likely saved his life.
When he came to, it was pitch-dark, and the first sensation he recalled was the sound of something burning. Then the smell of smoke reached his nostrils, bringing him to his feet. As he stumbled out into what had been the hospital’s corridor, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he realized he was standing on dirt. The wood floors had been blown away. In the corner, he saw a nurse on the ground surrounded by shattered glass, and her face covered in blood. To Michiaki, it was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over her head. Yet her eyes were open, and she was staring at him.
“Call the ambulance service,” she ordered, her expression a mix of shock and rage.
He looked around, but all he could see were shards of glass and wood panels blown from the ground. He crawled out a window frame and stepped down into what had been, just a little while before, a tranquil garden with water. Now, as he looked up, he could see some trees were toppled and the ones that still stood were in flames. When his eyes moved from the burning treetops down to the ground, the scene was pure horror. The hospital’s garden was strewn with corpses with hair burned into frizzy clumps. Some had eyeballs hanging down on their cheeks, and faces with their lips and flesh burned away, leaving the teeth and jaw exposed. There were some bodies with stomachs bloated to twice their normal size, and others with internal organs spilling out.
He fled the burning hospital grounds and instinctively started walking toward the city, thinking he would find help. Instead, he found more horror. The main boulevards of Nagasaki were cluttered with debris of blown-out buildings. The living were walking, their arms dripping with scorched flesh outstretched in front of them to avoid the pain of having burned skin touch their bodies. Dazed, they walked down the street, calling for water and looking for help that was not there.
Three days earlier, the United States had dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy, which used highly enriched uranium, on Hiroshima, instantly killing some seventy thousand people.
Many more would die later from burns and radiation sickness.
Nagasaki had not been the primary target of Fat Boy, a plutonium implosion bomb. A B-29 Superfortress, Bockscar, was planning to drop Fat Boy on the city of Kokura, but cloud cover forced the pilot to divert to Nagasaki, a secondary target.
Nagasaki’s natural geography of mountains and valleys protected part of the population, preventing many of the immediate deaths that took place in Hiroshima, but the city center was devastated.
Along with a bomb, a second airplane flying over Nagasaki dropped canisters containing scientific instrumentation. The canisters also contained copies of a personal letter several Manhattan Project scientists addressed to a prominent Japanese scientist. “You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material,” the letter, written by the nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, read. “Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland.”
In Japan, the bomb had now decimated two cities. Six-year-old Michiaki was fortunate: miraculously uninjured, he was found by a nurse and taken to a bomb shelter in the mountains, where he was eventually reunited with his family. Michiaki did not know anything about what had happened that day. He only knew that this was not like the other bombings the city endured during the war, a routine so common that residents often ignored the sirens warning of enemy aircraft. “I had no clue what a nuclear or atomic bomb was—that something like that existed,” he recalled. “I just thought it was many, many big bombs that had fallen.”
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The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was the third atomic device ever detonated. The first atomic explosion, called the Trinity Test, was conducted in secrecy on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Americans learned about this new weapon after Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 of that year. The New York Times announced the nuclear age to the world with the headline “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’ ”
In Japan, however, what little news was reported about Hiroshima was only that incendiary bombs were used.
Speaking the day the bomb on Hiroshima was dropped, President Harry Truman revealed not just the existence of this terrifying new weapon but a massive project conducted in secrecy to build it. Across the country, over two and a half years, as many as 125,000 people had been involved in this secret project, Truman announced. Many workers did not even know exactly what they were working on, only that it was an important war project. “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,” he said, “and won.”
Truman was right: Less than a week after Nagasaki was bombed, the Japanese emperor announced the country’s unconditional surrender, telling the nation in a broadcast speech that despite great sacrifice “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” More directly, he acknowledged the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying “the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
A few weeks after the Japanese surrender, Herbert F. York, a young physicist who had been one of the thousands of workers on the secret project Truman had referred to, brought his father to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium had been enriched for the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The work inside the plant itself was still secret, but its existence no longer was. Standing at the top of a hill, York pointed down proudly to the facility hidden in the valley below, where he had labored in secret for two years of the war. “We have made war obsolete,” he triumphantly told his father. It did not take York long to realize he was completely wrong.
In Japan, the power of the atomic bomb left people feeling helpless. In America, for that brief moment, it made people feel invincible. The idea that this same powerful weapon could soon threaten the United States had not yet sunk in. It would soon. The United States might have beaten the rest of the world in building an atomic bomb, but the Germans during the war had achieved something that the Americans, British, and Soviets had not: a guided ballistic missile. The V-2, a liquid-propelled rocket developed by Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists, could travel more than two hundred miles, with an engine thrust eighteen times greater than anything the Allies had achieved. The Nazis used it to terrorize England during the war.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of World War II, and it also marked the beginning of a new war for scientific talent and engineering. The atomic bomb had proved that knowledge was power, and whatever nation had the most knowledge would have an edge in the next war. The Soviet Union might have been allies with the United States in its victory over Germany, but the two countries’ interests diverged even before Japan surrendered. In Germany, the Soviets and the Americans were already engaged in a race to capture knowledge.
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Standing in Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof in 1949, twenty-eight-year-old William Godel paused to admire the grand arches and curved glass above the train terminal. Outside, most of the city was still many feet deep in rubble—the aftermath of bombing during the war. It was not just the station’s neo-Renaissance design Godel was admiring but also the fact that it had survived the war with only superficial damage. The strategic bombing of Germany had been highly effective at causing civilian casualties but not at stopping the industrial war machine.
“Hey, you,” an American woman snapped. “Come put this baggage aboard and I’ll give you a cigarette.”
“Jawohl, gnädige Frau,” Godel answered, picking up her bag. As he carried it to the train, he walked with a slight limp—a war injury, something not uncommon to see in a German man his age in Frankfurt; Germany was flooded with crippled veterans. The train station was also filled with Americans, mostly military service members and their families stationed in Germany. The Americans who walked through the station were smartly dressed, whether in military uniform or civilian clothing. The Germans, on the other hand, shambled about the train station in threadbare suits. Germany was still under Allied occupation. The Americans controlled Frankfurt, and many still harbored a deep resentment of the Germans.
Sometimes the Americans would tell him a compartment was for “Americans only.” Godel was accustomed to being given orders by Americans in the train station, and the woman’s request to carry her bag was a relief; it meant that he was passing for what he was meant to pass for: Hermann Buhl, a former member of Germany’s Wehrmacht, and not an American covert operative. The young American was posing as a German veteran so he could slip across Soviet-occupied areas in Germany and Austria, and even into the Soviet Union, recruiting Russian and German scientists, engineers, and military officers to work for the United States. His German was fluent, but not native, good enough to pass with the Americans and Russians, and even Germans, in many cases. German veterans could quickly figure out he was not really exWehrmacht, but that did not so much matter; they had other things to worry about in the late 1940s. “It was a high-risk undertaking, replete with forged documents, black-market funds, bribery, loose women, and all manner of illegalities and immoralities,” he later wrote. He was also on his own when it came to the Russians. “Don’t get caught,” one army general told him, “because I cannot help you worth a damn over there.”
Godel’s work was under the larger rubric of Operation Paperclip, the military intelligence program that was scooping up German scientists and engineers to bring to the United States. The project, so named for the paper clip attached to each scientist’s dossier, had already garnered the biggest bounty: von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. At the end of the war, von Braun had actively sought out the American military, knowing that he and his team would likely fare better with the United States than with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1945, the Soviets dispatched specialized military intelligence teams to Germany to gather anything that could be found in the way of military technology, including missiles, radar, and nuclear research. The Soviets took Peenemünde, where von Braun and his rocket team had been based, but they had already fled, taking much of their design work with them. “This is absolutely intolerable,” Joseph Stalin said. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde; but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and
and more inexcusable?”
The Soviets eventually took whatever they could, sending hundreds of German personnel back to the Soviet Union, not to mention trainloads of equipment. The Soviets’ hunt for technical expertise was broad, but it also lacked focus. As von Braun put it, “The Americans looked for brains, the Russians for hands.”
In Germany before the war, von Braun had been part of a visionary group that dreamed of building rockets for space travel but agreed to work for the military, and eventually the Nazis, on weapons. In going with the Americans, he hoped again to work on space travel. Instead, von Braun and more than a hundred other rocket scientists were taken to the United States, initially to Fort Bliss, Texas, and relegated to showing the Americans how to build and operate the V-2. Unsure of what to do with the Germans, and unwilling to give them money to design new rockets, let alone fulfill von Braun’s ambitions of space travel, the Americans allowed his team to languish in the South.
The Soviets did not suffer from indecision, however. Using captured German know-how, the Soviets moved forward swiftly with designing rockets that could travel even greater distances than the V-2. “Do you realize the tremendous strategic importance of machines of this sort?” Stalin told a senior Russian rocket scientist after the war. “It could be an effective straightjacket for that noisy shopkeeper, Harry Truman. We must go ahead with it, comrades.” In the Soviet Union, the goal was clear. “What we really need,” said Pavel Zhigarev, the commander in chief of the Soviet air forces, “are long-range, reliable rockets that are capable of hitting the American continent.”
As the Soviets moved forward with their ballistic missile program, William Godel, disguised as Hermann Buhl, was on a parallel mission: trying to collect intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. He was growing increasingly convinced that the American military was pursuing weapons based on its own bureaucratic interests and not based on what intelligence was telling it was needed.
William Hermann Godel was born as Hermann Adolph Herbert Buhl Jr. on June 29, 1921, in Denver, Colorado, to Hermann Buhl Sr. and Lumena Buhl, German immigrants. Hermann Buhl Sr. died of pneumonia in 1931, and Lumena soon married another German immigrant, named William Frederick Godel, who ran his own insurance business and prior to World War II served as the German consul in Denver. The next year, Lumena’s new husband legally adopted his stepson and, at the suggestion of the judge, officially changed the boy’s name to William H. Godel. Relations between the two were icy at best. At one point, the younger Godel built a shack in the backyard to avoid living in the same house as his adoptive father.
After high school, Godel attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell and then, later, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He initially went to work for the War Department’s military intelligence division, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Godel was commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps and participated in the initial landings in the Pacific. He was wounded twice, including at Guadalcanal in January 1943, where he was hit by a hand grenade. The fragments shattered the bone in his left leg and destroyed a good portion of its muscle. He was awarded the Purple Heart and sent back home to recuperate. For the rest of his life, he would need a leg brace and walk with a limp.
Godel desperately wanted to stay in the Marine Corps and insisted he was fit to serve, but by 1947, after a series of medical reviews, he lost the battle. The wound in his left leg was still not completely healed, and Godel was forcibly retired from the Marine Corps, declared medically unfit for service. He made enough of a name for himself that after the war General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, recruited Godel to Washington to work as an intelligence research specialist for the army focusing on the Soviet Union.
It was a chaotic but exciting time to be involved in intelligence. Before the war, intelligence was regarded as something of a dirty business. “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail,” Secretary of State Henry Stimson declared in 1929, when explaining why the United States should halt its cryptanalysis work. Pearl Harbor and World War II might have discredited that view, but there was still nothing approaching a robust intelligence machine even after the war ended. There were, however, powerful personalities lobbying for power, particularly those who formed part of a close-knit community of military and intelligence operatives who had served together in World War II. Men like the air force brigadier general Edward Lansdale, a legendary spy, and William Colby, the future director of the CIA, emerged during this period. So, too, did William Godel.
In 1947, Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which attempted to impose order on the bureaucratic chaos that emerged after World War II. The war had created a multitude of people and organizations vying for power, and the legal reorganization was supposed to bring some clarity with the establishment of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency while also streamlining the Department of Defense and creating the Department of the Air Force, splitting it off from the army. The National Security Act, in reality, simply spawned an array of new organizations all competing for resources. The army, the navy, and the newly created air force all claimed ownership of rocket and missile research, while the CIA also saw a need for military technology that could collect intelligence on the Soviet Union.
The most important of those new technologies was, as Stalin rightly pointed out, an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. It would be a categorically different military capability; by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union was building bombers that could carry nuclear weapons to the East Coast of the United States, but they could also be potentially detected and intercepted. In the United States, computer scientists were already hard at work developing computer systems that could link radars together, to allow the military to stop incoming Soviet bombers, but there was in the 1950s no existing technology that could conceivably stop an ICBM attack. Even if a missile were detected by radar, the military would have just seconds to respond, and then there was little to be done to stop it: it would be like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky.
In the immediate years after World War II, there was initially little enthusiasm in the White House for investing in such long-range missiles. In 1947, President Truman, who had promised to bring federal debt under control, slashed the military’s rocket and missile programs. Funding was tight, and it was being fought over. The army, the navy, and the air force all had their own rocket and missile programs, each with justifications, often tenuous, for why that work properly belonged to them. The seeming triumph of American technology was short-lived. The United States had spent millions gathering up German technical talent, but when von Braun proposed research to his Pentagon masters to build more complicated rockets or—his ultimate goal—to design rockets that could travel into space, he was refused. It was a time of “professional gloom” for him and his team.
Yet the Soviets by 1949 had already developed a new ballistic missile, called Pobeda, or “Victory,” that could fly higher and carry more than the V-2 rocket. That same year, on August 29, the Soviet Union set off its first atomic bomb on the Kazakh Steppe, ending America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons. A little more than a month later, China fell to communism, and in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman, who thought he would demilitarize, was suddenly left dealing with twin threats of a Soviet nuclear and conventional buildup in Europe and a growing communist threat in Asia. The only choice for politicians in Washington seemed to be developing weapons even more powerful than those that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
—
On November 1, 1952, Herbert York made a call to the nuclear physicist Edward Teller with a brief message. It was “zero hour,” York told Teller, who was watching a seismometer at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Fourteen minutes passed, and then Teller called back with his own coded response: “It’s a boy.”
That “boy” was Ivy Mike, a 10.4-megaton hydrogen bomb that had just exploded in the clear blue waters of Eniwetok Atoll, vaporizing the island of Elugelab and creating, as Richard Rhodes described it, “a blinding white fireball three miles across.” The device, designed by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that went off in Hiroshima. York, the young physicist who just seven years earlier had proudly told his father that war was obsolete, was now in charge of recruiting the scientists to design a new class of weapons whose power was so great that at one point it was feared the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and vaporize the oceans. Ivy Mike was a test of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, known as the Super. This new bomb did more than create a new generation of superweapons; it also eliminated one of the last arguments against developing ICBMs. Thermonuclear weapons with yields in the many-megaton range meant that accuracy was no longer critical; with a big enough bang, hitting the target precisely was not as important. And once the thermonuclear weapon could be reduced in size, the military did not need bombers to haul weapons over long distances; it could pack them on an ICBM.
Three days after Ivy Mike exploded, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was elected president in a landslide, running on a campaign that focused heavily on battling communism. “World War II should have taught us all one lesson,” he declared. “The lesson is this: To vacillate, to hesitate—to appease even by merely betraying unsteady purpose—is to feed a dictator’s appetite for conquest and to invite war itself.”
By the time Eisenhower took office in January 1953, the Korean War was already drawing to a close, and he was alarmed by the growth in the federal budget. In the past two decades, spending had grown twenty-fold to more than $80 billion, and over half of that was going directly to the Pentagon. To rein in military spending, Eisenhower instituted a policy called New Look, which turned to nuclear weapons as a cost-effective way to offset drawdowns in conventional forces. It was fortuitous timing for rocket enthusiasts. Von Braun and his team had moved in 1950 to Huntsville, Alabama, where they were finally working on a new missile, called the Redstone. In Washington, Eisenhower was met with a flood of reports and panels making the case for rocket technology: both as weapons that could reach the Soviet Union and as a way to carry satellites into space. Rand, a newly established think tank funded by the air force, produced a series of reports proposing an earth-orbiting satellite as a military capability. Because satellites did not yet exist, there was still a question of national sovereignty: Would a satellite that flew over another country, such as the Soviet Union, be regarded as a violation of its airspace?
In 1954, the Technological Capabilities Panel, appointed by Eisenhower to look at the potential of a “surprise attack” by the Soviet Union, offered a solution: the United States would launch a purely scientific satellite as a pretext to establish “freedom of space,” which would then pave the way for military satellites. With all three of the military services developing separate technologies, the question was which should get to build the first rocket to space.
—
As the military services battled over a nascent space program, William Godel in the 1950s was in the midst of a different war in the intelligence world. Back in Washington, D.C., he worked as an assistant to General Graves Erskine, the Pentagon’s director of special operations. Godel quickly earned a reputation as the go-to guy for special assignments, particularly those that combined intelligence with science. Whether it was recruiting foreign scientists to work with the Pentagon or formulating plans for Operation Deep Freeze, which established the American presence in Antarctica (and earned him an eponymous plot of frozen water, the Godel Iceport), Godel was known as a man who could get things done.
Godel was also often called in to deal with the turf wars in areas like psychological operations. Frustrated by the lack of coordination for such operations—covert and overt—across government, President Truman in 1951 established the "Psychological Strategy Board" and appointed Godel as a member. The job brought Godel into periodic battles with the CIA, though many of them were petty. Official correspondence from the time mentions CIA officials clashing with Godel about everything from the CIA director’s refusal to attend a Pentagon function for visiting dignitaries to whether the CIA was providing a Hollywood studio with film footage of American prisoners of war held in North Korea. But the infighting was bad enough that Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, banned Godel from his buildings.
It might have been run-ins like those that prompted a security investigation into Godel, something that was not unusual in an era when information dug up from background investigations was used as a blunt weapon to oust political enemies. In 1953, Pentagon security officials interviewed Godel after reports surfaced that his adoptive father had been a Nazi sympathizer.
While denying the allegation, Godel also distanced himself from the man who raised him. “I didn’t care for him,” Godel said. “I had no personal association with him other than as a man who has been very nice to my mother since I left in ’38.”
The investigation did not stop Godel’s upward trajectory in government, however. In 1955, Donald Quarles, then the assistant secretary of defense for research and development, assigned Godel to the National Security Agency, a part of government so highly classified at the time that its existence was not even acknowledged. The NSA had been established in 1952, bringing together the communications intelligence and code-breaking capabilities that had emerged from World Wars I and II. Like the rest of the Defense Department, the NSA was being scrutinized by the Eisenhower administration, which was unhappy with the quality of strategic intelligence. Godel was supposed to help straighten out the NSA’s overseas operations and cut back ineffective foreign bases. For Godel, the NSA assignment combined his twin interests in intelligence and technology. In a later unpublished interview, Godel had a simple description of his mission: he was a hatchet man. In 1955, the year Godel was assigned to scale back the NSA, a copy of his security interview, which included questions raised about his adoptive father’s Nazi sympathies, was sent over to the FBI at the personal request of J. Edgar Hoover to review. It is unclear what the FBI chief was looking for, but two years later Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson wrote back to Hoover: “Glad to know you think [Godel’s] doing a fine job.” Godel’s role by then had earned him consideration for a top slot at the NSA.
Godel might have been doing a fine job, but the NSA, like the rest of the defense and intelligence community, was about to become embroiled in yet a new crisis. The same year that Quarles sent Godel to revamp the NSA, he also appointed a panel to decide which rocket proposal would take the United States into space. The problem was that there was no civilian rocket program; only the military services were developing the technology that could launch a satellite into space. The air force’s plan was to launch an ICBM into space, and the army proposal would have involved relying on former Nazi scientists working at a military arsenal. The navy’s rocket, while the least mature, had the advantage of not being associated with a weapon. In the end, the panel passed over the army’s German rocket team and the air force’s ICBM, selecting instead the navy proposal, a rocket that was still in development. “This is not a design contest,” an outraged von Braun protested. “It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit, and we are way ahead on this.”
Von Braun’s concerns were ignored, even as over the next two years the navy fell behind schedule. The delays did not spark much concern among America’s political leaders, and particularly not for President Eisenhower, who still believed that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union.
Then, in the fall of 1957, the CIA and the NSA were monitoring Soviet launches of intermediate-range missiles from Kapustin Yar, in western Russia, unaware of a much more important launch that was being prepared in Kazakhstan. Twelve years after winning a scientific gamble on nuclear weapons, Americans were about to face the reality that the horror the six-year-old Michiaki experienced in Nagasaki could soon reach the continental United States. The United States would no longer be invulnerable, and war was anything but obsolete.

#ColdWar #history #WernherVonBraun #ICBM #NuclearWar #TrinityTest #Alamogordo NewMexico #Hiroshima #LittleBoy #Nagasaki #FatMan #IvyMike #Thermonuclear #satellite #WilliamGodel #NSA

If there are to be yet unimagined weapons affecting the balance of military power tomorrow, we want to have the men and the means to imagine them first.
—JAMES KILLIAN, science adviser to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Science as science should no longer be served; indeed scientists ought to be made to serve.
—WILLIAM H. GODEL, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1975

Guns and Money

In June 1961, William Godel set off on a secret mission to Vietnam carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash. At a stopover in Hawaii, he converted some of the cash to traveler’s checks to make space for a small bottle of liquor that he carried with him on business trips. Even that did not quite leave enough room, so he moved some of his secret Pentagon papers to another case to make space for the bottle. The money, $18,000, was for a classified project that would play a critical role in President John F. Kennedy’s plan to battle communism in Southeast Asia.
At thirty-nine years old, Godel still wore the short buzz cut of his Marine Corps days, but his reputation had been forged in the world of intelligence. A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agency’s new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting. Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stations— something he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australia —or, in this case, winning the support of South Vietnam’s president for a new American proposal. Bill Bundy, a former CIA official and White House adviser, called Godel an “operator” with a “rather legendary reputation for effectiveness” working overseas.
At five feet ten inches tall, Godel was not a physically imposing figure, but he had a way of impressing both admirers and enemies with his presence. “He was one of the more glamorous people to stride the halls of the Pentagon,” recalled Lee Huff, who was recruited by Godel to the Defense Department. Godel was never the most famous man in the Pentagon, but for several years he was one of its most influential. And by the early 1960s, that influence was focused on Southeast Asia.
Godel arrived to the summer heat of Saigon, a congested city of semi-controlled chaos where cycle rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and other motorized contraptions wove through the packed streets like schools of fish in a sea. The city was booming economically and culturally, even as it attracted an increasing number of American military advisers, spooks, and diplomats, who were looking to advise South Vietnam’s president on how best to run his newly independent country.
Parisian-style sidewalk cafés still dotted the main city streets, and the city’s French colonial heritage was reflected in everything from the fresh baguettes in the local bakeries to the city’s grand villas. Vietnamese women dressed in the "áo dài", the formfitting silk dress worn over pantaloons, mixed easily with teenage girls clad in miniskirts. It was still several years before the influx of American troops would provide a boon to the city’s brothels, or frequent Vietcong terrorist attacks in Saigon would drive patrons away from sidewalk cafés, but signs of that unrest were on the horizon. In December of the previous year, the Vietcong bombed the kitchen of the Saigon Golf Club, marking the start of a series of terrorist attacks in the capital. In neighboring Laos, a civil war fueled by Soviet and American involvement was spilling over into Vietnam. More disquieting was that the Vietcong, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam, were getting weapons from North Vietnam, using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit supply route that snaked through Vietnam’s mountains and jungle, and parts of Laos.
Godel had been traveling frequently to Vietnam for more than a decade. What made this trip unusual was that he was now working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by its acronym, ARPA. Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself. Godel figured if ARPA could not battle the communists in space, perhaps it could beat them in the jungles. President Kennedy had taken office just five months prior and was still in the process of formulating a new policy for Southeast Asia. He had already decided to support South Vietnam’s anticommunist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who hailed from a family of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who ran Vietnam under Chinese rule. The month before Godel’s trip, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited South Vietnam’s president, calling Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” and in April, Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam to serve as special advisers, helping to train the South Vietnamese military and the Montagnards, the indigenous tribes who lived in the country’s central plains. Diem was a deeply religious man, a lifelong bachelor who chose politics over the priesthood. Some in Western circles regarded him as an out-of-touch crackpot; others, like Godel, saw him as a flawed but promising leader. In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was already battling a communist insurgency, but it was a war being fought in the shadows; that summer, astronauts and celebrities still dominated the covers of Life and Time magazines. Yet there were hints that this new conflict was beginning to occupy America’s leaders in Washington. The October 27, 1961, cover of Life magazine featured a soldier peering out from jungle underbrush with the caption “GI trains for guerilla warfare.” The cover lines read, “Vietnam: Our Next Showdown.” Guerrilla warfare was precisely why Godel was in Vietnam. The money he carried with him to Saigon was a down payment on an initial $20 million that the American government expected to allocate for a combat center to develop technology suited for fighting insurgents in Vietnam’s jungles. Located in Saigon and run by ARPA, the combat center would be used to help American military advisers and South Vietnam’s military. Godel, however, was not just focused on Vietnam; ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was the starting point for a global solution to counterinsurgency, relying on science and technology to guide the way.
The cash in Godel’s bag, and his list of proposals for Diem, would alter the course of events in Vietnam and more broadly lay the groundwork for modern warfare. From stealthy helicopters that would slip over the border of Pakistan on a hunt for Osama bin Laden to a worldwide campaign using drones to conduct targeted killings, Godel’s wartime experiments would later become military technologies that changed the way America wages war. His programs in Vietnam, many of which arose from that meeting with Diem, would be credited with some of the best and worst military innovations of the century. Within just a few months of that trip, Godel would bring over to Vietnam a new gun better suited for jungle warfare, the Armalite AR-15. He would also send social scientists to Vietnam, hoping that a better understanding of the people and culture would stem the insurgency. Some of Godel’s work became infamous, like a plan to relocate Vietnamese peasants to new fortified villages, known as strategic hamlets. That plan became one of the more resounding failures of the war. Similarly, ARPA’s introduction to Vietnam of chemical defoliants, including "Agent Orange", is now held responsible for countless deaths and illnesses among Vietnamese and Americans.
At its height, the ARPA program he established employed hundreds of people spread across Southeast Asia —more than five hundred in Thailand alone—and then expanded later to the Middle East. The program sought to understand the roots of insurgency and develop methods to prevent it so that American forces would not have to get involved in regional wars they were unprepared to fight. ARPA developed new technologies, sponsored social science research, and published books on counterinsurgency warfare that would later influence a new generation of military leaders fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than any single technology, Godel’s single-minded promotion of the need to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare would have an impact decades later, when the army general David Petraeus, and his advisers known as the “strategic whizzes,” found themselves studying the writing of David Galula, whose seminal work, 'Pacification in Algeria', was published in 1963, paid for by ARPA. Four decades before Petraeus made “counterinsurgency” a household phrase, Godel created a worldwide research program dedicated to insurgent warfare that dwarfed anything done in the years after 9/11.
The nascent counterinsurgency program Godel started inadvertently played a critical role in shaping the future agency whose name would become synonymous with innovation. The Vietnam counterinsurgency work eventually became the backbone of ARPA’s "Tactical Technology Office", the seminal division that would produce stealth aircraft, precision weaponry, and drones—the fundamentals of the modern battlefield. The space age might have given birth to ARPA, but Vietnam thrust the agency into the center of Cold War strategic debates, and it was Godel, more than any other ARPA official, who shaped the agency’s future.
Yet it was not all counterinsurgency. In the early 1960s, the esoteric agency Godel helped build was planting the seeds for work that would bear fruit many years later. In the first two years, Godel helped create the agency’s space program, providing cover to the world’s first reconnaissance satellite, a top secret project. He also persuaded the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite and helped build a worldwide network for nuclear test monitoring. By the end of the decade, a descendant of one of ARPA’s first projects, the "Saturn rocket", would launch Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo 11 astronauts on their journey to the moon. And just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in "command and control", which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.
Godel’s seminal role was largely expunged from the record in later years, and his name rarely mentioned in official materials, forgotten except by a few loyal friends and dedicated enemies. The AR-15, the weapon that Godel personally carried over to Vietnam, eventually became the M16, the standard-issue infantry weapon for the entire U.S. military. The rest of Godel’s Vietnam-era work would be dismissed as a onetime diversion for an agency now more closely associated with high technology than strategic thinking. His story did not fit an agency touted as a model for innovation. Yet the real key to the ARPA legacy lies in understanding how all these varied projects—satellites, drones, and computers— could come to exist in a single agency.
—
The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) sits on a compound in Langley, Virginia, made famous by countless movies and television shows. The NSA’s massive headquarters is ringed by barbed wire and located on a military base in Maryland. Yet the agency responsible for some of the most important military and civil technologies of the past hundred years resides in relative obscurity behind a generic glass facade at 675 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia. The unremarkable office tower stands across from a dying four-level brown-brick shopping mall that houses a mix of fast-food restaurants and discount stores.
Behind the nondescript exterior of the office building, just beyond the guards, is a panoramic wall display that covers more than fifty years of the agency’s history. It begins in the fall of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. "Sputnik", as the satellite was called in the West, did little more than emit a simple beep. But that beach-ball-size sphere orbiting harmlessly around the earth touched off a storm of news reports that shook the American people’s feeling of invulnerability by demonstrating that the Soviet Union might soon be able to launch a nuclear-armed missile that could reach the continental United States.
?As the story goes, Sputnik sparked a national hysteria, and the American public demanded that the government take action. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower in early 1958 authorized the establishment of a central research agency independent from the military services, whose bickering had contributed to the Soviet Union’s lead in space. This new agency, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was the nation’s first space agency—established eight months before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The organization today known as DARPA—the D for “Defense” was added in 1972 (and then dropped, and added again in later years)—has grown into an approximately $3-billion-a-year research agency, with projects that have ranged from space planes to cyborg insects. The display in the lobby is a monument to more than fifty years of this unusual government agency, which has produced marvelous and sometimes terrifying technological achievements: precision weapons, drones, robots, and networked computing, to name a few. By thinking about fundamental problems of national security, DARPA created solutions that did far more than give the military a few novel weapons. In some cases, the agency changed the nature of warfare; in others, it helped prevent the nation from going to war.
By thinking about how to deal with Soviet conventional military superiority without resorting to nuclear weapons, it introduced the era of precision weaponry. By looking for ways to detect underground nuclear explosions, it revolutionized the field of seismology and enabled the negotiation of critical arms control treaties. And by exploring ways to improve nuclear command and control, it created the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.
Not all solutions are so tidy, however. In trying to tackle the problem of communist insurgency, DARPA embarked on a decade-long worldwide experiment that ended in failure. It is tempting to carve out unsuccessful work, like the counterinsurgency programs, by claiming this was an aberration in the agency’s history. Here we argue, however, that DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together. What made DARPA successful was its ability to tackle some of the most critical national security problems facing the United States, unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review. DARPA’s history of innovation is more closely tied to this turbulent period in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it delved into questions of nuclear warfare and counterinsurgency, than to its brief life as a “space agency.” Those two crucial decades represent a time when senior Pentagon officials believed the agency should play a critical role in shaping world events, rather than just develop technological novelties.
The Internet and the agency’s Vietnam War work were proposed solutions to critical problems: one was a world-changing success, and the other a catastrophic failure. That muddied history of Vietnam and counterinsurgency might not fit well with DARPA’s creation story, but it is the key to understanding its legacy. It is also the history that is often the most challenging to get many former agency officials to address. DARPA may brag about its willingness to fail, but that does not mean that it is eager to have those failures examined.
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DARPA is now more than sixty years old, and much of its history has never been recorded in any systematic way. One effort was made, in 1973, when DARPA approached its fifteenth anniversary. Stephen Lukasik, then the director, commissioned an independent history of the agency to better understand its origins and purpose. The final document was regarded as so sensitive that the authors were only authorized to make six copies, all of which had to be handed over to the government. Although it was supposed to be an unclassified history, the new director was aghast at what he felt was an overly personal account; he stamped the final product as classified and locked it away. It took more than a decade for it to be released.
Agencies, like people, make sense of themselves through stories. And like people, they are selective about the facts that go into their stories, and as time passes, the stories are increasingly suspect and often apocryphal. No other research organization has a history as rich, complex, important, and at times strange as DARPA. Whether it was a mechanical elephant to trudge through the jungles of Vietnam or a jet pack for Special Forces, DARPA’s projects have been ambitious, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Some of these fanciful ideas, like the concept of an invisible aircraft named after a fictional, eight-foot-tall rabbit, actually succeeded, but many more failed. At some point, the successes, and the failures, began to get smaller, because the problems assigned to the agency grew narrower. The key to DARPA’s success in the past was not just its flexibility but also its focus on solving high-level national security problems. DARPA today runs the risk of irrelevancy, creating marvelous innovations that have, unlike previous years, little impact on either the way the military fights or the way we live our lives. The price of success is failure, and the price of an important success is a significant failure, and the consequences of both should be weighed in assessing any institution’s legacy. Conversely, if the stakes are not high, then neither the successes nor the failures matter, and that is where the agency is in danger of heading today, investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact on national security.
Current DARPA officials may disagree with this pessimistic assessment of the agency’s current role or argue about which failures, and successes, should be highlighted. Yet the research for our work is based on thousands of pages of documents, many recently declassified, held in archives around the country, and hundreds of hours of interviews with former DARPA officials. Most past directors share a very similar sentiment: DARPA continues to produce good solutions to problems, but the problems it is assigned, or assigns itself, are no longer critical to national security. To understand why this narrowing of scope happened, it is important to examine the real history of DARPA. The agency’s origins may begin with the space race, but DARPA’s legacy lies elsewhere.
Godel and his trip to Vietnam were seminal to the agency’s history—both its high and its low points. That trip helped create the modern agency and its greatest and worst legacies. Yet Godel’s story is one that DARPA officials today do not talk about, or even know about. It is a story buried in long-forgotten court records and has been nearly written out of the agency’s history, because it no longer fits the narrative of DARPA as an agency dedicated to technological surprise. Yet it is a story that illustrates the true tensions within DARPA, an agency

#ARPA #DARPA #USA #Vietnam #ColdWar #history