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July 10, 2022 - January 4, 2023
DARPA as an agency does not conduct scientific research. Its program managers and directors hire defense contractors, academics, and other government organizations to do the work.
DARPA program managers maintain an unusual degree of authority in an otherwise rigid military chain of command.
These and other DARPA stories angle toward health and wellness, when in fact DARPA’s stated mission is to create weapons systems.
DARPA makes the future happen. Industry, public health, society, and culture all transform because of technology that DARPA pioneers. DARPA creates, DARPA dominates, and when sent to the battlefield, DARPA destroys.
DARPA, by its mandate, pioneers advanced military science in secret.
Without a Station 70–style bunker for protection, the entire population living there would have been killed by 5,000 roentgens of radiation exposure in mere minutes. Even in Philadelphia, 150 miles away, the majority of inhabitants would have been exposed to radiation levels that would have killed them within the hour. In New York City, 225 miles north, half of the population would have died by nightfall.
Lawrence considered the atomic bomb “one of mankind’s greatest blessings,” and felt that the hydrogen bomb was “a technical means of taking profit out of war.” He met with Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee. Lawrence took umbrage at the idea of anyone’s bringing moral principles into the mix.
Oppenheimer’s forced exile sent a strong message to defense scientists. There was little room for dissent, and certainly not for objection on moral grounds.
Dr. James Whitman, expresses shock and says that a 10,000-megaton bomb would “contaminate the earth.” Teller defended his idea, boasting that Lawrence had already approached the Air Force, and the Air Force was interested. Rabi called the idea “a publicity stunt,” and plans for a 10,000-megaton bomb were shelved.
American scientists must always take new and greater risks. “The United States cannot maintain its qualitative edge without having an aggressive R&D [research and development] establishment that pushes against the technological frontiers without waiting to be asked,”
RAND, an acronym for “research and development,”
Competition was valued and encouraged at RAND, with scientists and analysts always working to outdo one another.
By age eight he had mastered calculus, though his talents were not limited to math. By the time von Neumann graduated from high school, he spoke seven languages.
To his core, von Neumann believed that man was violent, belligerent, and deceptive, and that he was inexorably prone to fighting wars.
During World War II, when his only daughter was a little girl, John von Neumann helped decide which Japanese civilian populations would be targeted for atomic bombing. But far more revealing is that it was von Neumann who performed the precise calculations that determined at what altitude over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atomic bombs had to explode in order to achieve the maximum kill rate of civilians on the ground. He determined the height to be 1,800 feet.
Von Neumann wrote that when two players are involved in a zero-sum game—a game in which one player’s losses equal the other player’s gains—each player will work to minimize his own maximum losses while at the same time working to maximize his minimum gains.
If both men take the plea deal and testify against the other, the prison sentence will be reduced to five years. If both men refuse the deal, they will each be given only one year in jail for parole violation—clearly the best way to minimize maximum losses and maximize minimum gains. But the deal is on the table for only a finite amount of time, the police say.
The outcome of the Prisoner’s Dilemma seemed to depend on the human nature of the individual game players involved—whether the player was guided by trust or distrust.
found that the minority of game players who refused to testify against their criminal partner were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in order to get the best possible outcome for both themselves and a colleague—just a single year’s jail time.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma was a non–zero sum game, meaning one person’s wins were not equal to another person’s gains. From von Neumann’s perspective, even though two rational people were involved—or, in the case of national security, two superpower nations—they were far less likely to cooperate to gain the best deal, and far more likely to take their chances on a better deal for themselves. The long-term implications for applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma to the nuclear arms race were profound, suggesting that it would forever be a game of one-upmanship.
Von Neumann told Colonel Goldstine that he believed a machine would one day prove to be a better computer than a human.
These “instructions” that von Neumann imagined were the prototype of what the world now knows as software.
MANIAC was smaller and much more advanced than ENIAC, which weighed thirty tons.
Initially, von Neumann was able to compute numbers in his head faster than the machine. But as his assistants entered more and more complicated computational requests, von Neumann finally did what human beings do: he erred. The computer did not.
if one side figured out a way to decapitate the other in a so-called “first strike,” it might be tempted to launch an unprovoked attack to ensure its superiority.
To be caught outside, en route to a civil defense shelter, even forty miles away from ground zero, would be life threatening. The bomb blast and shock waves would rupture lungs, shred eardrums, and cause organs to rupture and bleed. Debris—uprooted trees, sheets of metal, broken glass, electrical wires, wood, rocks, pipes, poles—everything would be ripped apart and hurled through the air at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour.
The idea of an underground presidential bunker was first conceived by U.S. Army military intelligence (G-2) during postwar examination of the underground bunker complexes of the Third Reich. The survival of so many of the Nazi high command in Berlin was predicated on the underground engineering skills of a few top Nazi scientists, including Franz Xaver Dorsch, Walter Schieber, and Georg Rickhey, all three of whom were hired by the U.S. Army to work on secret U.S. underground engineering projects after the war, as part of Operation Paperclip.
John von Neumann, at the age of fifty-four, racked with pain and riddled with terror, was dying of a cancer he most likely developed because of a speck of plutonium he inhaled at Los Alamos during the war.
He theorizes that one day the computer will be able to outperform the human nervous system by infinite orders of magnitude. He calls this advanced computer an “artificial automaton that has been constructed for human use.” John von Neumann believed computers would one day be able to think.
concluded that there was no way to protect U.S. citizens in the event of a nuclear war.
My alibi is that I was new to the subject and that, like the rest of the panel, I was an easy victim of the extreme degree of secrecy that the Russians have always used to conceal what they are doing.” York also pointed out that no one on the Gaither Report panel questioned his and Wiesner’s math. “I don’t remember [the others] arguing with our views,” York said.
thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the Russians were not preparing for total war.
“Soap operas sell lots of soap,” he famously said.
Ever seeking more power and control, the Atomic Energy Commission lobbied to remove authority over outer space from the Defense Department entirely and have it placed under AEC jurisdiction.
But the attack against ARPA by the military services was bound to fail. “The fact that they didn’t want an ARPA is one reason [Eisenhower] did,” said Admiral John E. Clark, an early ARPA employee.
“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.”
There was one other contender for the position of ARPA chief scientist, and that was Wernher von Braun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Resistance came from the federal security clearance people. “They found it hard to believe that an ‘elevator mechanic’ had accomplished all that Christofilos had claimed,” said York. “He must be, they thought, some sort of mole that the Russians had pumped full of ideas not his own.”
For the first time in the history of nuclear weapons, top scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union had been meeting here in Geneva, under the strictest of security provisions, to hash out technical terms so that a nuclear test suspension could go forward.
J-Site was part of ARPA’s secretive 474L System Program Office, which was responsible for developing techniques and equipment to track all objects in space and any ICBMs that might be coming in over the North Pole.
the scientific world had become divided into insiders and outsiders. “Jason people are insiders,” Vitale wrote. “They have access to secret information from many government offices.” On the opposite side of the coin, “those who engage in criticism of government policies without the benefit of such inside access are termed outsiders.” Vitale argued that scientists needed to stand together in their outrage and not accept what he called phony arguments. “When a debate arises between insiders and outsiders, invariably the argument is used that only the insiders know the true facts and that
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