The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen

With a predicted yield of 6 megatons, Castle Bravo would deliver twice as much power as all the bombs dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II together, including both atomic bombs.

Castle Bravo was a weapon of unprecedented destruction. It was 250 percent more powerful than the force calculated by the scientists who had engineered it. In time Castle Bravo would become known as the worst radiological disaster in history.

competition with Los Alamos. This idea—that rivalry fosters excellence and is imperative for supremacy—would become a hallmark of U.S. defense science in the decades ahead.

The first test would take place on August 27, 1958. Although no one had a name for it at the time, Operation Argus was the world’s first test of an electromagnetic pulse bomb, or EMP.

The man, J. C. R. Licklider, invented the concept of the Internet, which was originally called the ARPANET.

Iraqis launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but almost immediately, a U.S. Patriot missile shot down an Iraqi Scud missile, making the Patriot the first antimissile ballistic missile fired in combat.

A little after 2:00 p.m. Rumsfeld gathered a core group of military advisors and Pentagon staff and began discussing what steps he wanted taken next. The people in the room included General Richard Myers, acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for intelligence; Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman; and a Pentagon lawyer. Cambone and Clarke took notes with pen and paper.

Tether had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a long career at the Pentagon and in the intelligence world. Since 1978 he had been working in both intelligence and defense, serving as the director of the national intelligence office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1978 to 1982, and from 1982 to 1986 as the director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, the agency’s liaison to the CIA.

Since 1995, DARPA had spent roughly $42 million advancing the Genoa concept under the Information Systems Office. The program was part of a concept DARPA now called Total Information Awareness (TIA).