Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  The president sought the advice of ACDA director William Foster, who in turn consulted Al Wadman, leader of the ACDA science and technology bureau. Wadman turned to Freeman Dyson. Should we cling to Plowshare or aim for a treaty? Dyson weighed his loyalties to Edward Teller at Livermore (where much of the Plowshare work was undertaken) and to Ted Taylor at General Atomic (where Orion was still struggling to survive) against his loyalty to friends like Bethe and, of course, to the prospects for greater comity with the Soviets. Dyson’s considered opinion, which percolated its way back up the chain of command and thence to Moscow, was that the Soviets should have their way. “Peaceful” tests of nuclear explosions in the air, space, and ocean were abandoned, and a treaty was achieved.

  Dyson diminishes his own role in this saga. No doubt the president and ACDA officials consulted numerous experts along the way, Dyson said, leading to the concession on peaceful testing.18 Furthermore, even though Plowshare had many advocates in and out of government, its implementation seemed to be, at best, many years in the future. Maybe trading in Plowshare for a test ban wasn’t such a hardship.19

  Next came the necessary Senate approval for the treaty. Most high-ranking government officials, such as the secretaries of state and defense, the AEC chairman, and the Joint Chiefs of the military branches, testified in favor of the treaty. Dyson, on behalf of the Federation of American Scientists, not in his capacity as a part-time employee of ACDA, testified positively. Testifying negatively were, among others, Robert Oppenheimer’s twin antagonists, Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller.

  One day after Dyson’s Senate testimony in August 1963, another historic event occurred on the streets of Washington, D.C. A quarter million people marched in opposition to racial injustice. Freeman Dyson joined the procession only a few blocks from his office. He flowed with the crowd to the culminating event, the series of speeches delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Dyson stood nearby and was moved to tears, like thousands of others, by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, perhaps the greatest American oration since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “I would be ready to go to jail for him anytime,” Dyson wrote in a letter that night.20

  The Senate, voting 80 to 19, approved the limited test ban treaty. And not too soon. The government reported that the amount of radioactive strontium-90 in milk had doubled over the past year. Little wonder: the fallout from tests during 1962, the year of the Cuban crisis, was comparable to the sum of the fallout from all earlier nuclear testing back to 1945.21 One report calculated that in Nevada and Utah, in a zone downwind of the Nevada test site not far from where Freeman Dyson had encountered his profound quietude at Jackass Flats, an estimated 3,000 children had received “excessive radiation that would possibly lead to 10 to 12 cases of thyroid cancer.”22 So, nursing infants and schoolkids were now incorporating artifacts of Cold War preparedness into the marrow of their bones.

  11. On the Oregon Trail

  Dyson as Pentagon Consultant

  (1960s–1970s)

  At a reception, in ordinary conversation about the worsening military situation in Vietnam, General Maxwell Taylor had actually said “I think it might be a good idea to throw in a nuke now and then just to keep the other side guessing.” Freeman Dyson, who was insider enough to have been invited to the reception, had seen and heard many notable things in his professional life, but at this instant he was too startled by the general’s remark to say anything back or to be certain he’d even heard the words correctly. So he consulted with his three scientist colleagues who had been within earshot to confirm that the quip had not been made in jest. They all agreed that the general had said what they thought he’d said, and it was no joke.1

  For General Taylor and some other high government officials, deploying tactical nuclear bombs was not an abstract concept, a doomsday last-resort measure, but something to be employed now in the fight against Communist aggression. The year was 1966 and the United States was becoming ever more entangled in the jungles of Vietnam. General Taylor was no longer chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but was still an important military advisor to President Lyndon Johnson. For dealing with a pesky enemy it must have been tempting to use a weapon that could wipe combatants off the board in a millionth of a second.

  Still, the general was talking, almost casually, about using the nuclear option in Vietnam. He couldn’t just say that, could he? Dyson and his colleagues decided to do something.

  THE VIETNAMIZATION OF PHYSICS

  Among scientists, physicists have had a disproportionate influence on matters of technology policy and national security in the United States. A majority of presidential science advisors have been physicists. Asked about this, the physicists themselves say that this is because of their broad training in the principles behind the big-ticket topics that command critical attention and large budgets—armaments, transport, energy, sensors, telecommunications, computers, space. The single biggest factor in the need for solemn science advice was the critical centrality of nuclear weaponry in defense planning.

  After World War II, Manhattan Project scientists and their heirs established several earnest institutions, such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which published articles about the implications of nuclear research and other social issues. Another institution, the Federation of American Scientists, also carefully scrutinized and commented upon—sometimes loudly—U.S. government policies and actions. The scientist organization with the biggest impact on postwar government research, at least for classified research, was called Jason. Taking its name from the ancient story of the hero and his mates on the ship Argo seeking treasure and adventure, Jason was formed in 1960 by some notable physicists such as John Wheeler of Princeton and Charles Townes of Bell Labs.2

  The name Jason denotes the group or any particular member. It was—and is, since it still functions to this day—funded by federal money but is largely independent of federal interference. It generally has between thirty and sixty active members. Newcomers are chosen by existing members and have to possess a top secret clearance qualifying them to handle classified documents. At first the members were mostly physicists and all male, but this changed in later years. The Jasons meet for six or seven weeks each summer and for briefer times in other months.

  Dyson was one of the first to be invited to join. Summer work, such as his stint with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, kept him from participating at first. But from 1965 onward, he has been one of the most active members. His first Jason project was to assess the Nike missile defense system.

  Jasons were stellar in their fields of study or, like Dyson, pretty good at everything. Put them in a room, give them a month and a half to solve a technical problem or assess a weapon proposal, and they’d come back with an answer or sometimes a devastating dismissal. Jason members were discouraged from rendering moral views of the political or military issue at stake. That’s not what the consumers of the reports wanted to see. Instead, it was Jason’s job to ensure that the known laws of physics were being obeyed. As Freeman Dyson had learned from his days at Bomber Command, the crazier the scheme being considered by generals, the more valuable it was to have independent, objective, civilian, informed comment.

  Problems would be brought to Jason from a “sponsor,” typically one of the military services or the Pentagon’s ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same outfit that oversaw Orion. The problem might involve some new detector technology or the basing of missiles or the effectiveness of a new airplane design. Jason usually spun off a committee of their members to look at each problem. This team would proceed to read documents, interview officials—often military personnel or civilian contractors—occasionally make site visits, perform calculations, get together for discussions, and then write up a report.

  What Jason produced was “deliverables,” consisting of shrewd scientific analyses of single topics. Thereafter the sponsor owned that report. The navy might make the findings public or lock them up for thi
rty years. You could never be sure the Pentagon would use Jason’s assessment, but at least the requests for Jason input kept coming.

  What made it enticing for Dyson to join, and for the others too, was the idea that you were helping your country, that you got to work on challenging projects with potentially important consequences, and that you would be in the company of some of the brightest scientists in the world. Early members included Murray Gell-Mann, who received the Nobel Prize for his theory that led to the idea of quarks; Steven Weinberg, who also got a Nobel Prize for particle physics theory; and Richard Garwin, one of the developers of the H-bomb. Like the Masons, the Jasons tended to be earnest, upstanding gentlemen (no lady members yet) who could keep a secret. There was no special handshake.

  What about that glib utterance by General Taylor at the reception? The four scientists in attendance—all of them Jasons—set to work. Although no sponsor had officially asked for a study on the subject of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, they were going to get one anyway. Jason funding allowed for this kind of discretionary inquiry. The four—Dyson, Weinberg, University of Chicago chemist Robert Gomer, and Chicago physicist Courtenay Wright—began to pore over documents. One of these was entitled “Oregon Trail.” The Oregon Trail, besides being the nineteenth-century wagon road used by white settlers heading outward from Missouri to various Northwest destinations, was the name given by American officials to the corridor used by insurgents bringing supplies from North to South Vietnam in the 1960s.

  The name also applied to a massive survey prepared by the U.S. Army around 1965 concerning recent conflicts in Indochina. Dyson was fascinated by the part of the report devoted to assessing the general legacy of colonial involvement in Southeast Asia. The professional historians who prepared this material concluded that in uprisings for which the European overlords devoted most of their attention and resources to military rather than social problems, such as the French in Indochina, the war was “lost.” Things went better if the European powers emphasized social over military solutions, as with the British in Malaya. These lessons were to serve presently as lessons for American behavior in Vietnam.

  “Oregon Trail” remained classified and mostly unused, as far as Dyson could tell. Why, he wanted to know, weren’t the lessons taken to heart? If “the Army had read their own documents they would never have gotten us into Vietnam. It was clear that what happened in Vietnam went exactly contrary to what “Oregon Trail” was saying should happen.”3 The more immediate value of “Oregon,” however, was not the historical lessons but its sections devoted to the possibility of using small, 1-kiloton-level nuclear bombs in Vietnam. The Jason effort would be the assessment of this part of “Oregon.”

  Dyson was not the main organizer of this work. Indeed, he never sought a leadership role in Jason. He didn’t want to become a heavyweight in advisory circles, like some Jasons. He didn’t like formulating policy. All of these things he left to others. He enjoyed being told what to do. What he did do he did well. Given something practical to calculate, an engineering problem to solve—that’s what he wanted. His work on TRIGA and Orion had whetted his appetite for these things. With his flair for writing he was often the one designated to prepare the report.

  The four-man Jason team decided early that their summary would avoid all political or ethical considerations and concentrate entirely on the military utility of tactical nukes in Vietnam. Only in this way, they figured, could their unsolicited, independent view have any chance of influencing deliberations higher up the Pentagon chain of command.

  Tactical bombs, in contrast to city-destroying strategic bombs, were intended to halt massed troops or armored formations, or to block mountain passes. Jason concluded that the 1-kT devices would do all those things, but that you’d need a lot of them, perhaps a thousand a year. Even then, felled forests could be cleared by the enemy relatively quickly. Furthermore, soil would be fouled by radioactivity, presenting a continuing health hazard. You’d be hurting civilians while not much holding back soldiers.

  There was another argument against the use of nukes. This was the fact that U.S. forces, concentrated in fixed and conspicuously built-up fortifications, represented a much larger and more visible target than the one posed by insurgent forces. The introduction of U.S. nukes in Vietnam would encourage Russia or China to sneak nukes of their own into the action. Instead of dropped from planes or missiles, the bombs would be trucked toward or tunneled beneath fat American targets.

  Prepared in the fall of 1966, the Jason report, “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in South-East Asia,” was presented to the Pentagon. As usual, no response came back, so no one can be sure of how instrumental it might have been in keeping nuclear weapons out of the war in Indochina. Even if the Jason work did no more than buttress the arguments used by those senior Pentagon officials who were themselves against tactical nukes, then Dyson considered his work on this subject worthwhile.4 Even the title of the Jason report was classified until 1970. The Jason report in full was declassified only in December 2002.5

  Freeman Dyson disliked everything about the Vietnam War. He continued to confer with the other Jasons, and to respect their work, but he felt that Jason Vietnam-related projects were being undercut. Dyson’s crashing airplane nightmares continued. In 1968 he decided to quit Jason, but was talked out of this decision by Jason’s leader Hal Lewis.6 Dyson was of course not the only one disgusted by the Vietnam War. A vast protest movement grew up in the United States and in other countries. In 1971, this protest touched upon Jason directly.

  Since its inception Jason’s existence was practically unknown to the public, until it was dragged into prominence by the publication of the “Pentagon Papers.” This name refers to a series of classified reports—internal army documents assessing America’s conduct of the war—that were leaked and then published in the pages of The New York Times and other newspapers. There for all to see was reference to Jason and to specific scientists doing secret work on behalf of the military establishment. Some Jason members, such as Gell-Mann, Garwin, Leon Lederman, and Stanford physicist Sidney Drell, were castigated for contributing their talents to conducting a dirty war.7

  Dyson and his fellow authors on the Vietnam nukes report were criticized. Only the title of their report but not its arguments against the deployment of nukes had been revealed. So it might have been supposed from the title, if that’s all you saw, that the Jason authors were in favor of tactical nukes rather than opposed. One of those authors, Steven Weinberg, returning on a visit to Berkeley, California, where he had been a professor years before, drove past his old home. There on the sidewalk someone had scrawled the message, “Steve Weinberg, War Criminal.”8

  Dyson was criticized for belonging to Jason at all, despite his professed loathing of the Vietnam War, on the grounds that the honorable thing would have been to resign. Dyson was specifically criticized for his involvement with the “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in South-East Asia” report. Even while forbearing to disclose the conclusions of the report, which was still classified, to his high-minded critics, Dyson ably defended himself:

  It is true that I helped write this paper under Jason auspices, and it is possible it may have had some slight influence upon US policy in Vietnam. The question is whether I am ashamed or proud of what I have done. I am glad to state publicly that I am proud of it. If my work had no effect on government policy, I can have done no great harm. If my work had some effect, I can be proud to have helped to avert a human tragedy far greater even than the one we have witnessed.9

  Some of the war protests were violent. In 1969 Dyson came to Santa Barbara to give a talk at the University of California. Staying at the faculty club, he was wrenched from sleep by an explosion. He was frozen with fear, as he had been in his recurring plane crash dream. After what must have been only a minute or two, he finally moved into action. He came downstairs to find the hotel caretaker, badly burned, being taken away by some students. The victim, a man named Dover Sharp, had picked up a
bomb-rigged package. No perpetrators were found, but the bombing of the faculty club was suspected of being an act of protest against the Vietnam War, one of many such deadly protests.

  Dover Sharp died of his injuries and Dyson, writing about the episode years later, blamed himself. If only he hadn’t been frozen, as in past enactments of his dream, he might have been able to offer assistance more quickly. He might have saved Sharp’s life.

  After that night Dyson never again had the burning-plane nightmare.10

  OUT OF THE BLACK

  Much of Jason’s work was narrowly focused on military projects, things like tactical nuclear weapons and antipersonnel devices. But other problems were interesting also for their potential civilian applications. An important example was the detection or imaging of luminous objects in the sky with ground-based telescopes. The air force wanted to track enemy ballistic missiles, whereas astronomers wanted to look at distant stars. Both these activities were frustrated by the light-distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. You can get a sense of this optical smearing when you look out to the horizon along an asphalt highway on a hot day. The rising heat wafts the air around just above the road, blurring the view and making mirages.

  In 1972 the Pentagon sought Jason’s opinion of a proposal by a military contractor to undo the distortion with an optical system that, moment by moment, assessed the degree of overhead turbulence and quickly compensated by a selective steering or flexing of segmented reflective surfaces. This clever idea had been around since the early 1950s but had languished for want of agile enough instruments.11

  By the 1970s this “active optics” scheme had become a possibility. Freeman Dyson and Steven Weinberg were grappling with the problem when into their office came a new Jason, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, who had come up with an independent approach to the challenge of undoing the effects of turbulence. Feeling a bit intimidated by his exposure to so many senior and illustrious colleagues all at once, Muller, who later became an illustrious cosmologist himself, cautiously shared his mathematical insight with Weinberg and Dyson. Weinberg’s first reaction was that the new idea wouldn’t work. Dyson gently disagreed, and then explained how. The men grappled with the problem at the blackboard.12 It was tractable after all.