Abstract
The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite, by Ann Finkbeiner. Viking, 291 pages, 2006, $27.95.
For more than 45 years, a group of skilled scientists has quietly advised the U.S. government on a range of vital issues. Standard biographies of scientists as well as histories of nuclear weapons and of science in the Cold War barely touch on what became known as the Jason Group, despite the fact that its work not only advanced U.S. military technology and contributed to executive branch decisions during Vietnam and the Cold War, but also helped steer the course of U.S. nuclear decision-making. In The Jasons, Ann Finkbeiner, a freelance science writer and educator, has supplied a first, though not definitive, cut at the group's story.
During the Eisenhower era, the government frequently recruited scientists to participate in informal “summer studies” aimed at addressing a range of defense-related technological problems. The Jason Group became one of the more articulated of these informal teams first hired by the Pentagon's research and development branch (at that time the Advanced Research Projects Agency) and successively administered by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and the Mitre Corporation.
In about 1960, the group acquired its more formal identity and name–the wife of one of the group's original scientists suggested that the crafty Greek hero Jason made a good symbol for the problem-solving scientists. For several decades, physicists almost exclusively comprised the Jasons, and the group specialized in theoretical studies that produced concepts and general principles that could be applied by scientific lab workers or weapons designers. Some concepts guided technical development; others prevented the American wizards of Armageddon from chasing after dead ends.
By all accounts, the Jason Group's most notable contributions were to the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The group's innovations included: a communication system for submerged submarines, high-velocity reentry vehicles, ballistic missile defense, studies for 1980s ballistic missile systems, and nuclear stockpile reliability. Its legacy can also be seen on the “electronic battlefield,” with the military's reliance on smart bombs and unmanned vehicles (starting in Vietnam), and in astronomy, with the Jasons' contributions to adaptive optics. But the group's nuclear influence may be coming to an end. In recent years, the group has moved away from a narrow focus on military projects, according to Finkbeiner, and in 2001, the Bush administration cut off its Pentagon funding altogether.
The history of the Jasons is rich with personalities and intrigue, but unfortunately Finkbeiner's breathless account is rather one-dimensional. The Jasons is long–and repetitive–on the careers of scientists, which will be fascinating for defense intellectuals and scientists, especially physicists, but not for many others. As a longtime admirer of Sidney Drell, Richard Garwin, and others who have populated the Bulletin's pages, I appreciated the fresh stories gathered from interviews but was disappointed that the relationship between the Jasons and the evolution of U.S. national security policy does not emerge clearly from the book.
Finkbeiner tries, somewhat artificially, to trace the Jasons directly to the Manhattan Project, while largely ignoring the more direct connection to the summer studies of continental air defense and other matters of the early 1950s. She exhibits a lack of familiarity with the subject matter in other sections, such as when she inserts the Bikini underwater atomic test shot “Baker” into a discussion of the hydrogen bomb. The portrayal of the Jasons' contributions to U.S. bombing strategy in the Vietnam War is thin, except for the description of the group's study on the disutility of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, which garnered media attention not long ago. [See “Nixing Nukes in Vietnam,” May/June 2003 Bulletin.] The book passes lightly over the Jasons' contributions of the 1980s, when physicist Charles Townes headed, and a number of other Jasons participated in, a succession of blue ribbon panels on U.S. nuclear forces.
Finkbeiner's treatment of the electronic battlefield, which in Vietnam was supposed to allow the U.S. military to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail through a combination of real-time observations and attacks upon supplies and troops, is a high point of the book. The author is quite correct to portray the Vietnam era as the apex of visibility–and controversy–for the Jasons. But here again, opportunity is lost due to narrow research. The Ja-sons contains a vivid account of the 1972 student occupation of Columbia University's Pupin Hall (not “Laboratory” as the book states) in protest over the university's connection to the Vietnam War. The one-sided story (largely drawn from interviews with one postdoctoral physicist, who later became a Jason, and some private papers), however, obscures more than it enlightens.
The account starts by describing the extravagance of the protesters' rhetoric, implying that it was somehow illegitimate, but without taking into account the political climate of the time. The occupation of Pupin occurred in the context of a student strike that shut down the university for days as the United States began bombing new locations in Vietnam as part of the Easter Offensive, soon after mining Haiphong Harbor. The incident reached a flash point when protesters uncovered papers from Columbia physics professor, and Nobelist, Murray Gell-Mann's Jason project to improve the efficiency of aerial interdiction over Laos. In the end, Finkbeiner fails to address the main issue university complicity with the Vietnam War, specifically embodied in its links with the IDA and the Jasons.
Indeed, throughout the book a number of important questions go unanswered: How far did the Jasons advance U.S. technology? How much money did they save the government by fending off the dreamer technologists? How effective were Jason efforts to rationalize and reduce the violence of U.S. bombing in Vietnam? What, if any, institutional impact did the group's thinking have on the Pentagon? Did the Jasons advance U.S. security? Arms control? Anything?
The book's stories of physicists involved in national service are engaging, but the reader ends up without much sense of the Jasons' collective contribution, leaving an already thin literature on the group plenty of room for a more systematic study.