Sputnik’s success created an overwhelming sense of fear that permeated all levels of U.S. society, including the scientific establishment:
As John Wheeler, a theoretical physicist who popularized the term “black hole” would later tell an interviewer: “It is hard to reconstruct now the sense of doom when we were on the ground and Sputnik was up in the sky.”
Back on the ground, the event spurred a mobilization of American scientists unseen since the war. Six weeks after the launch of Sputnik, President Dwight Eisenhower revived the President’s Scientific Advisory Council (PSAC). It was a group of 16 scientists who reported directly to him, granting them an unprecedented amount of influence and power. Twelve weeks after Sputnik, the Department of Defense launched the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), which was later responsible for the development of the internet. Fifteen months after Sputnik, the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (ODDRE) was launched to oversee all defense research. A 36-year-old physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, Herb York, was named head of the Office of the ODDRE. There, he reported directly to the president and was given total authority over all defense research spending.
It was the beginning of a war for technological supremacy. Everyone involved understood that in the nuclear age, the stakes were existential.
It was not the first time the U.S. government had mobilized the country’s leading scientists. World War II had come to be known as “the physicists’ war.” It was physicists who developed proximity bombs and the radar systems that rendered previously invisible enemy ships and planes visible, enabling them to be targeted and destroyed, and it was physicists who developed the atomic bombs that ended the war. The prestige conferred by their success during the war positioned physicists at the top of the scientific hierarchy. With the members of the Manhattan Project now aging, getting the smartest young physicists to work on military problems was of intense interest to York and the ODDRE.
Physicists saw the post-Sputnik era as an opportunity to do well for themselves. Many academic physicists more than doubled their salaries working on consulting projects for the DOD during the summer. A source of frustration to the physicists was that these consulting projects were awarded through defense contractors, who were making twice as much as the physicists themselves. A few physicists based at the University of California Berkeley decided to cut out the middleman and form a company they named Theoretical Physics Incorporated.
Word of the nascent company spread quickly. The U.S.’s elite physics community consisted of a small group of people who all went to the same small number of graduate programs and were faculty members at the same small number of universities. These ties were tightened during the war, when many of those physicists worked closely together on the Manhattan Project and at MIT’s Rad Lab.
Charles Townes, a Columbia University physics professor who would later win a Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the laser, was working for the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) at the time and reached out to York when he learned of the proposed company. York knew many of the physicists personally and immediately approved $250,000 of funding for the group. Townes met with the founders of the company in Los Alamos, where they were working on nuclear-rocket research. Appealing to their patriotism, he convinced them to make their project a department of IDA.
A short while later the group met in Washington D.C., where they fleshed out their new organization. They came up with a list of the top people they would like to work with and invited them to Washington for a presentation. Around 80 percent of the people invited joined the group; they were all friends of the founders, and they were all high-level physicists. Seven of the first members, or roughly one-third of its initial membership, would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Other members, such as Freeman Dyson, who published foundational work on quantum field theory, were some of the most renowned physicists to never receive the Nobel.
The newly formed group was dubbed “Project Sunrise” by ARPA, but the group’s members disliked the name. The wife of one of the founders proposed the name JASON, after the Greek mythological hero who led the Argonauts on a quest for the golden fleece. The name stuck and JASON was founded in December 1959, with its members being dubbed “Jasons.”
The key to the JASON program was that it formalized a unique social fabric that already existed among elite U.S. physicists. The group was elitist, but it was also meritocratic. As a small, tight-knit community, many of the scientists who became involved in JASON had worked together before. It was a peer network that maintained strict standards for performance. With permission to select their own members, the Jasons were able to draw from those who they knew were able to meet the expectations of the group.
This expectation superseded existing credentials; Freeman Dyson never earned a PhD, but he possessed an exceptionally creative mind. Dyson became known for his involvement with Project Orion, which aimed to develop a starship design that would be powered through a series of atomic bombs, as well as his Dyson Sphere concept, a hypothetical megastructure that completely envelops a star and captures its energy.
Another Jason was Nick Christofilos, an engineer who developed particle accelerator concepts in his spare time when he wasn’t working at an elevator maintenance business in Greece. Christofilos wrote to physicists in the U.S. about his ideas, but was initially ignored. But he was later offered a job at an American research laboratory when physicists found that some of the ideas in his letters pre-dated recent advances in particle accelerator design. Dyson’s and Christofilios’s lack of formal qualifications would preclude an academic research career today, but the scientific community at the time was far more open-minded.
JASON was founded near the peak of what became known as the military-industrial complex. When President Eisenhower coined this term during his farewell address in 1961, military spending accounted for nine percent of the U.S. economy and 52 percent of the federal budget; 44 percent of the defense budget was being spent on weapons systems.
But the post-Sputnik era entailed a golden age for scientific funding as well. Federal money going into basic research tripled from 1960 to 1968, and research spending more than doubled overall. Meanwhile, the number of doctorates awarded in physics doubled. Again, meritocratic elitism dominated: over half of the funding went to 21 universities, and these universities awarded half of the doctorates.
With a seemingly unlimited budget, the U.S. military leadership had started getting some wild ideas. One general insisted a moon base would be required to gain the ultimate high ground. Project Iceworm proposed to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launchers under the Greenland ice sheet. The U.S. Air Force sought a nuclear-powered supersonic bomber under Project WS-125 that could take off from U.S. soil and drop hydrogen bombs anywhere in the world. There were many similar ideas and each military branch produced analyses showing that not only were the proposed weapons technically feasible, but they were also essential to winning a war against the Soviet Union.
Prior to joining the Jasons, some of its scientists had made radical political statements that could make them vulnerable to having their analysis discredited. Fortunately, JASON’s patrons were willing to take a risk and overlook political offenses in order to ensure that the right people were included in the group. Foreseeing the potential political trap, Townes proposed a group of senior scientific advisers, about 75 percent of whom were well-known conservative hawks. Among this group was Edward Teller, known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb.” This senior layer could act as a political shield of sorts in case opponents attempted to politically tarnish JASON members.
Every spring, the Jasons would meet in Washington D.C. to receive classified briefings about the most important problems facing the U.S. military, then decide for themselves what they wanted to study. JASON’s mandate was to prevent “technological surprise,” but no one at the Pentagon presumed to tell them how to do it.
In July, the group would reconvene for a six-week “study session,” initially alternating yearly between the east and west coasts. Members later recalled these as idyllic times for the Jasons, with the group becoming like an extended family. The Jasons rented homes near each other. Wives became friends, children grew up like cousins, and the community put on backyard plays at an annual Fourth of July party. But however idyllic their off hours, the physicists’ workday revolved around contemplating the end of the world. Questions concerning fighting and winning a nuclear war were paramount. The ideas the Jasons were studying approached the level of what had previously been science fiction.
Some of the first JASON studies focused on ARPA’s Defender missile defense program. Their analysis furthered ideas involving the detection of incoming nuclear attacks through the infrared signature of missiles, applied newly-discovered astronomical techniques to distinguish between nuclear-armed missiles and decoys, and worked on the concept of shooting what were essentially directed lightning bolts through the atmosphere to destroy incoming nuclear missiles.
The lightning bolt idea, known today as directed energy weapons, came from Christofilos, who was described by an ARPA historian as mesmerizing JASON physicists with the “kind of ideas that nobody else had.” Some of his other projects included a fusion machine called Astron, a high-altitude nuclear explosion test codenamed Operation Argus that was dubbed the “greatest scientific experiment ever conducted,” and explorations of a potential U.S. “space fleet.”
The Jasons’ analysis on the effects of nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere, water, and underground, as well as methods of detecting these explosions, was credited with being critical to the U.S. government’s decision to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. Because of their analysis, the U.S. government felt confident it could verify treaty compliance; the treaty resulted in a large decline in the concentration of radioactive particles in the atmosphere.
The success of JASON over its first five years increased its influence within the U.S. military and spurred attempts by U.S. allies to copy the program. Britain tried for years to create a version of JASON, even enlisting the help of JASON’s leadership. But the effort failed: British physicists simply did not seem to desire involvement. Earlier attempts by British leaders like Winston Churchill to create a British MIT had run into the same problems.
The difference was not ability, but culture. American physicists did not have a disdain for the applied sciences, unlike their European peers. They were comfortable working as advisors on military projects and were employed by institutions that were dependent on DOD funding. Over 20 percent of Caltech’s budget in 1964 came from the DOD, and it was only the 15th largest recipient of funding; MIT was first and received twelve times as much money. The U.S. military and scientific elite were enmeshed in a way that had no parallel in the rest of the world then or now.
