Manhattan Project: the (not so secret) sequel

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, the pentagon, government advisors

Would you believe JASON stands for "July August September October November"? I didn't think so. Perhaps if some Pentagon figure hadn't first suggested the name Project Sunrise, prompting a chorus of gagging, no alternative would have been suggested. As it was, the name Jason was strongly suggested in its place, for its relation to the quest of the Argo in search of the golden fleece. The utility, and low profile, of the group is suggested by the fact that Senator Proxmire hasn't tried to award them one of his "golden fleece" anti-awards.

But who, or what, is Jason? It isn't really much of a secret. After the Manhattan Project was gradually disbanded, some in the government, and particularly the military, thought it would be useful to continue to sponsor a collaboration of scientists, at first all physicists, to study and advise them about the scientific and technical hurdles they faced. Though many projects and the ensuing reports have been classified Secret or Top Secret, the existence of the group hasn't been hidden, the way the Manhattan Project was hidden and disguised.

As it turned out, many of the first members, frequently called Jasons, had worked on the Manhattan Project, and several helped develop its successor the thermonuclear bomb. This made them heroes from the inception of the group in 1960 until the 1970s, when they were suddenly made the goats of the Vietnam War in the minds of many.

Science writer Ann Finkbeiner found out about Jason quite by happenstance, and became fascinated with it. She spent two years reading, learning, and interviewing many former and current Jasons. Considering the basic number of members, I suspect she has contacted well over half its total membership. Other than Dr. X and Prof. Y, those she interviewed agreed to have their names published in her book The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite.

The defining characteristic of Jason, she found, is collegiality. While the membership has increasingly included non-physicists, now amounting to about one-third, the members run their work like a grad-school seminar with numerous smaller discussion and work groups. Their value is working together, so many eyes see all the problems and have a whack at solving them.

Basically, if you take almost any technical problem, and present it to a massed IQ of 5,000 or so, embodied in no more than thirty people with hundreds of years of higher education and research experience among them, then let them have at it, you will at least get a large amount of very creative response, and usually one or more solutions ranging from baldly pragmatic to blue-sky, intergalactic wild.

Because of their long-time sponsorship by ARPA (now DARPA), and continuing funding by DDR&E, a lot of their work has been in weapons systems. But they are proudest in two areas: firstly, that they have stopped a lot of costly "lemons", such as an American SST (Concorde competitor); and secondly, that they got great technical advances such as Adaptive Optics declassified and in the hands of academic and practical scientists who can use it.

Along the way, they showed what would and would not work for ballistic missile defense and fusion power generation, and studied climate change, pointing the way to determine how CO2 we produce affects it, while doing much of the work to make such determinations themselves.

For the past couple of decades, primarily the presidencies of Bush, Clinton, and "W" Bush, Jason's influence has waned. These administrations don't like hearing "inconvenient truths." Perhaps that is why former VP Al Gore has stepped outside the establishment to produce his documentary about climate change and our role in it. Science is unpopular right now, almost as unpopular as it was in 1975.

The author's closing words are both an encouragement and a warning to all: "Good scientists make good advisers. Their methods of thinking about science are the most verifiable, falsifiable, and mutually understandable that humanity has ever come up with. ...since the whole enterprise of finding the truth depends on telling it, then about their clear and beautiful science...scientists tell the truth. When the country faces decisions about necessarily imprecise, shades-of-gray policies, it should have some truths at hand."