The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite
By Ann Finkbeiner
(Viking)
Credit: Mark Weiss
Science and secrecy don't exactly go hand in glove, but when they do, the hand is prosthetic and the glove is leather and both are at the end of Dr. Strangelove's upraised arm. This is true in the public imagination, but it also exists in the scientific imagination. Just ask the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who attended a Cold War-era defense briefing only to hear about a computer simulation of a massive missile exchange leading to the deaths of 20 million people.
Ann Finkbeiner recounts this story early in The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite, and not surprisingly, it haunts the rest of the book. Her subject is a collective of top-notch scientists who have been meeting every summer since 1960 to serve as consultants to the US Department of Defense. They don't like secrecy. They would probably all agree with Finkbeiner's simple declaration: "Secrecy is antiscience." But they also believe that transparency sometimes isn't an option, and they know too well that it can end up doing science more harm than good.
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Some information about the Jasons has surfaced in the press over the decades, especially in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and in the 1980s some of the Jasons participated in an oral history project now archived at the American Institute of Physics. But, until now, no one has written a major book on them. Indeed, much of the work the Jasons did—and do—for the government remains classified, and when Jasons are uncertain about the status of information, they err on the side of secrecy. Finkbeiner herself has conducted dozens of interviews with Jasons past and present. But by her own admission, she has produced "less a respectable history than a series of stories." That episodic, sometimes anecdotal quality lends the book a tone more journalistic than literary; Finkbeiner rarely recreates a scene, even when it would have been ethically unimpeachable to do so, preferring to keep the accounts within quotes. She has, nevertheless, produced an important investigation into the relationship between science and government; between "studying ultimate reality" and "shooting down missiles;" between the rules of logic and the vagaries of human nature. At heart, The Jasons is a meditation on morality.
Credit: Michael Gillette
The story begins, as descents down slippery slopes often do, at the summit of best intentions. During World War II, the atomic bomb might have been "the prototype of a harmful technology forcing a moral decision," as Finkbeiner writes, but for the physicists working on the Manhattan Project, the decision on whether to build a bomb before the other guys did was what we today might call a no-brainer. Not long after the end of the war, American physicists again found themselves advising the government in secret, this time about how to build more bombs, bigger bombs, better bombs, as well as how to detect the detonation of enemy bombs. Then on October 4, 1957, the Soviets sent a satellite into space. "It's hard," John Archibald Wheeler tells Finkbeiner, "to reconstruct now the sense of doom when we were on the ground and Sputnik was up in the sky." Sputnik carried no cargo but it did send a message: A rocket that could launch a 183-pound beeping piece of metal into orbit above the US could easily throw a warhead the same distance.