NYU and Columbia University's IDA-Pentagon Connection--Part 7

UC-Santa Barbara campus site of July-August 1966 IDA-Jason Profs' Weapons Research

IDA’s 1960-1968 Jason Division Weapons Research Work (continued)

After its June 1966 Wellesley, Massachusetts summer study, the IDA’s Jason Division held a follow-up weapons development research study session in Santa Barbara, California in July and August of 1966. During this “Jason Division West” summer study meeting in Santa Barbara, Columbia Professor Henry Foley was assigned Room 8229 and Columbia Professor and Director of Columbia’s Nevis Labs Leon Lederman was assigned Room 8323 of a college dormitory in which to live and work.

As The Jasons by Ann Finkbeiner revealed, “they met off the Pacific coast, at the University of Santa Barbara, on the upper floor of a dormitory.” The Jasons also revealed that during the summer of 1966, “Val Fitch and Leon Lederman designed what they called pencil mines: little projectiles that looked like ballpoint pens…”

According to an Aug. 1, 1966 list of “Jason East Participants,” Columbia Professor Leon Lederman also attended the July-August “special project” follow-up session on the East Coast in 1966, as did Columbia Professor I.I. Rabi and Columbia Professor and IBM Watson Laboratory Director Richard Garwin. Nineteen scientists or executives from IDA (including twelve IDA Weapons Systems Evaluation Division staff members), twenty-nine U.S. professors from universities other than Columbia, two colonels from then-Secretary of Defense McNamara’s office, a scientist from Fort Monmouth and ten scientists from firms like GE, Bell Telephone Labs, IBM and Sylvania were also included on the Aug. 1, 1966 list of “Jason East Participants.” 

According to The Jasons by Ann Finkbeiner, by early August the Jason East group apparently had completed its report that designed “specific types of mines and bombs” and “suggested the aircraft appropriate for dropping, orbiting and striking” and some in the group again met at Dana Hall Girls School in Wellesley, Massachusetts on Aug. 15, 1966. Then, on Aug. 30, 1966, “Nierenberg, Deitchman, Kistiakowsky, Ruina, Jerome Wiesner and Jerrold Zacharias met with Robert McNamara and presented their report,” according to the same book. In their 1987 book Vietnam On Trial: Westmoreland vs. CBS, Bob Brewin and Sydney Shaw observed that “the IDA’s Jason division…proposed that vehicular traffic detected by the sensors should be attacked with SADEYE-BCU26B cluster bombs” in this report.

By 1968, the electronic battlefield technology that IDA’s Jason Division had developed was being used in South Vietnam in the Battle of Khe Sanh. And, on Sat. Feb. 3, 1968, Columbia Professor and Director of Columbia’s Watson IBM Labs Richard Garwin “traveled to Vietnam” with MIT Professor Henry Kendall and several other scientists “to check on the operation of the electronic barrier,” according to The Jasons by Ann Finkbeiner. The same book also observed:

“The sensors allowed such accurate detection of the enemy at night, in fog, behind hills, and in the jungle, that attacks on the enemy could be remote—that is, only artillery or air strikes—and would need no soldiers.

“…The electronic barrier turned into the electronic battlefield, the modern method for carrying out nonnuclear warfare, in particular on the urban battlefield…The relay to which the sensor talks is now a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle like the Predator or the Global Hawk, used in both Gulf wars and in Afghanistan…The responders are now bombs that are guided by lasers…”

Thousands of Indochinese civilians may have been killed as a direct result of the weapons technology development war research work that was done by IDA and its Jason Division during the period when Columbia was an institutional member of IDA. As the book The Air War In Indochina by Cornell University’s Air War Study Group revealed in 1972:

“The figures show that during the intense phase of the North Vietnam bombing, 100,000 to 200,000 tons of munitions per year were dropped. This bombing inflicted 25,000 to 50,000 casualties per year, 80 percent of whom were civilians…Indochina…has…become the laboratory for the evolution of the electronic battlefield…For the period from 1965 to April 1971, the estimate of civilian casualties in South Vietnam is 1,050,000 including 325,000 deaths…

“…Special electronic techniques for improving nighttime interdiction has been under development by the U.S. Air Force through a project named IGLOO WHITE. Initial operation of some of the components began in December 1967, and since that time a whole family of electronic devices has come into being…Sensors are implanted on the ground or suspended in the foliage by air drop…Aircraft overhead receive electronic messages from them and relay the information to a central computer control station. Strike aircraft are then directed to the designated area…American scientists and engineers—civilians as well as those working for the Department of Defense—have been deeply involved in the development of the electronic battlefield.”

Igloo White weapons developed by IDA Jason Members/University Profs in 1960s

Neither the Columbia University Administration nor the Pentagon has ever released much information on the number of Indochinese civilians who were killed or wounded as a direct result of the IDA and Jason Division weapons research work that Columbia University institutionally-sponsored in the 1960s. But at least 250,000 Indochinese civilians apparently lived near the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” area that the electronic battlefield initially targeted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (end of part 7)

(part 7 of August 2018 article originally posted on ZNet website)