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)

Columbia University's IDA Jason Project 1960s Work: Part 13

Sensor used during Vietnam War whose antenna would pick up movements of targeted Vietnamese insurgents that U.S. aircraft attacked, which IDA-Jason consultants/university professors helped develop in late 1960s.(from Collection of Curator Branch Naval History and Heriatge Command).

In early March 1967, I accidentally discovered that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA], that Columbia University President Grayson Kirk was a member of both the IDA board of trustees and the IDA executive committee and that Columbia University professors Lederman, Foley and Koopman were members of IDA’s Jason Division of U.S. university professors who engaged in secret weapons technology research for the war in Vietnam. In late March or early April 1967, the Columbia-Barnard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] then first formally demanded that the Columbia University Administration resign its institutional membership in IDA.

But on April 7, 1967, Brigadier General Deputy Commander Wesley Franklin of the Department of the Army’s U.S. Army Security Agency wrote a letter to the head of the Jason Project No. 2 group, MIT Professor Hill, which stated:

“Dear Dr. Hill,
“As you are aware, the work initiated on the basis of recommendations from your study group of the Jason-East program is fast culminating in an operational system. General Dynamics is now in the systems check out phase of CRAZY CAT fabrication.

“I invite you to visit the General Dynamics plant in San Diego to be updated on our progress in implementing your recommended program…

“We would also like you to review our systems test program and to visit Fort Huachuca during the systems operational test phase, which is scheduled 1 May through 9 June.”

MIT Professor Hill then wrote a letter on April 13, 1967 to General Maxwell Taylor (a former president of the Upper West Side's Lincoln Center and a former U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam), who was IDA’s president at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, which stated:

“Dear Max:

“…Last summer you were kind enough to express some interest in my part of Jason-East, and I thought you would like to know that the special aircraft for this exercise are even now being completed in San Diego.

“Our last conversations I believe concerned getting support from your member universities in finding good people and sending them to you…”

Columbia University's IDA Jason Project 1960s Work: Part 9

Sensor weapon used in Vietnam that Jason Project's university professors developed for Pentagon.

A follow-up study to its June 1966 Wellesley, Massachusetts gathering was also held by Jason East members on the East Coast in July 1966. As an MIT professor named Albert Hill wrote in a July 11, 1966 letter to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton:

“I should like to report that our special project got underway as scheduled on Wednesday, July 6, and I believe I can say we are beginning to come to grip with the problems.”
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 University Professor and Columbia University IBM Watson Laboratory Director Richard Garwin and Columbia University Professor I.I. Rabi. Other U.S. scientists, U.S. academics or Pentagon officials whose names appeared on the Aug. 1, 1966 list of “Jason East Participants” were the following folks:

James Armstrong of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Delbert Arnold of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Bruno Augenstein of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Divison;
Hendrik Bode, a Bell Telephone Labs Vice-President;
Albert Bottoms of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Burton Brown of General Electric Company;
Chester Cooper of IDA;
E.E. David Jr. of Bell Telephone Labs;
S.J. Deitchman of IDA;
Col. Robert Duffy of the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s Office;
Giulio Fermi of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Peter Freck of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Charles Fritz of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Eugene Fubini, an IBM Vice-President;
Murry Gell-Mann of California Institute of Technology;
Marvin Goldberger of Princeton University;
Donald Glaser of the University of California-Berkeley’s Virus Lab;
Daniel Gould of MIT;
Walter Hausz of General Electric;
Albert Hill of MIT;
David Katcher of IDA;
William Kaufmann of MIT;
Carl Kaysen of Harvard University;
Henry Kendall of MIT;
George Kistiakowsky of Harvard University;
Robert Kulinyi of Fort Monmouth;
Charles Lauritsen of California Institute of Technology;
Thomas Lauritsen of California Institute of Technology;
John Lawson of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Richard Leibler of IDA;
Harold Lewis of the University of California-Santa Barbara;
Franklin Lindsay of Itek;
Franklin Long, a Cornell University Vice-President;
Gordon MacDonald of UCLA;
William Matthews of MIT;
Peter Metz of MIT;
John Moriarty of IDA;
Walter Morrow of MIT’s Lincoln Labs;
Joseph Navarro of IDA;
William Nierenberg of the University of California-San Diego/La Jolla;
Alan Peterson of the Stanford Research Institute;
Emanuel R. Piore of IBM;
John Pontaro of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Edward Purcell of Harvard University;
Ellis Rabben of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
George Rothjens Jr. of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division;
Jack Ruina of IDA;
Col. Sanders of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and IDA;
Matthew Sands of Stanford University;
Oliver Selfridge of MIT’s Lincoln Labs’
Leonard Sheingold of the Sylvania Corporation;
Eugene Skolinikoff of MIT;
Norman Taylor of Arthur Little;
Clark Thurston of MIT;
Leonard Weinstein of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group’
George Wheeler of Bell Telephone Labs;
Jerome Wiesner, the Dean of Science of MIT;
E. B. Wilson of Harvard University;
Maurice Wilson of Bell Telephone Labs;
Jerold Zaharias of MIT;
Frederick Zachariasen of the California Institute of Technology; and
George Zweig of the California Institute of Techonology.

According to The Jasons by Ann Finkbeiner, the Jason East group apparently completed their report during July and early August 1966 that designed “specific types of mines and bombs” and “suggested the aircraft appropriate for dropping, orbiting and striking” and 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 also described what happened after the July and August 1966 summer meetings of Columbia’s IDA Jason Division:

“the IDA’s Jason division…on August 30, 1966 sent McNamara the results of their `Summer Study,’ which determined that `In the realities of Vietnam…the barrier must be imposed and maintained mainly by air.’
“This report, based on the research of M.Goldberger and W. Nierenberg, put a twentieth-century high-tech spin on the age-old concept of a wall…

“…As the Jasons planned it, the air-supported…barrier would consist of two parts, an anti-foot-traffic barrier and an anti-vehicular barrier, each backed by its own system of sensors and weapons…
“The Jasons…proposed `seeding’ a variety of unique munitions along the [Ho Chih Minh] Trail, lying in wait for an unsuspecting foe. These included `button bomblets,’ aspirin-sized explosives designed more to activiate the sensors when stepped on than to cause casualties. The bomblet was backed up by…irregular-shaped antipersonnel mines…

“Finally, the Jasons proposed that vehicular traffic detected by the sensors should be attacked with SADEYE-BCU26B cluster bombs…”

Columbia University's IDA Jason Project 1960s Work: Part 8

U. of C.-Santa Barbara Site of Secret 1966 Follow-up IDA-Jason Weapons Research Session of  university professors

The month after its June 1966 Wellesley, Massachusetts summer study, the Jason Division of Columbia’s IDA held a follow-up weapons development research study session in Santa Barbara, California, related to helping the Pentagon wage its war against the Vietnamese people, in July and August of 1966. During this July and August “Jason Division West” summer study meeting, Columbia University Professor Henry Foley apparently resided in Room 8229 of a college dormitory while attending the Jason Division’s summer session; and Columbia University Professor and Director of Columbia’s Nevis Labs Leon Lederman apparently was assigned Room 8323 for his dormitory room.

The following other U.S. academics or IDA staff people also apparently attended the July and August 1966 Jason meeting in Santa Barbara: Joel Bengston; James Bjorken; Richard Blankenbecler; David Caldwell; Kenneth Case; Nicholas Christofiles; Earl Crisler; Roy Cook; Paul Cusick Jr.; Roger Dashen; Seymour Deitchman; Ray Dow; Freeman Dyson; Inise Eichorst; Val Fitch; Kathryn Fitch; Murray Gell-Mann; Mervin Goldberger; Roland Herbert; David Katcher; Henry Kendall; T. Lauritsen; Robert Levin; Harold Lewis; Nicholas Laske; Harris Mayer; Gordon MacDonald; William Nierenberg; Scott Payne; Allen Peterson; Albert Petschof; Malvin Ruderman; Matthew Sands; John Simerson; Samuel Treiman; Kenneth Watson; Steven Weinberg; Ronald Weiner; Herbert York; Fredrick Zachariasen; and George Zweig.

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…”

Columbia University's IDA Jason Project 1960s Work: Part 4

MIT Faculty Club-Sloan Building

On April 15, 1966 MIT Professor of Physics J.R. Zacharias then mailed out the following invitation to at least one of the U.S. university professors who was a member of IDA’s Jason Division, along with a “partial proposed list” that included the names of former Columbia University Professor Townes and Columbia University professors Garwin, Lederman and Rabi:

“A group of us have been discussing with the Department of Defense the possibility of conducting a special study of the military and technological options open to the U.S. in Vietnam. The original impetus stemmed from the obvious concern with the poor progress and rapid escalation of the war…Our hope is that by re-examining the present military tactics, especially in the light of technological opportunities that may not have been adequately considered, military alternatives might emerge that would be less costly and more likely to lead to a political solution.

“The Department of Defense has shown strong interest in our conducting such a study, and discussions with the Department are now under way. A steering committee for the study will include Carl Kaysen, George Kistiakowsky, Jerome Wiesner, Eugene Skolnikoff and myself. Tentative plans call for a session from June 13 to 25, a break for staff work and other studies, followed by another two-week session late in July. The possibility exists of a third two-week period late in August if needed. Financial and administrative arrangements are being handled by D.H. Gould, Room 8-407 at M.I.T….There will be more information forthcoming on these subjects later.

“I hope you can manage to arrange your schedule so that you can take part in the study. Please call me when you get a chance…Meanwhile, I will try to call you.

“We are planning an exploratory discussion meeting of the group on Wednesday, May 4, at M.I.T. and would be very pleased if you could join us. The meeting will be held in the Penthouse of the M.I.T. Faculty Club, 50 Memorial Drive, at 9:00 a.m.

“I would appreciate your keeping information about this study confidential.”

Columbia University's IDA Jason Project 1960s Work: Part 1

Columbia University Nevis Labs Director, Physics Professor and Jason Project Member Leon Lederman and LBJ in 1960s

The purpose of the Project Jason group of U.S. university professors that Columbia University’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank set up in the late 1950s was described by Princeton University Professor John Wheeler in the following way, in a Dec. 11, 1963 letter to former IDA Vice President and Director of Research Albert Hill:

“Project Jason of the Institute for Defense Analyses has served as one mechanism to draw a new generation into defense issues. It has had the great advantage of making defense work seem to scientists not as a second rate activity, as it is often regarded in other countries, but as something deserving the attention of the very best minds.”

On Friday, Oct. 20, 1961 at 1710 H Street NW in Washington, D.C., for example, the Jason Division of Columbia’s IDA held the initial session of its annual Fall meeting. At 9:00 a.m., Seymour Deitchman of IDA’s RESD Division spoke and led a discussion about “Problems of Limited War.” Then, at 11:30 a.m., Dr. Michael May spoke and led a discussion about “Limited War Technology.” After a lunch break, the U.S. university professors who were members of the Jason Division then heard Richard DuBois of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Division speak and lead a discussion at 3:30 p.m. on “Carrier Tactical Forces Through 1963.”

The following morning at 9:00 a.m. on Sat., Oct. 21, 1961, Dr. M. Ruderman and Columbia University Professor of Physics Henry Foley, both members of the Jason Division, began the second day’s session of Jason’s annual Fall meeting by leading a discussion on “Midas.” Then at 1:00 p.m., former Columbia Professor of Physics Charles Townes led a discussion on “CORWA.” And the second day’s session ended with a 2:45 p.m. discussion led by Dr. Paul Hansen of IDA’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group on the “Tactical Aircraft Penetration Study.”


The Jason Division of Columbia’s IDA also held a summer weapons research study session between June 14, 1965 and July 30, 1965 in Building N. 3614 at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts during the 1960s. Half of the Pentagon weapons researchers attending this summer Jason Division meeting were ARPA, RAND and IDA staff employees and half of the attendees were U.S. university professors who were Jason Division members. Besides former Columbia University Professor Townes, the steering committee for the 1965 Jason summer study session included Columbia Professor or Physics Henry Foley, Columbia Professor of Physics and Columbia Nevis Labs Director Leon Lederman and Columbia Professor Richard Garwin, who also directed Columbia’s IBM Watson Laboratory.