DARPA's First Projects

the Department of Defense. If you have not listened to the previous episode, I would recommend you go back and listen to that one first to hear about the founding of the agency and its first few projects, including the world's first spy satellite, before you come on over to

this one now. I mentioned in the last episode that there were tons of projects and historical events all happening around the formation of ARPA, which was of course the original name for DARPA, and that meant I had to pick and choose which ones to talk about and follow

those lines of logic. One of the ones I skipped over is one I want to look at before I move on in the timeline of the agency, and the project would involve exploding nuclear warheads high above the earth in an effort to create what would amount to a force field of sorts in order to protect the United States from an incoming nuclear strike. This project was based off the work of a physicist named Nick Christophilis, and

he had come up with a hypothesis. He believed that the high energy electrons produced in a nuclear explosion could, if it happened in Earth's magnetosphere, produce a lasting effect akin to what we now think of as an electromagnetic pulse or e m P. These powerful blasts of electromagnetic energy can overwhelm electronic systems and cause them to fail or even to burn out entirely. And it's the sort of thing that might happen in the event of solar storms or, as it turns out, the explosion of a

nuclear device. Christophilos believed that the magnetosphere would sustain the high energy electrons, and anything relying upon electronics that would try to pass through that barrier would end up failing, including the arming and firing mechanisms on Soviet I CBM, so they would just become ballistics. They wouldn't they wouldn't explode, they would be inert because the the firing mechanism would

never deploy. A full scale deployment of this approach would require firing hundreds or even thousands of nuclear warheads into high altitudes, and they theorized that the the high energy electrons could last for months in the magnetosphere. Christophilis was an interesting character. He had been an elevator installer back in the late nineteen thirties. He worked in an elevator company. It had its ups and downs, but in his spare time he was coming up with scientific hypotheses and inventing

theoretical devices, you know, little inventions like particle accelerators. So while his idea sounded wild, Arbo was willing to give it a shot because he had shown that he had a keen understanding of nuclear physics from a self taught perspective, which seemed pretty remarkable. The test would be called Operation Argus. The US chose a spot in the South Atlantic Ocean, essentially between the tip of Africa and the tip of South America. It was about as remote from human civilization

as you could get without being in the Antarctic. And this was an enormous endeavor. It wasn't like one launch pad. We're talking four thousand five military personnel involved. On top of that, you had scientists, you had engineers, were all part of the test. The first test happened on August nineteen fifty eight. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, on that same day, Ernest Lawrence, one of the strongest advocates for

nuclear weapons development and testing, passed away. Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller had been the gung ho proponents of building out a nuclear arsenal, including the hydrogen bomb and and bigger weapons beyond that. He had at the time been attending a conference dedicated to arriving at a global ban on nuclear weapons testing. This was essentially by order of the US government. President Eisenhower and Herb York, the scientific

director over at ARPA, had given him this assignment. It was kind of ironic that they sent Lawrence there to talk about a nuclear test band, considering his personal views on the subject, and that may have contributed to stress, which in turn may have contributed to his health deteriorating and then ultimately his passing. The Argus tests, which consisted of three separate nuclear weapons fired in into the atmosphere on three different occasions from late August into early September,

were considered a failure. The explosions did not produce the effects Christophilos had did. The explosions did create high energy electrons, and they did exist a bit longer in the magnetosphere than they might have otherwise, but not at the intensity and duration that Christophilos had anticipated, not enough to be a force field protector against incoming I C b ms,

So this defense was not going to pan out. There was some talk that perhaps the engineers and scientists could figure out a way to make it work if they had more time to test, but with the approaching ban on nuclear testing coming, that would make the matter moot. The ban on nuclear testing would begin on October thirty one,

ninety eight. Edward Teller, the proponent of nuclear tests and friend to Ernest Lawrence, suggested that the United States keep testing anyway, but if they were to keep those tests to less than a kill a ton of force, they could probably do it and remain undetectable by all the different powers in the world that were interested in monitoring such stuff. So he essentially said, if you want to do testing on the QT, just keep those explosions below

one kill a ton of force. You can keep on changing up your designs and approaches to nuclear weaponry as long as we don't make the boom too big, and then no one will ever be the wiser, and essentially Teller said, whether we choose to do this or not, you can bet the Soviets are going to be doing it. Tell her was very much of that kind of opinion

of the Soviet Union for all of his life. Now, when I left off in the last episode, I was talking about the Corona Project, the aforementioned spy satellites that had a public cover name called Discoverer. The nature of the Corona project would remain classified until ninet so for decades the American public was kept ignorant of what Discoverer satellites were actually doing up in space, which was taking

photos mostly of the Soviet Union. By the time the Corona Project was a success, DARPA had a new director. The original director, Roy W. Johnson, resigned in nineteen fifty nine after much of our was work in the missile program got undermined and handed back over to the various Armed services branches. The morale at ARPA was shaken as a result. People working in ARPA had the goal of advancing technology and military applications, and they were starting to

feel like their work was being tossed aside or dismissed. Now, originally Johnson's replacement was going to be a guy named Charles Critchfield. Critchfield was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. In nine he was working for Convey in their General Dynamics department and he received the request to come be the director of ARPA. But he

had a really good paying gig over at Convey. So originally he was saying, I'll do it as long as I can keep my position at Convey, and then I'll just recuse myself from any project that Convey might be part of to avoid the appearance of favoritism. But the press pushed against that notion, asking how would he be able to stay objective considering what looked like a really serious conflict of intra So he withdrew himself from consideration.

Herbert York was given the task to find someone else, and so he looked at the office of the Secretary of Defense, and there he found General Austin Betts, who was the deputy to the Director of Guided Missiles. York also warned Bets that ARPA was the target of opposition

from pretty much every branch of the military. Bets understood, and he went about doing his best to mollify the concerns and the objections of military brass while letting the administrators at ARPA continue their work as best he could. Bets gets a lot of credit for stabilizing ARPA in the wake of Johnson's departure. He also worked with the branches of the Armed forces to recognize ARPA's place in

the overall strategy for the United States. According to Bets, military officials would look at ARPA with some level of resentment because they believe that the money that was going to ARPA could have been better spent in those respective military branches. Essentially, they're taking our money. Bets did his best to convince them that ARPA's R and D focus would be a benefit to the branches in the long run, and it was not intended to be a competing agency.

I'll have more to say about DARPA's early days in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In nineteen sixty, ARPA announced the launch of an interdisciplinary Laboratory or IDEL program. The purpose of this program was to advance materials science, which is the study of the properties of matter and potential applications, which again largely had to do with defense. The agency awarded three contracts that year, each contract lasting four years,

and they all had renewable clauses attached to them. The three universities that won those first contracts were the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Northwestern University. The IDEL program would continue for twelve years. It would include more universities over time, and then ARPA would transfer it to the National Science Foundation, which subsequently changed the program's name to

the Materials Research Laboratories Program. That program would fund exploratory research in all sorts of materials, some of which would end up playing an important role in making better tools and equipment for the military. Also in nineteen sixty, ARPA launched a navigation satellite, the first and what would eventually become a global navigation system. It was called Transit. The project grew out of R and D work from the

Johns Hopkins Universities Applied Physics Laboratory. The satellite had an accuracy down to tens of meters, which helped boost map accuracy considerably. Are BA administered the project until the mid nineteen sixties, when it would transfer that system to the United States Navy Transit would ultimately consist of thirty six satellites in orbit and would serve as the primary US satellite based navigation system until nine, when it would be

replaced by the Global Positioning System or GPS. Over the first two years of ARPA's existence, the budget for its Defender program, also known as the Ballistics Missile Defense or BMD project, was about nine hundred million dollars from R and D to operations, so just under a billion dollars, an enormous amount of money now and back in nineteen fifty nine. Nineteen sixty would be a really big year of changes for DARPA, or again ARPA at the time.

Herbert York, who was the first chief Scientist then he became Director of Defense Research and Engineering, would step down. John F. Kennedy became President of the United States, and as a result, as is frequently the case with administration changes, you started to see a house cleaning process where people who had been uh inhabiting certain positions and various agencies

are removed and new people are put in place. But for a short time, York was essentially the acting Secretary of Defense until Kennedy's pick, a guy named McNamara would make his way through confirmation hearings, so for a short while, Herbert York was effectively in charge of the codes for nuclear weapons in the United States, like all of them.

This was before the country had established the protocols around the so called nuclear football, so he was the head man in charge of the nuclear weapons arsenal at that point for a few months or a few days really. Kennedy was concerned about Communist insurgents in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam, so in response, he began to task officials with coming up with counter insurgency strategies. ARPA would play a big role in that, particularly starting in nineteen sixty one.

I'll get back to that in a second, but first, in nineteen sixty one, after spending just a little more than a year as the director of ARPA, General Betts resigned. His placement was a guy named Dr Jack p. Runa, an electrical engineer who was a professor in my t now. Runa was the first scientist to head up our PA

from a director level. He would step down in nineteene, but in a short time as director he would oversee many important projects and developments, including the founding of the Information Processing Techniques Office or I p t O. More on that in our next episode. As part of Project Defender, ARPA would reach out to another young organization called Jason. Jason was a for profit scientific research group largely dedicated

to tackling problems related to defense and military applications. Is named after the Greek hero Jason, and it was a secretive, exclusive group of some of the most talented scientists in the United States. Super duper hush hush, though, and these scientists would get top level security clearance to various programs. Through Out its run, ARPA would ask Jason to pitch

ideas that would improve the Defender missile defense program. One such proposal they came up with was to equip every US warhead with decoys to confound the Soviet Union's anti ballistic missile defense system. So in this case, there wasn't so much as defending against incoming missiles as to make our outgoing missiles more effective. Essentially, every warhead would deploy a decoy or more than one up to five to improve its chances of making it through the defenses of

the USSR to detonate at its intended target. The strategy became known as Penetration AIDS or pen AIDS for short. This would later grow into another project called pen X, in which scientists work on creating multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles also known as merv's m I r vs. The Jason Group was being funded by ARPA, but it was so secretive and its work was so important to US defense that the scientists were able to put tough restrictions

on ARPA's involvement with their work, like crazy restrictions. They demanded that they would be allowed to to work on their own solving whatever problems were assigned to them without outside interference. And the only person from ARPA who was

allowed to attend their summer sessions. And this was a concession they made uh most of the members of JASON, by the way, we're teaching throughout most of the year, the summer was when they would have time off, and so they would dedicate that to working on these problems. The only person from ARPA who could go to this summer session was the director himself, Jack Runo. No one else from MARPA would be allowed to hang out with the scientists, and eventually RUNA agreed to this because they

needed these guys. The Jason scientists also worked on on a super top secret project on directed energy beam weapons. So one of the important members of the Jason group was a guy named Charles Towns. Charles Towns built the first maser that's the microwave based precursor of the laser, so the team wanted to explore the possibility of using directed energy beams to send blasts at, say, an incoming missile, in order to disarm it. There have been numerous directed

energy beam product projects at DARPA. Most of those remain classified, so we can only guess as to how far along they have come, although a lot of people will say that the technology being worked on at various projects that are funded by DARPA tends to be up to ten years ahead of the stuff you would see out in the quote unquote real world, so that's something to think about. Meanwhile, in Hawaii, ARPA began a project called the ARPA mid Course Optical Station or AMOS A m o S in

nineteen sixty one. This was an observatory that was meant to detect, image, and take measurements of space objects like satellites, payloads, and other stuff like miss re entering the Airth's atmosphere. The facility is on top of a mountain in Maui, Hawaii. It would take years to build this facility and the instruments needed to carry out the task, but it all started in nineteen sixty one. In nineteen sixty nine it

was an established facility. It entered into its second phase of operation, in which would measure re entry bodies as part of the Advanced Ballistic re Entry System project. And in nineteen four DARPA. At that point the agency's name had changed kind of and it had changed back. In nineteen seventy two they would change back to ARPA and then back to DARPA again. We'll get there anyway. In ninety four, DARPA transferred the facility over to the US Air Force to become part of the Air Force Space

Tracking System. In ninety three, AMOS got a name change, at least the acronym has now changed. Now it stands for Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site. So remember when I talked about the counterinsurgency efforts that Kennedy was interested in. Well, in nineteen sixty one that took shape as a huge initiative, probably the third biggest project DARPA was tackling behind Defender and Vila Villa being the project

to to be able to detect nuclear weapons detonations. This project was called Agile and it was a joint effort between ARPA. There was a group of advisors called the Military Assistance Advisory Group or m a a G, and South Vietnam officials like the President of South Vietnam. The project would have to deal with an entirely different approach than the counterballistics work that ARPA had been involved with.

This was a major switching of gears from missile warfare to how to get a technological advantage over enemy forces that were at home fighting in say, jungle environments. One of the champions project Agile was a guy named William Godal, and intelligence operative who worked with ARPA and who acted as sort of a liaison between various intelligence agencies and ARPA.

While many of the scientists at ARPA came from a perspective of advancing the US capabilities in nuclear warfare, Godal was looking at things from a different point of view. He was interested in psychological warfare and the alleged brainwashing techniques used by communists in the fifties and early sixties, and he advocated for the creation of an ARPA branch in Southeast Asia. Kennedy agreed, and the agency established the

ARPA Combat Development and Test Center. More on what they did in just a moment, but first another quick break to thank our sponsor. Godal wanted to develop techniques to teach the South Vietnamese military how to combat insurgents, preferably in a way that would not require the United States to get directly involved, and in that way, the United States could push back against the spread of Communism without

being on the ground in a war. So the thought was that Project Agile would develop not just technology, but best practices for the South Vietnamese military to use to fight off the Viet Cong and the spread of communism. It was the most active ARPA would get in actual military operations. One of the many developments under Project Agile, which covered tons of different subprojects UH, and one of

the most tragic. In fact, I would argue is probably the most tragic of the projects that Agile was focused on, was the development of the so called rainbow agents. These were chemical agents and they were meant to kill off vegetation. UH. They were herbicides. They were designed to remove jungle cover and also to take away any advantage insurgents might have while engaging in guerrilla warfare and to affect food supply.

Although Godal was largely looking at this as a way of taking away the jungle cover to remove that advantage that the viet Cong held. The most famous of these rainbow agents was, of course, agent Orange. Now agent orange is a mixture of two major herbicides, and it also happens to be incredibly toxic to human beings. The President of Vietnam, President d M, wanted to use herbicide in large regions which would affect both insurgents and innocent Vietnamese citizens.

They are beside would affect jungles and food crops, including food crops just grown by innocent people, not people who were feeding the viet Cong. D M's goal was to make the viet Cong, those those communists insurgents, dependent upon the South Vietnamese government for food and that would force them to obey him. So he took this tool that ARPA had created, this herbicide, and he put to use

in a wide area, affecting thousands of people. Agent orange can damage genes and it can lead to birth defects and offspring. It can lead to higher instances of cancer to people have been exposed to it. It's one of the most terrible weapons created by the United States and actually put to use in warfare. I also think it's an example of some of the mental gymnastics that William Goldal was able to go through to justify the existence

of this program. To begin with, the Geneva Convention expressly forbids, chemical and biological weapons, and if you use them, you're going to be the target of the international communities scorn and worse, and the United States did not want to to court that scorn. But destroying an enemy's food supply is not against the Geneva Convention. You can do that and it's quote unquote fair. The rules of what is and isn't fair and warfare still kind of perplex me.

It's a weird thing to think about that something that is terrible to people in one way is not against the rules, and something that's terrible to people in a different way is against the rules. Blows my mind anyway. Framing this project as targeting not the people but their food and the jungle itself wasn't against the Geneva Convention,

at least not on the surface. However, since the chemicals were distributed by plane or helicopter, which meant they were sprayed over large, often populated areas, I think it's kind of hard to say we were just aiming for the jungle and the food. We didn't mean to get the people to Despite all that, President Kennedy approved the use of the Arab side, though admittedly he did cut the scope of the proposed use by a significant amount. Even so, by the end of the Vietnam War, about nineteen million

gallons of the stuff had been unleashed in Vietnam. The estimates on the number of Vietnamese directly exposed to the chemicals range from two point one million people on the conservative side up to four point eight million people. It's truly horrifying stuff. Now. The documentation for Project Agile outlines

eight sub project areas. There's tactical unit weapons systems, area fire weapons systems, remote area mobility and logistics systems, communication systems, combat surveillance and target acquisition systems, individual and special projects, technical planning and programming, and finally, research and exploratory development. The work in Project Agile would lead to stuff like flame throwers, and then the adoption of the M sixteen

as the infantry weapon of choice for US soldiers. The M sixteen was based off the cult A R fifteen, a style of rifle that today has a pretty horrific reputation in various shooting incidents. The A R fifteen fires five five six ammunition five point five six millimeter ammunition.

During Project Agile, the US military mostly was using the I fourteen rifle for its soldiers, uh the M fourteen fires a heavy seven point six two millimeter ammunition seven six to The prevailing wisdom was that the five six mma would not pack the punch needed in US military operations.

Part of the Project Agile had ARPA scientists heading up projects to improve and test A R fifteen's to change them into a new type of light assault rifle so that the lighter weapon could replace this heavier M fourteen and it would be more useful to Vietnamese soldiers, who the group viewed as being smaller than American soldiers and

therefore they would need lighter weapons. I'm not going to comment on that other than to say that that was there conclusion anyway that led to the M sixteen, which until fairly recently was the primary weapon of the U S military. It's since been largely replaced by the M

four carbine, which is another five five six m O gun. Now, I'm going to spare you guys the language that's in the reports on the performance of the A R fifteen's that ARPA had issued to US Special Forces for lie field tests, meaning that soldiers were tearing this into actual combat scenarios. Suffice it to say that the weapons were found to be very effective, and the language makes that clear, and how deadly the weapons were in actual combat situations.

It's really disturbing stuff. Actually, how casually these reports refer to the lethality of the weapons. It's very matter of fact, which I get, I suppose from a you know, observing and evaluing the performance of a tool. But when you realize that the execution of that tool is the literal end of someone's life, it's pretty sobering stuff. Other parts of Project Agile seemed fairly bizarre. For example, there was

a canine program that was part of Project Agile. In this program, are But proposed developing a chemical scent that dogs could detect but humans could not. And the idea was that Viennamese soldiers could quietly and secretly mark large groups of people with a chemical or maybe even have an aircraft pass overhead and spray it out. The chemical would be harmless, but it would be detectable by these canines, and then Vietnamese soldiers could use dogs to track people

who turned up in suspicious places. As a result, AREPA tested a chemical they called Squalingens, was made from shark and fish liver oil. Uh The tests proved promising when they were conducted over at Fort Benning, Georgia, not too far from where I am. But then they took it over to Vietnam and discovered that the dogs would not be able to follow the scent for very long in the hotter, more humid environments. Are But also developed a quiet power glider meant to fly just over the jungle

canopy silently or near silently over in Vietnam. Rather, of course, are But did not developed this itself. It funded the development of this. They first reached out to the Navy and got two unpowered SGS two thirty two gliders. Those were made by a being called the Schweitzer Aircraft Corporation. AREPA then handed those over to the company Lockeed, which

used its skunk Works Special Projects division. Skunk Works is where all the super top secret work at Lockheed happens, and Lockheed would install Volkswagen air cooled engines in the gliders that would connect to the propellers. The aircraft ran pretty quietly, though not as quietly as the Army would like. They eventually would send the gliders back to Lockheed to

make some changes. Now. At one point there was talk of experimenting with radar absorbing paint to reduce the radar signature of these gliders, but the team ultimately decided that that was beyond the scope of their project. The gliders were in limited use during Vietnam, but more importantly, they led to the development of other spy plane technology, stealth technology,

and unmanned drones. Project Agile also included calls for new types of shotguns, new rifle grenades, uh sound cannons, cannons that would actually use sound waves as a shock deliverer, and bombs that could detonate between the top of a jungle canopy and the ground below. And besides weapons, the agency was funding research and stuff like anti venom kits in the event of a snake bite. Uh. They were

creating leach repellent, you know, glamorous stuff. They're also funding projects that would retrofit existing vehicles so that they could move more effectively through the jungle environments. And they began to work to develop more advanced communication systems to help with logistics. And it was a huge undertaking and this would fuel research for several years and result in many more changes in US military operations, not all of them

good ones. Project Agile would continue until nineteen seventy four, when ARPO would officially conclude it. Actually at that point they were called DARPA. Between its launch and its end, ARPO would officially kick off the Information Processing Techniques Office and put J. C. R. Licklider in charge of it. Liquilide Or would begin several projects that would have an enormous impact, not just on the United States but the entire world. That would include the first steps towards the

establishment of the Internet. Now I'll talk about that more in the next episode. For now, let's conclude this second part of our story about DARPA. We will continue our look in our next episode exploring some of the more bizarre things that DARP has been involved with, as well as the the baby steps that would lead to the Internet.

And keep in mind every single thing I've talked about, every project I've talked about, I could do a full episode or maybe a couple of episodes to really cover because there are tons of implications there, things that would spin off and become technological advancements in other areas. And

it's all fascinating stuff sometimes terrifying as well. But if you have any requests, maybe there's something you heard in this episode, or maybe there's some other tech topic you would like me to cover, go on and visit tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's our website where you'll find all the ways to contact the show. And don't forget to head on over to t public dot com slash tech stuff for a merchandise store. Remember te public holds crazy amazing sales all through the holiday season, so be

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