Review: They invented the future 20 years ago

Review of: The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency

Author: Annie Jacobsen
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Source: Dallas Public Library
Grade: A

Reality can be infinitely more terrifying than any fiction, as journalist Annie Jacobsen confirms in her history of the all too often secret alliance between scientists and the U.S. military, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency. Much of what Jacobsen’s book reads like science fiction. Except for the parts that have already come true.

As she notes, “In interviewing former DARPA scientists for this book, I learned that at any given time in history, what DARPA scientists are working on—most notably in the agency’s classified programs – is ten to twenty years ahead of the technology in the public domain. The world becomes the future because of DARPA.”

We have DARPA research to thank for innumerable innovation, from the internet and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to the flying drone toys we may have received for Christmas. But as Jacobsen writes, “These DARPA milestones are forty-year-old inventions. Why has so much else about America’s most powerful and most productive military science agency been shrouded in secret?”

And of course, even the most benign-seeming of DARPA inventions had far from benign beginnings.

Officially, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) came into being in 1958 when Congress created it in the hope of averting any more such technological embarrassments as the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Unofficially, the United States (like probably every other nation-state) had made use of secretive technology with and eye to its military use.

Jacobsen in fact opens her narrative with an invention that predates the space race, one that even the scientists behind it called “an evil thing.” It was the thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. Requiring a convention atomic bomb to light its fuse, the bomb tested secretly in 1954 over tiny Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, was expected to explode with a thousand times the force of the first atomic bomb used in war in 1945.

Scientists, however, had greatly underestimated the power of the weapon code-named Castle Bravo.

Eighty miles away, and approximately 15 miles outside the designated restricted zone, all Japanese fishermen aboard a fishing trawler named, with unintentional irony, Lucky Dragon, would be stricken with radiation poisoning from the fallout of Castle Bravo. Although discussion of the bomb was stonewalled by the U.S. press and president, the bomb was no longer secret, and the world would never be the same.

And by the way, all the fallout shelter and evacuation procedures familiar to U.S. residents who lived during those Cold War years would have been useless. An officially authorized (but then secret) “Emergency Plans Book” issued by the U.S. Office of Emergency Planning predicted a nuclear Armageddon followed by doomsday scenarios that have since become the staples of dystopian fiction.

Jacobsen divides her narrative into this opening section, The Cold War; followed by The Vietnam War; Operations Other Than War (covering subjects such as the “Star Wars” space defense system, biological weapons, tanks and assorted machinery); The War on Terror (including IEDs and the integration of surveillance techniques); and Future War, including expansion of drones.

DARPA, as might be expected, is great at turning out with gadgetry, less agile in dealing with human minds and hearts. Its employment of social scientists during the Vietnam war, in the hope of winning over South Vietnamese farmers, backfired when the U.S. military disliked being told that what peasants really wanted was justice and economic opportunity. It was news the U.S. scrapped in favor of such DARPA inventions as Agent Orange and the then-derided electronic surveillance that would come to play an even more important part in future wars.

Social science projects similar to those of the Vietnam era would flop later in Afghanistan. As one anthropologist noted, “(When) you start to ask naïve, misshapen questions (like). . . (w)hy do they hate us so much,” you can ignore answers such as: “‘They hate us because we are occupying their country, not because they don’t understand our hand signals. . . ’”

Such comments go for the most part unnoticed by outsiders when DARPA projects are more often than not shrouded in classified projects and budgets, in a world in which science more and more often assumes the guise of magic. Jacobsen notes the prediction of scientist (and anti-nuclear activist) Carl Sagan, that “‘It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody know anything about the science and technology.’”