A Beautiful Mind (22 page)

[World War II was] a war in which the talents of scientists were exploited to an unprecedented, almost extravagant degree. First, there were all the new inventions of warfare — radar, infrared detection devices, bomber aircraft, long-range rockets, torpedoes with depth charges, as well as the atomic bomb. Second, the military had only the vaguest of ideas about how to use these inventions… . Someone had to devise new techniques for these new weapons, new methods of assessing their effectiveness and the most efficient way to use them. It was a task that fell to the scientists.

Initially, the scientists worked on narrow technical problems — for example, how to build the bomb, how deep to set the charges, the choice of targets. But when it became clear that people didn’t know the best way to use this incredibly expensive and destructive weaponry, they were increasingly drawn into discussions of strategy.

The advent of the bomb turned the temporary wartime partnership between the military and the scientific establishment into a continuing relationship. The Air Force, which controlled the new weaponry, emerged after the war as the linchpin of the national defense. “Whole conceptions of modern warfare, the nature of international relations, the question of world order, the function of weaponry, had to be thought through again. Nobody knew the answers,” Kaplan writes.
⁷
Again the military turned to the academic community. As Oskar Morgenstern, also a RAND consultant during the 1950s, put it in his book on defense
issues: “Military matters have become so complex and so involved that the ordinary experience and training of the generals and admirals were no longer sufficient to master the problems… . More often than not their attitude is, ’here is a big problem. Can you help us?’ And this is not restricted to the making of new bombs, better fuel, a new guidance system or what have you. It often comprises tactical and strategic use of the things on hand and the things only planned.”
⁸
Fortune
magazine put it more succinctly: “If World War II was a war of weapons, another conflict would include on both sides a war of wits at the highest level of knowledge.”
⁹

In the final days of the war, the Air Force generals began to worry about the brain drain of top scientists.
¹⁰
How to keep the best and brightest thinking about military problems was far from obvious. Men of the caliber of John von Neumann would hardly sign up for the civil service. But scientists would have to have access to secrets so one couldn’t just rely on contracts with universities. The solution was a private nonprofit organization outside the military but with close ties to the Air Force. In the fall of 1945, General Henry “Hap” Arnold promised to give Douglas Aircraft $10 million of leftover wartime procurement funds for a research venture to be called Project RAND (for “research and development,” though wits later insisted the acronym stood for “research and nondevelopment”). The project was housed on the third floor of Douglas’s Santa Monica plant. Friction between Douglas and the new entity led to a spinoff as a private nonprofit corporation in 1946, which was when RAND moved to its downtown offices.

RAND’s Air Force contract gave it an amazingly free hand, according to William Poundstone’s history of RAND. The contract called for research on intercontinental warfare, which, given the dominant role of nuclear weaponry, effectively gave RAND an unrestricted license to roam over the front lines of the U.S. defense strategy. Within these guidelines, RAND scientists could study anything that interested them. RAND could also refuse specific studies requested by the Air Force.

From the beginning, RAND’s work was a curious mix of narrowly focused engineering, cost-benefit studies, and blue-sky conjecture. A now-famous 1946 study, completed more than a decade before the launch of
Sputnik
in 1957, proved remarkably prescient. In “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” RAND scientists argued that “the nation which first makes significant achievements in space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both military and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact on the world, one can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the US were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.”
¹¹

RAND’s civilian scientists soon made a mark on American defense policy. Poundstone reports that RAND played a leading role in the development of the ICBM; RAND convinced the Air Force to adopt in-flight refueling of jet bombers; it was responsible for the fail-safe protocol whereby bombers are kept in the air at all times and during a crisis head for targets in an enemy nation. Its worry that a
psychotic individual in a position of power could trigger a nuclear war convinced the Air Force to adopt a safer button that required cooperation of several individuals to arm and detonate a nuclear warhead.

To be plucked from academe and initiated into the secret world of the military had become something of a rite of passage for the mathematical elite. In World War II, the very best had traveled into the New Mexico desert to Los Alamos to work on the A-bomb alongside von Neumann, and to Bletchley Park north of London to help Turing and his team break the Nazi code.
¹²
Many others, less well known or simply younger, wound up at dozens of less famous sites working on weapon design, encryption, bomb targeting, and submarine chases.
¹³

The recruitment of scientists by the military hadn’t stopped when the war ended, much to everyone’s surprise. Many of the mathematicians and scientists did not return to their quiet prewar routines but instead took on military research contracts, made frequent visits to the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, and, in a few cases, stayed on at Los Alamos and the other government weapons labs. For an elite cadre of applied mathematicians, computer engineers, political scientists, and economists RAND was the equivalent of Los Alamos.
¹⁴

The problems the military asked the scientists to solve called for new theories and new techniques, which in turn attracted the top scientific talent on which RAND’s credibility depended. “We had so many practical problems that involved mathematicians and we didn’t have the right tools,” said Bruno Augenstein, a former RAND vice-president, years later. “So we had to invent or perfect the tools.”
¹⁵
Mostly, according to Duncan Luce, a psychologist who was a consultant at RAND, “RAND capitalized on ideas that surfaced during the war.”
¹⁶
These were scientific, or at least systematic, approaches to problems that had been previously considered the exclusive province of men of “experience.” They included such topics as logistics, submarine research, and air defense. Operations research, linear programming, dynamic programming, and systems analysis were all techniques that RAND brought to bear on the problem of “thinking the unthinkable.” Of all the new tools, game theory was far and away the most sophisticated.

The spirit of quantification, however, was contagious, and it was at RAND, more than anywhere else, that game theory in particular and mathematical modeling in general entered the mainstream of postwar thinking in economics. At that point, the military was the only government sponsor of pure research in the social sciences — a role later taken over by the National Science Foundation — and it bankrolled a great many ideas that turned out to have little true relevance for the military but a great deal for other endeavors. RAND attracted a younger generation of mathematically sophisticated economists who embraced the new methods and tools, including the computer, and attempted to turn economics from a branch of political philosophy into a precise, predictive science.

Take Kenneth Arrow, one of the early Nobel Laureates in economics. When Arrow came to RAND in 1948, he was an unknown youngster.
¹⁷
His famous thesis,
written in the as-yet-unfamiliar language of symbolic logic, was a product of a RAND assignment. The assignment was to demonstrate that it was okay to apply game theory, which is formulated in terms of individuals, to aggregations of many individuals, namely nations. Arrow was asked to write a memorandum showing how it could be done. As it turned out, the memorandum became Arrow’s dissertation, an attempt to restate the theories of British economist John Hicks in modern mathematical language. “That was it! It took about five days to write in September 1948,” he recalled. “When every attempt failed I thought of the impossibility theorem.”
¹⁸
Arrow showed that it is logically impossible to add up the choices of individuals into an unambiguous social choice not just under a constitution based on the principle of majority rule, but under every conceivable constitution except dictatorship. Arrow’s theorem, along with his proof of the existence of a competitive equilibrium, which also owes something to Nash, earned him the Nobel Prize in 1972 and ushered in the use of sophisticated mathematics in economic theory.

Other giants of modern economics who did seminal work at RAND in the early 1950s included Paul A. Samuelson, probably the most influential economist of the twentieth century, and Herbert Simon, who pioneered the study of decisionmaking inside organizations.

RAND’s location was part of its allure. The corporation’s headquarters, in a once-sleepy beach colony, lies five miles to the south of the Santa Monica Mountains at the far end of the Malibu Crescent, just west of Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, Santa Monica looked the way Nash imagined that certain towns in Italy or France might look. Wide avenues were lined with pencil-thin palm trees. Cream-colored houses were topped with tiled roofs and encircled by shoulder-high walls. Seaside hotels and rest homes were across from a seaside promenade. The magentas and reds of the bougainvillea and hibiscus were improbably intense. The breeze, surprisingly cool, smelled of oleander and seawater. Some of the best work was done in beach chairs.

RAND itself was tucked out of sight of the ocean on Fourth and Broadway at the edge of Santa Monica’s slightly rundown business district. The 1920s bank building was a white stucco affair ornamented with Victorian flourishes. The building had recently housed the presses of the
Santa Monica Evening Outlook;
the newspaper had moved catty-corner to a former Chevy dealership when RAND moved in. By 1950, RAND was already spilling over into several annexes located over storefronts, including ones occupied by the
Outlook
and a bicycle shop. A year later, when
Fortune
magazine discreetly introduced RAND to the wider public, it described “bright walls shining through fog-sunny days and its wide, white-lighted windows shining on uninterruptedly through the night. The building is never closed, nor is it ever really open.”
¹⁹

It was one of the most difficult buildings in the United States to get into,
Fortune
said. On Nash’s first day, members of RAND’s uniformed, armed police force stood guard in front of the building and in its lobby, scrutinizing him closely
and memorizing his face.
²⁰
After that, for the rest of the summer and in subsequent years, the guards always greeted him with a cool, respectful “Hello, Dr. Nash.” There were no ID cards in those days. Inside were a series of locked doors, with offices clustered by types of security clearance needed to gain access to them. The math division occupied a group of small private offices in the middle of the first floor, upstairs from the electronics shop where von Neumann’s new computer, the Johnniac, stood.
²¹
Nash got an office to himself, a small windowless cubicle whose walls didn’t quite extend to the ceiling, with a desk, blackboard, fan, and, of course, a safe.

RAND bristled with self-confidence, a sense of mission, an esprit de corps.
²²
Military uniforms signaled visitors from Washington. Executives from defense firms came for meetings. The consultants, mostly under thirty, carried briefcases, smoked pipes, and walked around looking self-important. Big shots like von Neumann and Herman Kahn had shouting matches in the hallways.
²³
There was a feeling around the place of “wanting to outrun the enemy,” as a former RAND vice-president later put it.
²⁴
Arrow, who was an army veteran from the Bronx, said, “We were all convinced that the mission was important though there was lots of room for intellectual vision.”
²⁵

RAND’s sense of mission was propelled largely by a single fact: Russia had the A-bomb. That shocking news had been delivered by President Truman the previous fall, a mere four years after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and many years before Washington had expected it. The military had hard evidence, the president said in a speech on September 13, 1949, of a nuclear explosion deep inside the Soviet Union.
²⁶
Nobody in the scientific community, especially around Princeton, where von Neumann and Oppenheimer were engaged in an almost daily debate over the wisdom of pushing ahead with the Super, doubted that the Soviets were capable of developing nuclear weapons.
²⁷
The shock was that they had succeeded so quickly. Physicists and mathematicians, who were less convinced of Russia’s scientific and technological backwardness, had been warning the administration all along that predictions by senior government officials that America’s nuclear monopoly would persist another ten, fifteen, or twenty years were hopelessly naive, but the sense of being caught off guard was still very great.
²⁸
The news effectively ended the debate over the hydrogen bomb more or less immediately. By the time the president delivered the news of the Soviet explosion to the public, he had authorized a crash program at Los Alamos to design and manufacture an H-bomb.
²⁹