Several
of my friends, knowing my aversion to things military, were aghast at the
revelation in my most recent
posting that I'd been involved in military work in the summer of 1948.
Despite their shock, though, they had the kindness to ask for other
tales of my early professional days. I'll oblige, but probably will upset
them again by disclosing still more of my early defense work. It's the reverse side of the coin whose
obverse shows my present, more pacific image.
In that
last posting, I surveyed the geopolitical context of the summer of 1948: the
Soviet blockade of Berlin and the Berlin Airlift. Things got worse after that, becoming a period of heightened
fear and paranoia in the US. Many were predicting a nuclear
Armageddon; others were calling for a first strike on the USSR while it was
behind in the nuclear arms race.
Anti-communist hysteria raged. (I remember my mother hiding
away books by Russian Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college
student, and a colleague at one of my defense jobs being discharged and
blacklisted because his father had been a radical during the Great Depression.)
The Korean War, which started in 1950, was seen as an augur of
things to come, part of an ongoing communist conspiracy to take over the world.
Bomb shelters were a hot item.
To begin to understand the zeitgeist
of the era, it's worthwhile watching the superb satirical movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Most
engineering jobs at the time were defense oriented, rather than civilian.
So, after earning my Master's degree from MIT in 1952, I joined MIT's Lincoln
Laboratory, a just-started undertaking for the Air Force aimed at upgrading
the country's air-defense system.
One element of the system was to be the Distant Early Warning (DEW)
Line—a network of radar stations in far-northern Canada and Alaska, built to
detect Soviet bombers coming over the polar region. I first worked
on a classified radio system, NOMAC, which would provide a minimally detectable
and jam-proof connection between the DEW Line and the Air Force's central
command. Later, still at Lincoln Laboratory, I did my MIT
doctoral thesis on theoretical models of the radio-propagation distortion that
could degrade the operation of NOMAC.
The
work was at once technically exhilarating and dismaying in its Cold War
context, yet strangely normal for one who had been weaned on the upheavals of
the Great Depression and World War II.
From my present-day viewpoint, the main good to come from it was that
the signaling technique we used in NOMAC became a predecessor of code-division
multiple access (CDMA), which is now used by many cellphone carriers such as
Verizon; and my radio-propagation studies led to much of my later academic work,
which in turn was used in the development of the GSM cellular-signaling system
employed by other carriers such as AT&T.
Since
I'm in a revelatory mode, here's more grist to chew on. While
working on my doctorate, I also consulted for EG&G, a company with origins
at MIT that developed instrumentation for the atomic-bomb test range in Nevada. My task was to analyze how such instruments distorted the measurements they made, with an eye to correcting the distortion. In the course of
that work, I visited the test range. Testing was then still done above
ground, on towers; I actually saw such a test from 13 miles away, wearing
goggles with a 10,000-fold attenuation. It was overwhelming and
sobering. But, once more, I must
admit that it just seemed part of the era's reality, and in that context was by
force of habit unexceptional to me.
And
there's yet more. After getting my doctorate in 1956, I worked for four
years at the Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, doing theoretical work
that in part underpinned the development of radar systems for fighter
aircraft. An unclassified
presentation of some of that work at a conference led to my being recruited to
teach at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. What's amazing is that, except for a
brief stint as an office boy before college and three work-study semesters at
the radio and television manufacturer
Philco as an undergraduate,
UCB was my first non-defense job.
I was already thirty.
Even
after having just again watched Dr. Strangelove, it's hard for me to re-create in my mind both the temper of those
times and how natural it seemed working under its influence. Those who grew up later, I believe,
cannot understand the miasma in which we were engulfed. The lifting of
the cloud was slow, starting with the downfall of Senator McCarthy in
1955, and the subsequent abating of anti-communist hysteria. It received a major impetus from President Eisenhower's farewell
address in January 1961, when he warned of the unprecedented power of what
he called the "military-industrial complex," which he saw as
threatening to change the country's very core principles—a grave statement from
a lifelong military man. None the less, echoes of the 1940s and 1950s
reverberated for decades, through the Vietnam era and beyond.
Eisenhower's
speech was a clairvoyant precursor of the remainder of the 1960s, yet in an
ironic way. Student protestors,
also fearful of the powerful, conformity-inducing "establishment" (which included the
military-industrial complex), ultimately did
change the very nature of our society.
But the transformation was in the opposite direction from the one that
Eisenhower worried about: rather than a change to more military fire power, it
was ultimately to the hippie generation's flower power. As I've written elsewhere
in this blog, I had a front-row seat at that upheaval too.
The reverse side of my coin, before it flipped to its
obverse in 1960, shows a side of my career that is scarcely recognizable to me
now. As the ancients understood, Tempora mutantur, nos et
mutamur in illis. Times change, and we change with them.