Customer Reviews

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite

5 star:		(6)
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2 star:		(1)
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Part social history, part biography, and definitely a large part philosophy of science, this book deserves a wide audience. Ultimately the book is about the conflict between return and reward based on merit versus return and reward based on political connections. It's the story of how a small group of the country's most elite scientists have come to understand in the past 50 years that sometimes it's not about how much you know or how smart you are, but about WHO you know and who likes you. In this way, it's an examination of American culture in general. It's an examination of the Enron model applied to science and why being the smartest man or woman in the room sometimes really doesn't matter. It's about the dangers of closing yourself off from society to explore the depths of the universe and the limits of your own mind without considering the social consequences. As this book illustrates, solutions to scientific problems, particularly for the government, reach far down into the depths of pragmatism where there is little room for tidy, inflexible theories, however rational or beautiful. Government is pragmatic. Theoretical physics isn't. Anybody see a potential problem here?

That said, these truly astonishing scientists have dedicated much work to improving the security of the country, and have suffered enormous moral guilt over the misuse of their most profound discoveries. We learn about how their work has changed their lives AND ours.

The book itself doesn't really engage the moral issues directly. They're merely presented for your own contemplation. What the author does do is offer a history of this particular oganization as reflected through biography and discussion of their various projects. She offers an analysis of how the demand for basic scientific research for the government has evolved during and after the Cold War. And most importantly, she asks the reader to consider the question, "Are these types of institutions still necessary?" As a warning to deep thinkers, this is NOT a philosophy or scientific text, per se. It's not Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene, but more Louis Menand.

I do not regret buying or reading this book, but I am greatly disappointed by both the lack of detail and the lack of visualization that I was hoping for.

The JASONS (according to the author, this stands for the months from July through November when individual stars did most of their consulting) were a spin-off from the Manhattan Project. There were two branches: the JASONS were hired by government sparked by the Sputnik scare and funded by the Advanced Projects Research Agency of DoD (the same one that funded the Internet); and those that feared nuclear power founded the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) which exists to this day to expose unnecessary secrecy.

The original group met in 1958, 22 scientists meeting for 2 weeks at the National Defense University. On page 33, early on, the author denotes the importance of this group with the phrase "distinterested advice comes best from independent scientists."

There was a major financial incentive: the summer consulting could double their 9-month academic salaries.

JASON became official on 1 January 1960, at first housed under the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA), then under the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and finally under MITRE, all in theory Federally Funded Research & Development Centers, but in the case of MITRE, often in real competition with legitimate businesses.

Missile defense is not new to the Bush-Cheney regime. It has been a mainstay of ARPA and the JASONS going back to Sputnik days, and generally consumed 50% of ARPA's budget (elsewhere we have speculated on the gains for mankind of having an ARPA for peace).

Early on the JASONS are described as "slightly flakey and almost bizarre," but supremely intelligent with the arrogance to match it. Their task was partly to shoot down stupid ideas with high-ranking supporters, and partly to think out of the box on really touch problems, almost always, but not always, at a classified level.

DARPA fired the JASONS in 2000 when they refused to take on some of the lame scientists that DARPA recommended, but the happy result was their promotion to work directly for DARPA's boss, the Director of Defense Research & Development.

The author discusses throughout the book the conflict between the scientific imperative to discuss hypotheses and findings opening, and the demands for secrecy imposed on these brilliant minds.

Among the projects credited to the JASONS, with all too little detail, are missile defense, directed energy weapons, extremely low frequency (ELF) communications to reach submerged submarines, nuclear event detection, sensors and night vision for Viet-Nam.

The JASONS could not handle the sociology of insurgency. I find this fascinating. Technocrats simply cannot "compute" real world anger.

The Pentagon Papers outed the JASONS. Over time they added the Navy, Department of Energy, and the Intelligence Community as clients, but the also changed in fundamental ways, moving from an elite of physicists to a melange of all disciplines, including many members without clearances.

The JASONS did well with adaptive optics and STAR WARS.

Putting down the book I thought to myself:

1) The Defense Science Board (DSB) is probably the public adaptation of the JASON concept, and does very very good work that is also capable of being shared with the public on most occasions (see for instance, their superb reports on "Strategic Communication" and on "Transition to and from Hostilities").

2) Is this all there is? I give the author good marks for investigation and diplomacy and elicitation, but very candidly, I could have done better with simple citation analysis from the Science Citation Index, and some dramatic visualizations of how the JASONs did or did not stand out from the crowd. It is possible today to detect secret programs as they black out, and overall I felt that what this book provided was one person's good efforts, without ANY of the modern tools of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).

This book, by Ann Finkbeiner, sheds light on a very mysterious group in defense circles: the Jasons. The Jasons are a group of elite scientists who have offered impartial advice on a range of technical questions over the last forty-five years. From their beginnings as the inheritors of the physicists attached to the Manhattan Project, Jasons have tackled some of the most pressing defense issues in existence, including reducing the impact of North Vietnamese smuggling through Cambodia and Laos (thus helping to eliminate the option of the use of nuclear weapons from the list of options), detecting submarines, and underground nuclear weapons tests.

The book does a have a few limitations: Much of the Jasons work is classified; some of them scientists did not want to have their names published in relation to Jason for various reasons. Finkbeiner is also too casual at times with her writing, frequently using the first person pronoun when this is supposed to be a serious work of history.

With those limitations aside, Finkbeiner has still shined a light on what had previously been a complete mystery, providing some useful insights along the way. Chief among those is the danger of feeling superior for knowing inside secrets: "if you know inside information, you think everyone who is on the outside doesn't know what they are talking about. And the sad fact of it was, [those on the outside] knew what they were talking about and [the insiders] didn't." This lesson holds true just about wherever you are or work, but perhaps no more so than inside government.

Everybody loves to learn about secrets, dark projects and the exciting things that went on during the age of nuclear tests and strange and promising science experiments. We get quite a bit of that in The Jasons, but Finkbeiner somehow manages to write about this subject so dryly that the fun of reading it is soon leached out. She focuses on things she finds to be of interest with great detail and serious attempts of storytelling like with the Trinity Test and subsequent development of the thermonuclear device, the Argus Shot, the ultra low frequency antennae for communications with submarines and attacks on the Jasons by rabid activists during the Vietnam War. But when the topic comes to something she obviously finds less exciting, the book begins to drag on and takes the form of a college essay on a topic the author really couldn't care less about but has to have finished by the end of the week.

The result of these abbreviated and dry patches is the loss of detail or useful information about the projects the Jasons were undertaking. For example, there is a lot that remains to be said about Wither Jason. Why was Jason undertaking climate studies? Why were there requestors in need of knowing if the climate was changing and how? Who were these requestors? Were there any military application to climate studies? The military has attempted to seed clouds to control hurricanes and tropical storms. Yet Finkbeiner makes no mention of these experiments or try to find out if Jason had anything to do with this whether it was encouraging the experiments or doing lemon detection studies that they're so famous for.

There are a lot of quotes interwoven throughout the narrative, so much so that in some places the book begins to take on the feeling of a 250 page article rather than... well... a book. It becomes hard to know who's telling the story, her or the quoted Jason and it's easy to loose track who is talking about what. Overall this is an interesting work, but be ready to sift through a lot of dry reading to get to the interesting parts and be aware that some things which may seem like fertile grounds for more exploration are never really discussed in any depth.

Although this book sticks fairly steadily to the Jasons and their work, it offers the best characterization I have ever seen of the choices and dilemmas faced by those who work with the Defense Department on topics everyone would rather not think about. As the book indicates, these days a profusion of outside experts advise the government on all sorts of technical matters, and the Defense Department is notable for the extent to which it seeks outside advice. I have never been a Jason, although I do know a few of the folks mentioned or quoted in this book, but I was involved off and on for more than 40 years working with and for the Defense Department as a techie and scientist. It isn't easy, and that is perhaps the most important message conveyed by this book. The objectivity required to give good technical advice is often at odds with one's personal feelings as a citizen. And it can be discouraging to be one of a group that's asked to advise on something, and puts a lot of effort into coming up with a clear, well-reasoned answer, to see it completely ignored, which does happen. So why do it? And here I would make two points that the book doesn't make clear.

First, occasionally one can make a big difference. Not often, but occasionally. I've had that happen. But for it to happen, one must "pay one's dues"; one has to have earned the respect of the policy-makers by putting in lots of effort over the years to help them make decisions. One person who has that respect can make more difference in certain cases than any number of noisy demonstrators, and this is as true of Congress as it is of Administration officials. That makes the disappointments worth while.

Second, the book fails to note that a large fraction of senior US military officers are themselves brilliant and technically well-educated, with advanced degrees in engineering or science, so they are good people to work with, as interesting to work with as one's colleagues in the civilian community. For example, Gen. Alfred Dodd Starbird, mentioned in this book, was among the most impressive people I have ever met, hard-driving, utterly tireless, and with a strong enough technical background so that I never had to tell him anything more than once, or go into elaborate detail; he soaked up technical information like a sponge.

This book isn't exciting, but I consider it mandatory reading for anyone with a technical or scientific background who is asked to advise the Defense Department on anything. Before saying yes or no, one should use this book as a collection of "case studies", and ask, "Am I willing to go through that". If you are, you can make a big difference.

It took about a week for me to read The Jasons. Maybe less. I enjoyed the book, especially the details about the individual scientists and their quirky personalities. In fact, the author seemed a bit overly attentive to this stereotype: an ivory tower academic out of place in the "real world" but too arrogant to notice. That got kind of old after a while, especially when there seemed to be notable exceptions (MacDonald and Drell spring to mind).

I think another reviewer at amazon mentioned the overly familiar writing style. I agree with that statement. I was hoping for something a bit more...objective sounding. Perhaps this could just be the authors chosen style. And it wasn't bad. It was light and quick paced. Just not very objective sounding, which, of course, should always be heavy and slow.

Overall, I would recommend this book to those with an interest in the relationship between scientists and the government (particularly DOD), as well as those looking for an easy read.

I feel compelled to alert others that The Jasons may not be what they might imagine it to be. It is essentially a detailed description of various parts of various scientists' careers, and all the conflicts, compromises and other complications therein. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it does mean that the material is hardly "intriguing," "explosive," or "spellbinding," as the inside flap purports. At least it is none of these things to the layman; the non-academic.

As someone who is interested in the Cold War and all the unconventional ideas that were being worked on/considered at that time, it was my hope that that would be the book's focus: a rare inside-look into this "shadowy" (again, the flap's term) work. Although Ms. Finkbeiner occasionally covered these areas, it was mostly done as a sidebar before she got back into the topics of career moves, political problems and other such issues this group of scientists were contending with. And I'm afraid that the aforementioned just couldn't hold my interest for 304 pages.

I have no major complaints about this book. I've known some Jasons, read many of their reports etc. From what I can tell the book has an accurate description of the culture group. There is alot about the history that I had not known, and some interesting anecdotes. In those rare cases the author attempts some technical discussion it seems reasonably accurate for this level of book. I didn't give it more stars because I just didn't find it that interesting. When you get down to it, the Jasons are just a group that gets together and writes reports for the government. It's hard to get too much mileage out of that. Sure, many of the members are really smart, but reading multiple statements to the effect that "so and so is really really smart" doesn't do much for me. Show me don't tell me. Not enough meat, I guess is what I'm saying.

This is story of the Jasons, a few dozen top scientists who were brought in to review secret projects and brainstorm when it was hard to review progress in more conventional ways.

The book is very sensibly laid out and progressed linearly from their original formation. I found this book of great interest, mainly because it is very close to some of my work.

There are three flaws from my point of view.

First, the author is a Jason enthusiast, so much so that any reporting of criticism of Jason is usually followed in the same sentence by why the criticism is wrong, making a mountain out of a molehill, or just an alternate point of view.

Second, in writing a detailed history, the evolving org chart, individual managers, and projects are presented in too much detail, so the narrative offers tedious reading at times.

Third, the classified material is probably incomplete at times, unavoidable but leaving large gaps in understanding and evaluating Jason and its impact. Only the discussion of the Viet Nam war tactics provide a plausible perspective of a few entire issues. Projects like missile defense, sub detection and nuclear test detection appear as anecdotes. Although the facts seem right it's clear the author is not a scientist.

Still, this book should be required reading for scientists struggling to understand how science turns into classified applications. It is also provides rare insights into why scientists wade into the realm of influencing public policy.

A book about science and scientists that is real literature. Finkbeiner writes with grace, skill, and humor about her subjects, a group of post-WWII scientist who were the best and knew it. You might not think a story of the links between academic science and the military could be an engrossing page-turner, but it is.