The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen · 14 Sep 2015 · 558pp · 164,627 words
technological frontiers. CHAPTER TWO War Games and Computing Machines On the west coast of California, in the sunny Santa Monica sunshine, the defense scientists at RAND Corporation played war games during lunchtime. RAND, an acronym for “research and development,” was the Pentagon’s first postwar think tank, the brains behind U.S
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explode in order to achieve the maximum kill rate of civilians on the ground. He determined the height to be 1,800 feet. At the RAND Corporation, von Neumann served as a part-time consultant. He was hired by John Davis Williams, the eccentric director of RAND’s Mathematics Division, on unusual
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nuclear arms race were profound, suggesting that it would forever be a game of one-upmanship. In addition to game theory and nuclear strategy, the RAND Corporation was interested in computer research, a rare and expensive field of study in the 1950s. The world’s leading expert in computers was John von
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Security advisors to put together a team that could answer one question: how to protect the American people in an all-out nuclear war. A RAND Corporation co-founder, the venture capitalist H. Rowan Gaither, was chosen to chair the new presidential research committee. Making up the body of the panel were
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’s game, he seemed to be saying. Intellect won wars. The most powerful men in Secretary McNamara’s Pentagon were defense intellectuals, including many former RAND Corporation employees. As a group, they would become known as McNamara’s whiz kids. “Viet-nam” had to be dealt with, the president’s advisors agreed
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a “secret weapon,” and had the potential of serving as a magic bullet against communist insurgents in Vietnam. CHAPTER EIGHT RAND and COIN At the RAND Corporation in sunny Santa Monica, California, by 1961 war game playing had expanded considerably since the days of John von Neumann and the lunchtime matches of
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with the Vietnam Task Force, the Special Group, and the CIA. The following month Harold Brown sent a classified letter to Frank Collbohm asking the RAND Corporation to come on board and work on Project Agile in Vietnam. RAND was needed to work on “persuasion and motivation” techniques, programs designed to win
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see democracy as a form of government superior to communism. It was an enticing proposal for RAND. Social science research was far afield from the RAND Corporation’s brand of nuclear war analysis and strategy, and of game theory. But defense contractors need to stay relevant in order to survive, and Frank
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Gulf of Siam, the water was robin’s egg blue. It was the winter of 1964, and Hickey was back in Vietnam, working for the RAND Corporation on another ARPA contract, this time studying how U.S. military advisors got along with their Vietnamese counterparts. The war that did not officially exist
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for ARPA, on subjects including the role of the AR-15 in battle and the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese. Back in America, RAND Corporation president Frank Collbohm had set his focus on securing a lucrative new contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Collbohm and analyst Guy Pauker flew
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on who these Vietcong insurgents really were. ARPA needed quality information on the enemy combatant, said Deitchman, and for this, to help facilitate the new RAND Corporation study, the secretary of defense made a deal with the CIA. Joseph Zasloff was the lead social scientist on the original Viet Cong Motivation and
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bomb shelters purported to have been built across Moscow were nothing more sinister than subway tunnels. He singled out “Leon Gouré, research specialist of the Rand Corporation,” who, Salisbury wrote, “has presented several studies contending that the Russians have a wide program for sheltering population and industry from atomic attack.” Salisbury had
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under scrutiny by Congress. During a hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, Congressman Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen demanded to know why the RAND Corporation had been hired to do so much work on the Vietcong when it seemed that what they were gathering was “straight military intelligence.” That work
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“should be done by the military,” Frelinghuysen said, not “highly-paid consultants like Rand.” “As a matter of convenience, [we] gave the contract to the Rand Corporation, as an instrument of the military systems, to perform the study,” ARPA’s Seymour Deitchman said. ARPA did not want to send its own people
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was appalled by what he saw as Gouré’s manipulation of prisoner of war interviews. “[We have] received reports of recent surveys conducted by the RAND Corporation and others concerning the attitudes of the Viet Cong defectors and prisoners,” Fulbright wrote to Secretary McNamara. It appeared to him that “those in charge
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embezzlement scheme was determined to have been $16,922, roughly $135,000 in 2015. CHAPTER ELEVEN The Jasons Enter Vietnam During the Vietnam War, the RAND Corporation handled soft science programs for the Advanced Research Projects Agency. For hard science programs, in fields characterized by the use of quantifiable data and methodological
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Papers appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The classified documents had been leaked to the newspaper by former Pentagon employee and RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The papers unveiled a secret history of the war in Vietnam—three thousand narrative pages of war secrets accompanied by four thousand
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of classified memos and supporting documents, organized into forty-seven volumes. Back in 1967, when he was secretary of defense, Robert McNamara had commissioned the RAND Corporation to write a classified “encyclopedic history of the Vietnamese War,” neglecting to tell the president he was undertaking such a project. The Pentagon Papers covered
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drones, called micro air vehicles (MAVs), for at least fourteen years. The first DARPA micro air vehicles feasibility study was conducted in 1993, by the RAND Corporation. “Insect-size flying and crawling systems could help give the United States a significant military advantage in the coming years,” the RAND authors wrote. Shortly
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also served on President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2009 to 2013, is a director of General Dynamics, chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, chairman of the board of HRL (the former Hughes Research Labs), chairman of the board of Exostar, chairman and CEO of Technovation, Inc., trustee and
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worked on ARPA programs, in Saigon, during the war. 4 Tanham’s 1961 report: Elliott, 17–18; George K. Tanham, “Trip Report: Vietnam, January 1963,” RAND Corporation, March 22, 1963. 5 Rand was needed: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 25. 6 generally looked down: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013. 7 “weapons systems
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philosophy”: George H. Clement, “Weapons Systems Philosophy,” RAND Corporation, 1956. 8 first two RAND analysts: J. Donnell and G. Hickey, Memo RM-3208-ARPA, August 1962, ARPA Combat Development & Test Center, Vietnam, Monthly Report
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: Epidemiologist, former senior scientist in the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratories BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Abella, Alex. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Alibek, Ken, with Stephen Handelman. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest
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of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. Elliott, Mai. RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010. Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Penguin, 2001. Ezell, Edward. The Great Rifle Controversy: Search for the
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, James, and Clay Blair Jr. The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, the Menace, the Mechanism. New York: David McKay Company, 1954. Smith, Bruce L. R. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Non-Profit Advisory Corporation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Spector, Ronald H. Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960, United
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Agency, 1958–1974. Richard J. Barber Associates, Washington, DC, December 1975. ______. Combat Development & Test Center: Vietnam. May 1962. ______. “Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16–20, 1962.” RAND Corporation, Washington, DC, 1962. ______. Counter-Insurgency Game Design Feasibility and Evaluation Study. SD-301. ABT Associates, Inc., Cambridge, MA, November 1965. ______. Guerilla Activity Defection Study. DEC
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Ad Hoc Committee, Washington, DC, September 2013. Betts, Russell, and Frank Denton. “An Evaluation of Chemical Crop Destruction in Vietnam.” RM-5446-1-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, October 1967. Block, Steven M. “Living Nightmares: Biological Threats Enabled by Molecular Biology.” McLean, VA, Summer 1997. [Chapter Two (pp. 39–76
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D-1661. Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA, March 1995. Davison, W. Phillips. User’s Guide to the Rand Interviews in Vietnam. R-1024-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 1972. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Cybernetics Technology Division Program Completion Report. Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA, April 1981. ______. DARPA
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Information Analysis Center, Kirtland AFB, NM, January 2013. Donnell, John C., and Gerald C. Hickey. The Vietnamese “Strategic Hamlets”: A Preliminary Report. RM-3208-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, September 1962. Donnell, John C., Guy J. Pauker, and Joseph J. Zasloff. Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964: A Preliminary Report
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. RM-4507/3-ISA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 1965. Doolittle, James H., William B. Franke, Morris Hadley, and William D. Pawley. “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central
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, Volume 3, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 1989. Gates, W. L. “Rand/ARPA Climate Dynamics Research: Executive Summary and Final Report.” R-2015-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, January 1977. Gatlin, Colonel Jesse C. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report, “IGLOO WHITE (Initial Phase), 31 July 1968.” HQ PACAF, Directorate, Tactical
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Evaluation, CHECO Division, 1968. Glenn, Russell W. Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare. MR-780-A/DARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 1996. Gorman, Paul F. Supertroop Via I-Port: Distributed Simulation Technology for Combat Development and Training Development. IDA Paper P-2374. Institute
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before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Washington, DC, May 21, 1992. Gouré, Leon. “Quarterly Report on Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, October–December 1966.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, January 1967. ______. “Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study, January–June 1966: A Briefing to the Joint Chiefs of
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Staff.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, August 1, 1966. ______. Some Preliminary Observations on NVA Behavior During Infiltration. D-16339-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, November 3, 1967. ______. “Southeast Asia Trip Report. Part 1. The Impact of Air
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Power in South Vietnam.” RM-4400/1-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, December 1964. Gouré, Leon, Douglas Scott, and Anthony J. Russo. Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study: June–December
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1965. RM-4911-2-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, February 1966. Gouré, Leon, and C. A. H. Thomson. Some Impressions of Viet Cong Vulnerabilities: An Interim Report. RM-4699-1-ISA
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/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, September 1965. Hansen, Chuck. The Swords of Armageddon, U.S. Nuclear Weapons Development Since 1945, Volumes 1–8. Chuckelea Publications, Sunnyvale, CA
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. Hickey, Gerald C. The Highland People of South Vietnam: Social and Economic Development. RM-5281/1-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, September 1967. ______. The Major Ethnic Groups of the South Vietnamese Highlands. RM-4041-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, April 1964. ______. “The Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case in Vietnam
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-75-03055. Lulejian and Associates, Falls Church, VA, February 7, 1975. Pauker, Guy. “Treatment of POWs, Defectors, and Suspects in South Vietnam.” D-13171-ISA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, December 8, 1964. Peterson, Val. Kefauver Committee Hearing: Administrator’s Statement of March 3. Federal Civil Defense Administration. Washington, DC, March 1955
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(GAMBIT) Study. DARPA Order no. N229. Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY, October 2003. Press, S. J. Estimating from Misclassified Data. RM-5360-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, July 1967. Reed, Sidney, Richard H. Van Atta, and Seymour Deitchman. DARPA Technical Accomplishments. Volume 1. An Historical Review of Selected DARPA
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.S. Department of Defense. International Security Affairs and Advanced Research Projects Agency. An Evaluation of Chemical Crop Destruction in Vietnam. RM-5446-1-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, October 1967. U.S. Department of Defense. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Historical Division. Chronology of Significant Events and Decisions Relating to the
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for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, DC, March 2007. Weiner, Milton G. U.S. Air Force Project Rand Research Memorandum: War Gaming Methodology. RM-2413. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, July 1959. White, Robert. Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces. U.S. Army Natick Laboratories, Natick, MA, June 1964. Wohlstetter
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, Albert. “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, November 1958. Wolf, W. L. Handbook of Military Infrared Technology. Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy, Washington, DC, 1965. Wolk
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, CA, March 1967. ______. Political Motivation of the Viet Cong: The Vietminh Regroupees. RM-4703/2-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, August 1966. ______. The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency. RM-4140-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, July 1964. Statements to Congress Abizaid, General John P. Commander, U.S. Central
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001
Institute for Advanced Study's machine would serve as the model for first- generation computers constructed during the 1950s at the University of Illinois, the RAND Corporation, IBM, and the national laboratories at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Argonne. Software. By 1947, von Neumann and Goldstine had laid the foundations for software
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the argument-an argument that was al- ready being embraced by strategic thinkers in the government and in newly formed think tanks such as the RAND Corporation-the nuclear-arms race could be rationalized, mathematized, reasoned about, and managed. Wiener begged to differ. He certainly didn't favor ilTationality in human af
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- THE FREEDOM TO MAKE MISTAKES 119 sibility, along with many of the original Lincoln Lab programmers, were eventu- ally transferred to Santa Monica and the RAND Corporation's system develop- ment division, which in December 1956 would break away and become the independent Systems Development Corporation. Second, in the early 1950s there
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have a clue what had happened to him until several years later, when his own SAGE work led him to visit Santa Monica, where the RAND Corporation had built a simulated air-defense center to study the social and psy- chological aspects of the operation. "And when I arrived," he says, "there
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; Newell, for one, had never even heard of J. C. R. Licklider. But they took the money. Also high on Licklider's list was the RAND Corporation, SDC's parent com- pany, located conveniently nearby in Santa Monica. Lick knew RAND as the home of JOHNNIAC, the hand-built clone of John
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really looking at the long term. The tech- nology's potential was obviously breathtaking. According to an ARPA-funded panel convened in 1976 by the RAND Corporation (and headed by none other than Ivan Sutherland), "the integrated circuit revolution [had] only run half its course" by then. 4 In the mid-1970s
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, 200, 207-9 queumg theory, 373 QUlktran, 292 R-7 Intercontinental balltstlc mis- sIle,196-200 radar, 18, 100-101 INDEX 499 RadIO-Electronics, 430 RAND Corporation, 91, 119, 133, 139,209,276,344, 359 random-access memory, 87 RAND Tablet, 209, 239, 255, 359 Rank-Xerox, 407 Rapid Selector, 27 RaskIn
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon · 1 Jan 1996 · 352pp · 96,532 words
received a master’s degree in engineering. Baran left Hughes in late 1959 to join the computer science department in the mathematics division at the RAND Corporation while continuing to take classes at UCLA. Baran was ambivalent, but his advisor at UCLA, Jerry Estrin, urged him to continue his studies toward a
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with Peter Denning from Purdue, Dave Farber from the University of Delaware, and Tony Hearn who had recently left the University of Utah for the RAND Corporation, to flesh out a detailed proposal for the new network. Their proposal called for a network open to computer science researchers in academia, government, and
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July 1995. Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communications Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems, 1 March 1964. ———.“Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes.” RAND Corporation Mathematics Division Report No. P-1995, 27 May 1960. Boggs, David R., John F. Shoch, Edward A. Taft, and Robert M. Metcalfe. “PUP: An Internetwork
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the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970. Catton, Major General, USAF, Jack. Letter to F. R. Collbohm of RAND Corporation, 11 October 1965. Referring the preliminary technical development plan for message-block network to the Defense Communications Agency. Cerf,Vinton G.“Confessions of a Hearing
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., John J. Vittal, Kenneth T. Pogran, and D. Austin Henderson Jr. “Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages.” Request for Comments 733. The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif., 21 November 1977. Crowther, William. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center
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Networks.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 42, October 1973. ———. “Network Architecture and Components.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 49, August 1973. RAND Corporation. “Development of the Distributed Adaptive Message-Block Network.” Recommendation to the Air Staff, 30 August 1965. RCA Service Company, Government Services Division. “ARPANET Study Final
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Kahn) psychoacoustics psychology psychometrics Pullen, Mark Purdue University Quasar Industries queueing theory Q-32 radar radio network linkage by RAdio Detection And Ranging see radar RAND Corporation Baran’s network research at communications division at IMP Number Seven at Raytheon RCA RD Reader’s Digest Reagan, Ronald real-time systems Redstone Arsenal
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000
, and then at John P. Eckert's and John W. Maulchy's Electronic Control Company), ILLIAC (at the Uni- versity of Illinois), JOHNNIAC (at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California), MANIAC (at Los Alamos Laboratories, New Mexico), and most importantly, WHIRLWIND (at MIT).6 In the United States, these computing projects
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: Morgan-Kaufmann. AvaIlable on-line at http:// www.dgp.toronto.ed/OTP/papers/bill.buxton Ihaptic.html. Baran, P. et al. 1964. "On DIstnbuted Communications." RAND Corporation Memos, vols. I-I I. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND. Bardini, T., and A. T. Horvath. 1995. "The Social ConstructIon of the Personal Com- puter User
Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words
The idea was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power.59 The RAND Corporation, under an ARPA contract, did most of this work. Based out of a building overlooking the wide, tan beaches of Santa Monica, RAND was a
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to make room for the big military trucks. I was fed up with the horror and disgusted by the petulance and pettiness with which the RAND Corporation conducted its business.”78 He believed that ARPA’s entire Project Agile apparatus was a giant racket used by military planners to give scientific cover
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on interactive computing and time sharing, graphical interface design, networking, and artificial intelligence at MIT, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, and the RAND Corporation. At MIT, Lick set up one of his biggest and most important initiatives: Project MAC, short for Machine-Aided Cognition, which evolved into a sophisticated
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Stanford’s Research Institute Carnegie Mellon University University of California, Irvine University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Berkeley University of California, Santa Barbara RAND Corporation Utah University It was time to wire all these computer centers together and have them function as one unit. It would be called the ARPANET
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network links computers at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, more than 20 universities, and a dozen research centers, like the RAND Corporation.” Rowan had spent months piecing the story together from several “reluctant whistleblowers”—including ARPA contractors who were alarmed at how the technology they were building
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Kennedy Task Force,” New York Times, July 1, 1971; Mai Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), 33. 5. Judith Perera and Andy Thomas, “This Horrible Natural Experiment,” New Scientist, April 18, 1985. 6. H. Lindsey Arison III, “Executive Summary: The
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skills and specialists, migration patterns, and villager responses to perceived ‘threats.’” Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-43–VI-44. 60. The RAND Corporation was originally created by the air force in 1946 as Project RAND “to perform a program of study and research on the broad subject of
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investigating Godel in 1964. ‘Mr. Godel, and his team’” (chap. 5). 62. Anders Sweetland, Rallying Potential among the North Vietnamese Armed Forces (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1970). 63. Although many of these ARPA studies had the appearance of scientific objectivity, those that produced results that fit preconceived notions or that
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31, 1963). 65. H. P. Phillips and D. A. Wilson, Certain Effects of Culture and Social Organization on Internal Security in Thailand (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 1964). 66. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2002), 60–61. 67
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to Expose It,” TomDispatch, May 31, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176004/tomgram %253A_barbara_myers,_the_unknown_whistleblower/. 78. Anthony Russo, “Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My Story” (photocopy), Ramparts, April 1972, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20 Materials/White%20Assassination%20Clippings%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Study%20Groups
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, 258 Radio Free Europe, 232–233 Radio Liberation From Bolshevism (Radio liberty), 232–233 Ramparts magazine, 29–30 Rand, Ayn, 109, 128–129, 239–240 RAND Corporation, 28–29, 32 Redirect Method, 182 regime change, 182, 251 Regional Enforcement Information Network, 81 revolution, technology, 101–106 Rhode, Joy, 66–67 Rich, Nathaniel
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham · 30 Oct 2009 · 717pp · 150,288 words
inadequate to the task of training US forces to counter future urban insurgencies in fast-growing megacities. As a result, the US Congress commissioned the RAND Corporation, the nation’s long-time military think-tank, to explore other options. The resulting four-hundred-page report was published in 2006.36 The report
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launch of Operation Defensive Shield, I attended a conference on ‘urban warfare’ organized by Soffer at Haifa University in Israel, in partnership with the influential RAND Corporation, a major think tank in the United States originally established to undertake military research.5 Populated by senior US Marine Corps, IDF, and British Army
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cities deemed the main foci of its adversaries. Drawing on conferences like the one in Haifa, Evans notes that ‘significant theoretical analyses were completed by RAND Corporation scholars focusing on the technical and tactical peculiarities involved in conducting military operations inside cities’.8 The US effort to exemplify, and imitate, Israeli experience
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety
by Eric Schlosser · 16 Sep 2013 · 956pp · 267,746 words
were destroyed. That’s when people began to leave en masse and seek shelter in the countryside. Iklé’s dissertation attracted the attention of the RAND Corporation, and he was soon invited to join its social sciences division. Created in 1946 as a joint venture of the Army Air Forces and the
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to Use the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). For a more recent look at the history, see Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Harcourt, 2008.) “It is not a pleasant task”: Iklé, Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, p. viii
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. I also learned a great deal about the Kennedy administration’s aims from How Much Is Enough? 1961–1969: Shaping Defense Program (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1971), by Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. Enthoven was one of McNamara’s most brilliant advisers. For Kennedy’s attacks on the strategic
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York Times, February. 9, 1961. Eisenhower had thought that twenty to forty would be enough: Cited in “The Ballistic Missile Decisions,” Robert L. Perry, The RAND Corporation, October 1967, p. 14. Jerome Wiesner advised President Kennedy that roughly ten times that number: Wiesner thought that about two hundred missiles would be enough
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RAND, RM-2632, Research Memorandum, December 31, 1960, p. 19. Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks”: See Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications Networks,” The RAND Corporation, P-2626, September 1962. a “logical, survivable node in the control structure”: “Memorandum for the President, Subject: National Deep Underground Command Center as a Key
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, p. 8. It was called QUICK COUNT: For information about the computer model, see N. D. Cohen, “The Quick Count System: A User’s Manual,” RAND Corporation, RM-4006-PR, April 1964. I learned about Quick Count from another report, one that was “designed to be of use to those who have
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quick means of computing civil damage to Western Europe.” See “Aggregate Nuclear Damage Assessment Techniques Applied to Western Europe,” H. Avrech and D. C. McGarvey, RAND Corporation, Memorandum RM-4466-ISA, Prepared for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense/International Security Affairs, June 1965 (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY/declassified). Between
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, California, May 8, 1959, RM-2364 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). “Aggregate Nuclear Damage Assessment Techniques Applied to Western Europe,” H. Avrech and D. C. McGarvey, RAND Corporation, Memorandum RM-4466-ISA, Prepared for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense/International Security Affairs, June 1965 (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY/declassified). “AGM
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Division, IDA Study S-507, July 1979. “Assessing the Capabilities of Strategic Nuclear Forces: The Limits of Current Methods,” Bruce W. Bennett, N-1441-NA, RAND Corporation, June 1980. “Assessment Report: Titan II LGM 25 C, Weapon Condition and Safety,” Prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee
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the Chairman, Subcommittee on Defense, Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, United States General Accounting Office, July 1989. “The Ballistic Missile Decisions,” Robert L. Perry, RAND Corporation, October 1967. “Ballistic Missile Staff Course Study Guide,” 4315th Combat Crew Training Squadron, Strategic Air Command, Vandenberg Air Force Base, July 1, 1980. “Beyond the
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and Control System Configuration,” Paul Baran, U.S. Air Force, Project RAND, Research Memorandum, RM-2632, December 31, 1960. “On Distributed Communications Networks,” Paul Baran, RAND Corporation, P-2626, September 1962. “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” Fred Charles Iklé with Gerald J. Aronson and Albert Madansky, Research
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T. L. Shipman, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, LA-1981, December 1955 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). “The Postattack Population of the United States,” Ira S. Lowry, RAND Corporation, Prepared for the Technical Analysis Branch, United States Atomic Energy Commission, RM-5115-TAB, December 1966. “A Preliminary Report on the B-52 Accident in
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.S. Air Force Project RAND, R-290, September 1, 1956 (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY). “The Quick Count System: A User’s Manual,” N. D. Cohen, RAND Corporation, RM-4006-PR, April 1964. “Reconsidering the Morality of Deterrence,” John D. Steinbruner and Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, CISSM Working Paper, Center for International and Security
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. Air Force Project RAND, R-1754-PR, October 1975 (SECRET/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), NSA. “U.S. Strategic Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence,” C. Johnston Conover, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, August 1977. “U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Europe After NATO’s Lisbon Summit: Why Their Withdrawal Is Desirable and Feasible,” Tom
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Flying. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008. Enthoven, Alain C., and K. Wayne Smith. How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1971. Ferrell, Robert H., ed. The Eisenhower Diaries. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Gates, Robert M. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story
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Books, 1987. _____. Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Books Abella, Alex. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. New York: Harcourt, 2008. Abrahamson, James L., and Paul H. Carew. Vanguard of American Atomic Deterrence: The Sandia
Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words
, was never christened with an acronym of its own, but its far-flung offspring (ILLIAC and ORDVAC at the University of Illinois, JOHNNIAC at the Rand Corporation, MANIAC at Los Alamos National Laboratory, AVIDAC at Argonne, ORACLE at Oak Ridge, BESK in Stockholm, SILLIAC in Australia, BESM in Moscow, and WEIZAC in
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of great reserve, but the military scientists were quick to sense its possibilities in their field,” wrote J. D. Williams in The Compleat Strategyst, a RAND Corporation best-seller that made game theory accessible through examples drawn from everyday life.6 The economists gradually followed. When John Nash was awarded a Nobel
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by engineers to computer systems that were beginning to organize themselves. The System Development Corporation (SDC) originated in the early 1950s with a series of RAND Corporation studies for the U.S. Air Force on the behavior of complex human-machine systems under stress. In 1951, behind a billiard parlor at Fourth
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had grown to twice the size of the rest of RAND. When the air force contracted jointly with the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT and the RAND Corporation to develop the continental air-defense system known as SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), the job of programming the system was delegated to SDC. Bell
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(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1954), 70. 19.Willis H. Ware, The History and Development of the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, RAND Corporation Memorandum P-377, 10 March 1953, 5–6. 20.Martin Schwarzschild, interview by William Aspray, 18 November 1986, OH 124, Charles Babbage Institute, University of
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Wiener, Physics Today 2 (1949): 33. 20.Willis H. Ware, The History and Development of the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, RAND Corporation Memorandum P-377, 10 March 1953, 7–8. 21.Burks, interview. 22.John von Neumann, “Memorandum on the Program of the High-Speed Computer,” 8
…
.Bigelow, “Computer Development,” 304. 37.Ibid., 307. 38.Ibid., 297. 39.Ibid., 308. 40.Ibid., 306. 41.William F. Gunning, Rand’s Digital Computer Effort, Rand Corporation Memorandum P-363, 23 February 1953, 4. 42.Richard W. Hamming, “The History of Computing in the United States,” in Dalton Tarwater, ed., The Bicentennial
…
Atomic War” (1955), 23; (1963), 525. 38.RAND Articles of Incorporation, 1948, in The RAND Corporation: The First Fifteen Years (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1963). 39.Contract of 2 March 1946 establishing project RAND; in Bruce Smith, The RAND Corporation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 30. 40.A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
…
Deviates (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1955; reprint. New York: Free Press, 1966), xii (page citation is to the reprint edition). 41.Louis Ridenour and Francis Clauser, Preliminary Design of an
…
Experimental Earth-Circling Spaceship, U.S. Air Force Project RAND Report SM-11827, 2 May 1946, 2, 16. 42.RAND, The RAND Corporation, 23. 43.Paul Baran, interview by Judy O’Neill, 5 March 1990, OH 182, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 44.J. M. Chester
…
, Cost of a Hardened, Nationwide Buried Cable Network, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-2627-PR, 1 October 1960. 45.Baran, interview. 46.Ibid. 47.Paul Baran, Summary Overview, vol. 11 of On Distributed Communications
…
, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3767-PR, August 1964, 1. 48.Paul Baran, “Packet Switching,” in John C. McDonald, ed., Fundamentals of Digital Switching, 2d ed. (New York:
…
Plenum Publishing, 1990), 204. 49.Baran, interview. 50.Paul Baran, Reliable Digital Communications Systems Utilizing Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes, RAND Corporation Memorandum P-1995, 27 May 1960, 1–2. 51.Baran, Digital Communications Systems, 7. 52.Paul Baran, History, Alternative Approaches, and Comparisons, vol. 5 of
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On Distributed Communications, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3097-PR, August 1964, 8. 53.Warren S. McCulloch, in Claude Shannon, “Presentation of a Maze-Solving Machine,” in Heinz von Foerster, Margaret
…
Communications, vol. 1, 25. 57.Ibid., 24. 58.Ibid., 29. 59.Paul Baran, Security, Secrecy, and Tamper-free Considerations, vol. 9 of On Distributed Communications, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3765-PR, August 1964, v. 60.Baran, interview. 61.Ibid. 62.Ibid. 63.Ibid. CHAPTER 9 1.Stanislaw Ulam, in Paul S. Moorhead
…
Economics,” Journal of Political Economy 54, no. 2 (April 1946): 114. 6.J. D. Williams, The Compleat Strategyst (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1954), 216. 7.John Nash, Parallel Control, RAND Corporation Research Memorandum RM-1361, 27 August 1954, 14. 8.John von Neumann, “A Model of General Economic Equilibrium,” Review of Economic Studies
…
’s-whisker” crystal detector, 208 microminiature, 205 spread-spectrum, 206–208 radiotelepathy, 200, 203, 208 rain forest, 125, 126–27 Rajchman, Jan (1911–1989), 104 RAND Corporation. see also SAGE; SDC and digital communications, 147–52 and digital computing, 97, 104, 107, 148–52, 155, 178 founding and organization, 145 and game
Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman · 31 Oct 2013 · 1,073pp · 314,528 words
to the production of the first atomic bomb. The center for the postwar application of such methods to practical, and particularly military, problems was the RAND Corporation, which became the prototypical “think tank.” The organization was set up under an air force grant to develop operational research. It soon became an independent
…
“father of modern strategic thinking.”30 Ansoff had grown up in Russia, moved to the United States, studied engineering, and—after a spell at the RAND Corporation—gained practical management experience with the defense manufacturer Lockheed. He worked on identifying companies to buy for purposes of diversification before moving in the early
…
adopt it as the foundation of a new science of decision-making and the active promotion of this new science by bodies such as the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation, both of which encouraged its embrace by business schools. As with Plato’s philosophy, a new discipline that offered eternal truths
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in part by disparaging and caricaturing what had gone before for its lack of rigor. The best place to start this story is with the RAND Corporation, which we identified in the last section as the home of game theory and the belief that a formal science of decision could be developed
…
social sciences. We have already seen how apparently detached intellectual activity was the product of wider social forces, whether the effort put in by the RAND Corporation to develop new sciences of decision-making, the foundation grants that encouraged business schools to adopt these—and which the more sociologically inclined organizational theorists
…
—often unsolicited (so that some universities were unsure what was expected of them)—to the tune of some $24 million between 1951 and 1957. The RAND Corporation’s influence was evident, with Gaither in charge of the Foundation and Hans Speier, the head of RAND’s social science division, advising. The aim
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solution and, 151–153, 155, 165, 582 nuclear weapons and, 155 origins of, 151–153 prisoner’s dilemma and, 154–155, 585–586, 590, 596 RAND Corporation and, 161–162, 513 Schelling and, 160–162, 166–167, 515, 529, 585 Games and Decisions (Luce and Raiffa), 161–162 Gamson, William, 582 Gandhi
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Pullman strike, 313–315 Quakerism, 346 quantitative analysis. See also game theory limitations of, 150, 203 McNamara and, 149–150, 199, 202, 501–502, 546 RAND Corporation and, 147–148, 152–153, 513–514 Quayle, Dan, 452–453, 690n51 Quiet American, The (Greene), 187 “Quiz Kids.” See “Whiz Kids” radical Islamists, 222
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, 235–236. See also al-Qaeda Raff, Daniel, 616 Raiffa, Howard, 161–162, 514 Ramsey, Douglas, 506 RAND Corporation game theory and, 161–162, 513 nuclear strategy and, 161–162, 168 quantitative emphasis of, 147–148, 150, 152–153, 513–514 rational choice theory
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, 580 experiments challenging, 594–597 heuristics and, 593 limits of, 575–576, 589–591, 594–597, 599–600, 605–606 political science and, 580–581 RAND Corporation and, 575–577 Rochester School and, 576–581 social contexts and, 594–597, 599–600 ultimatum game and, 594–596 Ratzel, Friedrich, 122 Reagan, Ronald
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, 515, 529, 585 Nobel Prize in Economics, 160 nonviolent direct action and, 412 on nuclear weapons, 164–165, 167–173 progressive risk and, 164–165 RAND Corporation and, 162 strategic theories of, 162–173, 190, 198, 515 Vietnam and, 191 Schlieffen Plan, 113, 198, 210 “Scholarship and Social Agitation” (Small), 315 Schwarzkopf
Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred · 5 Jun 2019 · 453pp · 111,010 words
stories of these high priests are varied, but together they show how economics has come to dominate our lives. 2 Trust No One Oh, the RAND Corporation is the boon of the world; They think all day for a fee. They sit and play games about going up in flames, For counters
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punctuated by bursts of vivid bougainvillea. The scent of oleander hung in the air. Santa Monica was an improbable setting for the offices of the RAND Corporation, a secretive think tank employing mathematicians and scientists to develop military strategy for potential nuclear war with the USSR. The Korean War had just begun
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what it means. 4 The Government Enemy In the early 1950s John von Neumann and John Nash were not the only geniuses associated with the RAND Corporation. RAND was the incubator for another intellectual revolution, as significant as game theory but completely independent of it. And this time the genius behind it
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defend the mathematical measurement of uncertainty, rather than question it. Ellsberg’s golden-boy education and early career made him a natural fit at the RAND Corporation. He graduated with highest honours in economics from Harvard, then, following graduate study and a period serving as a lieutenant in the Marines, he divided
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, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy
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Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
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