Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940–1960

The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air- Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940-1960 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Volmar, Daniel. 2019. The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air- Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940-1960. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41121266 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940–1960 A dissertation presented by Daniel Volmar to The Department of the History of Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts November 2018 © 2018 Daniel Volmar. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . Dissertation Adviser: Peter Galison Daniel Volmar The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940–1960 ABSTRACT During the late 1950s, the United States Air Force initiated development on nearly two- dozen military “command and control systems.” What they shared in common was a novel application of digital electronics to the problem of nuclear warfare. Most of these systems descended, in some fashion, from a program called “SAGE,” the Semiautomatic Ground Environment, which gathered data from a network of radar stations for processing at large Air Defense Direction Centers, where digital computers assisted human operators in tracking, identifying, and, potentially, intercepting and destroying hostile aircraft. Although histories of SAGE have been written before, they have tended to stress digital computing as a rationalist response to the threat of mass raids by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. Nevertheless, organizational sociology suggests that large bureaucratic organiza- tions, such as the United States Air Force, often defy our intuition that decisions, technological or otherwise, must follow a perceived problem to its potential solution. According to the so-called “garbage-can model of organizational choice,” problems and solutions may, in certain circumstances, arise independently and join together unpredictably, because the basic social phenomena do not conform to bureaucratic ideals. This dissertation argues that SAGE, and indeed, the entire Cold War project of nuclear- and-command, can be understood as a sequence of “garbage-can-like” decisions, resulting in a conglomeration of independent systems whose behavior appeared reasonable from the perspective of the using organization, but which nonetheless failed to cohere against the far greater danger of a global thermonuclear exchange. They did, however, succeed at satisfying the government’s need to act by projecting uncomfortable questions of political organization onto popular technology programs. iii The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare [ein Alp] on the brains of the living. Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, 1852 iv Acknowledgments The longer the list of acknowledgments grows, the greater the risk of unintentionally neglecting someone with as justifiable a claim to acknowledgment as another named herein. Therefore, in the interest of brevity, and in recognition of the fact that no one is likely to ever read this page anyway, the following list has been limited only to those most directly involved in the project. As my primary adviser throughout this ordeal, I should first extend my gratitude to Peter Galison, though Dave Kaiser, it should be mentioned, has also participated generously from beginning to end. While Matt Hersch joined the committee at a later stage, I have found his comments pointed and constructive, helping greatly to fill the void left by Heidi Voskuhl, whose guidance proved indispensable at the outset. For any strengths contained in the final manuscript, and none of its flaws, I credit Suzanne Smith. Gwen issure to be embarrassed if mentioned last, thereby implying that her contributions exceeded all others, in hours, forms, and capacities, so I will be certain to imply as much now. Hopefully, she does not notice. v Contents Title i Abstract iii Epigraph iv Acknowledgments v Contents vi Introduction 1 Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of Command-and-Control 1 The computer in the garbage can .......................................... 5 2 The organization of nuclear command-and-control ....................... 22 3 Synopsis ................................................................... 28 1 Remember Opana Point 35 Command, Control, and Organizational Technology 1 Organizational systems and technological control......................... 37 2 The first Air Defense Command ........................................... 41 3 The air defense of the Hawaiian Islands ................................... 55 4 Conclusion: Models for command-and-control............................ 63 2 Atomic Pearl Harbor 68 Conceiving a Continental Air-Defense System 1 Air-defense systems and the meaning of “integration” .................... 72 2 The second Air Defense Command ........................................ 76 3 The radar fence ............................................................ 87 4 Conclusion: A nucleus for command-and-control ......................... 105 3 Holes in the Sky 110 Air-Defense Operations Before Automation 1 A system-in-being.......................................................... 114 2 Postwar air-defense organization and exercises ........................... 116 3 System as simulation ...................................................... 141 4 Conclusion: Assessing command-and-control ............................. 161 vi Contents 4 Laboratories at War 170 Watson, Cambridge, and the Origins of Air-Defense Automation 1 Engineering the science of control ........................................ 174 2 Recovering the Radiation Laboratory...................................... 180 3 The normalization of automatic control ................................... 207 4 Conclusion: Research for command-and-control.......................... 221 5 “The Maginot Line Boys from MIT” 224 Air-Defense Automation and the Rise of the Cambridge Lobby 1 The national-security science labyrinth ................................... 228 2 Air defense as bureaucratic proxy war ..................................... 234 3 Breaking the political stalemate ........................................... 255 4 Building the continental-defense network ................................. 275 5 Conclusion: Selling command-and-control ................................ 291 6 Crisis in Command 294 Computer Automation and the Maximization of Choice 1 The new dialectic of systems integration .................................. 299 2 The Rome–Michigan proposal ............................................. 304 3 The trouble with Cambridge ............................................... 318 4 The integration of cross-organizational systems ........................... 349 5 Conclusion: The beginning of command-and-control ..................... 377 Conclusion 383 The organization of technology and the technology of organization 1 The Power of the Atom .................................................... 385 2 Bureaucracy and the bomb ................................................ 392 3 Managing the unmanageable .............................................. 401 Notes on Sources 405 Bibliography 412 vii Introduction Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of Command-and-Control The rules of decision making…may be much more preoccupied with the problem of assigning outcomes their legitimate history than with the question of deciding before the actual occasion of choice the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible courses of action, will be elected.1 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967 During the 1960s, America’s postwar ambitions for continental air-defense simultaneously reached their fulfillment and lapsed into decrepitude. The decline was evident in the number of projects canceled, outposts shuttered, squadrons deactivated, and officers reassigned, as well as in reduced funding and personnel levels overall.2 Yet it was the curtailment of the Semiautomatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, that most strongly attested the retrenchment of the continental air-defense program. The technological centerpiece of plans devised only a few years earlier, SAGE achieved the dubious distinction of not only rapidly diminishing in scope prior to its deployment, but actually being withdrawn from service while that deployment was still in progress. According to the schedule drawn up in December 1955, 46 SAGE “direction centers,” each housing two 21,000-square-foot AN/FSQ-7 computers—one active, and the other on standby— 1. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 114. 2. Figures tabulated in Historical Data of the Aerospace Defense Command, 1946–1973,

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