John Wheeler - Session II

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ORAL HISTORIES
Interviewed by
Finn Aaserud
Location
Wheeler's office, Princeton University
Usage Information and Disclaimer
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Interview of John Wheeler by Finn Aaserud on 1988 May 23, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5063-2

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Abstract

Second session deals mainly with science policy and science advising in the United States and Europe after World War II. Vice-president of International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), 1951-1954; chairman of U.S. NATO subcommittee (Henry Jackson); work for establishment of the NATO Science Council; U.S. delegate to the NATO Parliamentarians, Paris 1957. Discussion of his concern about scientific manpower; postwar Europe (Holland, France) leads to awareness of need for a national defense research laboratory in U.S. (discussed here at great length using correspondence, reports and memos); "Project 137" summer study (Los Alamos) (Marvin Goldberger, Kenneth Watson, Keith Brueckner); JASON. Discussions of pre-World War II Europe, war work at Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago with Eugene Wigner (DuPont); scientific work on acceleration of cosmic rays (Enrico Fermi; elementary particle physics) leads to Directorship of Cosmic Ray Laboratory at Princeton University; work on general relativity; the Crunch, Geometrodynamics; the hydrogen bomb project; the J. Robert Oppenheimer affair. Much of the discussion is based on correspondence.

Transcript

Aaserud:

I would like to take up where we ended last time. We had a long discussion then on Niels Bohr and your involvement at this institute, and today I would like to talk more generally on your experiences and activities as a science advisor and in science policy. I suppose that started with the war experience, more or less. And there’s a natural transition to go from Bohr to that by asking, to what extent did you discuss the world situation — and the potential for a nuclear device, for example — the dangers of a world war — with Niels Bohr in 1939 in the Princeton collaboration?

Wheeler:

I think, in 1939, everyone felt war was inevitable. The crisis we all followed with great interest. There was a radio down the hall in Fine Hall where Bohr’s office was, in the room where we had tea. We would listen with great interest to the brief summary at 4 o’clock, if I remember correctly, at tea time, of what had happened that day.

Aaserud:

That was a gathering of all?

Wheeler:

I would say that typically 60 percent any given day would come to tea, but it was a tea every day. As you remember Oppenheimer’s definition of tea was a place where we explain to each other what we do not understand. It was an advance over what it is today, in the sense that at that time, the physics and the mathematics communities were small enough so that both could have tea together. There would be for example von Neumann in there, or Weill would be in there, or Lifschitz from the world of mathematics, as well as those from the world of physics. The discussion then and at dinner, at one or another place where Bohr and I were invited, often of course could not help but turn to the world political situation. I recall so well his remarking that the Allies were making the mistakes at the beginning, but then the Germans would be making the mistakes at the end. And then I recall also bets about one or another political development, what would happen. I cannot recall whether it was exactly at this time or at a later time — but it was certainly primarily connected with the progress of the war — that Fermi said that the reason that he’d won most of his bets was not because the other people were wrong, but because they expected things to happen too soon, and he knew everything took longer than you expect. That’s how come he won his bets. But then, of course, there was the feeling that it was a dark night coming over Germany, and that had not been new in 1939. That was already in the years before that. I remember a long walk in Copenhagen with James Frank, where he said that he felt that it would be 50 years before Germany would fully get over the perversion of values that happened during the Hitler time.

Aaserud:

That must have been at your first visit to Copenhagen in 1934.

Wheeler:

Yes. I think I mentioned that Bohr had all these offers to stay in this country, but he turned them down, because he was loyal to Denmark. And then I think I discussed the further progress of the work, did I not, here at Princeton?

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

So I’m not clear just how to continue. But then, there’s this question, when and how I was recruited for war work.

Aaserud:

Well, let me first ask, was Bohr somewhat of a center at Princeton in these discussions, or was this just a discussion that was going on generally among everybody?

Wheeler:

I think Bohr — and more generally, those who came originally from Europe — discussed these things most intensely. And for somebody who had not so much experience with these world political questions, I found that it was very instructive and illuminating. I was much more a listener than a participator in the discussions.

Aaserud:

So how important were those discussions for your later reactions and actions in the war effort?

Wheeler:

I cannot recall. I had in early times been a member of the Deutsche physikalische Gesellschaft. That was not through honorary election but through application. I was interested in keeping up with physics in Germany, because, point one, it at the time was in such a leading position, and, point two, I had always had an interest in German science, German language, German literature. So perhaps as a result of that, I got this journal of propaganda that the Nazis sent out, which was a bit extreme, and yet… I think I have mentioned to you… Did I talk about the political side of it, my own impression that I had not seen, that I’d been terribly affected as a boy reading the book called THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND about the terrific loss of life in World War I?

Aaserud:

No, you didn’t mention that.

Wheeler:

I should go back some day and look the book up again and see if it affects me as strongly as it did then. It made me feel that, when I went to college and was asked would I participate in the Reserve Officer Training Corps Program — or whatever the equivalent was at that time — I said, no, I didn’t want to get involved. And then I had got the feeling that Europe would never be at peace unless it were united, and it would never be united unless it were united under the aegis of Germany. Therefore, terrible as the way of unification coming along was, still that was in the end destined to be the history of Europe. Of course, it was a misjudgment, a very big misjudgment, and I think you have seen what I’ve written about that misjudgment, because I had not realized that Jefferson had said in the Napoleonic Wars, the US should rather be united under the British fleet and nation, than let all Europe fall under the dominion of one power, meaning Napoleon. And then in the First World War, Wilson had felt that we could not let Europe fall under the dominion of Germany. Yet here we are today, and discussing things in general terms where we do work for the unification of Europe, and it’s really as a counter to the power further East. Well, this is in response to your question about political outlook. Of course I changed my outlook, as everybody had to.

Aaserud:

At which point did you change? Was this your point of view, for example, in 1939?

Wheeler:

In 1939, yes, I think I felt that way. I think I was beginning to change my view by that time. But when did I change it? At any rate, certainly by the time of the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain, that Roosevelt was so politically adept at getting up. That made it possible for people in this country, who were not yet tuned in on really actively participating, to feel that they could participate at a distance by that deal, trading American destroyers for British bases in Bermuda and the Caribbean. That made sense to people.

Aaserud:

Did you have specific discussions on your point of view on this, at the time when Bohr was here, for example?

Wheeler:

I cannot recall talking about that with him at that time. I think that his concerns… I don’t know how… Of course, it had not become a world war at this point. And so, not everybody’s attitude had hardened. It’s hard to project oneself backward in time. I do recall being at the house of Marston Morris, the mathematician, the afternoon of Pearl Harbor. That created in all of us the sentiment that we were definitely in it. Of course, it was for Hitler the most stupid thing in the world, to declare war on the United States, because if he had not done so, we might have made the great mistake of concentrating our efforts wholly in the Pacific Theatre.

Aaserud:

What were the circumstances leading to your personal involvement in war work?

Wheeler:

Well, there was this… Did I comment about Breit and the security?

Aaserud:

No, I don’t think so.

Wheeler:

I see. Szilard and Wigner were very active in pushing the idea of getting on with military uses. For them, the idea of the war and our being in the war and the side we wanted to be on were clear-cut right from the beginning, as they were not for somebody like me.

Aaserud:

You were in the majority, you think, before the outbreak of the war.

Wheeler:

I suppose so. But many of my colleagues could see the handwriting on the wall, and had the insight and foresight to go ahead and sign up for war work at the National Defense Research Committee; I cannot recall exactly what name it had I the beginning. But at any rate, we had this work going; we’d have to go back to the book of Rhodes to get the chronology straight. So at any rate, the project here involved the cyclotron, interpreting the results of cyclotron measurements. These measurements with White and colleagues were interpreted thanks to Wigner’s insight in the resonance of absorption. The idea, of course, had gone back to the idea that Bohr and I had talked about, of resonance absorption of U-238, but trying to avoid it. That was a great idea of Szilard and Wigner, to slow down the neutron outside the uranium and get down to the energy where you could then use the neutron effectively, in U-235, rather than let the neutron be caught in the uranium at a higher energy where it would be caught in the useless 238. It would have been fascinating to know how we would have reacted if we had known about the primitive reactor — was it 250 million years ago, in Africa, in Gabon? — where the material was then high enough in U-235 content to react under natural conditions, and produce fission products — to the great surprise of the French who mined that ore. And so I took part in the writing of these reports and in the interpreting of the results. Of course, those reports went to Briggs, and they were, I’m sure, circulated to our other colleagues in the enterprise, obviously, at Columbia. Then I certainly recall the discussions about pulling the effort together. For a time, there was an obstacle to my taking part in this, because Breit asked me here — and this was at lunch, I think, at Lyers(?) restaurant here in town — to take the pledge not to publish any work in the field. And I said, “To whom and for how long?” He was unwilling to discuss that, and he was not a master of diplomacy, and it ended up with my saying, “No.” But that didn’t seem to present any ultimate obstacles, when it came down to the line, but it did mean that some of the early meetings I did not participate in – for example, the meeting on implosion, where Seth Neddermeier talked about his idea in Washington. Then, the colleagues involved in the work wanted me to go to Chicago. I cannot recall exactly how that came — whether it was a telephone call from Compton to me — but I can recall taking it up with the chairman of our department. I’m not sure that he, Smyth, welcomed that enthusiastically, because I seem to remember saying that I was ready to resign at Princeton if that was what it took to go to Chicago. So it was that clear to me that that’s where I wanted to be — where the action was. That happened at the end of January, 1942, around the first day of February, the end of the semester. That was the time when I could go.

Aaserud:

What were your prospects at Princeton at that time?

Wheeler:

At that time, I was an assistant professor in my second year of appointment. I had come in 1938 to 1941 and then it was the second year of appointment, if I recall correctly, 1941 to 1944. So at any rate, I was granted leave of absence.

Aaserud:

Along with how many others?

Wheeler:

Yes, Ed Kreutz went, and Ed Kreutz was a marvelous person. He was willing to do whatever it took — sweep floors if necessary — to push the project ahead. And of course, Eugene Wigner. I think with Wigner there was some problem of negotiation. It isn’t always easy, I’ve gathered, in the past to get negotiations worked out. It’s very interesting; were you at that discussion the other day, when Wigner was talking about coming here to Princeton? And then, about how his appointment was not renewed, to his consternation, and his ending up going to Wisconsin? At Wisconsin he ultimately got an offer to come back to Princeton — the Jones Professorship in Mathematical Physics. They had tried, he explained to me, to get Van Vleck. Karl Herzfeld’s memoirs indicate that he had been approached in regard to taking the position, and he had said no. But then Van Vleck was consulted for advice, “If you won’t come because you’re going to Harvard, then who do you recommend?” And he recommended Wigner, so the offer was made to Wigner. And it took quite a lot of doing to negotiate that, because “once bitten, twice shy,” they say about dogs. So I believe that there was some shadow of that negotiation.

Aaserud:

What year was that? Do you remember?

Wheeler:

Wigner came in the fall of 1938 to Princeton. And he had the option of whom to recommend for somebody else, and if he had not recommended me, my career would have been entirely different. I feel very grateful that he did recommend me at that time. In the fall of 1938, I also had an offer to go to Johns Hopkins. It took a lot of doing to hold them off while Princeton could make up its mind.

Aaserud:

You preferred Princeton?

Wheeler:

I have great affection for Johns Hopkins, but Princeton was really the center of the scene in those days.

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

So that’s how come I ended up in Chicago. But then in Chicago — and I don’t know whether I said this to you — the part that concerned me was the engineering part, getting on with it. I had started life in my training at Johns Hopkins as an engineer, and switched gradually to physics. So then the first choice was made, of whom to have as a contractor. The people in the Chicago Laboratory — the Metallurgical, mostly abbreviated as Met Lab — were not sympathetic really to having their baby taken out from under their hands. So that the engineer that came in — and I wish I could remember his name, very nice man — found himself — I hope I’m not exaggerating — slightly ostracized, or ostracized by some of the group. And yet I felt that he was our hope to get on with the job, and so I worked with him. A union man would call that scab labor. But at any rate, that tuned me in on what the issues would be. But this contractor — it might have been Carbon and Carbide, and someday I’ll remember the name of the man but I don’t know — had wanted to take the idea as originally put forward by the Laboratory of a pile with cylinders of uranium cooled by helium, and there was a lot of interest in helium. I had even myself got an experiment going to take care of one of the issues about that method — that is, would the flow of helium through the graphite erode the graphite? And so I actually shot air through a hole in the graphite to see how rapidly it eroded.

Aaserud:

It was an assigned test that you had?

Wheeler:

No, I just went ahead and did it. It was very much a freewheeling operation there. There was not a tremendous sense of direction. It was rather more people seeing things needed to be done and pitching in and doing them.

Aaserud:

And you were free to pursue it, once you had formulated the problem.

Wheeler:

Yes. There was a laboratory council. This council met, was it once a week or once every two weeks? I somehow ended up in the position of secretary to it, keeping the notes, classified notes. I do not know where those notes are today. There’s so much out of those records that I would love to see. Perhaps you do.

Aaserud:

Well, I would love to see them. I don’t know where they are now.

Wheeler:

Yes. And then of course there were reports. I don’t know whether I wrote a dozen reports or more or less, during that period.

Aaserud:

In Chicago.

Wheeler:

On various issues about the pile, including questions of poisoning by chain reaction. So I was content to leave the calculation of the multiplication factor to Wigner and to Fermi, and their associates, in the measurements that Fermi was doing with the pile there. But then, the feeling was that we had to move faster. I do not know at what level that decision was taken. I do not know to what extent it was influenced by the visit of Sir John Simon and Wallace Akers and I think it was Chadwick — the three members of the British Committee — that summer of 1942.

Aaserud:

That was after half a year in Chicago, more or less.

Wheeler:

Yes. At any rate, DuPont was brought in.

Aaserud:

Before we go any further, do you remember what was your specific motivation for going to Chicago? Was it for pitching in for the war effort, or was it in joining a collaborative venture?

Wheeler:

Oh, the decision had been taken to unify the work at Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago in one place, and get going on the reactor business. Of course, it took some persuading of people to go, some people. That decision, how it was taken, I presume goes back to Bush and Conant and the National Defense Research Committee.

Aaserud:

NDRC, yes.

Wheeler:

So it was quite clear that if you wanted to get on with the reactor, that’s where you went.

Aaserud:

So it was a gradual development in that sense.

Wheeler:

Well, there was a specific moment of time at which that was done. Then we took over the Ryerson Physical Laboratory there, and that was made off limits. When DuPont came into the picture, then, of course, key people came from DuPont to discuss things, go over things. But then it was clear that it was not going to be enough for DuPont people always to come from Wilmington to Chicago. It was necessary to have a Chicago representative at Wilmington, and so Compton appointed me to go there. That was, you might say, to help take the know-how from… and then additional people came later. Herbert Anderson came; let’s see, I think Herbert Anderson only came for visits. Katherine Way came after a while to help me out, from the Metallurgical Laboratory. By Thanksgiving Day, 1942, we were meeting in the Engineering Department of DuPont, and there we were going over the factors in a choice of a reactor. I think I had already been helping appreciably on that, in analyzing what factors ought to be taken into account, because I can recall having recognized that if the electric power — which supplied the pumps and kept the cooling water going so the reactor could function — that was affected by thunderstorms, that would be bad. I had made an analysis of different locations as regards the number of thunderstorm days per year. And that was a factor against, for example, a location in Florida, which would have had more thunderstorm days per year than any other state in the union.

Aaserud:

How bad was it? How much of an impact would it have on the work?

Wheeler:

Well, that’s always the question, how much impact. And then the chemical engineers were concerned about the cooling water: would that corrode the pipes or cause difficulty? And we were always so concerned about things in the water that could get activated and go downstream and be a danger. So in the end, the Columbia River location was what we picked. If I remember correctly, that was Thanksgiving Day, 1942, and it was mostly DuPont people around. And I was there also; I just got back maybe once a week to see my family in Chicago. I’d go back and forth on the train. So I was there when the pile ran. I took that for granted, that it would go, and so I was not able to get excited about it.

Aaserud:

Like everybody else.

Wheeler:

But then it was of course necessary to consider all kinds of problems in the design of reactors. And it was a great help to be initiated into the ways of work at DuPont by Dale Babcock, close associate there. He had acted as a mentor, you might say, for new people in chemical engineering. He had been trained at the University of Illinois in chemical engineering. But most of the others considered themselves as chemical engineers. There had been a lot of experience with the Nylon process, and also with the process of combining hydrogen and nitrogen to make ammonia synthetically at high pressures and temperatures. That was an extreme of technology that had never been reached before in this country, so it was pushing things to the limit when DuPont did that. In both cases — both the ammonia plant and the nylon plant — not only were things pushed to the limit, but time was a big factor. The nylon plant was being built before the process had been worked out, to get the time shortened up. There was an experience there of the key people, every morning, first thing, dictating accounts of what had been decided on the day before. I do not know to what extent this was normal practice, but I do know that DuPont felt very skittish about getting into this work, because of two reasons. Reason number one, it had been accused after World War I of being — what was it? — a “merchant of death,” making explosives. And then there was a question of safety, of radioactivity, so that that would be a hazard that would have to be looked out for. But then there was a third factor, and that was, it was an enormously expensive project. I can recall one senior DuPont man saying to me — I think this was Roger Williams — that if we succeed, great, everybody will go happily on his way; and if we fail, there’ll never be an end to investigations, one Congressional committee after another. And I can recall Roger Adams, the great chemist whom I got to know him later — wonderful man, great admiration for him — somehow, through a leak from somebody, got word about this nuclear project, and he was dead against it. He said, “The world’s greatest boondoggle.”

Aaserud:

Even at that time you were involved, or at least participated in or knew about, these discussions, for and against the project, at DuPont?

Wheeler:

Right. I heard, did not participate, because DuPont had already committed itself to do it. As you may remember, and as told in the book of Richard Rhodes, the government, in return for DuPont being willing to take on this project for a fee of a dollar a year, had to agree to drop some anti-trust charges, because that had been the heyday, shortly before the war, of so-called trust busting. The method of organization at DuPont, in doing big things in a big way with big people, was an eye opener to me, and I feel immensely grateful to have had that experience, because it colored my approach to what could be done ever since.

Aaserud:

Yes. We’ll get back to that. It was a model in your National Defense Laboratory proposal later, of course, but we’ll get back to that.

Wheeler:

Yes. Right. Since there were a number of us who had been brought in and had not yet been moved to Wilmington — DuPont people, I mean — from this, that or the other location, we would often have sessions in one or another hotel room after dinner, talking about the ways DuPont did things, and past experiences; and it was so totally different. As you may remember, Fermi in effect practically said that he could build the pile himself — the production pile. He was not a man to delegate things, and I had seen him in the laboratory with his hacksaw cutting a bar of lead in half. Not somebody else, Fermi cutting it in half with the hacksaw in hand. By contrast, in DuPont, instead of getting down to the job, the first effort was getting people to do the job — what seemed to my friends back at the Met Lab to be enormous numbers of people. But the idea was that there was so much to be done, so much to be thought about, so much to be planned for. Here were these parallel groups, one concerned with the technical process itself, another concerned with the engineering, another concerned with the operation, and another concerned with the construction. Each group went over the same things, but from a totally different point of view, whereas somebody like Fermi would have looked at all points of view at once.

Aaserud:

It must have been quite a transition for you too. I mean, that kind of experience, that kind of working environment must have been new to you.

Wheeler:

Yes. It was absolutely fascinating.

Aaserud:

You didn’t encounter any difficulty in making the personal transition yourself?

Wheeler:

No. No. My first job, after all, had been in a silver mine, where I was in effect among engineers, fixing electric motors to pump the water out of the mine. So I had the feel for the real world, you might call it — things and processes.

Aaserud:

And you already had that experience with the engineer in Chicago, for example, too, which was along the same lines.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

Was that part of the reason for your being selected for that task, do you think?

Wheeler:

I think so. Yes.

Aaserud:

So you were an untypical theoretical physicist in that sense.

Wheeler:

I had an engineering orientation. But as you know; Eugene Wigner was trained as a chemical engineer, because his father felt that he couldn’t get any job in physics. Then I could go on endlessly about this, but of course, the people who planned things out — Roger Williams and Crawford Greenwalt — felt that it was extremely important for everybody to be acquainted with all the key elements in the picture. Among other things, that meant for me not only keeping up my visits back and forth to Chicago, reviewing specific questions for control of the reaction or poisons or what not, but also meant going to the state of Washington as soon as that site had been selected and looking over it. And then there was the question of where we would put the reactors. There was one hill there on this site along the river, and there was a temptation of some people to use that as a criterion for where the reactor would be placed. I can remember wise old Roger Williams say, not to me but to somebody else, “Don’t you let that factor prejudice your choice. It’s too easy to let some minor thing perturb major decisions. Make them on their proper basis, and not on some accidental basis.” The start-up of the pile was one where Fermi and George Weil would work closely together. Experimental nuclear physicists were primarily involved, as well as of course the pile operators and all that. But I was back at the technical site where I did my work. After all, these are enormous distances. I suppose that our technical site was 15 miles north of town and we called it the 300 area. And then the piles themselves were 35 miles north of town. At any rate, I was not at the pile when they started up, but I kept of course in touch with the progress and how the water was going through and the reaction was proceeding. The power level had been raised up from a very low level to — I’ve forgotten what it was — and then there were these reports. May I told you all this already? As the hours went by, the reactivity of the pile seemed to go down, and it was necessary to pull the control rod out some to keep it going. The next hour it went down further, and they pulled the control rod out further, and finally there was no more place to pull the control rod and the reaction stopped. It was like a bunch of ants running around after you’ve kicked an ant hill — the consternation. And then after some hours, it started up again, and the reactivity got greater and greater, and they kept putting the control rod in more and more, and then after some hours more, it had to be pulled out again. And so there was terrible concern, and theories that there was some chemical in the water getting deposited on the inside of the aluminum tubes, poisoning the reaction, and that chemical then finally getting washed away, when the pile was no longer in operation, and then getting re-deposited. Or there was a theory that there was some fixing of the nitrogen of the air into the pile, to make it an absorbing thing. Well, I had had done so much work on poisons and what they could possibly be that it seemed to me that was a reasonable thing to look for. So right across my office here, right on the wall of the corridor facing me, was a big chart of the nuclear isotopes and their decay lives, and I looked at it. There was only one situation that would fit those times, and that was an iodine xenon, and it looked like the right times. So when Fermi came in, he was a little set back by that. But immediately he gulped and accepted it as a sensible hypothesis and set to work to figure the reactivity loss that way. And Crawford Greenwalt, who later became president of DuPont, later learned how to do these calculations. I’d see him with a slide rule out doing calculations of xenon and iodine growth and decay in reactivity. Anyway, that was one of the most exciting things, but there was another exciting thing. That was the question of the separation. Well, I don’t know how much should we go on on this, because there’s also the case of the Japanese fire balloon and there’s the business of the blow-up of the 200 area plutonium chemical processing plant. Should I say anything about those?

Aaserud:

I don't know. Have your comments on that appeared anywhere else? I don’t remember it.

Wheeler:

Well, John McVee was asking me some about the fire balloon, and I told him about this. It was quite interesting, because he got his story written, but then the NEW YORKER demands a check of everything, and they couldn’t find anybody who could remember this fire balloon incident, and so I suggested so and so and so and so. Well, they are all since retired. Finally the NEW YORKER checkup staff were able to reach on long distance telephone one of these people who had just stopped at a gas station to get gasoline in his car, and verified this story, so it’s in the NEW YORKER anyway.

Aaserud:

OK, but that was not your version of the story anyway.

Wheeler:

It was as I told it to him.

Aaserud:

OK.

Wheeler:

That’s how they checked up on it. And then the other thing was the — I’m not sure that’s written up anywhere — the concern as to whether one might by accident have enough plutonium accumulate in one chemical process vessel — in the process of chemical separation — so that it would become chain reacting. That of course would ruin the whole building, and then the whole business of plutonium production would have to stop. We couldn’t make any more bombs. And who knew how long the war with Japan would go on? And so at that point, what was the chance of this? When this became a crisis, I happened to be on the train going from Wilmington to the state of Washington. I got to Fargo, North Dakota, and somebody came on the train with a telegram for me, “Please take next train back to Chicago and a train to Los Alamos.” So that’s how come I went back there to check out the story. Feynman had done quite a lot of work on this question. With the help of Feynman, it was possible to get a good figure on how much plutonium you had to worry about being collected, because you could have an enormously smaller critical mass of material if it’s in water than if it’s in a bomb, if it’s dry. It’s just a few hundred grams, so it’s no sneezing matter. But then when I got back to Hanford, I reviewed with Bill Mackey, the plant manager. And we reviewed all the unlikely ways that we could have such a concatenation of material — that many hundred grams. There was no absolute way to exclude it, any more than there’s any absolute way to exclude an airplane landing on top of the US Capitol, so it’s just a question of probability. Well, he finally said, “Johnny, the reason the DuPont Company pays me such a big salary is to make the hard decisions. This is a hard decision, and I have to take it. I’ve decided we won’t build a second one.” That saved a couple of hundred million dollars.

Aaserud:

How far into the effort?

Wheeler:

I’ve got to find out. That was a wonderful thing for me to do, to get my family records in those days, probably the spring of 1945.

Aaserud:

You have it somewhere in your files?

Wheeler:

Oh boy. I honestly don’t know. In the attic of the summer place in Maine where I work I’ve stored old records; it could be there. If you would stick a long needle into me when I’m there, then I could someday look.

Aaserud:

OK. Do you know how much there might be? Other things you’ve got up there too?

Wheeler:

Yes. I honestly don’t know. Let’s see, now. Then I think I mentioned about coming back, leaving there. I perhaps told you about figuring about when the bomb would be dropped and the war would be over. It’s not so easy to assume that the war would be over. I wonder if you have read the last chapter in this book of Haru Nazekato-Reischauer. Did I mention that to you?

Aaserud:

No.

Wheeler:

A samurai himself. Anyway, that last chapter you would find, I think, quite illuminating.

Aaserud:

No, I haven’t seen it.

Wheeler:

At any rate, I assumed the war would be over shortly. I recall Korn(?) coming to visit me. He was going through Hanford on his way to Los Alamos. I think, he was perhaps thinking of somebody he might get for the Harvard faculty when the war was over, but he evidently concluded that this man he was looking at did not measure up. That’s all theory on my part. He said nothing, either that he was looking me over or that he was saying, no. But he was also looking me over I think for another possibility, that I would be invited to the test at Trinity, but I was not invited to the test at Trinity. I suppose the point was to keep that number down. But at any rate, I felt the war would be over by fall, and consequently, I took my family to Vancouver, British Columbia, so they could go East while I finished up, and have a little vacation. My wife’s mother lived in Maine. There was a cottage in Maine, and that would be a place for the children to be for a few days and the family together before going back to school in Princeton. Therefore, the best way to get across to Maine with minimum changes, I thought, was to go the Canadian Railway. I took them to Vancouver, British Columbia, August 6, and as I came out of the railway station, from putting them on board, there were the newspaper boys selling extra copies of the paper, about the bomb dropped on Japan. My wife in the observation car of the train also saw the same papers. She had been in on what was going on, and so she was filled with immense excitement. But all these Canadians sitting around were so placid, so tacit, so quiet, that she finally couldn’t get over it. Finally she said to somebody sitting there, “Can’t you see? The war is going to be over.” They thought she was totally crazy. And I was stopping for a few hours at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, because I looked forward to the future of physics in the postwar period, and that was a good place. He was talking about such and such a supernova, and I was saying, “Yes, it’s like that exciting news in the paper about the bomb.” So he went on, “And the supernova has such and such potential.” At any rate, in physics in the postwar period, one of the first decisions was, I had already… It’s odd, it seems to me that I had sent a paper to the New York Academy of Sciences on this too, photon annihilation of the positive and negative electron, just at that time, but I may be mistaken about that.

Aaserud:

At the time of the end of the war?

Wheeler:

Yes. I had been very interested in Fermi’s ideas about mechanisms for accelerating cosmic rays, by magnetic fields, in the space between the galaxies. It seemed to me that by far the simplest way to get on with the problem of elementary particle physics was to use cosmic rays. You wouldn’t have to spend lots of money for an accelerator. So that the building just down the way here, which was used for wartime projects, I made moves to get and take over for a cosmic ray laboratory. So I became director of the Cosmic Ray Laboratory there and got in various colleagues to participate. There was W. Y. Chang, who had been here in the late days of the war, and Sigurdgeirson. I don’t know whether you saw the article in the NEW YORKER about him, about two months ago, about stopping the Icelandic lava flow that threatened to engulf the only port on the south coast of Iceland. But Sigurdgeirson; and Reynolds, who just retired from here; Yamakawa, Lloyd Lewis — anyway a collection of younger people. We had a very exciting time getting going there, and one of the things was this meson game. That was the first evidence that Chang got for the drop of a mu meson from one energy level around a nucleus to another. I called it the Change radiation, but the name never stuck, in an article in REVIEWS OF MODERN PHYSICS. He later became the director of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at Peking. I think he just recently retired from there.

Aaserud:

To what extent did the war change the approach to and activities in physics on your part and here at Princeton? Even more concretely, did you have problems getting back to Princeton? You took up work here afterwards.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

That was a continuation of your presence here before the war?

Wheeler:

Yes. I was still assistant professor, if I remember correctly, and very soon an associate professor. And then — I don’t know whether it was three years or five years — a full professor, and then still later a Joseph Henry Professor. I can recall being invited to give a paper at the American Philosophical Society on the future of this general field of physics. “The Problems and Prospects of Elementary Particle Physics,” I believe I called it, gave a survey of what could be done, what needed to be done, as seen at that time.

Aaserud:

That was immediately after the war?

Wheeler:

I think it was fairly soon after the war.

Aaserud:

Yes. But how was that transition from war work to peace work? That was my question.

Wheeler:

Well, I think the biggest feeling was a feeling that physics could begin now to do big things in a big way, and for me it was encouragement to look into the biggest problems. That’s a very good point — Feynman and I had been working, and I guess I left that out, about my work here at Princeton, my scientific work. We got all into the uranium work and such things, but my scientific work was going on.

Aaserud:

Yes, they went on in parallel until you went to Chicago?

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

Then it was all war work.

Wheeler:

Yes, right. But with Feynman — we had done this work on the action at a distance. We’d done a lot of work on scattering, too, before that, which we never wrote up. I have a bad conscience about it. I had a note to myself to call Feynman about it, a few months back, and he was dead by the time I got to call him. But at any rate, the action at a distance business, we had excuse to pull together, by the need for a paper for — I forget whether it was Einstein’s birthday or Bohr’s birthday, I think it was Einstein’s birthday. It seems to me we did that at Los Alamos, but I can’t tell you exactly which month it was we were working there at Los Alamos on that, but that must have been the… [telephone interruption]

Aaserud:

— just wanted to backtrack a little bit. You mentioned an article in the NEW YORKER about the balloon story.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

And just to make sure that I can get back to that, do you remember who wrote it?

Wheeler:

John McFee. But the title I cannot remember, and he’s written a lot in the NEW YORKER.

Aaserud:

Do you remember the approximate year?

Wheeler:

It seems to me that I was in Texas at that time, so if I had to make a horseback guess, I would say seven years ago, plus or minus four.

Aaserud:

Was it a main article?

Wheeler:

One of these main articles.

Aaserud:

Then it should be possible to find it. If not, I’ll ask you to tell the story anyway.

Wheeler:

He lives here in town. But I never see him.

Aaserud:

Yes, but he had the story from you anyway, right. Anyway, I pulled out this article by Crawford Greenwalt which of course you know. It’s from the MAGIC WITHOUT MAGIC book.

Wheeler:

I see. It’s a long time since I’ve read that.

Aaserud:

Yes, and he talks about your activities with DuPont, and he says that you came in early 1943. I think you said around spring 1942?

Wheeler:

I was spending most of my time with DuPont already in November of 1942, but I was, at that time, an employee of the University of Chicago. But ultimately, sometime in 1943, they moved me to the payroll of DuPont.

Aaserud:

I see. So that was more a formal thing, but you were working with them for longer than that in actuality.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

And he goes through the things you talked about as well. You worked with DuPont in Delaware the first part of the time, right, and then you moved to Hanford.

Wheeler:

Yes. But I was always going back and forth, across the country once a month by train.

Aaserud:

So you got to travel a lot at that time. You didn’t stay in one place for a long period and then another place for a long period. You actually moved back and forth all the time.

Wheeler:

Well, the family is where I regarded my home, and we moved to Wilmington about March of 1943, and we moved from Wilmington to Richland, Washington, in July of 1944.

Aaserud:

OK. And he talks about in particular your tendency to use a pen and not a pencil.

Wheeler:

Oh, really?

Aaserud:

He doesn’t know either how conscious that was, but he thought that was maybe expressing your concern that nothing should be arbitrary, that everything should be there on the page. You weren’t allowed to, you know, erase and start from scratch again. But I don’t know if that has any significance at all. It’s just interesting that he remembers that.

Wheeler:

That’s interesting, yes. I don’t know how he got onto that.

Aaserud:

OK, we left off with your talking about you and Feynman.

Wheeler:

I guess it’s because I’m intrinsically lazy, and it takes work to push a pencil, whereas a good juicy pen will just move all by itself.

Aaserud:

That’s a different explanation. I think you talked about you and Feynman in Los Alamos.

Wheeler:

Yes, that’s where I was. Where did we do this article? For the Einstein issue of REVIEWS OF MODERN PHYSICS? At any rate, my member is that we were working over the desk at Los Alamos. I could find the paper and see. Should I try to find it or forget it? Let’s forget it.

Aaserud:

OK. Maybe we can get back to it if we have time.

Wheeler:

Yes. And then later we did another paper, in 1949, and I can’t recall where it was we did that, but I think that might well have been also at Los Alamos. He might have gone there in the summers.

Aaserud:

Maybe we could talk briefly about the building up of the Cosmic Ray Laboratory. That started in 1945 already just when you came back to Princeton?

Wheeler:

Yes, back at Princeton. And you asked about the attitude and the effect of the war. I think the effect of the war was to make people appreciate who were in the field of physics, that physics is important, that you can get money to do physics, you could do it in a big way, and you don’t have to be a worm. So this Cosmic Ray Laboratory looked good to me, and I was lucky to get these colleagues going on it. That was four years in there, and I got quite a lot of things related one way or another to cosmic rays. I can recall, however, that I had heard Niels Arley in Copenhagen talk about cosmic rays, in earlier times, and I had stupidly invited him to come as a visitor to the Cosmic Ray Laboratory. I can recall somewhat one of our Copenhagen friends asking me later, how come you asked him? And that was a good question.

Aaserud:

But I suppose, he was brilliant in his own way, but he was a little difficult also. I came across some letters from him to you in the American Philosophical Society Archives, where he talks about Bohr becoming mentally ill and things like that.

Wheeler:

He talks about Bohr?

Aaserud:

He talks about Niels Bohr becoming mentally ill, yes.

Wheeler:

He must have been looking at himself in the mirror.

Aaserud:

Yes, exactly. You know, that indicates the same tragedy.

Wheeler:

That must be it, that it was a tragedy overtaking him, that perhaps at the time when I knew him, he was a different person — when I first knew him.

Aaserud:

Yes, because he was very active at the Bohr Institute for a while. I think he had Bohr’s full confidence in his early years.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

How long was he here?

Wheeler:

I think, a year. Maybe only a semester. So there was a variety of aspects of cosmic ray physics that went on here.

Aaserud:

How typical or untypical was your vision of that kind of laboratory at the time? Was it a unique laboratory in that sense?

Wheeler:

Well, of course having cosmic ray work going on here brought me in touch with cosmic ray laboratories elsewhere. It’s very striking, now that you bring that up, that one involvement in one part of physics has brought me in touch at one time with one group of people, another involvement in another part of physics in touch with another group. So there was a whole group of people in cosmic ray physics I got to know well. I had already known Compton at Chicago. Then there was Marcel Schein at Chicago, and there was Emanuel Sandevel Vayarta in Mexico City. There was Clay in the Netherlands, and there was a colleague in Goya in Japan, Sekedo, and of course Bruno Rossi at MIT. There were others as well, but those are the ones I think of.

Aaserud:

So it was a complete break for you, in that respect.

Wheeler:

Yes. How come I wasn’t talking about nuclear physics more at that time? That’s a good question. I know I had given at least one course in… I have no schedule of the courses that I gave over the years. That’s an odd stupid thing of me.

Aaserud:

Well, maybe it can be gotten from the catalogues or something.

Wheeler:

Yes, sure. But I gave a course at least one and probably more than once in nuclear physics. I must have. And then came the feeling that this cosmic ray business and the elementary particle business was not getting the answer to the maiden’s prayer. With the speed of light, it was going to be a long row to hoe, and better to go back closer to fundamentals. I was still at that time attached to the idea of action at a distance, and the thought pressed on me harder than ever, that that idea ought to be developed in the realm of gravity. If in the realm of electromagnetism, it means sweeping out the electromagnetic field between the charged elementary particles, then in the realm of gravity, it means sweeping out space and time themselves between the particles – so a description of nature that doesn’t use space or time, just particles. You can easily set up a framework for such a description, but then how do you twiddle the screws in it in such a way as to make it correspond to the theory of gravity as we know it? That’s a much bigger problem. That’s still unsolved. That’s one side of that outlook on physics. Another side of it was the feeling that pair theory, where Feynman and I had done our work, was still full of marvelous things, and that it ought to be explored and exploited to the fullest. And so I put in an application to the Guggenheim Fellowship, to work on that subject, in touch with Niels Bohr, but I said that — or at least I had in mind, and I must have clued them in — that my intention since my children could do better with learning French than learning Danish, was to have them in school in Paris, and me go back and forth to Copenhagen. But in Paris, there were enough mathematical people. I had already, before I went to Paris, been in touch with enough mathematical people in this country to get some background on the kind of mathematics that would be needed to make this action at a distance idea go through in gravity theory. I also had along John Toll as a graduate student, and he was working with a thesis with me on the application of the dispersion relation to derive all sorts of cross-sections and processes from other data. We published a note or an abstract of a paper in some journal, but I never got to follow that up with him, and I have his thesis on the topic. Unfortunately that thesis was never published either. Of course it’s available, if you’re interested, on microfilm. But copies of the thesis circulated around at the Institute for Advanced Study, and people immediately plunged into using dispersion theory for all sorts of things there, in the realm of elementary particle theory. But Toll himself never got the credit he might have gotten in that field, because he, like me, was engulfed in this Los Alamos game. I was, of course, going to Bohr, to get his discussion. He always liked to focus on the central issue, and the central issue in nuclear physics as he saw it was to reconcile these elementary particle features of nuclear behavior with the collective features. We had talked about the collective features in our fission business. But there we got going on a lot of exciting things, and it was a tragedy that I couldn’t just stay on with him and finish it up. But I got at my pension in Paris all these phone calls from Washington about the crisis and having to go back. I probably told you this story, about Claus Fuchs and the predication and all that. I’d been on the Reactor Safeguard Committee for the first, I guess, seven years of its life, something like that.

Aaserud:

Beginning in?

Wheeler:

Beginning whenever it began. And with Edward Teller, I had supported the idea of domes over reactors, which the Russians always… And our calculations always assumed the worst case. Suppose the pile caught on fire and this stuff went up in smoke? And the stuff spread downwind? Then how far would it cause fatalities? And we used, if I remember correctly, four or five hundred roentgens as the 50 percent mark fatalities. And we used something that our friend, Harry Wexler, from the Weather Bureau helped us onto — a wonderful meteorological angle. Smoke coming out of a chimney spreads out downstream, goes swirling around, but fills out a sector of 1/7 of a radian — the meteorological angle, I like to call it. If you use that, you’ve got enough numbers to do your figuring with. The few of us who were theoretical physicists could figure this, and so it came out, if I remember correctly, that the distance between a community and a reactor had to be .01 times the square root of the power level in kilowatts, .01 miles. That was a foundation on which we gave OK to General Electric tentatively to put a plant near Schenectady. Maybe I told you about all that?

Aaserud:

No.

Wheeler:

And then of course we could not give final approval until we saw final drawings, and they had indeed a dome to go over it, but one thing concerned me. It was always my job to look for things that were overlooked, bugs under the bed is one way to describe it. The thing concerned me this way, that sodium could leak out of the pile onto the floor, and the sodium could react with the oxygen, and that could reduce the pressure in this dome. I had seen enough children’s rubber balls that over time had lost enough air so that they had dimples in them, and I was concerned that there would be a dimple develop from a lowering of pressure — not from a raising of pressure — in this dome. Then the accident proceeds further and now pressure develops. This dimple then unravels, so it gets undone and you get more and more kinetic energy concentrated on a smaller and smaller mass, and that would drive a slug of matter out of it, and break the containment. Well, this sounded preposterous to our friends among the General Electric engineers, but they were obliged by the terms of the arrangements to try it out. So they had a hollow copper sphere at the next meeting, and then they had a vacuum line they connected to it. And by George, that thing really crumpled. Then they hooked it to the pressure line, boom, there was a shot and a slug of copper shot through the ceiling into the ceiling of the next floor above. So that this was not something you could laugh off. But the solution was easy, to put a valve on the container, so that if pressure did go down, it would let air in. But then came the time of reviewing these things with the British. That was what both sides felt would be a good idea, to see if we came to a community of conclusions. We reviewed this meteorological angle and these calculations and so on, and they had essentially similar conclusions — different meteorologists but not a different meteorological angle. And I was worried about — or brought up the question about — whether you could not, if you had a release of reactor products, have nearby some huge oil storage tanks, and at the moment of the nuclear disaster, it would ignite these huge oil storage tanks and create an updraft so powerful it would carry all the radioactivity to the high atmosphere and that would be carried down wind. Well, the conclusion was, of most people there, that that was an invitation to another disaster, if somebody would ignite that. So we never did do that, although if that had been available at Chernobyl it would have made a lot of difference.

Aaserud:

This was in the forties, all of that?

Wheeler:

This was in October of 1949, the joint meeting with the British at Harwell.

Aaserud:

But that was also the Reactor Safeguards Committee.

Wheeler:

The Reactor Safeguards Committee meeting with the corresponding British committee.

Aaserud:

How large a committee was it, and who else was on it?

Wheeler:

About eight on it, and Edward Teller was a very active member. Joe Kennedy, chemist from Washington University, St. Louis. Harry Wexler from the US Weather Bureau. Abel Woolman, professor of sanitary engineering at Johns Hopkins University, an expert on getting rid of pollution. Through him I learned the motto of the sanitary engineer, “pollution plus dilution equals solution.” I’m sure I’ve omitted a couple of names, but I cannot recall at the moment. At any rate, in that meeting, it fell to my lot having to — since I’d dealt with control rods — talk about the chance of an accident. I talked about two of the three control systems. There was one chance in a million, say, that one failed, and if that failed you had backup of system B, and if that failed you had still system C. So you might say that there was one chance in a million million million of something going wrong. But I argued that that was not the way to figure it. The way to figure it was, what’s the chance that someone comes along who is clever enough to turn off all these things, somebody who is trusted enough by security to get through the line and wise enough in engineering terms to do all this? And I argued that that was something that you could not predict by everyday statistics. I had collected the statistics on sabotage in World War I and sabotage in World War II in this country. There was a lot of difference, and how come? Because in World War I, we were divided. There were a lot of people sympathizing with Germany. In World War II, it was more united than we’d been in any war in history, so it was totally different — a much lower level of sabotage. So it was a matter of imponderables. I painted a picture of somebody who is very clever, a loner, animated by some strange ideology, and he would be the one you would have to worry about. And as I was speaking, I remember in the British committee opposite me, was Klaus Fuchs. Well, of course, a month later, he was in prison. And Peierls told me much later that he who had hired Fuchs had seen in the newspaper about his arrest, and thought that there was some terrible mistake. He had gone to see him in prison and Fuchs said, “Oh no, there’s no mistake. I was a spy.” “But how could you?” “I meant to give control of the world to the Russians.” “But how could you?” “I meant then to tell them what was wrong with them.” Incredibly naive.

Aaserud:

There was nobody at Los Alamos at the time having any suspicion of him, I think.

Wheeler:

Nobody what?

Aaserud:

At Los Alamos, during the war.

Wheeler:

Suspected. No.

Aaserud:

I found this article of yours, which is a rather unusual article of yours at the time, on the future of nuclear power that you wrote for MECHANICAL ENGINEERING.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

In 1946. And that must be related to those kinds of activities. I don’t know if it’s directly related to your tenure in the Safeguard Committee, but —

Wheeler:

Oh, I see. I don’t know how come.

Aaserud:

I was just wondering what was the context of that article, if you remember at all?

Wheeler:

No, I certainly… Evidently I was invited to give a talk there.

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

And that is 1946, isn’t it?

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

No, I didn’t remember anything about that.

Aaserud:

I guess you argue that government should have control of fissionable material, but that otherwise the development of nuclear power should be as free as possible. It should be industry developing it. I think that is the main argument of the article. And there’s also an argument against secrecy. Some scientific information you have in that article is taken from a German journal during the war, because the same information wasn’t free yet here.

Wheeler:

Oh, really? So I could quote that.

Aaserud:

You have that in a chart in there somewhere. But you don’t remember that in particular?

Wheeler:

No, I don’t remember that article at all. That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for showing me.

Aaserud:

Sure. It’s an interesting article, too.

Wheeler:

You probably have seen the article I did for the Danish Society of Engineers, about three or four years ago, on — I think it was safety, safety of reactors. Or dealing with risk, I think.

Aaserud:

I’m not so sure. It doesn’t come to me immediately, you know.

Wheeler:

It’s dealing with risk. I don’t immediately see any copy of it here. But maybe it’s cuckoo should be looking for it.

Aaserud:

Well, OK. I guess then, well, did you do any science advising of any sort other than that committee between the war and 1959?

Wheeler:

Yes, in two ways. First, I was a consultant to DuPont, on the Central Research Laboratories. It was just across-the-board research, in all sorts of fields. They just felt that somebody could bring in some new insights.

Aaserud:

Yes, that was from the war period.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

You became a consultant in 1942, even, I think.

Wheeler:

Well, that was just for the war work. But then after the war, they made me a consultant. But then they also had me in touch with their other nuclear work. After the war, DuPont got out of it and turned it over to General Electric, at Richland, Washington. DuPont didn’t want to get involved because it was afraid that something would happen that would discredit it. So it got out. Like this “merchants of death” business. This morning’s paper, uses a lovely phrase I’d never heard before, “radiophobia.”

Aaserud:

Oh yes, I saw that.

Wheeler:

Say, what time is it? We’d better stop, if we’re going to get through the line without having to wait for lunch. [lunch break]

Aaserud:

We’re back from a nice lunch, and we’re going to continue. We’re going to skip your involvement in the hydrogen bomb, because that was covered by Peter Galison in an extensive interview with you. Instead I would like to talk a little about your vice presidency in the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, what that amounted to, why you took the position, and the effects of that involvement. That was from 1951 to 1954, was it not?

Wheeler:

I’m glad you know, because you’re ahead of me.

Aaserud:

That’s the years I have here, at any rate.

Wheeler:

I think perhaps it was Kramer’s example and perhaps words from him that made me willing to consider it. I remember friends either at the National Academy or the National Research Council who were, I think, the real instigators of putting me on. I believe the hope was that I would end up as the president of it. But after three years of it, I felt that really to do it in a big way was a big enterprise, and that I wouldn’t be able to do that and do the things I was trying to do in science as well. The most interesting feature of it was the role of the secretary, Fleury(?) in keeping the organization going for a long time. He deserved great credit for that. At the same time, it had come, I think, to the point where it needed new blood, and one of the actions of the committee was to introduce a colleague from England into some of the secretarial work, where he could help make it even more effective in promoting meetings and cooperation between organizations. One of its biggest functions was to confer OK on some scientific meetings, and say, this deserves sponsorship, and not give that to others. That was not itself money but it made the organization that got the OK more easily able to raise money from national sources for this or that meeting. One of the most important actions was to resist giving any OK to any country that would not grant a visa to any legitimate scientist from any country, regardless of politics. It wasn’t always possible to adhere absolutely 100 percent to that, but we came pretty close. Another feature was keeping alive contacts with our friends in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and keeping the seats apportioned so that this, that and the other part of the world had a fair representation. There was a small amount of money available for giving to young people or people otherwise short of funds, to go to meetings. That was really a help, but nowhere near as much help as is these days possible. The sponsorship of the International Conference on Weights and Measures was one of the important activities of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, because it really is so significant in keeping everybody together so the results all mean the same thing to whomever the user is. We did not get into any great activity in the way of encouraging publications. I think that would have been a major enterprise. There was never a journal published by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. We did give encouragement to the formation of the European Physical Society, and in the setting up of that Gilberto Bernardini had a great effect. He was extremely eager to see that Europe remained Europe and not simply Western Europe, so he devised ways in which people in East Europe could come in, although not on the basis of individual membership — the way people do in Western Europe. Instead, it was membership by the country, and dues by the country. And that European Physical Society goes on being an active and useful organization. In regard to China, things were then not in good conditions to do anything very much. It’s only later that that’s become possible.

Aaserud:

Who was president during your tenure?

Wheeler:

My memory is that Mott was the president, but I can’t swear to that.

Aaserud:

What was it that made you accept the position?

Wheeler:

That’s a good question. Maybe if I’d thought more carefully, I wouldn’t have got involved in it. There was a similar situation at a later point in my life, when we were trying to do something to encourage contact with Mainland China. The National Research Council set up a committee and I served on that, and I took part in the enterprise of getting reprints sent to colleagues in China, to make them feel part of the scheme of things. That was still during the period of the Cultural Revolution. But when it came after a certain period of time that either I should become the chairman of the whole committee, with an immense amount of work to do, or get out, I got out. I remember Niels Bohr had been asked to be, between the wars, a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and he had said, No, at that time for grounds and reasons quite different from mine in this postwar period. For him, it was because he felt that there was an unfair discrimination against Germany, the loser in World War I, and he did not want to be a party to it until that was corrected.

Aaserud:

How much work did it amount to? Was that a full time thing?

Wheeler:

Being vice president of the International Union of Physics?

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

No. No, I would say that it was four days a year.

Aaserud:

Four days a year? So you continued you other activities. It didn’t affect your life in any other way.

Wheeler:

No. No.

Aaserud:

The presidency was not full time either?

Wheeler:

No, the secretary; I would say the secretary was like four days a month.

Aaserud:

So if you decided that it might not be worth it, you didn’t lose that much by having that task. Is there anything it led to that otherwise wouldn’t have happened in your career or life?

Wheeler:

Well, I had a chance to get acquainted with a lot of people that I have kept contact with since, and that is in many ways as much a benefit of these varied parts of my career as anything — different outlooks, different people. A feel for what this world is. It’s unbelievable, what a variety of enterprises are going on, and how exciting a place it is. And if I just stayed home, I would not have had that. But I confess that one neighbor of mine, who led a far more academic life in history — history of the Middle Ages — jokingly called me one day, “the TWA professor physics at Princeton.”

Aaserud:

Are there any achievements in that position that you can point to?

Wheeler:

Any initiative that I took?

Aaserud:

Any initiative that you started, yes?

Wheeler:

I can’t point to one. I’d have to dig it up.

Aaserud:

Yes. But all in all, you consider it a valuable experience.

Wheeler:

Yes. And one of the most useful things was to be in Copenhagen in 1951. The chance again to see Bohr, a chance again to see James Frank who was visiting there. The last day, our planes were leaving at slightly different times of day, different planes, and I knew he was well along in years. I knew his heart wasn’t good. And I expressed some concern about his going back that long trip to Chicago alone. He laughed and he said, “We come into the world alone,” and he would have been in those great battles in World War I and had the Iron Cross for his bravery, and he said, “And we go out of the world alone.”

Aaserud:

He didn’t want to listen to that.

Wheeler:

No.

Aaserud:

I have, as you have seen, a long list here. Maybe we should go on into the Jackson Committee thing. Aside from that, I have a little more on science.

Wheeler:

By the way, coming back to this question about, what initiative did I take in the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. I suppose that I had as much effect as anyone in modernizing and updating the secretariat. I think that colleagues there went along with that, and so it came off. It’s stupid of me to say that when I can’t even remember the name of the new man who came in to help on the work of the secretary, a British, very effective.

Aaserud:

What did that change amount to administratively?

Wheeler:

Well, just to get more money and work more effectively, reach out further to more organizations, promote more meeting. Just become a bigger force in the scheme of things.

Aaserud:

And that was your suggestion basically.

Wheeler:

Well, I had substantial part in it. Later, I had to be responsible for changing the secretariat of the American Physical Society. That was a far bigger undertaking, and there the responsibility fell very heavy.

Aaserud:

Yes. How much later was that?

Wheeler:

Whenever I was president of the Physical Society. I can’t recall when that was.

Aaserud:

That’s in your vita, of course. OK, then on the scientific side, you got into the general theory of relativity.

Wheeler:

Yes, when the hydrogen business was over.

Aaserud:

I just mentioned the turn to gravity theory, or general relativity, after the hydrogen bomb.

Wheeler:

Oh yes. Already, before the project was finished up, already in the spring of 1952, it was clear how things were going to go, and therefore I wanted ultimately to wind things up. Maybe unwisely I assumed the test of the November 1st, 1952, would succeed, so I spoke to the chairman of our department, Alan Shenstone at that time, about coming back to do part time teaching in the fall, and continuing to run Project Matterhorn during the period from then until we wound up in March of 1953. I saw you had some questions there about Project Matterhorn A and B and Spitzer and all.

Aaserud:

Yes, I did, but we skipped the hydrogen bomb.

Wheeler:

Yes, I think that’s included in the interview with Galison.

Aaserud:

Yes, fine.

Wheeler:

So Shenstone said I could indeed teach the course in relativity. That was a great privilege for me, and I got a notebook to begin that course with.

Aaserud:

Yes, that was the first course.

Wheeler:

First course I’d ever given in general relativity. Obviously it was an opportunity to learn it, and in that first year, I was very lucky to have these students that made it really a great honor and pleasure to do it. I should get the names of the students. I don’t have them with me now.

Aaserud:

They’re probably in the notebook.

Wheeler:

They might well be. Is there a notebook that goes back to this period?

Aaserud:

There’s a series of notebooks that’s labeled Relativity, and the first one of those starts in May, 1952.

Wheeler:

Oh yes, that’s when Shenstone told me I could give the course, I guess.

Aaserud:

Yes, it must be. Just as an aside, was that a general habit of yours, by that time, keeping such notebooks when you were giving courses; did you keep such notes on other courses than relativity too?

Wheeler:

I can’t recall doing it. As a matter of fact, I’ve come across here some notes that Feynman took on my course on nuclear physics, and I know he took also notes on my course in mechanics, but they were mimeographed, given to the students.

Aaserud:

Well, that should be kept.

Wheeler:

But a notebook, I don’t recall keeping them, but when the war came along, we got into the habit of using notebooks for classified work.

Aaserud:

Oh, that’s where it’s from.

Wheeler:

Yes. And there I learned from Fermi the system, to leave the first four pages blank, to put an index in when you get to the end. But he was much better than I, because he went further and he had a card index, so for any given item in his card index, he could say, notebook so and so, page so and so, notebook so and so, page so and so.

Aaserud:

Well, that’s Fermi.

Wheeler:

But then in that course — now we’re talking perhaps of spring of 1953 — I took the students around to Einstein’s house for tea. It is, I know, the time that I became convinced that this business of gravitational collapse was THE great issue — the Crunch, what happens in a Crunch. I devoted various papers to analyzing ways to escape Crunch and showing that they didn’t work, that it was an inevitable thing. I guess the most broad sweeping thing I did on these problems was the lectures I gave at Les Houches in one of the summers — I don’t know whether it’s 1954 or 1956 — called “Geometrodynamics” — if I remember correctly, “and the issue of the final state.” But anyway, they’re in the book of RELATIVITY GROUPS IN TYPOLOGY that Bryce and Cecile DeWitt edited. But already in that first year, to state this problem, I had sent in an abstract for a meeting of the American Physical Society — if I remember correctly, I have not yet been able to find it — with the title, “The Kugel Blitz,” (?) which was the name I gave to an object formed entirely of radiation — no matter in it at all. The object was not so much to make an object that way as to illustrate on theoretical grounds that the problem of collapse was not something peculiar to matter collapsing. You could have empty space, radiation, collapsing too. And therefore it was a deep question of principle. Later on, I called such an object held together by its own gravitational attraction no longer a Kugel Blitz but a GEON, Gravitational Electromagnetic Entity. And there was the first Atoms for Peace Conference held at Geneva. That was the summer of 1955 or whenever it was. I took the opportunity to spend a month quietly at work in Geneva. A second cousin of my wife had an apartment overlooking the place where the river flows out of the Lake of Geneva, and on the top floor. She was going to be away for a month, so we took her apartment for a month, so that that’s where I wrote the paper on the GEON. It was a quiet place to work, and I’ve always found, as you probably have too, the idea of “dream and drive” is a good combination. You mix the two activities. That was a time to dream and write. But at any rate, I should say a little about the motivation for that involvement in gravitational collapse. It had become clear through the work of Feynman and others in the field of elementary particle physics — quantum electrodynamics — that the picture of the electron as a primordial entity — a point-like object, an independently existing thing, and everything built out of electrons or things like electrons, even if they do go backward and forward in time — is not a good way to do physics, because in the neighborhood of what you think is an electron, — experimental electron — there are in effect these things going back and forth in time; there’s a whole atmosphere of virtual electrons. So it’s much more a field theoretic thing than the particle picture admits, or realizes.

Aaserud:

Well, that was quite a turnaround for you, was it not?

Wheeler:

Yes. But they say that nobody gets religion so strongly as a reformed drunkard. So I, who had been against field theory, became more field theory than anybody. The most extreme form of field theory that I knew how to adopt was to say everything is space and time. The ultimate field.

Aaserud:

It’s interesting what you said about dreaming and driving. I mean, I almost see pattern here. You do nuclear physics before the war, then you drive during the war, then you get back to an entirely different thing, then you do the hydrogen bomb, then you change back completely again. Does it have anything to do with the interruptions, that you did those changes? Or would you have done the changes anyway, do you think?

Wheeler:

Well, I would not have been involved in those outer things if it had not been for the state of the world. I would have stayed with my work.

Aaserud:

Yes, but it seems to me that the turnarounds come in relation to those periods of driving.

Wheeler:

Well, they draw me away from a line of work, because I confess that I’m a person who like to keep on plowing a furrow, if I’m already with my plow at that furrow, unless I’m interrupted. And maybe only when I’m interrupted am I ready to start plowing a different furrow in a different place in the field. That might be it. Because right now, my big push is no longer field theory any more, but that SSS paper that I gave you a reprint of. Information is the ultimate thing, or meaning. I don’t know how you combine or how you relate information and bits, and communication and meaning, all those ideas. But out of my notebook — if you Xerox the last few pages of it — you’ll see my discussions with myself: what are the important things to push in that area, who are the important people to keep in touch with, and what are the encouragements to give?

Aaserud:

Yes, they’re a lot more than notes for lectures. I mean, they’re really your own lecturing to yourself.

Wheeler:

There’s nobody I can talk to better than myself. Yet, it’s a strange thing, that just talking without writing it down somehow is less effective. There’s a definiteness to the act of writing it down that helps to crystallize ideas and move the discussion forward. Well, so that was relativity, and it took twenty years more or less of my life. It’s been a wonderful field, and I have a great commitment to it, and it has continuing lessons that I still bring out. There’s a paper that I don’t know whether I showed you, I just did quite recently. It’s a real lollapalooza to do that.

Aaserud:

No, this I haven’t seen.

Wheeler:

Anyway, there are 130 references in it. But it’s on the nature of the dynamics of general relativity, and what you have to specify to… And this graduate student that I talked to…

Aaserud:

Oh, it’s a survey article?

Wheeler:

Yes. This graduate student is working further in this area, but also it leads to new insights on this communication business. This geometrodynamic steering principle reveals the determiners of inertia. A lot of people would be upset at going to a meeting with so little idea of what they’re going to say there as I seem to have, but it somehow puts the screws on me to force me to come to a conclusion. My poor wife has a terrible time with me, because I’m so slow in making decisions, and going to a meeting forces me to adopt a stand on an issue that’s been puzzling me. And then afterwards I have to write down an explanation of my stand. First you say it, then you write down what you wish you’d said. And I find that’s a very productive way to make progress.

Aaserud:

Well, you write down what you did say too, to some extent. I mean, the realization isn’t entirely afterwards.

Wheeler:

Yes, right. Yes, of course. As somebody once put it, I find it pays to listen when I give a lecture, because I often learn something new.

Aaserud:

Was that a conscious strategy that you developed at some point?

Wheeler:

No, it’s pure desperation. Pure desperation. No credit to me for planning ahead.

Aaserud:

No, but it sounds like a strategy now. I mean, you accept the fact that that’s what happens.

Wheeler:

Yes. Maybe I could re-word Einstein’s definition of a scientist, “an unscrupulous opportunist” to make it read, “a desperate detective.” Well, so, that was gravity. Now, what should I tell you?

Aaserud:

Well, the Oppenheimer affair came up, of course, and you were at Princeton at the time.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

So I was wondering whether you had any particular reminiscences or experiences in relation to that?

Wheeler:

Well, I had mentioned to Peter Galison about Oppenheimer’s position in regard to the hydrogen bomb, and about how he had given his support to bringing this work from Los Alamos here. My proposal was put forward at a time when it looked as if the hydrogen bomb business was going to be a very long row to hoe, and it was clear to me from my experience with Los Alamos in that year or more that the people that one wanted, and that could give the push and the initiative and the insight, were few and far between. There were a few great people at Los Alamos — Teller and Ulam — but as for the larger community they had contributed so much during Los Alamos days, they were not contributing, or no people of their kind so much contributing, and I had the feeling that if a part of the enterprise could be moved to Princeton, that would be a much more attractive environment. People could then keep on with their academic work, come for a year’s leave and work on this for a year. And Norris Bradbury approved of that — he and General Froman, the associate director of the Laboratory. Then I wrote a letter to the chairman here proposing such an arrangement, and that took quite a gulp for the department, because people had been hoping that they were out of war work or anything with the smell of war work, especially anything secret, and here was something coming in. Allan Shenstone, I think, perhaps felt a special embarrassment in dealing with this issue, as chairman of the department, because he was a Canadian citizen rather than an American citizen. But he, as I understand it, consulted Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer gave a favorable opinion of the idea of moving it here, although somebody else told me that Oppenheimer had said about this hydrogen bomb business… Oh, I don’t want to quote anything. “De Mortuis Nihil Nisi Bonum.” (?) And then, after the decision had been made, but before we really got going here — and by really got going here, I mean the spring of 1953 — then Teller and Ulam had their idea. Then, instead of it being a long term project, where you’re bringing people in to give creative ideas, it was rather a business of converting a vague idea into concrete flesh — getting dimensions, sizes, conditions, all set up. And I wrote… No, we’re not staying on it; I don’t want to get on the hydrogen bomb business. But at any rate, we went over to look with Peter Galison at the room where the meeting was held — I think in late May or early June of 1951 — at the Institute of the General Advisory Committee, where I had this talk I was giving about the concept of the burning of the hydrogen bomb. The poor boys — John Toll, Ken Ford, Louis Henyay, Larry Willits — had been working 36 hours often at a stretch to get things run out, and while I was talking, the window was pushed up, and Ken Ford, now as you know, handed in through the window this rolled up chart. I was able to tape it up on the blackboard, and it showed the progress of the burning, that big chart, diagram. So that at the end of that meeting, Oppenheimer changed his position, and came around completely for the project. But I had already — now, how did it come about? — become acquainted with Senator Jackson, and the key man on his committee — which committee was that? I don’t know whether it was…

Aaserud:

I know about your relationship with Jackson in 1957, but you knew him from before, you’re saying.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

That I don’t know. You have to tell me about it.

Wheeler:

The key man on Jackson’s Senate committee on — I’m so stupid I can’t remember — was Bill Borden. And of course Dorothy Fosdick was an important person, but Bill Borden…

Aaserud:

Yes, Dorothy Fosdick was also in 1957.

Wheeler:

Pardon?

Aaserud:

Well, I’m thinking about the NATO committee, where Dorothy Fosdick was also involved.

Wheeler:

No, this is totally different. This is a Senate committee.

Aaserud:

And that was in the early 1950s, you’re saying?

Wheeler:

This was in the years 1951 and 1952. And the first part of 1953. Bill Borden came several times to give liaison, if you might call it that, between Jackson’s committee — deeply concerned with progress on this hydrogen bomb business — and our work. He felt this was great stuff, we ought to push it, and it deserved every support.

Aaserud:

There was the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of course too. But that was a Congressional committee.

Wheeler:

Yes, well, maybe it was that committee.

Aaserud:

I know that in the late fifties, Henry Jackson was chairman of a subcommittee of that. Could it be that?

Wheeler:

It could be that. Who would know really about that would be Dorothy Fosdick in Washington.

Aaserud:

She’s still around.

Wheeler:

Yes, she’s wonderful. She was offered, Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian, told me, the presidency of four different colleges at different times. She never accepted. By belonging to Senator Jackson’s group, she felt she had more influence on the course of events. Anyhow, Borden acted as liaison and kept giving us encouragement and giving encouragement back to Senator Jackson about how things were going. But he, I think, felt queasy about Oppenheimer.

Aaserud:

Jackson did?

Wheeler:

Borden. I don’t know about Jackson. Borden did. And Borden really had his career ruined by the Oppenheimer affair. Oppenheimer became famous from it, and Borden became ruined by it, because he, as a matter of conscience, felt that something was wrong, that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, as they said. At any rate, I was going to a meeting in Washington. We were having a push, push, push, push here, and therefore, I took the night sleeper from Trenton to Washington. I did what I ought not to have done, took some classified papers with me, and I had not been able to get a roomette. You’re supposed to have a locked compartment, a berth. But to get through the materials in preparation for the next morning’s meeting, I was reading as I lay in my berth. And the next morning, when I went to leave, the letter that Borden had sent me — about his concern about the project and the way things were going and what not — was missing. Nothing that I could do could find it. I felt it was so important, I stayed right there and I asked the passengers getting off the train if they had seen it, and got the porter to work looking for it, and then really felt terrible. I called — who was the colleague who was with me on the train? Anyway, I told him to tell my colleagues that I was not going to be at the meeting; I was going to stay with. I called, and ultimately the security people came. They had the car towed to another place on the tracks there at Washington, and searched it, and brought back all the passengers. The document was never found. Strauss refers to it in his autobiographical book. Eisenhower lined up the whole Atomic Energy Commission before him in the Oval Office, and made them stand while he gave them a lecture on this violation of security. This was a very sensitive thing, because it was Congress versus the President. This project was so to speak under the administration. Here was Congress getting in through Jackson and Bill Borden.

Aaserud:

How did you become acquainted with Henry Jackson in the first place? Was that through that committee? Or was it through starting the hydrogen bomb project?

Wheeler:

I guess it was through this hydrogen business. I honestly don’t know. I remember being taken by him, Dorothy Fosdick, maybe Bill Borden along to lunch at the Senate Dining Room one day, but the dates escape me. Well, where do we go from here?

Aaserud:

I started asking about the Oppenheimer affair.

Wheeler:

Yes, that’s how we got onto this.

Aaserud:

That’s how we got onto this. This is some kind of prelude I suppose to something more. You did talk about the division of labor on the hydrogen bomb between Princeton and Los Alamos with Peter, I suppose? I think the building up of a part of the hydrogen bomb project at Princeton is interesting. But I’m sure you covered that with Peter, so it’s just an important thing to have covered. You did discuss that?

Wheeler:

Yes, as I can recall. Also, in the fall, I was teaching relativity, but that was only part-time teaching — fall of 1952. And yet keeping very busy on the Matterhorn. Also, I was trying to get out the work with Bohr on the collective model of the nucleus.

Aaserud:

At the same time?

Wheeler:

Yes, and I can recall David Hill was helping me on that. To keep myself awake, I’d go in the bathroom and soak in the bathtub and come back, so he and I could work all night long and get this out and still keep going on Matterhorn. Anyhow, I was very sorry that there wasn’t time to go on with that with Bohr himself. Of course, it would have grown to a much bigger thing and taken much longer. A Japanese friend in nuclear physics told me, when that paper came out he felt it was a revolutionary change in outlook in nuclear physics. Strauss, of course, was head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and there were these doubts, with perhaps Borden being the leading doubter, about Oppenheimer and the security hearing. Then I can recall being in a hotel in Washington the night before, for something quite different, although I cannot remember now what it was. Edward Teller was walking up and down the room, and what was he going to say in his testimony the next day? Would he say what he really felt about Oppenheimer, or would he just speak polite things about what he’d done during the war? Of course, I knew what he would do. So that was that. I think that the best thing about it all is to forget it all, the best thing for the physics community. But one colleague, from Los Alamos days, whom I respect very much, who had a major responsibility at one of the universities on the West Coast, I recall at the airport meeting Edward Teller and Teller holding out his hand to shake hands, and this colleague turning around and going away. It’s an indication of the depth of feeling at that time. Not good for the physics community, and so I think from that point of view, the less said, the better. And one great very distinguished colleague, who shall be nameless, one person I admire very much, had always spoken in public about his admiration for Oppenheimer. But he had said, his wife told me after his death, something of a different character about his view of Oppenheimer. But I think it was to the good of physics that my distinguished colleague adopted that position.

Aaserud:

Well, we can drop that, of course. I came across some letters at the Philosophical Society. It was a letter of protest that was planned by Livingston and Bethe and yourself to Lewis Strauss, I believe. I think in the end, you decided that it was counterproductive to write that letter. I don’t know if that is an event that you recall.

Wheeler:

I see, I didn’t even remember that.

Aaserud:

Well, in that case, we’ll just go on.

Wheeler:

Freudian memory slip.

Aaserud:

Freudian or not, I didn’t bring the copies of the letters, so it’s difficult to refresh your memory.

Wheeler:

Did I write that I thought it would be counterproductive?

Aaserud:

Yes. You did. At first, it had to do with going to Glasgow, and Weisskopf was upset about the implications of the Oppenheimer affair. He felt that he might be a suspicious person if he talked to the wrong persons at conferences and things like that. He saw that as the implication of the Oppenheimer affair. And you disagreed with him, but you also participated in writing a letter to Strauss, I believe, but then you decided in the end that it would be counter-productive because it would make Americans doubt the system itself.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

I think that was it. But I should show you that correspondence. You may not remember it.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

I’m just paraphrasing now. This was in 1954. It was August or December 1954.

Wheeler:

You can’t know how much I appreciate your having taken all this trouble and all these pains, because I never could have done a quarter of what you’ve done, in drawing these things together. I know it costs money to photocopy things, but could I put $20 in your hand to take to the American Institute of Physics for the cost?

Aaserud:

I’m sure they’d be happy to pay for that.

Wheeler:

I’ve got to do that autobiography, and it would cost me not $20 worth of work, not $200 worth of work, but $2000 worth of work at least to try to dig up those materials.

Aaserud:

So would you be interested in those particular letters?

Wheeler:

Oh yes, the whole shebang. Is that too much to ask?

Aaserud:

No, it’s not. But as I said, it’s skewed towards my interest. I could have been interested in another aspect of your career and you would have gotten something entirely different. That is the problem with it. But you can get whatever I have.

Wheeler:

It’s fantastic. Fantastic. Unbelievable, to have this wonderful way of getting the information.

Aaserud:

But actually, there are things I did bring, so maybe we could copy them here?

Wheeler:

Yes, but now you’ve got some more quick questions we should go at.

Aaserud:

Yes. How active were you in that Jackson committee in 1951? Were you a member of that at all in 1951, when you came to know Jackson?

Wheeler:

Oh, this committee. There was some committee that was formed at one point, and I honestly can’t recall what it was. Just as the President had a general Science Advisory Committee, so Congress thought it would have a committee. It was not a good idea. It didn’t work. But I found myself on that. But it only met a couple of times, and Congressmen are not people that want advice generally.

Aaserud:

When was this?

Wheeler:

That’s what I can’t remember. It must have been in the fifties.

Aaserud:

Yes, because it was long before PSAC.

Wheeler:

Yes. Well, perhaps so. Perhaps so. But there was such a committee, and it was a very interesting thing.

Aaserud:

I’ve been unable to find anything on that. I actually didn’t know about that committee you talked about.

Wheeler:

As a purely political question, it would be interesting to know why such a thing didn’t work.

Aaserud:

Yes. But first of all, I would like to see some materials on it.

Wheeler:

Papers on it, yes.

Aaserud:

At least to get the dates straight and all that.

Wheeler:

Yes. Dorothy Fosdick might have some memories of that.

Aaserud:

Yes, that’s right.

Wheeler:

She’s a wonderful person.

Aaserud:

And she was in the midst of it all. She was working full time on this. All right, so that was one committee affair that was related to the hydrogen bomb. I mean, that was in the same area and arena. Then, I have the NAS-NRC Advisory Committee on Scientific Manpower to the Office of Scientific Personnel in 1956. That’s the next committee involvement I have on your part, on my list. There are obviously others since I didn’t get that other one.

Wheeler:

Boy, that can’t have been a big show. It probably is something where all the work was done by some staff member in Washington, and we were just waxworks.

Aaserud:

Yes. I think Trytten may have been the chairman of that.

Wheeler:

Oh, Trytten. That name rings a bell, but I can’t recall more on that.

Aaserud:

OK. There’s the minutes from a meeting of that committee from 1956, where a motion was made by Dr. Wheeler, who is you, and was seconded by Dr. Carmichael, who was Leonard Carmichael of the Smithsonian Institution. It was voted that “in view of the possibility of emergency situations arising in the world, and in view of the position of the United States vis-a-vis possible coalition of forces against us, the Advisory Committee requests Dr. Trytten to review the existing provisions in law and regulations of the federal government regarding training, development and utilization of adequate technical personnel, with a view to determining what additional steps might be taken in the strengthening of our resources.” That’s it.

Wheeler:

I see. I see. Boy, if I would have totally forgotten any such thing, but I’m glad to hear that. That preceded this NATO committee.

Aaserud:

Exactly. Exactly.

Wheeler:

I see. It’s the same flavor.

Aaserud:

Same flavor, except that it’s American.

Wheeler:

Yes. Yes.

Aaserud:

So it’s exactly the same kind of interest there. I also got one other minutes, and you were absent from that meeting, so maybe you weren’t all that active in it. I don’t know. But in that case let’s get to the NATO thing, because you were obviously more active and enthusiastic about that. That started with your getting a letter from an old friend, it seems, John Kenneth Mansfield?

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

A letter dated the 24th of January, 1957, where he tells about him and Edward Teller meeting with Scoop Jackson, and where he tells you that you will be contacted by Jackson, and where he says that, “Quite independently Edward and I both told Jackson that the man he should go after and get if humanly possible is John Wheeler. Jackson agrees completely.” So I guess that helped in your decision in joining the committee.

Wheeler:

That’s when I got made chairman of it, at the very beginning of it. And there were wonderful people on the committee. I think you probably have a list of them.

Aaserud:

I do. But before that, what was the prehistory of the committee?

Wheeler:

I had the feeling that it was our job, or my job, talking it over with Mansfield and Dorothy Fosdick and Scoop Jackson, to come up with ideas. Then this committee would give the stamp of approval, so that it would give the imprimatur, so it would have an impact. There was another committee, I understand, from a different origin, dealing with the same issues, which met at about the same time, but it was just talk; they didn’t come out with a practical set of measures. So it made me feel good that we had some concrete practical things to propose. These NATO science fellowships, and these NATO summer institutes, and this… Was it Michael Foote, the British Labor man? It was somebody in our meeting in Paris. We learned from him and others that you have to make sure that somehow the money that the various countries put into the pot comes back to those countries in the way of fellowships and meetings. I think we recognized that and set up a framework or recommended a framework. And then the NATO Conference of Parliamentarians in Paris that we went to.

Aaserud:

In November of 1957, yes.

Wheeler:

It was November, 1957? That was extremely interesting. And, of course, the various people there. Boeing from the state of Washington was something close to the heart of Jackson, and Marcel Dasso, the head of the big French air organization, Aerospatiale — I can’t recall what the present name is. He was an old acquaintance of Jackson, so he gave us a very nice treatment while we were there. I can’t recall any great influences outside of the French, the Americans and the British there, although there surely were other representatives.

Aaserud:

You had extensive correspondence with people from other countries as well.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

Mostly scientists, because you solicited the advice of scientists in other countries. I could give you a list of the people you wrote to, it might help your recollection.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

These are the members of the committee, by the way.

Wheeler:

Bronck, Courant, Briggs, Eric Johnston… Oh, this is the Advisory Committee, right. These are not Jackson’s committee.

Aaserud:

It’s your subcommittee.

Wheeler:

Yes, right.

Aaserud:

No, it’s not Jackson’s committee itself, no.

Wheeler:

Yes, right.

Aaserud:

How important was Mansfield in getting you into this?

Wheeler:

He was an expediter. That’s a good word for him. He was a head man to Jackson on expediting things. And Jackson later saw to it that he was… [interruption]

Aaserud:

We were talking about Ken Mansfield.

Wheeler:

Yes, an expediter. And then later he was appointed to something like overseer of foreign aid, I believe — a three man commission — by Jackson. Another person who was an expediter and who helped boost things was Colonel John Driscoll, who had been doing a lot for developing airfields in Europe for use in case of military emergency. He now is Colonel Sean — S-E-A-N — O’Driscoll — O’Driscoll — Castle Matrix in Ireland. He bought a castle that use to belong to Sir Walter Raleigh, that had fallen into disrepair and fixed it up. It’s a fascinating place.

Aaserud:

Have you been there?

Wheeler:

Yes. Anyway, he also has served as advisor to the Saudi Arabian government on security arrangements against incidents like the upset at the Great Mosque, or takeover attempts by any dissident group, so he can give you a table of military organization of the Saudi Arabian forces. So it’s a different world.

Aaserud:

Yes. But you also knew Mansfield from earlier, right?

Wheeler:

I guess from the hydrogen bomb period.

Aaserud:

But at any rate, he wasn’t necessary for you to make that decision to join the committee, I suppose. You knew Jackson already anyway, so I guess the letter from Jackson by itself might have done it.

Wheeler:

As a matter of fact, we invited Jackson to a dinner here with Niels Bohr at my house.

Aaserud:

Was that at the event of the Atoms for Peace award?

Wheeler:

I can’t recall what the occasion was. No, but something fell through. I can’t recall whether it was Bohr. I know we’ve had both of them at our house for dinner, but it was a different time.

Aaserud:

A different time. You actually connect the two in your correspondence somewhat later.

Wheeler:

Oh, really?

Aaserud:

Yes, in your answering letter to Jackson. You also got a letter of invitation from Jackson, of course, and you answer it and you say, “I too have become deeply concerned about the issue,” that is, the scientific manpower issue in NATO countries.

Wheeler:

Which year is this?

Aaserud:

This is the 12th of February, 1957.

Wheeler:

And this is before Sputnik.

Aaserud:

This is before Sputnik, yes.

Wheeler:

Isn’t that interesting?

Aaserud:

Yes, it is.

Wheeler:

It’s like a preliminary sensitization to an issue that would really become terribly hot as when Sputnik. It couldn’t have been better timing.

Aaserud:

Sputnik occurred between your joining the committee and the actual meeting in Paris. Then Sputnik had occurred, of course.

Wheeler:

And sort of galvanized people to do something.

Aaserud:

Yes. Your letter to Jackson continues: “I learned about the problem in connection with my duties as vice president of the international unit on physics in 1951-54. I saw it even more vividly as Lawrence Professor at the University of Leiden, February to June.” What year was that? 1956, could it be?

Wheeler:

I think 1956-1957.

Aaserud:

“The United States is falling behind Russia, but the Allies who share our strongest traditions are falling even further behind,” you write. I was wondering whether you could expand upon your experiences in Europe that made you draw the conclusion about lacking manpower.

Wheeler:

Yes. It was very hard to get positions for people in the Netherlands. One of the problems was the low salaries in universities. Unlike the Swiss, who pay more for a professor of physics than a professor of Arabic, the Dutch paid the same. They got very good professors of Arabic, and people that might have gone into physics went into industry or abroad. Casimir, who would have been the great leader of theoretical physics after Ehrenfest, had gone; he was instead in Phillips Company. I think that perhaps what impressed me as much as anything was the difference between what I might call the gung-ho spirit of the scientific community in this country, where one’s willing to consider anything and contemplate a project however large if the payoff is big enough, and a sense of conservatism on that score in Europe. They were wonderful people, but the traditions were more in the past than in the present. Gorter in the Netherlands was really encouraging science. But take the outstanding student that he had, Maarten Schmidt, who was working on a project of condensation of atoms and molecules on a particle to get insight on the formation of cosmic grains in the space between the stars. I participated in that student’s doctoral examination, and that was a great experience of the total difference between the wonderful traditions of those times and our own. But I recall that he now has been for a long time director of Mt. Palomar Observatory, because there was no position in the Netherlands. Yes. So they lost so much talent. There was a French summer school of physics, Cecile DeWitt-Morette had told me about how she felt the French educational system was ossified, and that it would be impossible to inject new courses, new teaching methods, new people into the system, except unbelievably slowly, except if something drastic was done. The way to do it was to have a summer school of physics. She got the money — marvelous initiative — to set up this summer school of physics at Les Houches. But that was a pretty small contributor to the building of French science. It wasn’t the total answer to French science. And in my experience at the Ecole Polytechnic, where I had made my base in Paris, when going back and forth between Paris and Copenhagen in 1949-1950, there too the work was good and there were good people. But there were few, and what they could do was very far from the gung-ho spirit, as I say once again, in American physics, with the experience of doing big things in a big way during the war. The French had no such background.

Aaserud:

Well, there had been a project in France too, of course, before the occupation.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

So there had been some experience with Big Science there, but not of the same size or scope of course.

Wheeler:

Yes. Well, then one could· see the political divisions. But that’s a separate point.

Aaserud:

Also, you continue in the same letter, “I favor action along the lines of the International Productivity Councils that did so much a few years back. Let three to five active not too old but influential men be selected from each NATO country,” etc. What was your experience with the International Productivity Councils and what were they?

Wheeler:

I must have read about it. There was Alexander King. I had through him heard of the effort to improve productivity, and was very much impressed by it. Now, how did I meet Alexander King? I honestly can't tell you. He was the British science policy man, who had had a lot to do with encouraging this European-wide enterprise. My wife and I are reading out loud these days that book about a truly great period in history — the Marshall Plan period. The book is entitled THE WISE MEN, and one sees there the beginning of this. Surely one could trace an element of influence from that political impetus, and Jean Monnet was involved in it as well. Surely one could trace an impetus from that to the formation of this Productivity Council — and Alexander King and the enterprises that he promoted — to this NATO enterprise. But that would take quite a bit of discussion to trace that out. Certainly somebody entering as I did at that particular level on that particular issue must have been to some extent aware of all this background, because we all read the newspapers. We all know in general terms some of the big movements that are going on.

Aaserud:

Yes. But it was mainly theoretical. It was nothing that you had been involved in.

Wheeler:

Nothing that I was involved with, right.

Aaserud:

That had caught your attention and impressed you. And you accept the position by saying, “My time is over-committed already, but on the basis of your statement that the advisory committee will take no more than two or three days this year, I will go into bankruptcy to accept your invitation.” Well, I think you went more into bankruptcy than you expected. That’s another thing. Jackson was very impressed by your idea of the Productivity Councils, by the way. And then, as I promised, I can show you who you solicited advice from. You wrote a letter to several people in Europe, the people being Gorter, whom you already mentioned, C. J. Backer, Amaldi, Jakob Nielsen, the mathematician in Denmark, the successor to Niels Bohr’s brother by the way.

Wheeler:

Yes, Harold Bohr.

Aaserud:

Harold Bohr, yes. And H. P. Robertson and Mott. And a carbon to Niels Bohr, of course.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

That was your letter, and you submitted a proposal with that letter that you wrote. I don’t have the proposal at that stage but I have it a little later, where you suggest three things — initial fellowships, mathematics awards, I guess those are the main two things. And you also asked for an administrative body of it all. That was a main concern. “Would either CERN itself or the branch office of CERN at Copenhagen meet the requirements? Does the AGARD group have any administrative organization that would be at all appropriate? Is there any other European agency that has the necessary status to do the job?” Those were the questions you posed.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

We shouldn’t get into detail of all the answers you got, of course. That would bring it too far. I don’t know what became the eventual result of this, who finally took the responsibility for this venture, do you remember?

Wheeler:

The NATO Science Council.

Aaserud:

Yes, it was established a separate council for that.

Wheeler:

Yes, and the Science Advisor to NATO had a lot to do with it.

Aaserud:

That became a new institution, didn’t it? Was that Ramsey who became the first one?

Wheeler:

Was he the first?

Aaserud:

I believe so.

Wheeler:

I see. Right. And Bill —

Aaserud:

Nierenberg.

Wheeler:

And Bill Nierenberg. I don’t know who it is now. And Will Allis, was he not for a while?

Aaserud:

Perhaps later, yes. So the NATO Science Council was actually a fruit of this work, then.

Wheeler:

I can’t recall just how it got transferred to those hands.

Aaserud:

No.

Wheeler:

But the parliamentarians approved; that’s what I remember. That was the key point at the Paris meeting. And that was due really to Jackson. I could carry along these thoughts and these ideas and these conclusions of the American committee that he had set up, but he was the one who was good at dealing with people.

Aaserud:

Well, you basically wrote the report, didn’t you?

Wheeler:

I, yes, well…

Aaserud:

Getting back to the Bohr thing. You brought up the question of why the meeting between Jackson and Bohr never materialized.

Wheeler:

The dinner party at our house.

Aaserud:

Yes.

Wheeler:

Somebody had to call something off. I can’t remember which one it was.

Aaserud:

Yes, and actually in a letter to Jackson on the 16th of October, 1957, just before the Paris meeting, you write about that. You had just had Fosdick and Ken Mansfield and Jackson over for dinner. “When Bohr is here, I hope we can have a get together to review his Open World policy, to back which would, I think, give the Free World and all the world great advantages.” So was that part of your motivation for bringing them together? They were just two people I admired and I wanted to see what would happen. But that would be, I thought, a productive subject on which to interact. I say this not from memory — because I can’t remember anything — but it’s my deduction from the two people and why I would have wanted to bring them together.

Aaserud:

But that actually never materialized.

Wheeler:

Yes, it did not.

Aaserud:

What do you think would have happened?

Wheeler:

I can only go from analogy with being with the Danish ambassador and Bohr and Justice Frankfurter, during the war, at dinner, at the home of, if I remember right, the Danish ambassador in Washington, where Bohr really was the dominant voice in the discussion, even though Frankfurter was no slouch.

Aaserud:

No, hardly. Well, in the end Jakob Nielsen and Bohr did not want to have the administration of NATO science in Denmark. I don’t know what was the basis for that. The letters don’t say.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

There were others as well. CERN didn’t want it. And the DSIR, isn’t it, in Britain?

Wheeler:

Yes, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, DSIR.

Aaserud:

Exactly. That was a candidate. IUPAP was a candidate, I think, at some point.

Wheeler:

They were all frightened of touching that.

Aaserud:

UNESCO was considered too.

Wheeler:

Yes. We talked this morning about the new word in this morning’s paper, “radiophobia.” What kind of phobia would you put an adjective in front of it? Defense-phobia? So NATO was in the end the logical vehicle.

Aaserud:

Among the Scandinavian countries, I think it seems that Norway was the most positive.

Wheeler:

That sounds right to me, and I can well believe that was Gunnar Randers.

Aaserud:

Yes, he may have been part of it, although the name I have here is Rostoft. “Of the three reports from the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, only that by Rostoft from Norway made suggestions how NATO cooperation might help, and his line of thought you develop more fully in your report,” etc. That was a letter from Richard Fort to Henry Jackson. I’m not exactly sure at this point who Richard Fort was. I think he was a member of the British Parliament. I believe so, but at any rate, the letter is in your file.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

Yes, it says here that Fort is an English parliamentary representative. You noted that in the letter in handwriting, so you didn’t know Fort beforehand either, obviously.

Wheeler:

I see. Because there was this Labor member of Parliament, if I remember correctly, who was a member of this conference of NATO parliamentarians in Paris. I have such a terrible memory for names, and what I mentioned to you some minutes earlier as Michael Foot might have been Richard Fort. The two names don’t sound too different.

Aaserud:

Well, that makes sense. He’s the only British parliamentarian that I’ve seen participating in this.

Wheeler:

Yes, and if I remember right, he had been a coal miner, and had been a very poor person to begin with, so he spoke with a special authority for a wide sector of opinion in Britain, I would say.

Aaserud:

And he was a Laborite.

Wheeler:

Yes. Now, I hope I’m identifying the right man, but that’s my best memory.

Aaserud:

Well, you’re making the necessary qualifications, I think. For your letter to Henry Jackson, in which you wish him and Bohr to meet, you continue, “In the meantime, I trust that you will make good progress on the ‘atomic’ level of science training in Paris. On your return I hope you will embark on a ‘thermonuclear’ level of science technology management training for this country.”

Wheeler:

I see. Which year is this?

Aaserud:

This is just before the Paris meeting, just before you went to Paris, so it is in mid-October, 1957.

Wheeler:

It's interesting you should mention this Paris meeting, because I was undecided whether I would go or not with the delegation. Talking with my wife about the yeses and the nos, and the so much to d here, only on Friday evening did I decide I would go. And the plane was going to leave Washington at noon the next day, Saturday. So I had to grab up my clothes in a hurry, get the train at Trenton — she drove me to Trenton — I got on the train, and I was getting breakfast in the dining car. Then I had time to look at my passport and suddenly discovered it was out of date. The man sitting opposite me, I discovered, was going to be getting off at Philadelphia, so quickly I wrote a telephone message to Dorothy Fosdick. And I handed him — I don’t know — five or ten dollars and I said, “Look, you’re getting off at Philadelphia. Could you phone this message in to Dorothy Fosdick?” And I gave him the number. “And any change you can give to your favorite charity.” When I got to Washington, I called her office, and she’d already set it up so I could quick as a wink get a photograph and quick as a wink go to the Passport Office, quick as a wink get a passport, and I just made the plane taking off for Paris with this Congressional delegation. So that was how undecided I was, because I had my commitments here at Princeton.

Aaserud:

Yes, of course. It was your science work. There were no political considerations involved in your doubts there. It was just science vs. non-science.

Wheeler:

Yes, I had a class. I think I got Wigner to take the course.

Aaserud:

You talked about another committee doing the same thing, that mostly led to paperwork. Was that Koepfli’s committee I wonder?

Wheeler:

This was on NATO science policy? Yes, there was another committee and I don’t know what the name of it was.

Aaserud:

This was the task force of the NATO Council.

Wheeler:

I see, yes. That was the one that I referred to. Well, it came up with some general words, but I don’t know what action followed from them.

Aaserud:

What about support for this venture, once it was getting off the ground? I think both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution said no. I think the Ford Foundation came up with some funding. Did you have anything to do with obtaining support for it?

Wheeler:

I don’t think so. That might well have been Jackson. Or it might have been Dorothy Fosdick acting through Jackson, acting in the name of Jackson. Dorothy Fosdick would be, I would think, a very good person to give background on that.

Aaserud:

Yes. There’s a lot of interesting comments here. I think this correspondence gives good insight into the difference in relationship between defense and science in this country and in Europe.

Wheeler:

That’s very interesting, what you say.

Aaserud:

We could pull a lot out of that but I don’t think we should do it here. But from this side, the physicists are mostly criticized for staying in their ivory towers. That’s basically the thrust of the criticism from here.

Wheeler:

Criticism of whom?

Aaserud:

Of the European physicists, from the American physicists. Maybe also some self-criticism among the Europeans. Caianiello who was your contact in Italy. He was rather criticizing the Italian military as compared to the American military, because of course the Italian military can’t be trusted so we can’t deal with them, but you can deal with your military because that’s a more decent institution.

Wheeler:

Isn’t that interesting? Did I tell you that marvelous incident, when he was fighting in the North African campaign, of course on the Italian side against the British, and his men came from Naples and places around like that, as he did?

Aaserud:

Caianiello?

Wheeler:

Yes. And he was making them go into battle, and they didn’t like it. It was dangerous of course, they were getting shot, and one of these men came and told him that they were planning to shoot him in the back next time around. So what he did was, as he tells me, to line them up in a circle, and say, “I hear you’re planning to shoot me in the back. You guys don’t have guts enough to do that!” He dealt with it openly.

Aaserud:

Yes, and he survived.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

I could send you copies of this, if you’re interested.

Wheeler:

Oh, this is unbelievably interesting to me.

Aaserud:

This letter from Caianiello is very interesting. This is only my comment. I have a copy of the whole letter. In general, it’s a very rich correspondence. How much time do you think you spent on this? Obviously more than the two or three days foreseen by Jackson.

Wheeler:

Fascinating. All these are very interesting. I mustn’t take time to read it now. But they’re so interesting. It really is interesting.

Aaserud:

But I guess what I’m getting at here is that this symbolizes too a danger for the historian, because this is by far the richest source of that kind of involvement of yours. In the American Philosophical Society papers, there’s actually a whole box of it.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

But on the other hand, it was a very small part of your total activities in those kinds of questions, so it’s dangerous to make conclusions on the activities of historical actors on the basis of the volume of paper it has produced. So I guess my question is, how much work did you put into this? Because there’s so much interesting correspondence created by it.

Wheeler:

Oh, boy, it’s totally impossible for me to say, because I had different things cooking, and I’d give an hour to this, one day, and an hour to that another day, and so on. Does it have the name of a secretary at the bottom of that page? Of my letter?

Aaserud:

Your secretary? Which letter? This was the Caianiello letter.

Wheeler:

Any letter, just at this time. Any letter from me.

Aaserud:

Well, this does not have any indication of a secretary, as far as I can see.

Wheeler:

Well, let’s see. By this time, probably my secretary was Georgia Witt.

Aaserud:

I think so. I remember the name. I’ve seen that name.

Wheeler:

Georgia Witt, who retired from here just last fall. She might possibly remember this. But I confess, my feeling on so many of these things is to do what I can in a little hunk of time, that’s it, and then get on to the other things.

Aaserud:

But at any rate, I think we can safely conclude that it was a lot more than the three days foreseen by Jackson.

Wheeler:

Oh boy, yes. Yes. Yes.

Aaserud:

That was a substantial task, at any rate. Were you satisfied with the results of the work, the way it turned out?

Wheeler:

I’m very pleased at the way that’s gone on. And it was not something that could have been done by any one person. It took a concerted effort, with a lot of people pitching in on that, to make it go. And looking at it now in the perspective of this book of the wise men and the Marshall Plan, I have the feeling that was the background for the climate of opinion that made things like this possible. The feeling that things could be done. You didn’t have to take things lying down.

Aaserud:

And it seems also from the quotation that I just made from your letter to Jackson, that it also sensitized you to the need for similar work in this country.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

Which might have helped you in developing the idea of the Defense Research Laboratory and all that. And that’s our next big topic. Before that, I should add that there were a lot of people that had continuing relations to defense problems. I was only one among many, in the postwar period. Robertson, who had…

Aaserud:

You’re talking about physicists now?

Wheeler:

Yes. H. P. Robertson, who had done so much in relativity here, and had been so active in wartime work, left Princeton and went to Caltech. When asked how come — I don’t know whether it was jokingly or not — he said to me that by going to Caltech he would have less time taken away from science by commitments in Washington, as compared to Princeton where he could go back and forth. But then shortly afterwards, it turned out he was spending just as much time in Washington as ever, except he was having to go a greater distance to these meetings. Well, I only pick that out as one example. I wanted to lead up to Oscar Morgenstern who – I don’t know quite what he did during the war, but it’s my fault not to know. He and von Neumann, had been always urging me, like Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner to get into this kind of work. I feel my life is always surrounded by three Hungarians who march and keep me under guard and see that I do what needs to be done. Anyway at that time, those three people, Teller, Wigner, von Neumann, were urging me on the hydrogen bomb work. Then subsequently, after the Sputnik, it was Wigner and Morgenstern who urged me to do something on this business, on the response to Sputnik. That’s where our discussions led to this proposal of a National Defense Laboratory, to get things going. That was right after Sputnik, I guess, wasn’t it?

Aaserud:

Yes, it was. Indeed, it was still 1957 when you started it. But you just answered my question without my having posed it. What I wanted to know was, to what extent there was an advising community within Princeton that you fed into and to what extent there was something here that encouraged that kind of activity.

Wheeler:

Yes, there was a real community of people here at Princeton who were concerned about defense problems from various angles. Klaus Norr(?) in the Woodrow Wilson School came more from the political side.

Aaserud:

And you had connections with those people.

Wheeler:

I’d see them from time to time. This community had a special concern along these lines. The Harvard-MIT community, of course, especially MIT, also had involvement in defense problems. In fact, MIT was enormously more dependent on defense money for its budget than Princeton was. But I don’t think of the same proportion of people who were opposed to defense work and opposed to defense analysis – or involvement — and opposed to strengthening US military position, that you would have in the Harvard area. Princeton was more united in its outlook here. Maybe that goes back to the motto for Princeton of the man who lived in the house where we had lunch today, Woodrow Wilson, “Princeton in the nation’s service.” And that tradition continues. At any rate, Morgenstern was strong on these lines, and he had spent a lot of time advising one or another defense organization on policy. Did he have an involvement in RAND, the setting up of RAND? I’m not sure on that point.

Aaserud:

He may very well have. I’m not entirely sure. I’ve come across, just at this time, two manuscripts which perhaps symbolize this. One is a manuscript by Oswald Veblen.

Wheeler:

That’s another man that we should point to.

Aaserud:

Yes. He proposed a national university for advanced study, in a proposal of his from the 19th of November, 1957, just before the proposal for a National Defense Laboratory comes up. That’s one.

Wheeler:

That’s wonderful.

Aaserud:

And another one just days later is a memorandum by Oscar Morgenstern and Edward Teller, which is a memorandum concerning some immediate naval problems.

Wheeler:

Naval problems?

Aaserud:

Yes, and which is circulated through you to Goldberger, Treiman, Hamilton, White, back to Wheeler. So it’s clear that there was internal discussion and even internal memoranda to this effect, because I don’t think these things fed into any other specific committee activity or official work. It may have, but it seems to be for internal Princeton consumption, before it went anywhere else. You might correct me on that, of course.

Wheeler:

Yes. No, there was a stirring always here. I’m very glad you mentioned this.

Aaserud:

Well, that’s just my notes there.

Wheeler:

Yes, very good, yes. These are wonderful. What was I going to say?

Aaserud:

Would you be interested to have these things too?

Wheeler:

Oh, oh, this whole collection of things. You can’t know what an absolute goldmine it is, because these are things I could never manage to dig out myself, because of the time that you’ve spent on this. How could I? I couldn’t possibly thank you adequately for whatever you could give me of it.

Aaserud:

You’ve put a lot on tape in return, so that’s a fair deal.

Wheeler:

At any rate, this community. I’m so glad you mentioned this idea of a national university, because Veblen’s idea in a way has been slowly moving forward. James Billington, who just became, as you know, Librarian of Congress, was before that director of this center in Washington which is the closest approach, I think, we’ve ever had to the national university, where scholars come. Is it called Hubert Humphrey Center? It’s under Smithsonian auspices. It’s one of these tricky things to negotiate in Washington; one needs the right heading. That has moved forward, and of course John Adams was pushing it way back in his day as President, and here slowly we’re making progress toward it. After all, if you look for a center of excellence, and frontier thinking, where can you find anywhere in the world a place greater than Washington for concentration of people, that just simply haven’t been brought together, capitalized on, but that is intellectual in all fields of knowledge. So this is gradually working forward to a new unknown future. It will be greater than a national university. It will be greater than a national center for advanced study. But all these ideas will be transmuted in what finally comes out.

Aaserud:

And there are obvious connections to your idea too, of course. Yours was also an idea of a national university, in a sense. Even if it was limited to defense, you wanted it as broad as possible within that, and maybe we should start talking about the origins of that. You did mention already that it was these Hungarians that brought you into…

Wheeler:

…the hydrogen bomb business, and it was Wigner and Morgenstern who brought me into this reaction to Sputnik — to do something about it.

Aaserud:

Do you remember how that occurred?

Wheeler:

No. I think that Morgenstern was the bigger pusher in the beginning. I always loved his description of the difference between the United States Navy and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Have you ever heard that?

Aaserud:

No.

Wheeler:

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was organized by dolts so that even geniuses could not make it work, and the US Navy was organized by geniuses so that dolts could make it work. And you know, Morgenstern was the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm the First, through an illegitimate line. Anyway, he had a sense of responsibility about things. So that’s how come. And somehow, they seemed to have conspired together to make me be the vehicle of their concerns. Thinking back on it, I can believe that: look, here is a native-born American, and it would look better if it were signed by him.

Aaserud:

But you weren’t all that hard to convince.

Wheeler:

Oh no, of course not.

Aaserud:

That was more important say, than your experience with Jackson. The influence of Morgenstern and Wigner was more important for you personally?

Wheeler:

Yes, because it was Teller that had done most to get me into the hydrogen bomb work, and he had of course been in contact with Jackson during the time, and it was through him that Jackson got onto me, I would say.

Aaserud:

More than Mansfield.

Wheeler:

Teller to Jackson and Mansfield, and Fosdick, and they to me. I had a sabbatical leave for the spring of one of these years. Sputnik was the spring of 1958, wasn’t it?

Aaserud:

Fall of 1957.

Wheeler:

Fall of 1957. So it was the spring of 1958 which was my academic sabbatical leave, which I normally would have used to push to get ahead my work. I spent so much of it instead on this stuff.

Aaserud:

But the sabbatical was arranged prior Sputnik, to the pushing.

Wheeler:

Yes. If I had only arranged to take my sabbatical in Peking, then I would have had more chance to do my scientific work, but it was in Princeton.

Aaserud:

It just didn’t happen like that.

Wheeler:

Herb York’s autobiography tells something about how that was worked around, to be a summer study group, and whether it was Killian’s idea to do it that way or York’s idea, whether it arose from the discussion between the two, or whether we also had input in suggesting the summer study group as a trial run. That’s a very interesting point and needs a closer look, and honestly in my memory now can’t give you a proper perspective on the relative proportions of those guidances. But at any rate, we did have it, and we did get…

Aaserud:

I would like to go a little slower, if I may.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

Because I have a letter here. The first correspondence that I have specifically with regard to the proposal of the laboratory is a letter that you sent to Killian, Rabi, and other members of PSAC, on the 11th of December, 1957, where you’re noting the establishment of ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency. You argue that you need a working entity, a laboratory under ARPA, just as you have a working entity at Los Alamos, under the AEC.

Wheeler:

It is a laboratory focus, is that it?

Aaserud:

Yes. That is a laboratory focus entirely. Let me see if I can find the passage. Yes, “I find it impossible at the present time to name to them” — that is, physicists interested in national security work — “a central missile or advanced planning laboratory where they can contribute with optimal access to information, with proper facilities, and with certainty that their sound results will receive rapid unified Department of Defense follow-up.” That is your motivation for doing this. “I therefore very much hope you plan to create a civilian national advanced research projects laboratory, to work under contract closely with the new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense.” Exactly. “Such a laboratory appears as indispensable to the agency as Los Alamos and Livermore are to the AEC.” And “The only way to imagine where we would be on bombs without them is to look at where we are now in missiles.” And then you go on to say that this laboratory should be much larger than Los Alamos and that it should be more general in scope, etc., etc. But this is the first letter I’ve seen proposing the laboratory.

Wheeler:

That’s December?

Aaserud:

That’s the 11th of December, 1957, yes.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

Do you remember writing it?

Wheeler:

Well, yes, I know I wrote a letter, but I can’t remember all these details. And then I know we started with the idea of a laboratory. And I cannot recall exactly how it got transmuted into the idea of the summer study as a trial run.

Aaserud:

Somehow it doesn’t seem natural. Somehow it doesn’t seem automatic, because a summer study is so different from a laboratory.

Wheeler:

Yes. I think that the key point was getting good people. That was the absolutely essential point, because there are all these government laboratories now. I’m looking at it in retrospect. I’m looking at it in terms of the reasoning that anybody in his senses would go through, thinking about such a proposal. There are government laboratories now, and you know the contest — it’s called “roles and missions” — between one agency and another. And therefore, you can believe that no defense — either Army, Navy or Air Force — would be eager to see something coming up that would seize some of its turf. On the other hand, getting people in is a different kettle of fish. Getting people involved, that’s something that they could think of as a great idea, and therefore, I can see that anybody that has this letter dumped in his lap is going to say, “Look, what about this can I preserve that’s key?” And the key point is getting in anybody concerned about national defense issues, because there were a lot of people at that time who were concerned about it, and who didn’t see how they would contribute or get in. And so we were not speaking just for ourselves. I think we were speaking for a sense of concern on the part of colleagues all across the country. Yet if you ask me for chapter and verse on those concerns, I don’t know whether I’ve got letters to prove it, or memories of conversations to evidence it. But surely that was true. And the fact that we were able to get people in that summer study from so many places is evidence, living evidence, that there was a concern.

Aaserud:

Well, the idea of the laboratory certainly didn’t die from that. The 137 study was seen by hindsight as a test case for the laboratory.

Wheeler:

Yes. You don’t think it was in prospect also a test case for a laboratory?

Aaserud:

I think so too.

Wheeler:

Yes. That was my feeling too.

Aaserud:

Yes, I do think so. I shouldn’t say by hindsight. I should say that’s how it was perceived at the time.

Wheeler:

Yes, and I remember, when I was presenting the final results of our study 137 to the Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, who came over to the National War College to take part, my colleagues I sensed were nervous. Would that guy Wheeler be able to give a convincing account of our results and our concerns to the Secretary of Defense? It was quite a tall order for one fellow to do all 22 things. But I gather from their feelings — what they said to me afterwards — they were content with the way I spoke for them, and I know that I had to spend some many weeks at the Pentagon writing up a report afterwards. That was a miserable period, to be all alone in effect putting together our ideas, and that report, with our 22 proposals. Sam Treiman jokingly said, 23 — I think it was a joke. I have somewhere a list of those proposals, but it was classified.

Aaserud:

It’s still classified?

Wheeler:

Is it?

Aaserud:

No, I’m asking you.

Wheeler:

I don’t know. I would think not. I would think it could be got.

Aaserud:

I’d be very interested in those.

Wheeler:

Yes. It gives a flavor of it in a way you’d never get otherwise. The report that I wrote to pull them all together is surely somewhere in the Defense records, and I would think by now it’s totally unclassified.

Aaserud:

You wouldn’t have a copy of it yourself, would you?

Wheeler:

No.

Aaserud:

No, because it was classified.

Wheeler:

Right.

Aaserud:

When Wigner and Morgenstern approached you on this, was the idea of the laboratory already there, or was that your suggestion?

Wheeler:

I can’t recall. I think the concern was the thing that brought us together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it just bubbled up out of kicking things around. I can’t say whose idea that was.

Aaserud:

But the laboratory was just a means, anyway.

Wheeler:

Yes, a means to get things going.

Aaserud:

All right, I’m staying slow on this. I just had a question here. There’s a letter that was signed Ken. Unfortunately, I didn’t make a copy of it; I just wrote it into my computer. But he argues that a national laboratory is absolutely necessary because private enterprise or private organizations can’t deal with this in this large a sense. He’s referring particularly to his visit to the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, which is much too much inhibited by concern for competition with other industries and things like that. So therefore you can’t do that in industry. I don’t know if you solicited advice or whether this was something that just organically happened.

Wheeler:

What’s the date of that?

Aaserud:

The date of that is the 22nd of December, 1957, and I don’t know who it’s from. I guessed Ken Watson first, but it could also be Ken Mansfield of course. But since I don’t have the signature with me, you might not be able to tell me who it is. But it’s obvious that you are a group of people who are working on this.

Wheeler:

Yes. It would be easier to ask Ken Watson or Ken Mansfield which was the one who was the author. It could be either.

Aaserud:

Or it could be none. It must be one of them, perhaps.

Wheeler:

If Ken is the only clue to it…

Aaserud:

Yes, Ken is the only clue.

Wheeler:

If it’s signed Ken, then it would be easy to check with them individually.

Aaserud:

But both of them are candidates, as far as you’re concerned. You knew them both at that time.

Wheeler:

Yes, and either one could have. I would think this is more likely to be Ken Watson, but it could be Ken Mansfield, because Ken Watson would have more likelihood to visit that laboratory.

Aaserud:

Well, from the style too I would guess Watson. But I don’t know. It’s better to ask. Another crucial person in this was Marvin Stern.

Wheeler:

Yes. Yes.

Aaserud:

He was obviously solicited, because he says, “Thank you for your copy of the message sent to Killian on a national advanced projects defense laboratory. Since I saw you last, I have given more serious thought to some of these ‘organizational’ problems, and have discussed them with Courant, Teller and others.” Well, you can look at it yourself. It goes on, and he’s generally positive to the idea. It seems to me that you have solicited his advice, which makes the group even bigger, of course. Do you remember doing that?

Wheeler:

No, I was going to bring up Marvin Stern in another connection. That is the book that we did that he steered. He acted as a bringer-together of four people to do a study on what’s the matter with me?

Aaserud:

The letter was from the 30th of December, by the way, 1957. I didn’t tell the tape.

Wheeler:

The Convair. Yes, that was it. The study for Convair.

Aaserud:

He was working at Convair at the time.

Wheeler:

Yes, and this was a study. He got a group together of four people to do a study of a doctrine for a limited war. That was the topic. A doctrine for a limited war. And the people were Charles Chalmers Sherwin, who’s been the head of one big aerospace unit on the West Coast since, but was then professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. He had been a leading person in developing so-called side-looking radar, a plane that could tow an aerial behind it and get a lot of information. He’d been a leader in setting up posts on the Turkish border and other places near the periphery of the Soviet Union to get bi-radar information on Soviet missile tests. So there was Chalmers Sherwin. There was, what’s the matter with me? Was it Oscar Morgenstern?

Aaserud:

Von Neumann?

Wheeler:

No. I remember there were four of us anyway, and Kissinger was the fourth.

Aaserud:

Was this before or after?

Wheeler:

This was before Kissinger was appointed to… But I don’t know the relation in time to this. That’s why I’m at a total loss. For that study, we used to meet, as I jokingly said, a day and a half every month and a half for a period of about a year and a half, and we put together this paper, “A Doctrine for a Limited War.” That was going to be published as a book by Convair, but then they got cold feet, because they were afraid that it would be used by people to claim they were merchants of death — that same old trouble — so it never did get published. It was, I think, for Kissinger, a step toward later more comprehensive formulations that he drew up. We’d meet at one place or another for these studies. I can remember one piece of paper that Kissinger had written. Different ones of us would write different pieces of the paper on different parts of this subject. I’d written at the top of it, “De-sludge this.” He saw my remarks. And joked about it. At any rate, that got me in close touch with Marvin Stern.

Aaserud:

You think that was how you got in touch with him?

Wheeler:

I don’t know the order in time here.

Aaserud:

But soliciting advice from him indicates that you knew him from before, of course, but could be in connection with something else.

Wheeler:

Yes, something else.

Aaserud:

Well, maybe he remembers.

Wheeler:

Exactly. He wrote a book with George Gamow. So where are we now?

Aaserud:

So you cannot say how and why Stern got into it, but he was a natural person to contact.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

He seems to be more important than most people realize, because he’s not a well-known physicist as most others in this group.

Wheeler:

But he knew his way around the Defense community…

Aaserud:

Yes, very much so.

Wheeler:

…in a wonderful way.

Aaserud:

Well, then we get to your — at least one version of it — proposal for a laboratory. The version I have here is dated the 9th of January, 1958. So it happened fairly quickly. In other correspondence, you said you sent a more complete version to Killian in February. But I don’t know if there’s any significant changes. This seems to be so complete that I wouldn’t suppose you made many more changes in this. And it lays out in detail the laboratory idea. I mean, you write, about the current situation, that “men in this work are supposed to do the job with one hand tied behind their backs and the other hand all taped up except for one finger.” And this is also where you set up the DuPont Industries as a model for how a laboratory should work.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

Contact with the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group is important. And you want the Los Alamos Laboratory as part of this, or at least that’s a suggestion. You want an initiation laboratory as the head of the structure, where you have the most basic work, and then it branches out from there to other more specialized laboratories which are more mission-oriented. There’s one idea laboratory and there are several for application.

Wheeler:

Yes, I remember that word, initiation.

Aaserud:

Yes, exactly. So this the report. You’ve obviously put a lot of thought and writing into that. That’s probably your creation entirely, isn’t it?

Wheeler:

I’m sure I must have kicked it around with Wigner and Morgenstern. But it’s signed by me, I take it, rather than by the three of us, is that it?

Aaserud:

Yes, it’s signed by you. How new was that idea at the time? Was that something that had been kicked around before?

Wheeler:

No.

Aaserud:

How important was, ARPA or the idea of ARPA, in it?

Wheeler:

Well, I hadn’t really had any big contact with ARPA. It seems to me that at this time, I went around to consult with various people. I can remember poor Phil Morris. I say poor Phil Morris because he’d worked so hard; he’d devoted so much of his life to national service. And there he was also at MIT doing his bit on the job as a professor of physics and writer of important textbooks in physics. The only time that somehow he and I could arrange to see each other was a Sunday, and I think his poor wife had been dragooned by him to invite me to Sunday dinner where we could talk. They were both worn to a frazzle, but he gave advice about this whole stuff. And so I got some background about it. Then there was Bill Shockley, another person I’d talked with. He’d been involved in this. Bill Shockley was not a person to mince words or to be diplomatic, or to seek to look after public relations, as you probably know from his career.

Aaserud:

Oh, yes.

Wheeler:

But he used to call ARPA, that he’d been involved in in earlier days, “I don’t know how many good men and 50 shoe clerks.”

Aaserud:

He was also involved in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group at an earlier date.

Wheeler:

Yes, right, so it was out of that experience that he came out with this assessment. I don’t know what the timing is on this, but that was a warning against institutionalization of anything of this kind. Anything that’s institutionalized really gets into trouble.

Aaserud:

That was his message, yes.

Wheeler:

And as you probably know, in further stages of this whole thing, Killian — after our summer meeting had come off and after our report had been submitted and after there had been time to further digest this idea of such a proposal — then subscribed to the idea of a laboratory. It would be right here in Princeton, right on Prospect Street. There was this National Security Laboratory — what’s really a cryptographic laboratory, a research center — where mathematicians come. They were building that.

Aaserud:

Yes, that was the National Security Agency that was establishing a science laboratory.

Wheeler:

Yes, I think so. And since that was going to be there, and would have security perimeter and all that, why not have this other thing there too? And it would have the right combination, like the Matterhorn Project, of having both a university and a Defense connection, so the two would be related. Surely he, out of his MIT history, knew how that would work, where there also you have Defense and educational activities nearby. Well, so there the ball had gone full circuit and had come back to me, and in that sense, would I get going on it? That was a great big gulp for me, because I’d had the wartime period off, I’d had the hydrogen period again out of my normal work, and this would be an even bigger period. And I just couldn’t face it, because you’ve got only one life to lead, and I’ve always felt that the biggest thing I could do was to help to understand how, jokingly put, the universe is put together. So therefore, I was so sick about having to make the decision, and how it would affect the prospects of such a laboratory, that I almost wished a car would run over me and break a leg or do something like that, so I could get out of having to make the decision myself, and could automatically say I couldn’t do it. I talked, with a great deal of agony, with the president of our university, Bob Goheen, about this. How could I gracefully say no? And I don’t think he was very sympathetic to that. He didn’t say he wasn’t sympathetic, but he’s a man of duty, and here’s somebody in effect trying to find a way to evade duty. So how could he be sympathetic to it? In addition, perhaps it would have meant a plus for Princeton. But anyway, I did say No. And so the whole thing lapsed. And then the next summer, there was no activity, but there was this confluence of people who had been associated with 137 at Los Alamos. I was not there, but Goldberger and Watson were there and Keith Brueckner, and they decided to get going on this same idea of summer studies and make that the real piece de resistance.

Aaserud:

Well, those two laboratories were entirely independent, were they not? I mean, the National Security Agency Laboratory and the laboratory…

Wheeler:

…that Killian was proposing. Totally independent. Totally independent.

Aaserud:

Exactly, because I have the minutes from the IDA board meeting on the 3rd of June, 1958. That is actually before…

Wheeler:

…the summer study…

Aaserud:

…137. Here, you are reported as a candidate for the NSA position, and also reported as the instigator, together with Wigner and Morgenstern, of the laboratory idea. And those two things are treated as independent here, which they obviously were.

Wheeler:

I see. That’s something I never saw. So that’s fascinating.

Aaserud:

It says, “One man who was presently available for at least one year and had shown a keen desire to join in the defense effort is Professor John Wheeler, a mathematical physicist at Princeton University. All members of the group thought he would be ideal if he could be induced to undertake the task. I have requested Dr. Hill to pursue this matter with Professor Wheeler personally, to ascertain his possible availability.” And, “By a complete coincidence, Professor Wheeler plus Professor Eugene Wigner and Oscar Morgenstern of Princeton University have suggested to the Department of Defense and to Dr. Killian that a small group of scientists not now working on military problems be given rather thorough briefings for a period this summer, in order to determine whether there is not some way in which the scientific community could be brought more closely into the Defense effort.”

Wheeler:

I see. Let me get the phraseology at the beginning of that sentence.

Aaserud:

Yes, that indicates that it came from you. Well, you can look at it. “By complete coincidence.” It’s number two there.

Wheeler:

I see, so that we are the ones who suggest a summer study group, rather than Killian saying that the summer study group is a way to give your idea a try-out. We are the ones that are saying it.

Aaserud:

Yes, if the IDA report is to be believed, of course.

Wheeler:

And this is written in advance of the meeting.

Aaserud:

No, that’s written after the meeting.

Wheeler:

Oh, General McCormack, yes, he was a great person. In the hydrogen bomb period, McCormack was a real favorite. I asked him once, “Jim, how can you get so much done? What would happen if you weren’t pushing the hydrogen bomb project?” He laughed and he said, “The American people would see that I was kicked out of office.” There also was a joke. I recall at a reception we had for him at Los Alamos at our house, the drains had been stopped up. The plumbing wasn’t operating properly, and we knew we couldn’t have the reception like that, because there would be lots of people — 60 or 70 people — at this reception at our house. The day before, the Zea Company which did all the maintenance at Los Alamos, had been stalling and stalling on this because they couldn’t find their records where the pipes were. So the morning of the critical day for McCormack they had an army of people there all digging with picks and shovels all over the yard. They had it all dug up. They were bound to find it. And by the time the reception came, they had the pipes fixed and everything was back in order.

Aaserud:

Well, this indicates that the proposal for the summer study came from you, but I wouldn’t consider it complete proof.

Wheeler:

Word gets around.

Aaserud:

This is General McCormack writing this?

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

That should indicate its truthfulness, don’t you think? He was close enough.

Wheeler:

Oh yes, he knows the ropes. But we might have been led to make that proposal, of course, by our discussions with Killian. So it’s one of these tricky things.

Aaserud:

Yes, it is. It is. So, where were we? I didn’t quite want to get to the summer of 1959 yet. I haven’t finished with the summer of 1958.

Wheeler:

The summer of 1958, then, that group. And then I don’t know how many weeks it was afterwards to write up the report. It seems to me that I even finished writing up the report of our Project 137 at Los Alamos, but I can’t swear to that. I would sure like to see it now.

Aaserud:

What do you remember of 137? Who was there, what was done, how did you work?

Wheeler:

Yes, yes. Well, we would have been absolutely sunk if we hadn’t had really good friends in the Defense establishment that would dig out people for us and give us briefings on key problems — Navy, Air Force, Army. I can well believe Marvin Stern was one of those people that helped, but no one was more important than Al Hill in getting people to give us briefings on important topics. I can remember one person — but I’ve forgotten his name — who, when we asked him for information on some topic, said, “That wouldn’t really be of interest to you.” This was his polite way — if you want to call it polite — of saying that that was a classification we shouldn’t get into. But our clearance was really not Secret, it was Top Secret, so that was good, and different people got enthused on different things. Of course the Vietnam War going on at that time made ways to deal with those problems, that war, very very live in our minds. For example, trick ways to detect enemy movements, chemical sensors based on the ability of an insect to detect a smell. Nobody was more active or came up with a bigger project — one that has reverberated more even to our day — than Nicholas Christofilos. You remember, he was an elevator operator in Italy for a while after coming from Greece. But Nick had come to the point — I won’t go over all his long history — where if he made a proposal for something that would cost $100,000, he was ashamed of it. If he made a project that cost a million dollars, well, that was all right. But this thing came up in the billion dollar category, so he was very proud of it and pushed it hard, and did a lot of calculations on it and got us enthused about it. You know, the scheme to detect submarines — or rather not detect them but to communicate with them — that has run into so much flak in the state of Wisconsin, because they wanted to bury these wires underground. But that’s been making its way slowly in the world, and it’s very important. Well, that’s a feel for the nature of the projects.

Aaserud:

Well, Jackson was, at least to some extent, in on this planning too. He was in Princeton in January of 1958…

Wheeler:

Oh, really?

Aaserud:

…discussing at a meeting, among other things, the Advanced Research Projects Laboratory.

Wheeler:

What meeting was it?

Aaserud:

Well, it just says “Tentative agenda for informal advice for a meeting with Senator Henry M. Jackson, Saturday, 9:45 AM.”

Wheeler:

And no list of distributees?

Aaserud:

There’s a list of those who will attend the informal advisory meeting.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

Harvey Brooks, Harvard, Bryce? Crawford, Minnesota, Kenneth Mansfield, Combustion Engineering, Oscar Morgenstern, Lyman Spitzer, Marvin Stern, John Wheeler, Eugene Wigner.

Wheeler:

I see. Well, that’s getting something done, wasn’t it?

Aaserud:

Yes. It was not only the laboratory that was discussed at that meeting. Most of these are Princeton people. So this was just an expansion from the Princeton group, I suppose.

Wheeler:

Not Marvin Stern. Not Harvey Brooks. And not Bryce Crawford.

Aaserud:

No, that’s right. So it’s very extensive, I agree. Half of it only was from Princeton.

Wheeler:

Yes.

Aaserud:

You discussed solid fuels for jet rocket propulsion, ballistic sea power, the research laboratory, security and secrecy. But you don’t remember the context for the meeting. Was that a regular thing that you people met?

Wheeler:

No, I think it was an ad hoc thing for Jackson. I think he wanted to meet the Defense community in a non-Washington context.

Aaserud:

As I said, you sent the final proposal to Killian on the 26th of February, 1958. We did discuss the National Security Agency offer. Who became the director?

Wheeler:

We never had a laboratory. If I didn’t go, it wouldn’t come, and it didn’t.

Aaserud:

Both laboratories were like that?

Wheeler:

No, one of them did come. Dick Leibler, Richard Leibler became the director of the…

Aaserud:

…National Security Agency Lab, that’s what I meant.

Wheeler:

Yes. But the other one…

Aaserud:

…never came into being, of course… I did ask you about Project 137 and what you remembered of it.

Wheeler:

Yes. I could give you more on the project, more of the things we did, but I don’t want to get into classification problems.

Aaserud:

Do you remember the people? How many were there?

Wheeler:

22. For three weeks.

Aaserud:

But the names? You see, I have only one page of the report, “Section D,” and that relates the main proposal coming out of it. That is the proposal of the Research Laboratory again. But that is presented as a proposal from the summer study then.

Wheeler:

There’s no date on this, is there?

Aaserud:

No, there isn’t. It’s just a page I got from Charles Townes, from his files. Maybe the rest of the report is classified, I don’t know.

Wheeler:

That’s of course not the same as the project report of what our recommendations were, our individual ideas.

Aaserud:

Isn’t this a recommendation, though? “It is suggested that ARPA consider how far it might be reasonable to encourage such a center to evolve towards an advanced security research institute.”

Wheeler:

Well, it could be from our report, yes.

Aaserud:

It reads like it is, I think.

Wheeler:

It’s very hard to know, without getting hold of the report.

Aaserud:

Yes, it is. Here you, or whoever, writes that “the laboratory should be made after the pattern of the Institute for Advanced Study.” Was that something that you stressed?

Wheeler:

I can’t recall that, but that would have been very logical for us to suggest, because I don’t know any place that does better than the Institute, in having housing for visitors. It makes it an international free port of ideas. This would be a free port of ideas, and housing would be absolutely essential. The reason JASON meets in California is that it’s an attractive place for summer for families to be. But this could be attractive too, if there were housing.

Aaserud:

Well, on the other hand though, it’s very different from the DuPont model…

Wheeler:

…with all the other laboratories…

Aaserud:

…in interaction there.

Wheeler:

Yes, right. But of course these laboratories are spread all over the country.

Aaserud:

Well, I’ll have to try to get more information on 137.

Wheeler:

Yes, to get hold of that report. Could you not use Freedom of Information?

Aaserud:

I could try to do that. If it is classified I could do that, of course, yes. I could do that.

Wheeler:

Because that’s 1958. It’s 30 years.

Aaserud:

Yes. But it is a little awkward to use it, because I’ve been trying not to use it in getting information on JASON, for example, because some JASONs are very sensitive to the use of that Act, because it can bring out things that they don’t want to show. And I’ve got a lot of things just by having a good relationship with the steering committee, so it’s a very difficult balancing act in that respect.

Wheeler:

Do you mind if I just break off a minute to go down the hall?

Aaserud:

No, not at all. [short break]

Wheeler:

This is not coffee, this is not tea, this is a mathematical intersection of coffee and tea. Water.

Aaserud:

In the end of course, the laboratory did not come to anything.

Wheeler:

Exactly.

Aaserud:

It was still alive when the IDA had its trustee meeting on the 24th to 25th of October, 1958. At that point, Herbert York presented the laboratory idea as a result of the 137 study again.

Wheeler:

Oh, really?

Aaserud:

And then York somehow a little later set the condition for establishing such a laboratory that you, Morgenstern and Wigner worked with the laboratory up to ten days per week. I don’t know if you remember that?

Wheeler:

Ten days per week is a bit tough!

Aaserud:

Yes. Ten days per week, yes, the three of you together.

Wheeler:

Ten days per week is more than would fit into…

Aaserud:

No, it’s ten days per week between you.

Wheeler:

Oh, between us, I see, because one person could not get in ten days per week.

Aaserud:

No. Not even you, perhaps. No, it’s 3.3 days for each of you, I suppose.

Wheeler:

I do not remember taking up with Morgenstern and Wigner the question of whether they would give a comparable amount of time to this. And Morgenstern of course is dead and Wigner confesses to us all that his memory is shot.

Aaserud:

Even long term memory?

Wheeler:

Well, he did have quite a lot of long term memory about coming from Wisconsin here, so maybe he would have memory of that. That’s a good point. It’s really worth exploring. As you leave here, you might stop at his laboratory room office on the next floor.

Aaserud:

He did tell us in the hallway the other day that he came up with the 137 name. I don’t know if you can testify to that.

Wheeler:

I would have said I was the one who came up with 137, but that’s fine.

Aaserud:

There’s a letter from you to Herbert York dated the 16th of March, 1959. That is the letter in which you say that you cannot do it, that you are unable to serve for that long with the laboratory.

Wheeler:

Do I say anything about anybody else serving?

Aaserud:

Well, not specifically, no. It starts out by saying, “A number of days ago, you told Oscar Morgenstern, Eugene Wigner and me that you are prepared to back the creation of an Advanced Defense Research Center, provided that the three of us between us would contribute ten days of time per week. Eugene has since written you that he will contribute a day a week, and Oscar has indicated willingness to contribute full time for a year, both truly admirable actions.” It’s only those three — or the three of you — that you mention specifically.

Wheeler:

I see.

Aaserud:

And then you end the letter by saying, “I have heavy obligations to my work which I cannot give up at the present time. The group of able young men who have freely associated themselves with me in their work is more outstanding than any I have ever had the privilege of guiding before. The kind of work we are doing on the structure of space and time and the nature of gravity just doesn’t go ahead if it is done on a part time basis, in bits and crannies of time. I have either to limit my ARDC participation to a day a week, or see the finest opportunity in this country for work in my field to go to smash.” And a little further on you say, “If such an ADR Center can go at all, as I think it can, it can go without me, and if it cannot go without me, it does not deserve to go at all.” So that was the end of the laboratory, I suppose. There is an interoffice memo from Morgenstern to you dated the 7th of April, 1959. This letter was the 16th of March, 1959.

Wheeler:

Oh, here’s my girlfriend. I’m sorry, I’ll have to go.