Vietnam War
The Vietnam War had a significant effect on JASON's membership and research focus. A major initiative of JASON became the McNamara Line electronic barrier, promoted by the hawks. (According to Freeman Dyson, a member of JASON, this research was actually not carried out by JASON, but by a group called JASON EAST). By around 1966, the team had become strongly divided along political and ethical lines. In March 1967, Freeman Dyson, Robert Gomer, Steven Weinberg, and S. Courtenay Wright produced a report, approved by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and titled "Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia." Declassified in 2002 through a Freedom of Information Act action brought by the Nautilus Institute, the paper predicted catastrophic consequences for U.S. global interests as well as for the people and environment of Southeast Asia of a tactical nuclear weapons strike in the area. Going into great detail, the paper strongly contradicted game-scenario research from the RAND Corporation and other groups that was optimistic about a nuclear option. Co-author Wright later stated that the report's main finding was that "employment of nuclear weapons by the US would be of little use against a widely distributed opponent but disaster if copied by the opponent." In a nuclear counterstrike against U.S. troops, the report concluded that, in the worst-case, "the U.S. fighting capability in Vietnam would be essentially annihilated." Co-author Weinberg showed the political point of view of the writers and the increasing political division:
I have to admit that its conclusions were pretty much what we expected from the beginning, and if I had not expected to reach these conclusions then, for the ethical reasons that we left out of the report I would not have helped to write it.
Seymour Deitchman, a national security consultant who served with the IDA for over 28 years, said, "To the extent of my personal knowledge, the talk of using nuclear weapons in that war stopped after the JASON report on the subject." Gordon J. F. MacDonald, executive vice president of IDA at the time, reflected on the JASON report in 1998. MacDonald said that the "grim picture" painted in the report had a major effect on both Johnson and McNamara. It was central to McNamara's differences with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were sanguine about the nuclear option; this ultimately led to McNamara's resignation. RAND experts also conceded the report's credibility.
There arose internal conflict between hawkish JASON members such as William Happer, Edward Teller, and William Nierenberg and others such as MacDonald, Sid Drell, and Richard Garwin. Public attention to JASON's involvement in the Vietnam War led to public criticism and attacks, even against JASON members who were not hawks; for example, MacDonald's garage was burned down and Richard Garwin was called a "baby killer."
Around this time, some members critical of the war left, and others directed JASON research into unclassified, non-military work on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy on problems like global warming and acid rain.
