Annie Jacobsen > Quotes

“Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes.
And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out.
Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“We still don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the human brain. We have theories; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that mimics the biological system. We can’t emulate the behavior. One day in the future, we think we can.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“By contrast, Dresher and Flood found that the minority of game players who refused to testify against their criminal partner were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in order to get the best possible outcome for both themselves and a colleague—just a single year’s jail time.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560) did not pass. So the Defense Department could be cloning now.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Health Alteration Committee”
― Annie Jacobsen, Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins

“Dayton had no civilized culture.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy commanders each insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the Army, the moon was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“As part of the animal sentinel program, going back to 1999, scientists had been making great progress training honeybees to locate bombs. Bees have sensing capabilities that outperform the dog’s nose by a trillion parts per second. Using Pavlovian techniques, scientists cooled down groups of bees in a refrigerator, then strapped them into tiny boxes using masking tape, leaving their heads, and most of their antennae, poking out the top. Using a sugar water reward system, the scientists trained the bees to use their tongues to “sniff out” explosives, resulting in a reaction the scientists call a “purr.” After training, when the scientists exposed the bees to a six-second burst of explosives, some had learned to “purr.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all. —Ovid”
― Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

“A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Clandestine Service, tells us a story about the building at the center of the Pentagon courtyard, which is now a food court but used to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during the height of the Cold War, when satellite technology first came into being, Soviet analysts monitoring the Pentagon became convinced that the building was the entrance to an underground facility, like a nuclear missile silo. The analysts could find no other explanation as to why thousands of people entered and exited this tiny building, all day, every day. Apparently the Soviets never figured it out, and the hot dog stand remained a target throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of the Pentagon. It’s a great anecdote and makes one wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon, which is rumored to have multiple stories belowground.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Ten years earlier, participants from the same movement had fought to kick the French out, and had succeeded. Now they were fighting for the same cause. The insurgency was not an insurgency to the locals, Zasloff and Donnell said. It was a nationalist struggle on behalf of the people of Vietnam.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Castle Bravo had been built according to the “Teller-Ulam” scheme—named for its co-designers, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam—which meant, unlike with the far less powerful atomic bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount of power, or yield. “What this meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the world.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“The hijackers had rented apartments, bought airplane tickets, purchased box cutters, received emails and wire transfers. All of this could have been looked at as it was happening, Poindexter said. Terrorists give out signals. Genoa could find them. It would take enormous sums of time and treasure, but it was worth it. The 9/11 attacks were but the opening salvo, the White House had said. The time was right because the climate was right. People were terrified.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The cause of an effect is just as important as the results produced in order to formulate doctrine,”
― Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

“Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the history of the United States. It began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert on July 16, 1945, the bomb’s price tag, adjusted for inflation, was $28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is almost inconceivable.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“The past is a foreign country.” —L. P. Hartley”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“President Eisenhower was fed up with the interservice rivalries. Having commanded the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the value of unity among the military services. As president, he had been a crusader against the excessive waste of resources that came from service duplication.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper attacks.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“To address strength and endurance issues, Goldblatt initiated a program called the Mechanically Dominant Soldier. What if soldiers could have ten times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap seven feet and be able to cool down their own body temperature? What if the military benchmark of eighty pull-ups a day could be raised to three hundred pull-ups a day? “We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong as far as metabolic profile,” program manager Joe Bielitzki told Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau a decade before Armstrong resigned from athletics in disgrace.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Poindexter’s background was in submarines, and there was an analogy here, he told Tether. Submarines emit sound signals as they move through the sea. The 9/11 hijackers had emitted electronic signals as they moved through the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“These systems,” said Armour, referring to human brains, “are the product of evolution, optimized by evolution for a world which no longer exists; it is not surprising then that, however capable our cognitive apparatus is, it too often fails when challenged by tasks completely alien to its biological roots.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency