Today, MIT plays a key role in maintaining U.S. competitiveness, technological leadership, and national defense — and much of the Institute’s work to support the nation’s standing in these areas can be traced back to 1953.
Two months after he took office that year, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower received a startling report from the military: The USSR had successfully exploded a nuclear bomb nine months sooner than intelligence sources had predicted. The rising Communist power had also detonated a hydrogen bomb using development technology more sophisticated than that of the U.S. And lastly, there was evidence of a new Soviet bomber that rivaled the B-52 in size and range — and the aircraft was of an entirely original design from within the USSR. There was, the report concluded, a significant chance of a surprise nuclear attack on the United States.
Eisenhower’s understanding of national security was vast (he had led the Allies to victory in World War II and served as the first supreme commander of NATO), but the connections he’d made during his two-year stint as president of Columbia University would prove critical to navigating the emerging challenges of the Cold War. He sent his advisors in search of a plan for managing this threat, and he suggested they start with James Killian, then president of MIT.
Killian had an unlikely path to the presidency of MIT. “He was neither a scientist nor an engineer,” says David Mindell, the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing and a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “But Killian turned out to be a truly gifted administrator.”
While he was serving as editor of MIT Technology Review (where he founded what became the MIT Press), Killian was tapped by then-president Karl Compton to join his staff. As the war effort ramped up on the MIT campus in the 1940s, Compton deputized Killian to lead the RadLab — a 4,000-person effort to develop and deploy the radar systems that proved decisive in the Allied victory.
Killian was named MIT’s 10th president in 1948. In 1951, he launched MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research center where MIT and U.S. Air Force scientists and engineers collaborated on new air defense technologies to protect the nation against a nuclear attack.
Two years later, within weeks of Eisenhower’s 1953 request, Killian convened a group of leading scientists at MIT. The group proposed a three-part study: The U.S. needed to reassess its offensive capabilities, its continental defense, and its intelligence operations. Eisenhower agreed.
Killian mobilized 42 engineers and scientists from across the country into three panels matching the committee’s charge. Between September 1954 and February 1955, the panels held 307 meetings with every major defense and intelligence organization in the U.S. government. They had unrestricted access to every project, plan, and program involving national defense. The result, a 190-page report titled “Meeting the Threat of a Surprise Attack,” was delivered to Eisenhower’s desk on Feb. 14, 1955.
The Killian Report, as it came to be known, would go on to play a dramatic role in defining the frontiers of military technology, intelligence gathering, national security policy, and global affairs over the next several decades. Killian’s input would also have dramatic impacts on Eisenhower’s presidency and the relationship between the federal government and higher education.
Foreseeing an evolving competition
The Killian Report opens by anticipating four projected “periods” in the shifting balance of power between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
In 1955, the U.S. had a decided offensive advantage over the USSR, but it was overly vulnerable to surprise attack. In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. would have an even larger offensive advantage and be only somewhat less vulnerable to surprise. By 1960, the U.S.’ offensive advantage would be narrower, but it would be in a better position to anticipate an attack. Within a decade, the report stated, the two nations would enter “Period IV” — during which “an attack by either side would result in mutual destruction … [a period] so fraught with danger to the U.S. that we should push all promising technological development so that we may stay in Periods II and III as long as possible.”
The report went on to make extensive, detailed recommendations — accelerated development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and high-energy aircraft fuels, expansion and increased ground security for “delivery system” facilities, increased cooperation with Canada and more studies about establishing monitoring stations on polar pack ice, and “studies directed toward better understanding of the radiological hazards that may result from the detonation of large numbers of nuclear weapons,” among others.
“Eisenhower really wanted to draw the perspectives of scientists and engineers into his decision-making,” says Mindell. “Generals and admirals tend to ask for more arms and more boots on the ground. The president didn’t want to be held captive by these views — and Killian’s report really delivered this for him.”
On the day it arrived, President Eisenhower circulated the Killian Report to the head of every department and agency in the federal government and asked them to comment on its recommendations. The Cold War arms race was on — and it would be between scientists and engineers in the United States and those in the Soviet Union.
An odd couple
The Killian Report made many recommendations based on “the correctness of the current national intelligence estimates” — even though “Eisenhower was frustrated with his whole intelligence apparatus,” says Will Hitchcock, the James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of “The Age of Eisenhower.” “He felt it was still too much World War II ‘exploding-cigar’ stuff. There wasn’t enough work on advance warning, on seeing what’s over the hill. But that’s what Eisenhower really wanted to know.” The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor still lingered in the minds of many Americans, Hitchcock notes, and “that needed to be avoided.”
Killian needed an aggressive, innovative thinker to assess U.S. intelligence, so he turned to Edwin Land. The cofounder of Polaroid, Land was an astonishingly bold engineer and inventor. He also had military experience, having developed new ordnance targeting systems, aerial photography devices, and other photographic and visual surveillance technologies during World War II. Killian approached Land knowing their methods and work style were quite different. (When the offer to lead the intelligence panel was made, Land was in Hollywood advising filmmakers on the development of 3D movies; Land told Killian he had a personal rule that any committee he served on “must fit into a taxicab.”)
In fall 1954, Land and his five-person panel quickly confirmed Killian and Eisenhower’s suspicions: “We would go in and interview generals and admirals in charge of intelligence and come away worried,” Land reported to Killian later. “We were [young scientists] asking questions — and they couldn’t answer them.” Killian and Land realized this would set their report and its recommendations on a complicated path: While they needed to acknowledge and address the challenges of broadly upgrading intelligence activities, they also needed to make rapid progress on responding to the Soviet threat.
As work on the report progressed, Land and Killian held briefings with Eisenhower. They used these meetings to make two additional proposals — neither of which, President Eisenhower decided, would be spelled out in the final report for security reasons. The first was the development of missile-firing submarines, a long-term prospect that would take a decade to complete. (The technology developed for Polaris-class submarines, Mindell notes, transferred directly to the rockets that powered the Apollo program to the moon.)
The second proposal — to fast-track development of the U-2, a new high-altitude spy plane —could be accomplished within a year, Land told Eisenhower. The president agreed to both ideas, but he put a condition on the U-2 program. As Killian later wrote: “The president asked that it should be handled in an unconventional way so that it would not become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department or troubled by rivalries among the services.”
Powered by Land’s revolutionary imaging devices, the U-2 would become a critical tool in the U.S.’ ability to assess and understand the Soviet Union’s nuclear capacity. But the spy plane would also go on to have disastrous consequences for the peace process and for Eisenhower.
The aftermath(s)
The Killian Report has a very complex legacy, says Christopher Capozzola, the Elting Morison Professor of History. “There is a series of ironies about the whole undertaking,” he says. “For example, Eisenhower was trying to tamp down interservice rivalries by getting scientists to decide things. But within a couple of years those rivalries have all gotten worse.” Similarly, Capozzola notes, Eisenhower — who famously coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” and warned against it — amplified the militarization of scientific research “more than anyone else.”
Another especially painful irony emerged on May 1, 1960. Two weeks before a meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in Paris to discuss how the U.S. and USSR could ease Cold War tensions and slow the arms race, a U-2 was shot down in Soviet airspace. After a public denial by the U.S. that the aircraft was being used for espionage, the Soviets produced the plane’s wreckage, cameras, and pilot — who admitted he was working for the CIA. The peace process, which had become the centerpiece of Eisenhower’s intended legacy, collapsed.
There were also some brighter outcomes of the Killian Report, Capozzola says. It marked a dramatic reset of the national government’s relationship with academic scientists and engineers — and with MIT specifically. “The report really greased the wheels between MIT scientists and Washington,” he notes. “Perhaps more than the report itself, the deep structures and relationships that Killian set up had implications for MIT and other research universities. They started to orient their missions toward the national interest,” he adds.
The report also cemented Eisenhower’s relationship with Killian. After the launch of Sputnik, which induced a broad public panic in the U.S. about Soviet scientific capabilities, the president called on Killian to guide the national response. Eisenhower later named Killian the first special assistant to the president for science and technology. In the years that followed, Killian would go on to help launch NASA, and MIT engineers would play a critical role in the Apollo mission that landed the first person on the moon. To this day, researchers at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory uphold this legacy of service, advancing knowledge in areas vital to national security, economic competitiveness, and quality of life for all Americans.
As Eisenhower’s special assistant, Killian met with him almost daily and became one of his most trusted advisors. “Killian could talk to the president, and Eisenhower really took his advice,” says Capozzola. “Not very many people can do that. The fact that Killian had that and used it was different.”
A key to their relationship, Capozzola notes, was Killian’s approach to his work. “He exemplified the notion that if you want to get something done, don’t take the credit. At no point did Killian think he was setting science policy. He was advising people on their best options, including decision-makers who would have to make very difficult decisions. That’s it.”
In 1977, after many tours of duty in Washington and his retirement from MIT, Killian summarized his experience working for Eisenhower in his memoir, “Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower.” Killian said of his colleagues: “They were held together in close harmony not only by the challenge of the scientific and technical work they were asked to undertake but by their abiding sense of the opportunity they had to serve a president they admired and the country they loved. They entered the corridors of power in a moment of crisis and served there with a sense of privilege and of admiration for the integrity and high purpose of the White House.”
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