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DisasterMan
entered the war in December 1941, the President set up the
Offi ce of Scientifi c Research and Development (OSRD) which
included the NDRC and a Committee of Medical Research. An
electronics countermeasures lab was established at Harvard.
The California Institute of Technology built the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, the University of Chicago had an atomic energy
research laboratory which built the fi rst nuclear reactor, and
MIT built a radar laboratory called Radiation Laboratory. Dr.
Karl Compton (President of M.I.T.) was in charge of OSRD's
Field Service Branch, with Columbia University administering
Dr. Morse's antisubmarine warfare operations research group
at the U.S. Navy's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
When the fi rst physicists, chemists, biologists and
mathematicians reported to the Navy in Boston in April 1942,
according to Morse, they were shown a room full of safes
containing reports from antisubmarine ships and aircraft
crews. The research group politely told their Naval hosts
that they didn't want to read any reports, and said that they
wanted fi rst to just sit down and think about the problem. They
then proceeded to discuss among themselves what actually
happened when German submarines attempted to sink
American merchant ships and what sorts of countermeasures
might be tried to thwart these attacks. They soon developed a
"search theory for aircraft" for night operations when aircraft
searched with airborne radar for the submarines charging
their batteries on the surface, and for daytime operations
when aircraft searched for periscopes with both radar and
visual observers. A similar search theory was developed for
sonar-equipped destroyers and other naval ships searching
for submerged submarines.
When they fi nally got around to reading the offi cial Naval
reports, they found lots of interesting narrative information,
but very little quantitative information of any value for their
search theory. They then asked for permission to visit the
operational Naval Bases, but the Navy initially suggested
that they could bring all kinds of Naval offi cers to Boston to
answer any questions the scientists might have. The group