My Father’s Super-Secret Double Life as a Nuclear Missile Savant

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here, from arts to sports, from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. Our next story comes to us from John Clawson in the Seattle area. Here’s John to introduce himself and then share his story.

Hello, audience, this is John Clawson, the author of “Missileman.” And it’s the story about my father as a Cold War engineer who lived a secret life for over forty years. And once he was diagnosed with cancer, he was told he had eighteen months to live. I got a phone call from him that he wanted to come out to New Jersey, where he helped me select a home and build a fence. I picked him up in Philadelphia at the airport, and, you know, Ninety-Five at south of Philadelphia. And as usual, he was casually dressed. And my mom is an avid knitter. I refer to it in the book as a Mister Rogers knitted sweater. And with a piece of luggage, we drove up Ninety-Five to go back up to New Jersey. Just north of the airport, there’s an exit called Broad Street. And my father said, “John, ten men sat down in the basement of a YMCA and decided how nuclear weaponry was going to be deployed, and missiles.” And he started naming off names, and one was Enrico Fermi, which I recognized immediately, but I didn’t recognize the other names. And he was looking quite pensive, kind of looking down on the street. And he gets to the ninth person, and he could not remember his name. And he goes, “And he was a guy from Georgia.” And I said to my dad, “If you can’t remember number nine, you’re sure not going to remember number ten.” And to my amazement, he goes, “It’s your father.” It took me by such surprise that I almost went off the road, hitting the white knobs on the highway. And I kept driving. I said, “Dad, what would you be doing in a meeting like that?” He goes, “Johnny, I got something to tell you for the next three and a half days.” So the next morning, we got out to start the fence. He’d already told me what materials to buy, and he just started telling me what happened in his life and how he got recruited into the top-secret NDRC. Very few people have heard of the NDRC, the National Defense Research Committee, which is the precursor, actually two committees before the Manhattan Project. Now, let’s just go back to the beginning, in the forties, thirty-nine to forty. Now, having received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences, my father is thinking that he’s being recruited for college because he has been correcting math books. Now, let’s talk about him correcting textbooks in eighth grade. My father is told that he’s missed two questions in an eighth-grade math test. Now, a year and a half before, he was in a very violent car accident where he was thrown from the car after church, when a drunk T-boned their car. They were driving on gravel in Kiron, Iowa. My father went flying. They had to look for him in the cornfield where he was. He was unconscious and with this gigantic scar on his face. They brought him back to the house, and the only dressing on his face was the drunk driver’s T-shirt. And they just assumed my dad was going to die. They didn’t even bother going to see a doctor. My grandfather said, “I’m not wasting any money.” Well, there was no money, and my dad’s in a coma. And his mom was a very devout Christian. She locks herself in a prayer closet, and she prays nonstop. Now, this accident happens Sundays, let’s say noon. He wakes up on Tuesday morning, and he takes the T-shirt off his face. And that gash is fully healed. My father kept that open the way it was because he always wanted to remind himself that God kept him alive. And now he realizes that he’s been given a mathematical and mechanical skill set that is not normal, that he’s alive for a purpose. He shortly realized thereafter that not only was he a mathematical savant, that the things just naturally came to his brain, now that he was also a mechanical savant. Now, it’s very, very, very rare to see a theoretical and a mechanical savant kind of combined in one package. We’ve been emailing with the world’s leading expert. He’s a doctor out of the University of Wisconsin. He’s the world’s leading expert on savants, and he’s only met sixteen called post-birth savants. But what’s so rare with my father: it’s mechanical and theoretical. Albert Einstein, while he might have been a theoretical genius, wasn’t mechanical at all. He had a hard time even tying of shoes, and how to do that. He can do all the theoretical codes of nuclear reactions along with how to fly a missile. Usually, those are two completely separate skill sets. So my father is basically a one-man shop for a nuclear ballistic missile, which is extremely rare.

And you’re listening to John Clawson. And he’s the author of “Missileman: The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clawson.” And his father’s secret, super-secret double life is a nuclear missile savant, is what this story is about, and so much more. More, more when we come back. More of John Clawson’s father’s story, and he listens in Seattle. Here on Our American Stories, folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and John Clawson’s story of his father’s super-secret double life as a nuclear missile savant. Let’s return to John and more of his father’s story.

So, once my father is correcting textbooks, the teacher—the basketball coach as well—mails the textbook back to the publisher because my father took the textbook where they said he missed two questions, and my father told the teacher the textbook is wrong. And my father that night, when he took the teacher’s textbook home, not only corrected the questions, which are in the back of the textbook, he corrected the entire textbook and rewrote it how it should read. So, when they were scouring the country looking for the top scientists in America, they noted MIT, Yale, Harvard, Caltech, UC Berkeley. That’s when they said to them, “You might want to check out this young kid in Iowa.” “His name’s Wallace Clawson.” “But there’s one thing about him.” “He’s seventeen, I think.” And they kind of shrugged it off initially, but the publisher said, “You probably should go see him because he’s already correcting our astrophysics textbooks.” So my dad went to this small, rural country school that incorporated all the grades in basically a classroom, rural, rural Kiron, Iowa. And my dad was on the basketball team, and that week of practice back in February of nineteen forty, he received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences, thinking, “We’d like to talk to you about your math skills.” Well, my dad thought he was being recruited to go to college. Well, he had no idea it was the NDRC coming after him. So he asked the coach if he could have a half hour because he was being recruited to maybe go to college. And he knew the tough environment my dad grew up with, with his dad being a drunk, a very abusive father. He goes, “Wally, you can have a half hour.” He was in a basketball outfit. He pulled on his pants over, but he left his basketball shirt on and a light coat, and it…

It was very cold. He ran all the way to…

the cafe, and there were the three G-men. And they must have looked at this young kid and said, “You’re Wallace Clawson?” And my dad goes, “Yeah.” And they sat down with my father and they said, “If you take more than two hours to correct this question, we’re not interested.” And now my father’s thinking, “I’ve only got like twenty minutes left.” “Now, I got to get out of here because it’s going to be ten minutes to run back.” And the two of the gentlemen went to the restroom. And my father just sits down, instantaneously rewrites this very long, protracted math question, and then rewrites it, saying that this should be the way it should be written. “It’s not so cumbersome, it’s not so complex.” “Always make math very logical.” He never liked to see people use math to intimidate anybody. So he started running back, and that’s when the two gentlemen came back out and sat down at the table and said, “What do we do, scare the punk kid off?” And the gentleman, who saw what my dad had done, said, “We don’t know who should be more scared: him or us.” So the NDRC was in such a panic, and in a hurry, they infiltrated eighteen high-profile scientific universities, and they acted all like graduate students or young professors, but they were all doing research work for the NDRC. But of one of those committees, there was one called the Uranium Committee. They determined that the making of an—they call it then—a “super explosive” was not all that far-fetched.

It looks like it.

Can be done, and we’re recommending that we go to the next phase.

So what FDR did…

He split the NDRC Uranium Committee off into its own group called the S-1 Committee. And my father went with radar down to Jacksonville, Florida, where all these radar microwave radar sets were attached. During World War Two, that’s where they affected the microwave radar. They call it the biggest unsung hero of World War Two because if the U-boats were not captured correctly and eliminated, forty to fifty percent of all shipping lanes across the Atlantic were being taken out, sunk well within three years, three and a half years. If you wanted to be in a U-boat, you were putting your life at severe risk of being killed. So, when the microwave was done, he was brought in to help design the first thermonuclear computer with a gentleman who was considered the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, John von Neumann, who was quite an interesting character in himself, with his office directly across the hallway from Albert Einstein. And that was the connection of my father getting to know Albert across the hallway from his closest mentor because…

John von Neumann…

had developed the first programmable computer program, which was unheard of back in the early fifties. And my father was exposed to the mechanical machine at Iowa State while doing radar projects from the name of John Atanasoff, who was considered to be the first person to manufacture a computer. So they combined the computer of Atanasoff with my father and the program from John von Neumann. And hence, you end up with the IBM 704 computer, which was brought out to Livermore, California, from Poughkeepsie, New York.

And as my father told…

me, it took three eighteen-wheelers to transport that machine. And he says, “John, you have no idea of the security around that convoy.” But it’s important for everyone to realize that during the fifties, that was the Seven Series computers, tweaked. And then the IBM had of natural ability then to tweak it again so it could be commercialized and sell it. And that’s when the Seven Series IBM computers turned into the 360, which was one of IBM’s most successful commercial machines ever built. Now, let’s explain this. When the atomic bomb was dropped in nineteen forty-five, that was what you call a fission bomb. It splits the atom. That was Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Well, they found out mathematically—which are incredibly complex calculations—that if you take the heat energy of a fission bomb, which is what it was dropped at Nagasaki—fission—and if you take that million-degree heat and you specifically direct it at hydrogen atoms, you vaporize off the one electron. And now, what you do, you try to implode billions of hydrogen atoms, which is basically considered like the center of the Sun. So, if you have them implode on each other, the energy release is the energy of the Sun. So that’s what my father specialized in. Then, in forty-six, the government wanted my father to do advanced ballistic calculations under the guise of being an engineering student. The first thing I did: I pulled his grades from Iowa State. There my father is: he’s flunking nine classes—nine. He flunked Basic Math 101. So they made him look like he was the flunky. So he’s now at the University of Minnesota. All of a sudden, the government started a long, four-year process to figure out if there were moles within our nuclear and scientific world. And we know that in Los Alamos, they caught a group of the engineers selling secrets to the Russians. So they come to my father and they tell him, “Wallace, we’re thinking they’re going to be coming after you now, and we think there could be a mole within your group.”

And you’re listening to John Clawson telling the story of his dad, and that would be Wallace Clawson. When we come back, we continue the story here on Our American Stories. And we continue here on Our American Stories with the life of Wallace Clawson, as told by his son, John Clawson, author of the book “Missileman: The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clawson,” and soon to be a movie. There are producers attached to this as we speak, and of course, screenwriters.

But now, let’s return to the story.

We last heard that the Russians were coming after John’s father, Wallace. Here’s John with what happened next.

“We want you now to go to Iowa and act like you’re going to be a farmer.” “And we’re going to isolate you, living with your father-in-law at the farm in Kiron, Iowa, and tell everybody you’re now going to be a farmer.” So he did that, but he wasn’t done working. They did the drops at the windmill of scientific papers, where he would go pick him up early in the morning, take him back to the farmhouse. He’d crawl up into the attic and do the mathematical calculations, put him back in the bag, and then he’d put a light on up in the attic to notify his handlers that “I’ve got a fresh drop of research papers I’ve developed.” But what my father failed to recognize is that my grandfather was up at four a.m. every day. And my grandfather could see that his new son-in-law was leaving at four-thirty in the morning and come back in like ten minutes. So he watched this go on and on, and he watched how the light would go on and off, and in certain times when…

the light was on, he’d leave that day.

So, when they were in the kitchen, my grandfather approached my dad. He was a World War One, and I have framed at my home here the letter he wrote to his father about how horrible the conditions were in France in World War One and that he learned to sleep with rats crawling on his face. And that backs up his statement, “I know what a rat smells like, and I think I’ve got one in my family.” And my father very calmly responded, saying, “You know, Alban, you fought for this country in a certain way.” “I’m just doing it in a different way.” And my grandfather backed off. Never a word was ever said about anything. So after about a year of doing that is when IBM came and knocking, and that’s when my father was brought into the commercial world of IBM, still doing a lot of government projects, but under the guise of IBM’s—back then it was called—the Military Products Group.

So when we were…

doing the interviewing of my mom, and we went to my mom with my writer and researcher. Where we asked my mom, “Didn’t you think Wallace had kind of a strange career path?” “He’s getting an engineering degree, now says he wants to be a farmer, and now gets hired by the IBM Military Products Group.”

“What kind of career path is that?”

And we got the biggest chuckle out of that because my mom said this: “Oh, Wallace would have been such a good farmer!” She still thought about my dad being a farmer. It was very touching. Well, then life all of a sudden changed when Russia shot off Sputnik up into the sky, and they went to get my dad out of bed. We had four kids sleeping in a two-bedroom house. My mom and dad had one, and we had four kids in the other. My brother is seven years older than me. He remembers that I was holding onto my dad’s leg because I was sleeping usually on the floor with my blanket. And when my dad went to leave, I grabbed onto his leg, and my brother woke up—who would have been ten at the time. And my brother vividly sees four large, statued men with rifles getting my father, shuttling him off. And what they were doing, they were going to be analyzing the track data of the satellite as it went. And my dad said to everybody, “Oh, calm down.” So my dad put those calculations in, but we, a month later, shot our first satellite off. We thought we were going to be first. We weren’t. But that’s when President Eisenhower initiated the program of NASA. So the exact month NASA was formed, we moved down to Long Beach, California, where my father is involved in IBM’s what they call Space Systems West Division, on a very unique address called Wilshire Boulevard. From there, in nineteen sixty-two, we moved up to San Jose, California. One thing that’s important to note, that whenever you have a person who even has a group that knows the actual ballistic codes that can activate a variety of different, either ballistic missiles or missiles, in wherever, you always have to be able to find where that person is. So, in the early sixties, the military had developed GPS guidance systems with satellites. We h…