NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1999 (Senate - June 19, 1998)
Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, earlier today I had the distinct honor of attending a 75th anniversary ceremony held at the Naval Research Laboratory here in the Anacostia area of our Nation's capital. For 75 years, the U.S. Navy has conducted research on all aspects of radio, radar, sonar, space, and the like. It is a facility that is without comparison anywhere in the world in terms of its excellence.
I ask unanimous consent that an article in today's Washington Post be printed in the Record following my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1)
Mr. WARNER. In today's Washington Post, on page 23, is a brief description of the historic work that has been performed by this laboratory.
I say with a great sense of humility I was asked to speak because of the fact that I am a graduate of a school that was conducted at this laboratory during World War II. Young men, and to my recollection, a few young women, were trained as radio/radar technicians. It was a 15-month course. Barely a third of those who started this course ever completed it because it was 6 days and 6 nights, and those were not unusual hours during wartime, and then for the period after the cessation of the war in Europe and the Pacific, the momentum kept up, but they turned out remarkably trained young people, and I was privileged to be one of them.
I remember on the day of graduation--and these are the basic remarks that I deliver today--an admiral stood up and addressed us, and he said, `You understand how to maintain,' which means fix, `every piece of equipment in the United States Navy through which an electron flows.'
Thousands of young persons went through that program, then reported to the fleet, whether it was a ship or submarine or an airplane, and they were immediately able to go in and examine the most complicated pieces of equipment and repair them. And that was before the black box era, where today, if there is a malfunction of a piece of electronic equipment, by and large, the technician goes in and pulls the box, takes a spare box out and pushes it right in, and the equipment starts up.
No, in those days we had to take the time to take off the covering, go in with electronic devices to try to find the faulty vacuum tube. We did not have solid circuitry in those days to any extent. It was vacuum tubes, great big capacitors. But that was the equipment that gave the eyes and ears to the U.S. Navy, and we shared it with our allies.
I always believed that this laboratory contributed in a very significant way to the ultimate victory of the U.S. forces, together with our allies. Radar, which was a distinct advantage that the United States and Britain had, was basically developed simultaneously in Great Britain and at this laboratory. That gave us an enormous, what we called a force multiplier, over the axis forces, because we had the eyes and ears to project out distances which are small by today's measure but in those days very significant, and to detect the presence of ships and aircraft to give the American and allied forces early warning. I don't know how many lives were saved.
This laboratory really was the vision of Thomas Alva Edison, who we all recognize as one of the great pioneer scientists in American history. He had an active role in this institution in 1923. Then for a while he phased out, and then he came back.
Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
Navy Lab Uncloaks a Secret, Celebrates Its Breakthroughs
(BY STEVE VOGEL) The veil was pulled away from a Cold War secret this week at the Naval Research Laboratory in Southwest Washington.
Speaking to an audience of scientists, lab employees and reporters, top U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday disclosed the existence of a previously classified spy satellite system.
The system, known as Galactic Radiation and Background (GRAB), was launched in June 1960 and became the nation's first reconnaissance satellite system, gathering information on Soviet air defense radars only weeks after Francis Gary Power's U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union.
For the NRL, which this week is celebrating its 75th anniversary, the public disclosure of GRAB was a relatively rare moment in the sun.
Spread over 100 buildings on a 130 acre site along the Potomac, NRL has been responsible for a host of critical scientific developments, from the discovery of radar in the 1920s to directing the first American satellite program--the Vanguard project--in the 1950s, to a pivotal role more recently in developing the Global Positioning System.
GRAB, which was proposed, developed, built and operated by NRL, was `a milestone in the history of the laboratory in the history of U.S. intelligence,' said Keith Hall, director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in announcing the declassification.
Addressing the family members of NRL employees in the audience, Rear Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the director of naval intelligence, said, `For many of you, this is the first opportunity to hear what your husband or your father or your grandfather or whoever were doing every day when they came to work at NRL.'
The lab, though little known today to many Washingtonians, including the thousands of commuters who drive past it every day on Interstate 295 just above the Blue Plains water treatment plant, is inextricably linked to some of the 20th century's major scientific breakthroughs.
Those accomplishments are being celebrated this week in a ceremony and a five-day symposium.
`There's a real long history of firsts that came out of this lab,' said Ed Senasack, head of the lab's spacecraft engineering department.
The lab has provided many things, not the least of them `time to think,' said Jerome Karle, who has worked at the lab since 1946. Karle, with his partner and wife, Isabella Karle, used his time to develop a theory for determining molecular structure, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1985.
That research, like much of the work at NRL, has had implications far beyond military technology. `The ability to get these fundamental structures has revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry, because it provides fundamental information about drugs and their activities and processes,' Karle, 80, said in an interview at the lab where he and his 76-year-old wife still lead groundbreaking research.
`NRL is a research lab. It's where the ideas come from,' says Gerald Borsuk, a scientist who has worked at the lab for three decades. `NRL has kept research going here when industry has shut theirs down. Nobody wants to spend money on research, because it won't pay off for 10 years.'
The lab began with an offhand remark made by Thomas Edison to a newspaper reporter. What the country needed, the great American inventor told an interviewer in 1915, was an idea factory.
It took eight years and even some lobbying help from Edison to get congressional funding, but in 1923, the lab opened on the site of an annex to the Navy's Bellevue Arsenal, a location that won out over competing proposals from Annapolis and West Orange, N.J.
One of those early successes--the discovery of radar--happened more or less by accident in the early 1920s. NRL researchers who were experimenting with radio sent signals across the Potomac to a receiver on Hains Point. `As ship< traffic would pass through, they noticed the phenomenon that was radar,' said Capt. Bruce Buckley, commanding officer of the NRL. Though the Navy was slow to act on the discovery, the NRL was to play a key role in developing radar for military use.
In the early years, because NRL was off the beaten track, some hardy employees living in Virginia rowed to work across the Potomac. Well into the 1950s, many employees commuted to work on launches that ferried workers from Alexandria and the Washington Navy Yard.
Space exploration became a major part of the lab's operations in the 1940s, when NRL scientists conducted cosmic ray and other experiments by launching captured German V-2 rockets. Many of the most important V-2 experiments were the brainchild of a NRL scientist named Herbert Friedman, a man now considered a space pioneer.
`It was a wonderful opportunity,' Friedman, 82, but still active at NRL, recalled recently. `It opened up an entirely new vision of how the sun interacts with the ionosphere.'
The lab's most recognizable physical feature, a 50-foot radio telescope atop the headquarters building, was installed in the early 1950s. Though no longer operating, the telescope was used in determining the surface temperatures of Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
Vanguard I, developed by NRL, was launched into orbit in 1958 and is still there; in March, the satellite marked its 40th year in space, by far the record for any man-made satellite.
Civilian scientists at NRL praise the Navy's stewardship of the lab, which operates with about $800 million in annual funding and has around 3,400 employees. `The Navy has kept NRL alive, despite having lots of freaks here, and guys in sandals, and geeks, and you don't know what they'll come up with next,' said Borsuk.
Throughout much of NRL's history, the military leadership has been `very quick to support anybody with ideas,' said Friedman.
But there is concern at the lab about a growing sentiment in Congress, in the aftermath of the Cold War, against funding research unless it is guaranteed to have concrete results.
`In the past, there weren't [funding problems], but there are pressures outside the military that have made life much more difficult,' said Nobel laureate Karle. `It is post-Cold War, but it's accelerating now.'