My new article for Aeon magazine does not include all the sources that I would have used in a properly footnoted article. Here are the sources I had to leave out:
Wiesner was a self-described ‘military technologist’ who had helped set up the Sandia nuclear weapons laboratory and was now the director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. ...
As he has confirmed in various interviews, MIT was ‘90 per cent Pentagon funded’, ‘almost everybody’ was involved in defence research and he himself ‘was in a military lab’. ...
He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices, describing himself as a ‘technophobe’ who can’t even handle a tape recorder. ...
In 1971, Gaines referred to the kind of language research that Chomsky had pioneered in these words: ‘We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control ...
As many as ten of Chomsky’s students played ‘a key role’ in MITRE’s linguistics research – research that was always intended to enhance ‘the design and development of US Air Force-supplied command and control systems.’ ...
MITRE’s role in that war included overseeing the technical side of the McNamara Line. ...
As Partee says: ‘For a while, the Air Force was convinced that supporting pure research in generative grammar was a national priority ...
Researchers at the System Development Corporation were also trying to develop machines that could understand English commands, examples being ‘Blue fighter go to Boston’ ...
Evidently, these generals were following in the tradition of General Eisenhower who, in 1946, directed that military scientists must be given ‘the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research’.
Consider his response when his wife Carol began working on an Air Force project in 1959. This MIT-based project was intended to enable people to communicate with computers in ‘natural language’, one aim being to enhance ‘military command and control systems’. We have it from the project’s head, Bert Green, that Noam was ‘very nervous’ about all this ...
Take MIT’s vice-president in the early 1960s, General James McCormack. He supervised the university’s Center for Communication Sciences which naturally included MIT’s linguists. ...
After all, he was the general who had supervised the creation of the Pentagon’s entire nuclear weapons stockpile. ...
Or take Jerome Wiesner, who not only recruited Chomsky to MIT but who, in 1960, co-founded the university’s linguistics programme. ...
But, again, I doubt it considering he played a significant role in setting up the Pentagon’s entire nuclear missile program as well as its computerised air defence systems. ...
According to one of his MIT colleagues, Wiesner was well-suited for the role as he was ‘soaked’ in military work such as ‘submarine warfare, air defense, atom bombs ...
By the mid-1960s Wiesner’s air defence research at MIT had evolved into what Life magazine described as ‘the backbone of the American field communications in Vietnam’. ...
Meanwhile, various laboratories at MIT continued to research helicopter design, radar, smart bombs and counter-insurgency techniques for use in that brutal war. ...
By 1968, he admitted not only that he feel ‘guilty’ for waiting so long before protesting against the Vietnam War, but that he felt ‘guilty most of the time’. ...
As Chomsky himself says, academics and students were moving between MIT’s campus and its off-campus military labs ‘all the time’.
But to imply that MIT’s natural scientists weren’t also complicit is quite wrong, especially when we know that Wiesner recruited eleven natural scientists from MIT to work on the McNamara Line. ...
On this basis, bizarrely, Chomsky has now extended his claims to the languages of extraterrestrials, arguing that Universal Grammar may prove to be universal ...
Some years ago, the prominent evolutionary linguist and child psychologist Michael Tomasello summed up the prevailing consensus by observing that Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse.’
Chris Knight
My previous article, 'The Unknown Chomsky', is freely accessible here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348615725_The_Unknown_Chomsky_When_the_Pentagon_Used_Chomsky%27s_Linguistics_for_Weapons_Research
This article has other relevant arguments and source details.