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

On this episode of Our American Stories, for 50 years, John Clauson's father was a simple "salesman," that is, until—nearing his deathbed—he revealed to his son a secret. John is here to tell the story from his book Missileman.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 our American Stories dot com. There's some
of our favorites. Our next story comes to us from
John Clawson in the Seattle area. Here's John to introduce

(00:31):
himself and then share his story. Hello, audience, So 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

(00:51):
he was diagnosed with cancer and he was told he
at eighteen months to live. I got a phone call
from him that he wanted to come out to New Jersey,
where it helped me select a home and build a fence.
I picked him up in Philadelphia at airport and you know,

(01:11):
ninety five at south of Philadelphia, and as usual, he
was casually dressed and my mom as an avid knitter
that 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

(01:33):
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 in
Eureque Fermi, which I recognized immediately, but I didn't recognize

(01:56):
the other names. And he was looking quite pensive, kind
of looking down down 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's not going to remember number ten.

(02:18):
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 at a meeting like that? He goes, Johnny, I
got something to tell you for the next three and

(02:40):
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 DRC. Very few people have heard of the DRC,

(03:04):
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 of in the forties, thirty ninety. Now,
having received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences,

(03:24):
where 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,

(03:47):
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 a gravel
road in Kirrone, Iowa. My father went flying. They had
to look for him in the cornfield where he was.

(04:07):
He was unconscious and with his 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 to descent I'm not wasting any money. Well, there

(04:30):
is no money, and my dad's in a coma, and
his mom was very devout Christian. She locks herself in
a prayer closet and she prays NonStop. Now, this accident
happened Sundays, let's say noon. He wakes up on Tuesday
morning and he takes the T shirt off his face,

(04:54):
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 given him a mathematical and mechanical skill

(05:17):
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 things just naturally came to his brain,
now that he was also a mechanical savant. Now it's very,

(05:41):
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

(06:03):
what's so rare with my father it's mechanical and theoretical.
Albert Einstein, while he might have been a theoretical genius,
he wasn't mechanical at all. He had a hard time
even tying his 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

(06:27):
completely separate skill sets. So my father is basically one
man's shop for a nuclear or 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 Blausson and his father's secret, super secret double

(06:53):
life as a nuclear missile savant. Is what this story
is about, and so much 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

(07:30):
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(07:51):
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our
American Stories and John Clawson's story of his father's super

(08:15):
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

(08:36):
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
in the back of the textbook, he corrected the entire

(08:57):
textbook and rewrote it how it should read. So, when
they were scouring the country looking for the top scientists
in America, they'd noted mit Yale, Harvard, Caltech, UC Berkeley.
That's when they said to them, you might want to
check out this young kid. N Iowa his name's Wallace Closson.

(09:21):
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

(09:44):
in basically a classroom, rural rural Kyrone, Iowa. And my
dad was on the basketball team, and that week of
practice back in February of nineteen forty, he received a
le from the National Academy of Sciences thinking, we'd like
to talk to you about your math skills. Well, my

(10:07):
dad thought he was being recruited to go to college. Well,
he had no idea it was the n DRC coming
after him. So he asked the coach if he could
have a half hour because he's being recruited to maybe
go to college, and he knew the tough environment. My
dad grew up with his dad being a drunk, a

(10:30):
very abusive father. He goes to Wally, you can have
a half hour. He was in basketball outfit. He pulled
on his pants over but he left his basketball shirt on.
In a light coat and it was very cold. He
ran all the way to the cafe and there's the
three g men and they must have looked at this

(10:51):
young kid and say you're Wallace Closson 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 gotta
get out of here because it's going to be ten
minutes to run back, and to the gentleman went to

(11:14):
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

(11:35):
math very logical. He never liked to see people use
math to intimidate anybody. So he had started running back,
and that's when the two gentlemen came back out and
sat down at the table and said, what we do
scare the punk kid off? And the gentleman, who saw

(11:56):
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, the
infiltrated eighteen high profile scientific universities and they acted all
like graduate students or young professors, but they were all

(12:18):
doing research work for the NDARC. 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

(12:40):
we go to the next phase. So a FDR did.
He split the NDRC Uranium Committee off into its own
group called the S one 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

(13:04):
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, we're
being taken out sunk well within three years three and
a half years. If you wanted to be in a

(13:25):
U boat, you were put in 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

(13:49):
an interesting character in himself, with his office directly across
the hallway for 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

(14:13):
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 Altassanoff, who was considered to
be the first person to manufacture a computer. So they
combined the computer of Altassanoff with my father and the

(14:35):
program from John von Neuman, and hence you end up
with the IBM seven O four computer, which was brought
out to Livermore, Californmia, from Poughkeepsie, New York. And as
my father told me, it took three eighteen wheelers to

(14:55):
transport that machine. And he says, John, you have 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

(15:18):
be commercialized and sell it. And that's when the seven
series IBM computers turned into the three sixty, 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.

(15:41):
It splits the atom. That was Nagasaki and Hiroshima. While
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 Nagasa Hockey fission,

(16:01):
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 it is basically considered

(16:21):
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

(16:47):
engineering student. The first thing I did, I pulled his
grades from mya state there. My father is he's flunking
nine classes nine. He flunked basic math one oh one,
so they made him look like he was the flunkey.
So he's now at University of Minnesota. All of a sudden,

(17:11):
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 Almos that they caught
a group of the engineers selling secrets to the Russians.

(17:31):
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 story,

(18:08):
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.

(18:30):
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 and living with your father in law at the
farm in Kirrone, Iowa, and tell everybody you're now going

(18:51):
to be a farmer. So he did that, and 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 crawled up into the attic and do the mathematical calculations,
put him back in the bag, and then he'd put

(19:13):
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 am every day,
and my grandfather could see that his new son in
law was leaving at four thirty in the morning and

(19:36):
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. 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

(19:59):
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

(20:19):
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 a knocking,

(20:40):
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 IBMS. 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,

(21:04):
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

(21:27):
a good farmer. She still thought about my dad being
a farmer. It was very touching. Well, then the life
all of a sudden changed when Russia shot off Sputnik
up into the sky and they went to get my

(21:49):
dad out of bed. We had a 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

(22:12):
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
statured men with rifles getting my father is shuttling him off,
and what they were doing. They were going to be
analyzing the track data of the satellite as it went,

(22:36):
and my dad said to everybody else, calmed 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

(23:00):
NASA was formed, we moved down to Long Beach, California,
where my father is involved in IBMS, what they call
Space Systems West Division, on very unique address called Wilshire Boulevard.
From there, in nineteen sixty two we moved up to

(23:21):
San Jose, California. One thing that's important to note that
whenever you have a person who's even has a group
that knows the actual ballistic codes that can activate a
variety of different either ballistic missiles or missiles and wherever,

(23:44):
you always have to be able to find where that
person is. So in early sixties, the military had developed
GPS guidance systems with satellites. We had it installed my
dad did in the back of the Austin Healy sprite.
So twice there was a time in which the government

(24:10):
was following that sprite in San Francisco being driven by
my brother, and my brother runs out of gas. They
realized that the sprite wasn't moving. Along the side of
a highway in San Francisco, a military truck pulls up
next to my brother and says, we think you need
some gas, and then filled him up and off he went.

(24:34):
My brother was thinking, man, that's strange. And then another
time the sprite was actually stolen and my brother was
directed not to call the police, call Dad if you
don't know where that car is. And they just went
and got the car and brought it back. And then

(24:57):
there was a war called the Six Day when Egypt
basically led an attack of a coalition of countries in
the Middle East against Israel, and Russia was so frustrated
with America that we helped Israel out so much in
the Sixth Day War. And what does Russia do. They

(25:19):
move in fifteen thousand advisors into Egypt and six hundred
sam sites. Those are a surface to air missiles. So
lo and behold, guess who moves to Switzerland In nineteen
seventy My father moves to Switzerland. And this is how
we told this to the family. And I'll never forget

(25:41):
it as long as I live. He said it in
a very plain, calm voice. And I'm going, where in
the heck is Switzerland? He goes The Shaw of Iran
wants me to assist on building a water damn project,
and I'm thinking, WHOA, what does my dad know about
water dams? And the week before we moved to Switzerland,

(26:07):
the PLO had hijacked an airplane at a Zurich and
they blew it up. My father absolutely freaked. He was
thinking that PLO has infiltrated the network of his program,
and he thought they were maybe coming after not only
him but his family. At San Francisco, we flew first

(26:32):
class and it was a seven forty seven, and my
father later told me that the whole front row of
coach were armed guards for security. We landed, we got off,
we're going through a pack of customs. We're in customs lines,
and all of a sudden, I see my dad in
a window and he's saying, come over here. A door

(26:55):
opened up and we just walked out. And you're listening
to John Klasson tell him the story of his father,
flash engineer Wallace Clawson. But not just any engineer Folks
a super secret double life as a nuclear missile savant.
The book is Missileman, The Secret Life of Cold War

(27:16):
engineer Wallace Clauson. This is our American Stories, and we

(27:38):
returned to John Clawson's story about his father Wallace. Here
on Our American Stories we left off with John and
his family having just landed at Zurich Airport in Switzerland.
We were out of that airport in under thirty seconds
because my father didn't know if they were going to
attack now at the Zurich airport where they hijacked the

(28:00):
plane the previous week. And we got in the car
and we drove to Tallville, which is where we lived
in our house. Had had to be a good fifteen
twenty miles. We had to go through at least forty stoplights.
We didn't hit one red light. And my father said
we were in a convoy of three cars and the

(28:20):
first car controlled the lights of the street. And my father,
when he was telling me his story as to what
we did when we lived overseas, he says, Johnny, look
at your passport. You'd never ever entered the country of Switzerland.
I go. I got a high school diploma from Switzerland,

(28:41):
and he looked at me with his hands in concrete,
looked straight up at me and said, Johnny, we can
make anything disappear. What my dad had done, he had
put ballistic missiles in Iran in case Russia came into attack,
is real. I think it's important to do in telling

(29:04):
you the story with my father is some of his
idio secrecies and things he'd like to do, because obviously
he could not have traditional friends because he couldn't trust
anybody for obvious reasons. If you know the nuclear codes,
you're not going to be hanging out with somebody. But
what my dad liked to do though, he loved to

(29:26):
hit flyballs to my friends because he always thought the
kids could be trusted. So we often did that. And
my father would always carry a plastic satchel. This is
in the early mid seventies and he says, Johnny, open up,

(29:46):
I want to show you something that we're developing. And
in it was a twelve inch by two by two.
It looked like a white piece of chalk, but it
virtually weighed nothing. And I go, what like styrofoam? But

(30:08):
it was denser than styrofoam. And I go to Daddy goes,
what do you want me to see? He goes, Johnny,
I just want to show you what the world's greatest
hot plate looks like. Now, that was the sample piece
of the Space Shuttle tiles. As you re enter Earth's atmosphere,

(30:28):
there's incredible amounts of mass heat developed as you enter
atmosphere again, and that two inch thick they ended up
painting it with a different color that even absorbed more
heat as it came in. But that was one of
the original Space Shuttle tiles that was being developed. And

(30:51):
my father often would say, Johnny, inquire about whose TV's
working and not working? And you know, I have kind
of a propensity of fixing television sets that kind of
get a kick out of it. And the only thing
he ever asked once in a while, I'd be like
a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, and
he'd completely tear apart the back of the TV set

(31:12):
and fix their color TV with ever bringing out a
manual or anything. He just went in there, Eddie, go Johnny,
go into my tube wall to row two down, bucket
three over, and I need two of those, or go
down four four over. I need one of those and

(31:32):
I'd run back, and I would. He would take him,
and he had carried a soldering iron with him, and
he'd fixed tubes. And those tubes which he was using
were what you call G force rated. In other words,
they were used in missiles. And you can just imagine

(31:54):
if you have a tube machine and the G forces
in a missile, if those tubes aren't reinforced with special
strong connection tips and glass, they'll break apart. And those
were all G force rated for missiles. So when my
father died, my gosh, I can't believe I actually did this.

(32:18):
We took all of his tubes and took him to
the dump and I've later found out that on an
average those tubes were probably worth two hundred grand today.
My father always said, this Sunday is the day the
Lord has made. We will rejoice and be gladden it.

(32:40):
I woke up every Sunday and he was always playing
church music, and he was always asking me who can
we pick up to fill our car to go to
Sunday school with. He goes, Johnny, get up and get
your friends here. We'll wait for him at the train
station or whatever. But he felt comfortable. He even was

(33:03):
kept a smile on his face. He never really lingered around,
but he always that was his time to unwind and
appreciate that he'd been kept alive and that he now
knows what his mission in life is is to try
to keep the world safe. And then in nineteen eighty two,

(33:26):
my father is sent to England where under Carter's administration,
they were quietly secretly going to be bringing in missiles
into England. And then NATO says to Russia in an
exercise only, we are going to attack you, and it's

(33:47):
generally going to increase over the ten days, and the
last three days is going to climax with a nuclear
exchange of weapons. Their hair is up, and they're watching
all the computer codes, and my father is in the
exercise making sure that none of the codes are in

(34:11):
launch mode but have all been deactivated. And there's thousands
of missiles. Can you imagine thinking, oh, did I forget
about that missile in Turkey? So for three days Russia
goes to deaf Com too. Deaf Com too. We have
never been at before with an enemy. They are expecting

(34:32):
nuclear war eight nine and ten, nineteen eighty three, and
we have no idea that Russia's even this mad. Soon
after that exercise ended, my dad was diagnosed with cancer
and basically he retired from IBM and came back to California.

(34:54):
But when he found out that he had eighteen months
to live, he wanted at least leave some to mark
that to his family that he did exist in a
different way than being a quote unquote IBM sales affiliated guy.
So when we were coming back to return the post

(35:17):
hole digger, my father said, Johnny, pull in here, I
want you to see this house. And it was John
von Neumann's house where the top scientists were deciding what
we were going to do with nuclear activity. Now the
bomb had been dropped. Now top scientists Faremi Openheimer. They

(35:41):
wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. They figured,
you know what, this is a horrible thing we've done.
You can go on YouTube and see Openheimer openly crying
of the technology that they've released to the world. But
my father was in the camp that said, you know what,
the genie's out of the bottle. We can't put it

(36:02):
back in, but you know what we can do. A
scientist can stay so far ahead of the military and
uniqueness that will control it. There's no doubt that my
father was a walking savant met mechanical and theoretical, but
he did not give off any of that aura. He

(36:25):
just did it and quietly walked away. And his skill
sets was so far advanced. He was probably twenty five
to twenty eight years before Bill Gates even talking about programs.
But I look at it this way, once you're in

(36:48):
the inner sanctum of top secret computer projects, you're not
going to be openly now working on commercial projects. It's
just not going to happen. So he came back to
Seattle after in nineteen eighty nine, and he really got

(37:12):
sick in a very quick way, and he passed away
in May of nineteen ninety one. And I'll never forget.
He was at a hospice center and I basically said

(37:34):
goodbye and yeah, and he said he learned so much
from me. And I was thinking, what could you possibly
learn from me? And he said he learned about life?

(37:55):
And I left and he died that night, after my
mom and two sisters saying, Ebbs, and you've been listening
to John Clawson choking up talking about his father. A
great family story here on our American Stories