Army Math Research Center: What Was It Really Doing?

Anti-war activists attending University of Wisconsin- Madison during the Vietnam War era knew that their school was making millions of dollars assisting the military in the application of research. Certainly, people were finally hearing about the war crimes happening in the Far East, and one could wonder if their Midwest university would contribute to them.

During the FOIA requested examination of the Sterling Hall bombing defendants’ court files, Media Milwaukee staff found an official document from the Army’s Office of the Chief of Research and Development in Washington dated Sept. 1,1966 that outlined some purposes of the AMRC.

The official contract lists purposes of the AMRC as “carrying on mathematical research which has relevance to problems that exist or are inherent to Army operations,” providing the Army “a source of advice and assistance with respect to the solution of mathematical problems,” making “technical studies, when requested, of the use of mathematics by Army activities and make recommendation as to the implementation of the conclusion of such studies,” cooperating with Army recruitment of scientific personnel, providing a facility for “stimulating scientific contracts between Army scientific personnel and other scientists” and spreading “acquaintance of the Army’s problems among civilian mathematicians, to the end of increasing their capabilities for assisting the Government in the event of a national emergency.”

Despite the verbose language in the document, one thing is clear: the Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall was working to benefit the United States military in some capacity during the years that the Vietnam War took place and received millions of dollars while doing it.

A quarterly report for the AMRC from January 1973 through the end of that March detailed that total monetary disbursements in that period totaled $8,825,613. That translates to a real value of about $60 million in 2023.

In an official correspondence, in the court files, from former UW- Madison Dean of College of Letters & Science Stephen C. Kleen, he said that students who were anti-war advocates hoped to be able to establish that members of the ARMC were engaged in “various sorts of nefarious military activities, such as devising a more pervasive never gas or drawing secret blueprints for the ABM.” But he also said that the AMRC is doing something of value to the military since the Army is supporting it.

“I always replied that certainly the MRC is doing research of value to the Army,” said Kleene. “Indeed, it is my responsibility as Director to assure that it does.”

According to Kleene, the Army “appreciates fully the value of entrusting to the capable staff of the MRC the choice areas of research which will produce results of practical value. He said that this point in the Army release was a hang-up in the interviews with student inquisitors.

“At the same time that the MRC is generating new mathematical principles of widespread value, and hence of value to the Army, it is undertaking to see that Army mathematicians learn of these, and learn how they may be used,” said Kleen.

Kleene also said, “In most of the six enclosed descriptions of what the MRC does, efforts have been made to explain that carrying on basic mathematical research of one’s own choice can indeed lead to results of monetary value.”

According to an interview with Jim Rowen in the 1979 The War At Home documentary, a writer for UW-Madison student news publication The Daily Cardinal, he had requested a copy of the 1967 annual report of AMRC research conducted. When he got this initial copy, there was an 8-page section censored out with a note reading, “This material is considered classified and not for public release.”

Despite this roadblock in finding out what the research of the AMRC was contributing to, Jim Rowen noticed that the table of contents in the report listed the censored section as “Assistance to Project Michigan.”

Kleen said that the primary means of communicating research results was writing technical summary reports on these mathematic principles and distributing them to Army installations where the results could be applied.

According to the files examined, among the theories researched by the AMRC that proved of value to the military were game theories such as John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam’s Monte Carlo Method, Martin Fox and George S. Kimeldorf’s Noisy Duels problem, spline functions and, indeed, Project Michigan.

The AMRC, although a major point of contention on the UW- Madison campus through the 1960’s, was contained only on the second, third and fourth floors of Sterling Hall. The basement and first floor were occupied by the physics department.

One of these physics department post-doctoral researchers, Robert Fassnacht, was killed the night that Karl and Dwight Armstrong, David Fine and Leo Burt detonated an ANFO bomb in a van parked on a ramp on the basement level of Sterling Hall.

Fassnacht was not contributing research to war efforts, according to fellow post-doctoral and graduate students who knew what Fassnacht had been working on at the time of his death.

Robert Fassnacht, called Bob by his friends, was said to be on the edge of a breakthrough in superconductivity at absolute zero temperatures. His life and years’ worth of research, along with other valuable research, was destroyed in the bombing of Sterling Hall on August 24, 1970.

One of the four men charged with the bombing of Sterling Hall and the death of Fassnacht, Karleton Armstrong, 77, said that the whole success of the bombing depended on just property destruction.

“When Fassnacht was killed and others were injured, I knew that we were defeated,” Armstrong said. “The highest criteria was only going to be property damage. Now I know that we had just completely blown it.”

He acknowledged the bombing as being irresponsible and that one has to expect that an outcome like death and injury could happen.

“That was the furthest thing in our mind,” said Armstrong. “We thought that we had the ideal time to do the bombing.”

When speaking to Laura Smail in an interview submitted to the UW- Madison archives, Henry Haslach, who worked as TA for UW-Madison Math Department in 1976, said many other anti-war advocates and people on campus who had the inside scoop about the AMRC, the university was abstractly working with the US military to aid in advancing warfare.

“If they get the research, then they can just put it together for what they want,” said Haslach.

However, this was a point of conflict with some others on campus at the time. Frank Scarpace, who worked with Robert Fassnacht as a graduate student denied that the AMRC building was “doing anything for the pro-war affection for the government.” He told Media Milwaukee reporter Jackson Minshall that Madison never accepted classified research.

“They were fighting the wrong people,” said Scarpace. “We were always apolitical doing things that, in general, we thought were helping people.”

In a series of interviews conducted by Media Milwaukee journalists, there were many claims about the various research activities the AMRC was conducting, and the Army benefits connected to them.

Karl Armstrong said that he knew that the university had been working to benefit the military.

“The Army Math Research Center was responsible for developing the mathematics for bombing the Viet Cong. In Vietnam, part of the mathematics used [with] infrared devices actually tracked down Che Guevara in Bolivia,” Armstrong told Media Milwaukee reporters, alluding to Project Michigan. “It was very useful to the U.S. Army.”

He said that although he never intended to kill Fassnacht and has regret for that, he feels that the bombing was righteous in the sense that it sent the right message to the federal government in Washington, D.C.

“They realized that had to bring the war to an end,” said Armstrong. “In my way of thinking, maybe it saved a few 100,000 people’s lives.”

Leslie A. Ballais, the current Curator of Social History and the Wisconsin Historical Society, said that the AMRC was devising strategies for more efficiently killing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers.

Former mayor of Madison and anti-war activist Paul Soglin said that an example of the kinds of projects the AMRC would work on was calculating the mathematics of “launching a missile and then trying to intercept it with another missile.”

Lester Pines was between his sophomore and junior years at UW- Madison in the summer of 1970, when the Sterling Hall bombing occurred. Five years later, he was admitted to practice law in Wisconsin. Six years later, David Fine’s family hired him to represent the fugitive in the first part of the federal criminal process, the initial appearance and arraignment.

Pines said that the bombers’ objective in the bombing was to destroy the AMCR, that- in part of its research- was aiding in the war by providing information to Project Michigan.

“Much of the research was gone,” said Frank Scarpace. “People’s theses were type written, and bombs destroy paper as well as people.”