The Journal of Defense Research (JDR) was a classified publication sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage dissemination of classified research on topics of military or national security interest. It began publication in 1969, replacing the former Journal of Missile Defense Research.
Many years later, most of the Journal’s contents still seem to be classified, but the table of contents of the Journal’s first decade (pdf) has been declassified and is now available on the Federation of American Scientists website.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the names of the authors whose work was published in JDR are unfamiliar, with a few exceptions (e.g., Garwin and Augustine; Hugh Everett’s name does not appear). The topics of the papers provide a snapshot of the technologies and the strategic concerns of the time, and give an indication of the scale of classified government research that was devoted to addressing them.
“The JDR is ‘mission essential’ as a classified research tool,” a Defense Science Board Task Force (pdf) stated in 1985. “Being the only classified journal of its type, the JDR is used to communicate ideas amongst the defense community and is a basic tool for researchers.”
Update: Additional JDR index material is available here.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.