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.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hello, audience, 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 he was diagnosed with cancer and he was
told he had eighteen months to live. I got a

(00:58):
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, ninety five at south of Philadelphia,
and as usual, he was casually dressed. And my mom
is an avid knitter. I refer to it in the

(01:21):
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 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

(01:45):
deployed and missiles. And he started naming off names, and
one was in Eureque Fermie, which I recognized immediately, but
I didn't recognize the other names. And he was looking
quite pensive, kind of looking down on the street. And
he gets to the ninth person, and he could not

(02:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
And to my.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
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 in a
meeting like that? He goes, Johnny, I got something to
tell you for the next three and a half days.

(02:42):
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 NDRC, the National Defense

(03:06):
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 nine to forty. Now,
having received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences,
where my father is thinking that he's being recruited for

(03:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Now, a year and a half.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Before, 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 Cairon, Iowa. My father went flying. They
had to look for him in the cornfield where he was.

(04:07):
He was unconscious and with this 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 said, I'm not wasting any money. Well, there is

(04:30):
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 happens Sundays,
let's say noon. He wakes up on Tuesday morning and

(04:52):
he takes the t shirt off his face, and.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
That gash is fully healed.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
My father kept that open the way it was because
he always wanted to remind himself.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
That God kept him alive.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
And now he realizes that he's given him a mathematical
and mechanical skill 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 the things just

(05:33):
naturally came to his brain, now that he was also
a mechanical savant. Now it's very, 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

(05:55):
the world's leading expert on savants, and he's only meant
sixty called post birth savants. But 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 of shoes and
how to do that. He can do all the theoretical

(06:19):
codes of nuclear reactions along with how to fly a missile.
Usually those are two completely separate skill sets. So my
father is basically a one man shop for a nuclear
ballistic missile, which is extremely rare.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
And you're listening to John Klausen and he's the author
of Missileman, the secret life of Cold War engineer Wallace
Klassen and his father's secret, super secret double life. Is
a nuclear missile savant. Is what this story is about,
and so much more. When we come back more of

(07:02):
John Clawson's father's story and he listens in Seattle. Here
on our American Stories, folks, if you love the great

(07:30):
American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
Our American Stories family.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
If you agree that America is a good and great country,
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Speaker 4 (07:54):
That's our American Stories dot.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Com and we continue with our American stories in John
Clausen's story of his father's super secret double life as

(08:17):
a nuclear missile savant.

Speaker 4 (08:19):
Let's return to John and more of his father's story.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
So, once my father is correcting textbooks, the teacher, the
basketball coach as well, mails the textbook back to the
publisher because 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

(08:48):
he took the teacher's textbook home, not only corrected the
questions which are in the back of the textbook, he
corrected the entire textbook and rewrote it how it should read.
So when they were scouring the country looking for the
top scientists in America, they noted mit Yale, Harvard, Caltech,

(09:12):
UC Berkeley. That's when they said to them, you might
want to check out this young kid in Iowa. His
name's Wallace Clawson. 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

(09:32):
because he's already correcting our astrophysics textbooks. So my dad
went to this small rural country school that incorporated all
the grades in basically a classroom, rural, rural kyro and Iowa.
And my dad was on the basketball team, and that

(09:53):
week of practice big in February of nineteen forty, he
received a let from the National Academy of Sciences, thinking,
we'd like to talk to you about your math skills. Well,
my dad thought he was being recruited to go to college. Well,
he had no idea it was the NDRC coming after him.

(10:17):
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,
with his dad being a drunk, a very abusive father.
He goes, Wally, you can have a half hour. He
was in basketball outfit. He pulled on his pants over

(10:40):
but he left his basketball shirt on and a light
coat and it.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Was very cold. He ran all the way to the cafe.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
And there's the three g men and they must have
looked at this young kid and say you're Wallace Clauson,
and my dad goes yeah. And they sat down with
my father and they 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.

(11:08):
Now I got to get out of here because it's
going to be ten minutes to run back. And the
two of the gentlemen went through 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,

(11:33):
it's not so complex. Always make math very logical. He
never liked to see people use math to intimidate anybody.
So he had start running back. And that's when the
two gentlemen came back out and sat down at the
table and said, what do we do scare the punk

(11:53):
kid off? And the gentleman, who saw 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, they infiltrated eighteen high
profile scientific universities and they acted all like graduate students

(12:16):
or young professors, but they were all doing research work
for the NDRC. But of one of those committees, there
was a 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

(12:36):
it can be done, and we're recommending that we go
to the next phase.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
So what FDR did.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
He split the NDRC Uranium Committee oft 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 were
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 putting 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 an

(13:49):
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 Neuman had developed the
first programmable computer program, which was unheard of back in

(14:13):
the early fifties, and my father was exposed to the
mechanical machine at Iowa State while doing radar projects from
the name of John Altasanoff, who was considered to be
the first person to manufacture a computer. So they combined
the computer of al Tasenov with my father and the

(14:35):
program from John von Neuman, and hence you end up
with the IBM seven oh four computer, which was brought
out to Livermore, California, from Poughkeepsie, New York.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
And as my father told.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Me, it took three eighteen wheelers to transport that machine.
And he says, John, you have no no 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

(15:14):
ability then to tweak it again so it could 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

(15:37):
forty five, that was what you call a fission bomb.
It splits the atom. That was Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Well,
they found out mathematically, which are incredibly complex calculations, that
if you take the heat energy of a fission bomb,

(15:57):
which is what was dropped at Nagasa Fision, 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 is basically considered like the center

(16:22):
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

(16:44):
under the guise of being an engineering student. The first
thing I did, I pulled his grades from Iowa 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 flunky. So he's now at

(17:07):
University of Minnesota. All of a sudden, 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. So they

(17:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
And you're listening to John Klausen telling the story of
his dad, and that would be Wallace Klausen. When we
come back, we continue the story here on our American stories,

(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.

Speaker 4 (18:28):
But now let's return to the story.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
We last heard that the Russians were coming after John's
father Wallace.

Speaker 4 (18:34):
Here's John with what happened next.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
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 Kyron, Iowa, and tell everybody you're
now going to be a farmer. So he did that,
but he wasn't done working. They did the drops at

(18:59):
the windmill scientific papers, where he would go pick him
up early in the morning, take him back to the farmhouse.
He'd crawl up into the attic and do the mathematical calculations,
put him back in the bag, and then he'd put
a light on up in the attic to notify his
handlers that I've got a fresh drop of research papers

(19:20):
I've developed. But what my father failed to recognize is
that my grandfather was up at four a m. Every day,
and my grandfather could see that his new son in
law was leaving at four thirty in the morning and
come back in like ten minutes so he watched this
go on and on, and he watched how the light

(19:42):
would go on and off, and 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 my home here the letter he wrote to his
father about how horrible the conditions were in France in

(20:06):
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
calmly responded saying, you know, Alban, you fought for this
country in a certain way. I'm just doing it in

(20:28):
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 and knocking,
and that's when my father was brought into the commercial
world of IBM, still doing a lot of government projects,

(20:49):
but under the guise of IBM's 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,
didn't you think Wallace had kind of a strange career path?
He's getting an engineering degree, now says he wants to

(21:12):
be a farmer and now gets hired by the IBM
Military Products Group.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
What kind of career path is that?

Speaker 2 (21:21):
And we got the biggest chuckle out of that because
my mom said this, Oh, Wallace would have been such
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

(21:46):
up into the sky and they went to get my
dad out of bed. We had 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

(22:08):
usually on the floor with my blanket, and when 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 statued
men with rifles getting my father is shuttling him off,

(22:29):
and what they were doing. They were going to be
analyzing the track data of the satellite as it went,
and my dad said to everybody, ohs, calm 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

(22:51):
Eisenhower initiated the program of NASA. So the exact month
NASA was formed, we moved down to Long Beach, California,
where my father is involved in IBM's what they call
Space Systems West Division, on very unique address called Wilshire Boulevard.

(23:17):
From there, in nineteen sixty two we moved up to
San Jose, California. One thing that's important to note that
whenever you have a person who even has a group
that knows the actual ballistic codes that can activate a

(23:39):
variety of different either ballistic missiles or missiles in wherever,
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

(24:00):
dad did in the back of the Austin Healy sprite.
So twice there was a time in which the government
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

(24:22):
a highway in San Francisco, a military truck pulls up
next to my brother and says, we think you need
some gas, and they fill them up and off he went.
My brother was thinking, man, that's strange. And then another
time the sprite was actually stolen and my brother was

(24:43):
directed not to call the police, call dad if that
if you don't know where that car is, and they
just went and got the car and brought it back.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
So and then there was a war called the Sixth.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
Day War when Egypt basically led an attack to 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.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
And what does Russia do.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
They move in fifteen thousand advisors into Egypt and six
hundred samsites. 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
he 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 dam project,
and I'm thinking, WHOA, what does my dad about water dams?

(26:02):
And the week before we moved to Switzerland, 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

(26:23):
thought they were maybe coming after not only him but
his family. At San Francisco, we flew first class. 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

(26:46):
through a pack of customs. We were in customs signs,
and all of a sudden, I see my dad in
a window and he's saying, come over here. A door
opened up, and we just walked out.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
And you're listening to John class and tell him the
story of his father, flash engineer Wallace Clausen.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
But not just any engineer folks.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
A super secret double life as a nuclear missile savant.
The book is Missileman, The Secret life of Cold War
engineer Wallace Plausin This is our American Stories, and we

(27:38):
returned to John Klausen'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.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
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
plane the previous week. And we got in the car
and we drove to Tallville, which is where we lived
in our house. That had to be a good fifteen
to twenty miles. We had to go through at least

(28:12):
forty stoplights. We didn't hit one red light. And my
father said we were in a convoy of three cars
and the 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,

(28:33):
look at your passport.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
You never ever entered the country of Switzerland. I go.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
I got a high school diploma from Switzerland, 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. I think

(29:02):
it's important to do in telling you the story with
my father is some of his idio secrecies and things
he'd liked 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.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
But what my.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Dad liked to do though, he loved to hit fly
balls to my friends because he always thought the kids
could be trusted.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
So we often did that.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
And my father would always carry a plastic satchel. This
is in the early mid seventies and he says, Johnny,
open up, I want to show you something that we're developing.
And in it was a twelve inch by two by two.

(29:56):
It looked like a white piece of chalk, but it
virtually weighed nothing. And I go, what like styrofoam? But
it was denser than styrofoam. And I go to Dandy goes,
what do you want me to see? He goes, Johnny,
I just want to show you what the world's greatest

(30:18):
hot plate looks like. Now, that was the sample piece
of the Space Shuttle tiles. As you re enter Earth's atmosphere,
there's incredible amounts of mass heat developed as you enter
atmosphere again, and that two inch thick They ended up

(30:38):
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
my father often would say, Johnny, inquire about who's TV's
working and not working, and kind of a propensity of

(31:01):
fixing television sets. I kind of get a kick out
of it. And the only thing he ever asked once
in a while would be like a cup of tea
or a cup of coffee, and he'd completely tear apart
the back of the TV set and fix the color
TV with ever bringing out a manual or anything. He
just went in there, Eddie, go Johnny, go into my

(31:21):
tube wall. Go two row, two down, bucket three over,
and I need two of those, or go down four
four over. I need one of those, and I'd run
back and I would. He would take him and he
had carried his soldering iron with him and he'd fix tubes.

(31:42):
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 if you have
a tube machine and the G forces in a missile,
if those tubes aren't reinforced with special strong connection tips

(32:05):
and glass, they'll break apart. And those were all G
force rated for missiles. So when my father died, I gosh,
I can't believe I actually did this. We took all
of his tubes and took him to the dump and
I've later found out that on an average those tubes

(32:27):
were probably worth two hundred grand today. My father always said,
this Sunday is the day the Lord hath made. We
will rejoice and be glad in it. I woke up
every Sunday and he was always playing church music, and
he was always asking me who can we pick up

(32:48):
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 the Sunday he felt comfortable. He even was kept
a smile on his face. He never really lingered around.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
But he always had. That was his time to.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
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, my father is sent to England where
under Carter's administration, they were quietly secretly going to be

(33:34):
bringing in missiles into England. And then NATO says to
Russia in an exercise only we are going to attack you,
and it's generally going to increase over the ten days,
and the last three days is going to climax with

(33:55):
a nuclear exchange of weapons. So 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 launch mode but have all been deactivated.

(34:16):
And there's thousands of missiles. Q imagine thinking, oh did
I forget about that missile in Turkey. So for three
days Russia goes to deaf Coom two. Deaf Coom two,
we have never been at before with an enemy. They
are expecting nuclear war eight nine to ten, nineteen eighty three,

(34:37):
and we have no idea that rush is 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. But when he found out that he had
eighteen months to live, he wanted to at least leave

(34:59):
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 posthole digger, my father said, Johnny, pull

(35:21):
in here, I want you to see this house. And
it was John von Neuman'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, Faremie Oppenheimer,
they wanted to put the genie back in the bottle.

(35:43):
They figured, you know what, this is a horrible thing
we've done. You can go on YouTube and see Oppenheimer
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 genies out of the bottle. We can't
put it back in, but you know what we can do.

(36:04):
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.

(36:25):
He 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

(36:47):
you're in 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

(37:12):
got sick in a very quick way, and he passed
away in May of nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
And I'll never forget.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
He was at a hospice center and I basically said goodbye,
and he said he learned so much from me. And

(37:44):
I was thinking, what could you possibly learn from me?
And he said he learned about life? And I left
and he died that night, after my mom and two
sisters saying, Ebbs.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
And you've been listening to John Clauson choking up talking
about his father. A great family story here on our
American Stories