DECLASSIFIEU Authorityampf 6 Q81 2 SECRET UNITED STATES ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT AGENCY WASH1NGTON October 19 1979 OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR MEMORANDUM TO Ambassador HenrynOven FROM Spurgeon M Keeny Jr J wf SUBJECT Transmittal of Letter from Richard Garwin Attached for your information is a copy of a letter I received today from Dr Richard Garwin concerning the Agnew Garwin Lukasik report to which reference was made at our last meeting last Thursday on the South Atlantic problem - For the technical reasons outlined in the attached - letter I continue to believe that there is merit in a more detailed review of the'technical data in question by a group of senior scientists of the type suggested by Garwin lb Attachment Garwin 10 18 79 cc Amb Gerard Smith Mr T Pickering Mr Bruce Clark Mr John Deutsch - mun-Ar 3 Ms Davis - i 10 19 85 w I -- w U nya-n SECRET EDS-3 - Authority MW SECRET - Richard L Garwin Thomas J Natson Research Center P O Box 218 Yorktown Heights NY 10598 945-2555 18 1979 Dr Harold M Agnew Dr Stephen J Lukasik President Chief Scientist General Atomic Company Federal Communications P O Box 81608 Commission San Diego CA 92138 Washington DC 2055 Dear Harold and Steve Questions from interested people in the washington community who have read our report of 10 09 79 haVe caused me to think further about this- matter I have arrived at two conclusions the second both more interesting and operationally more concrete than 'the first You will remember that our report says that the data consistent and later that the data 1 Without attempting to justify the particular choice of words on the basis of the information which we obtained and - the analysis we were able to do I would bet 2 to 1 in favor of the hypothesis This assertion includes my estimate of the a priori probability of the event and also an estimate of the likelihood that the data are produced by another phenomenon or combination of phenomena These betting odds would be changed by a change in either assessment 2 we advocated the acquisition of more information at considerable implied cost I continue to support this judgement What we did not say in our brief report and which is obviously compatible with an implied by our recommendation to' spend more money lto obtain more information is that it would be well to take somewhat longer with a perhaps larger group of technical experts to focus in particular on the possibility that a combination of real phenomena could have produced the data presented to us I would not make this recommendation if I did not have in mind an approach to the quantitative calculation of the likelihood of such an accidental coincidence It would involve going back to the primary data day by day and not particularly at the time in question to determine the rate of individual events which could mimic the components of the data which we saw Various outcomes are possible- we might find enough such SECRET DECLASSIFIED i 8 EC ET A 2 events to provide an accidental coincidence once per year once in ten years or once in ten thousand years We might - also be unable to find any of these singles so that we would be unable to estimate but could still set an upper limit to the accidental coincidence rate All the above says that there should be another one-or two day meeting of a group of skeptical 6Yitical experts to review the singles occurrences in order to estimate the probability of accidental occurrence of the data as presented to us I would be willing to serve and I believe it will be useful to add other people used to evaluating anomalies Panofsky Richard Muller Luis Alvarez Burt Richter all of whom have adequate clearance I rely on S M Keeny to distribute this letter to those who received our original repOrfi Sincerely yours Richard-L Garwin cc Keeny ACDA SECRET