Winter Study Group

The Winter Study was a six-month effort from January through June 1960 to evaluate the increasingly complex unwieldy assemblage of command and control system that made up the US nuclear deterrent.   Involving more than 150 scientists, engineers, managers and analysts from the US Department of Defense, defense contractors, and hosted by the MITRE Corporation, the study’s conclusion that the complexity was being driven by lack of technical management and the lack of strategic vision was not well received and resulted in the final report being buried by Air Force leadership.

However, the scientists involved in the study still wanted to broadly share the concepts that were addressed in the report.  In the months and years that followed the study, MITRE publicly release papers (Jacob, 1962) and presented the concepts of the Winter Study at conferences. These “slides”, recently discovered in the MITRE Archives, outlines the “Winter Study Concept”. The Winter Study Concept takes Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics theories regarding the links between “man and machine” and applies them to military problems.   The anxieties about having a computer in the flow of military decision making will feel familiar today as we grapple with military applications of AI.

To read the declassified final report, click here.

PR_25-03042-6 and PR_26-1219