supported an attempt by MIT's students to give an army deserter sanctuary on campus. He also gave lectures on radical politics. Throughout this period, MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam. Jerome Wiesner, the military scientist who had initially employed Chomsky at MIT, also organised a group of researchers from MIT and elsewhere to devise a barrier of mines and cluster bombs between North and South Vietnam. By his own account, back in the 1950s, Wiesner had "helped get the United States ballistic missile program established in the face of strong opposition". He then brought nuclear missile research to MIT – work which, as Chomsky says "was developed right on the MIT campus." Until 1965, much of this work was supervised by a Vice-President at MIT, General James McCormack, who had earlier played a significant role supervising the creation of the US's nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, Professor Wiesner played an important advisory role in organising the US's nuclear command and control systems. Chomsky has rarely talked about the military research done at his own lab but the situation has been made clear elsewhere. In 1971, the US Army's Office of the Chief of Research and Development published a list of what it called just a "few examples" of the "many RLE research contributions that have had military applications". This list included: "helical antennas", "microwave filters", "missile guidance", "atomic clocks" and "communication theory". Chomsky never produced anything that actually worked for the military. However, by 1963 he had become a "consultant" for the US Air Force's MITRE Corporation who were using his linguistic theories to support "the design and development of U.S. Air Force-supplied command and control systems." The MITRE documents that refer to this consultancy work are quite clear that they intended to use Chomsky's theories in order to establish natural languages such as English "as an operational language for command and control". According to one of his students, Barbara Partee, who also worked on this project, the military justification for this was: "that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program." Chomsky's complicated attitude to MIT's military role was expressed in two letters published in the New York Review Books