ON OCTOBER 4, 1957, THE 187-POUND BEACH BALL–SIZED GADGET NAMED Sputnik was launched from the steppes of Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, announcing its presence to the world with a steady radio beeping as it circled the planet every ninety minutes. Everyone who heard it—or learned about it from the torrent of hysterical news reports—knew immediately that nothing would ever be the same.
It wasn’t that the idea of an Earth-orbiting satellite was such a big deal. Scientists had been talking about it for years, and, in fact, both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced plans to do just such a thing as part of the newly begun International Geophysical Year (IGY), a coordinated eighteen-month program of research and exploration by more than sixty nations, dedicated to achieving a greater understanding of planet Earth. America had two separate but equally driven teams working on its satellite program: one called Vanguard, operated by the Naval Research Laboratory and strictly devoted to the civilian science ideals of the IGY, and another under the decidedly more martial auspices of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), led by Major General John Medaris and expatriate former-Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun.
Both groups had been engaging in a spirited competition to earn the official nod from the White House to launch what was then expected to be humanity’s first satellite. But interservice rivalry, political maneuvering, and Cold War concerns had hampered progress. The Army—which had been steadily working on developing missiles since its postwar experiments with von Braun’s captured V-2 rockets—had a definite technical lead, but the Vanguard group had a stronger civilian pedigree, which better meshed with President Eisenhower’s desire to keep America’s IGY and space research efforts free of any militaristic bent. For that reason, Vanguard was to be the first to make the attempt.
Everyone liked to believe that the Soviet Union was far behind the United States in science and technology. Yes, they also had atomic and hydrogen bombs, but it had taken them years to catch up, and besides, they had cheated, relying on espionage to steal American secrets. The Soviets boasted about their prowess and might, but it was all bluster. There was simply no way that such a backwards society could best the United States in the accomplishment of a technological feat that no one had ever done before.
Except now they had done it. If anyone doubted the official announcement on Moscow Radio that was being repeated and spread across the planet, they had only to tune a shortwave radio to 20 MHz. Beep beep beep. It was there, it was real, it was passing over the United States, and there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it.
Including, it seemed, ignore it. Immediate reactions ranged from fear and anger, to excitement and scientific curiosity, to outright indifference and incomprehension.
For General Medaris, at the time hosting a reception for Washington dignitaries at ABMA headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, there was only one natural response when his public affairs officer interrupted the party to announce the news. “Those damn bastards!” Medaris snarled. The way he said it, no one knew whether he was talking about the Russians, his Vanguard rivals, or the administration officials who had refused to give him free rein. His team could have launched a satellite at least a year earlier if they’d only been allowed, or so he told his guest, newly-designated-but-not-yet-confirmed Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy. A frustrated von Braun picked up on the theme, promising McElroy that his people already had the “hardware on the shelf” to put up an American satellite in sixty days or less, if Ike would just give them the green light.
Thousands of miles away from Alabama, physicist James Van Allen took the news with a far greater degree of scientific equanimity. One of America’s leading geophysicists and a driving force behind the IGY, he was aboard the USS Glacier, a research ship several hundred miles off the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean and en route to Antarctica when Sputnik launched. Van Allen was on the journey to launch “rockoons”—rockets lofted to high altitudes by balloons—to study cosmic ray patterns as part of the IGY. Earlier that day, he had sent off his first rockoon of the voyage.
He was busily writing up a brief summary of the day’s launch when an assistant interrupted with word of Sputnik. Immediately Van Allen headed for the Glacier’s radio shack to confirm the news and attempt to hear the sound of Sputnik for himself. It was there, loud and clear. But a mere radio signal didn’t necessarily confirm a satellite in orbit.
Ever the scientist, Van Allen proceeded to find out everything he could. He jury-rigged a paper tape recorder to chart Sputnik’s signals for analysis and to measure the Doppler shifts in the signal, which would confirm that the signal was coming from a moving radio source in orbit. Everything checked out: the beep-beep-beep was definitely from an orbiting satellite at precisely the altitude the Soviets had announced.
After gathering as much data as possible with the equipment on hand, Van Allen sat down to write a detailed seventeen-page report, including calculations of Sputnik’s probable orbit and other particulars. “Brilliant achievement!” he wrote. He added some personal observations, noting how politically-motivated delays in the US program had allowed the Soviets to trump the free world and wondering how the Russian achievement would affect the American effort. He praised the Russians’ “astute” choice of 20 MHz for Sputnik’s heralding frequency, observing that unlike the 108 MHz chosen for Vanguard, Sputnik’s voice was readily audible not only to amateur radio operators but anyone else with a receiver that could operate at that frequency.
“Where do we stand now on Vanguard?” he scribbled in his notes, adding, “Russians have a very great scientific lead on us.”1
IN HISTORICAL RETROSPECT, IT’S NOW CLEAR THAT FAR FROM BEING AN EVENT THAT immediately awed and terrified the world, the initial waves of Sputnik shock and hysteria didn’t rack the general public so much as they did the military and political powers that be. As science historian Sharon Weinberger notes, “there was no collective panic in the first few days following the launch. It was not immediately clear—except to a small group of scientists and policy makers—why the satellite was so important … for most Americans, the beeping beach ball initially produced a collective shrug.”2
Barely a month after the launch, the political posturing, bureaucratic finger-pointing, and editorial second-guessing had mostly settled down to a level only a few decibels above the usual omnipresent murmur of Cold War paranoia and apocalyptic anxiety. It helped that by October 26, the ceaseless beeping of the Soviet satellite had finally faded and passed into blessed silence. The damned thing was still up there, of course, and could still be seen passing regularly through the skies of the US on every dark, clear evening, but at least it wasn’t mocking us with its radio signal anymore.
There was no denying the fact that the Soviets had beaten us fair and square, but now they’d had their fun, and it was America’s turn. Soon now, Vanguard would be launched, and it would do more than just beep at the inhabitants of the planet below. It would carry actual scientific instruments that would conduct valuable research. Let the Soviets boast about Sputnik and their rockets all they liked—in the end, all they had done was pull off an impressive but ultimately pointless stunt. The United States, on the other hand, would begin the true exploration of space with Vanguard, paving the way for human beings to follow in the very near future.
But the Soviets were not about to wait. On November 3, 1957, they launched Sputnik 2. And this was not merely a carbon copy of its predecessor. It was almost a thousand pounds heavier, and also carried a living creature: a specially trained mixed-breed female dog named Laika.
Now, not only to many within the government and the military but to the American public, it was more than clear: the first Sputnik had not been a fluke, a lucky shot, a gimmick. The USSR had a real and substantial head start, and they were not going to be shy about flaunting it. Never mind the fact that they had now put a living thing in space, with all that portended for Russian intentions and capabilities for eventually sending human beings up there. With the first satellite, one could console oneself with the fact that, impressive and ominous as it was, the thing was still less than two hundred pounds—far lighter and smaller than any practical nuclear warhead the Soviets might decide to lob at us. But Laika’s vehicle was far larger, an indication that they were getting into the realm of serious “throw-weight,” as missile designers referred to ICBM payload capacity. By contrast, the Vanguard satellite, in the midst of frantic launch preparations, weighed barely over three pounds, and was small enough to be held in one hand.
As capitalist animal lovers around the world bemoaned the fate of Laika and pestered the Soviet Union with accusations of animal cruelty when it became clear that she wouldn’t be coming home alive, others worried about the survival of the free world. Once more, questions abounded as to how Soviet Russia, a society in which washing machines and refrigerators were unheard-of luxuries, could have bested the most advanced country on Earth.
Obviously, many thought, it had to be due to more than the reasons offered by television commentators and newspaper editorialists. Even if it were true that Americans had allowed themselves to grow lazy and complacent, giddy with fancy tail-finned cars, silly TV shows, and rock-and-roll music, that couldn’t explain everything. Had Communist spies stolen American secrets again, just as they had with the atomic bomb?
The only problem with that premise, aside from the lack of any actual evidence of foreign espionage in the missile program, was that if Soviet spies had stolen American technological know-how to build the Sputniks, then why hadn’t America already launched their own satellites? After all, even though it was established fact that Russian spies such as the Rosenbergs had contributed to the USSR’s atomic program, they had been relaying progress America had already made. As John Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, observed: “Those Russian spies must be really good. They stole a secret we didn’t even have yet.”3
If not espionage, then, what was the explanation for Russian superiority? Why were we struggling to put an aluminum grapefruit into orbit while our mortal enemies were flying car-sized spacecraft over our country? Maybe it was simply because they knew something we didn’t, some mysterious secret, a formula, a gadget that for whatever reasons of fate and chance, the United States did not have.
Physicist Herbert F. York, who had already been working for several years on nuclear weapons research and was about to become swept up in the official furor over Sputnik, wrote in his memoirs: “Many people, including some scientists and engineers who should have known better, came to believe that the Soviets knew some ‘secret’ about rocket propulsion that still eluded us, and even that Russian science in general was about to surpass American science.”4 Although that was decidedly paranoid, what was true, York and others came to realize after the initial Sputnik shock had faded and a more rational, if not always calmer, perspective began to take hold, was that the American missile and space program simply needed more time. The Russians had succeeded first not only because they’d been working longer and harder but also because their highly centralized, dictatorial system wasn’t plagued with all the interservice rivalry, competition, duplication of effort, and plain old inefficiency of good old American democracy.
Things really weren’t half as bleak as they seemed. Our civilian space program and our various classified defense efforts were proceeding apace, and all would work out in due course. Yes, we had to redouble our efforts and our determination, but there was no need to panic.
The problem was that such confidence arose from a privileged awareness based on classified data unknown to the public and the press. President Eisenhower realized that something had to be done to address American fears and to reassure people that however dire the situation seemed, the end was not near. On November 7, four days after Laika went into space, Ike went on national television to address his agitated constituents and to defuse criticisms that he wasn’t doing enough to deal with this whole Sputnik situation. He announced the appointment of MIT president James Killian as the first White House science advisor, described a slew of new American weapons systems able to bring “near annihilation to … any country,” and showed off the nose cone of a Jupiter C missile that had just been flown into space—on a suborbital flight—a few days before. “With two Sputniks in orbit, this display of a suborbital souvenir at the president’s feet in the Oval Office was hardly reassuring,” Paul Dickson wrote.5
Eisenhower’s speech, and several similar ones that followed, did little to quell public anxiety. Polls showed that many Americans were convinced that the Soviets now had the ability to rain atomic warheads down upon our cities on a whim. But at least Ike was doing something. Perhaps most importantly, the day after his speech, he gave von Braun and Medaris official permission to launch their Explorer 1 satellite on the Army’s Jupiter C missile as soon as possible.
First, however, would come Vanguard. On December 6, 1957, after two days of delays, America’s first prospective spacecraft barely lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral before falling back, the booster rocket exploding in a huge fireball. Unlike the previous Soviet efforts, which weren’t made public until already successful, this humiliation took place in full view of the world on live television.
Even before the debris had been cleared and the Vanguard satellite was recovered from the tall Florida grass into which it had rolled after falling from the top of its rocket, the hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and pronouncements of impending doom began anew. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson presided over congressional hearings in search of an official scapegoat, while in the next couple of weeks, just in case anyone had missed the point that America was in grave danger, a top-secret White House report was leaked to the press that spelled out that message in dire detail.
Informally, it was called the Gaither Report, although its official title was suitably ominous: Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age. The fruit of a months-long study commissioned by the National Security Council to examine defense preparedness against the Soviet threat and propose solutions, it was never supposed to be seen by the public. The commission was chaired by the head of the Ford Foundation, Rowan Gaither, and composed of various eminent citizens and defense experts, including members of the RAND Corporation, a think tank created to advise the Air Force.
The Commission’s report minced no words. America was not only in danger, she was facing the greatest threat in her history. Not only had we no defense against Soviet ICBMs, our own efforts in that department were woefully inadequate. The USSR was building far more missiles and bombers than the US, leading to an inevitable and dangerous “gap” in the coming years, and while they had shelters to protect their people from bombs and fallout, the US had practically none. The solution was obvious: immediately increase the defense budget by $44 billion over the next five years to start building more and better bombs, ICBMs, aircraft, and fallout shelters.
This was hardly the sort of thing that the ever-frugal Eisenhower wanted to hear, nor did he, as ex–Supreme Commander of all Allied military forces in Europe, think it necessary or advisable. But he faced a dilemma. Even as bits and pieces of the Gaither Report leaked to an eager press corps, Ike had hard evidence that matters were not nearly as dire as the Commission, LBJ, or the more alarmist members of the military establishment (particularly Strategic Air Command leader General Curtis LeMay) were declaring. The top-secret U-2 spy plane, which had been conducting aerial reconnaissance over the Soviet Union since 1956, had produced photos that proved conclusively that the Russians were not in fact turning out atomic missiles or bombers like sausages, as some, including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev himself, had claimed. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The Russians’ missiles might be making more impressive headlines than the Americans’, but we definitely had more of them, not to mention bomber aircraft and nuclear weapons of all kinds.
But Eisenhower knew that revealing those facts also meant revealing how they were acquired. And that meant giving up an enormous and very real strategic and psychological advantage. The Soviets certainly knew about the U-2—they routinely tracked its intrusions into their airspace—but, so far at least, they had been unable to do anything about it, which made them just as keen on keeping its existence from the public as the Americans. It amounted to a sort of Cold War “gentlemen’s agreement” to keep the secret for mutual benefit. Public disclosure of the U-2 would force public protest by the Soviets and inescapable demands to stop the over-flights, thus eliminating the US’s most valuable source of intelligence.
Eisenhower was forced to endure withering contempt and criticism from all sides: the press, the public, the Democrats—even many from his own party and administration described him as a wishy-washy, spineless president who cared more about his golf game than protecting the United States from a grave threat. Despite enormous pressures, he resisted the calls to officially declassify the Gaither report, knowing it would only make the entire situation worse and do no conceivable good.
The president bided his time, secure in the privileged knowledge that the U-2 had given him, confident that the United States was not in any imminent danger but was instead about to regain its bearings. He took comfort from the poet Robert Frost, who gave the president a book of his poems, inscribed with a personal note: “The strong say nothing until they see.”6
BARRING AN ACTUAL ATTACK BY THE APPARENTLY MIGHTY SOVIET UNION UPON the humbled United States, it was hard to see how 1958 could possibly be any worse than the last few months of 1957. A deep gloom hung over the country regarding America’s place in the world. There was a generous helping of pessimism about the possibility of redemption, along with good old-fashioned fear and paranoia.
Toward the end of January, that almost palpable yearning for good news, for something to celebrate, focused on the Jupiter C missile and the payload it would carry into space: the Explorer 1 satellite. Still licking their wounds from their explosive December fiasco, the Vanguard team had made several more attempts to launch, all of which had failed. So the weight of all America’s hopes now fell squarely upon the shoulders of the unlikely odd couple of General Medaris and Wernher von Braun.
After two agonizing delays due to weather conditions at Cape Canaveral, Explorer 1 finally made it into space on the night of January 31, 1958. A little less than two hours later, after prodigious amounts of coffee and many cigarettes smoked by anxious technicians, scientists, and generals, it was confirmed: Explorer 1 was in orbit around the Earth. The United States finally had its satellite.
In the relief and jubilation that followed, no one paid too much attention to the fact that Explorer was really a rather puny thing, just over six feet long and weighing barely thirty pounds, small enough for three men to hoist over their heads, as Wernher von Braun, James Van Allen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory director William Pickering did with a model at a February 1 press conference in Washington. The significant part wasn’t the weight or size, emphasized the scientists—it was the instrument package. Designed and built by Van Allen, Explorer’s instruments included cosmic ray and micrometeorite detectors and sensors to record temperature variations in the space environment. America’s first satellite was far more than just a grandiose stunt, more than just a radio beacon or a dog carrier, like the Sputniks. It was instead a real scientific achievement.
However, the true extent of that achievement wouldn’t become clear until several months later, long after the initial euphoria had faded. The more Van Allen, his graduate students, and their scientific colleagues pored over the results returned by Explorer 1, the more head-scratching ensued. At first, the cosmic ray detector seemed to confirm the data that Van Allen had collected in his many rocket and balloon tests over the previous years. Yet other data seemed to indicate no cosmic rays or other radiation count at all, which couldn’t be the case. Was there some kind of malfunction in Explorer 1’s radiation detectors? It seemed unlikely, not only because Van Allen’s team was perhaps the most experienced in the world at designing such instruments, but also because they had purposely built the package to very conservative limits to allow for the unknown rigors of the orbital environment and stresses of space travel.
The next mission, Explorer 2, failed to go into space, but Explorer 3, which achieved orbit on March 26, cleared up the mystery. Van Allen and his team spent weeks analyzing the findings from both satellite packages, and on May 1 finally announced their conclusions to the world at a joint meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society in Washington, DC. The Explorer satellites had discovered bands of radiation surrounding the Earth, trapped by the planet’s natural magnetic fields. Not long after, the term “Van Allen radiation belts” caught on, and Van Allen found himself immortalized as a scientific pioneer. It was humanity’s first scientific discovery of the new space age.
JAMES VAN ALLEN DIDN’T FIND OUT ABOUT IT UNTIL HE WAS IN THE MIDST OF analyzing Explorer 3 data, but someone else had already been speculating about the possibility of radiation belts surrounding the Earth.
At the University of California’s Livermore Radiation Laboratory, a Greek-American physicist named Nicholas Christofilos had reacted quite differently to Sputnik on that fateful Friday evening the previous October. Christofilos wasn’t worried about any scientific advantage the USSR might have over the United States, or about losing prestige in the IGY program. His concerns were far more direct and elemental.
It wasn’t the satellite that mattered, he realized, nor the presence of the first artificial body in orbit, not even the incessant beep-beep-beep it emitted—even if those beeps contained some hidden nefarious messages, as some paranoid types were claiming. Apparently the satellite didn’t even have scientific instrumentation, so any data it could provide would be minimal.
Before the Gaither report sounded the alarm about American vulnerability to the public, before Senator Johnson began his hearings, Christofilos had already recognized the most important fact about Sputnik: the R-7 rocket that had hurled it into space. It proved that the Soviets now had missiles powerful enough to loft objects at least hundreds of pounds in weight to vast heights and distances—and that those missiles worked.
On a peaceful October evening, a Soviet rocket had carried a harmless metal sphere bearing a couple of radio transmitters into space. On another evening in the near future, Christofilos knew, that same type of rocket—or more powerful ones the Soviets were no doubt developing or already possessed—could hurl a hydrogen warhead over the North Pole and down onto the United States. And, just as there was nothing that could be done about Sputnik except to tune in to its beeps, there would be no way to ward off Soviet warheads from devastating American cities. It was impossible to shoot down or otherwise intercept missiles traveling at thousands of miles an hour.
But, he mused, perhaps there was another solution.
Christofilos’s main project, not to mention personal obsession, at Livermore was his concept for a nuclear fusion reactor called Astron. It was wildly original, revolutionary, and extremely difficult to realize on any practical level, just the sort of idea for which he had become notorious among his colleagues. Astron was strictly a civilian project—Christofilos wasn’t directly involved with defense work or building weapons. But now that Sputnik had convinced him that the Soviets might be about to overwhelm us with their strength and apparently superior rocket technology, he extended his Astron ideas into a possible means to defend the United States.
In the midst of the post-Sputnik upheavals in late 1957, Christofilos went to his supervisor at Livermore, Herbert York, and laid out his idea. The thermonuclear reactions at the heart of Astron involved confining superheated plasma in a magnetic field generated by circulating electrons. He proposed to simply expand and extrapolate that idea from the small to the large, involving the entire Earth. What if a vast number of high-energy electrons could be generated above the Earth’s atmosphere?
He theorized that the planet’s magnetic fields would shape and focus them into an intense field or shell of radiation strong enough to disrupt and perhaps even destroy missiles and atomic warheads passing through it. The electrons, Christofilos explained, would be generated by detonating nuclear weapons in space. He had a name for the plan: Argus.
Not incidentally, there was a potential side bonus for Christofilos. The Astron machine did not yet exist; the Earth did. If Argus was successful and proved his theory, it could also help to vindicate Astron.
“His purpose was of epic proportions,” York later recalled. “He intended nothing less than to place an impenetrable shield of high-energy electrons over our heads, a shield that would destroy any nuclear warhead that might be sent against us … Nick was completely confident that he had found the answer to the new Soviet threat, and he was eager to work it out before it was too late.”7
York was intrigued but dubious. Not only was Argus an idea on a “grand scale,” but realizing it even on an experimental level would involve satellites—something that, at least so far, the US didn’t have. And even if it could be organized, it was beyond the purview of Livermore or any other existing government agency. “There was simply no place to take an invention like Nick’s,” said York.
But that was not going to stop Christofilos. He set out campaigning for Argus over the following months, first at the lower levels of officialdom in government and the military, and then moving steadily up the ladder. His urgent advocacy and untiring persuasiveness soon won him a growing legion of converts among Sputnik-spooked bureaucrats and military men, up to and including members of the brand-new President’s Science Advisory Committee. When Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense in early 1958 as an official response to Sputnik, Christofilos finally had a place to take Argus—a place that would soon be equipped with a convenient ally when York was named the chief scientist of ARPA.
On January 10, 1958, Christofilos spelled out his proposal in detail in the highly classified paper “On the Possibility of Establishing a Plasma Shield of Relativistic Electrons in the Exosphere of the Earth as a Defense against Ballistic Missiles,” a title that made his ambitions abundantly clear even to those who didn’t bother to read the technical details.8 The paper was widely circulated amongst the upper echelons of secret military and governmental circles, piquing intense interest and much discussion.
Christofilos didn’t know it yet, but some people were already taking him very, very seriously. Just over a month before, on the second and third of December, Pentagon scientist Frank Shelton had briefed CIA officials on “the Christofilos concept,” warning them specifically “to watch for similar Argus developments in Russia.”9 If we could think of it, so could they, was the implication. As bad as Sputnik might have been, that would be even worse.
Classified discussions continued and intensified, as anything and everything Argus-related was placed under the deepest secrecy. ARPA and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP)—the Pentagon agency in charge of nuclear weapons for all the military services—set out to make preparations and plans for what Christofilos, with his characteristic self-confidence, called “the most fantastic experiment ever conducted by man.”