BY THE TIME AN AGITATED NICHOLAS CHRISTOFILOS FIRST BURST INTO HERBERT York’s office with the idea for Argus, America had been in the atomic testing business for quite a while. Ever since the first atomic explosion on July 16, 1945, the United States had detonated close to a hundred nuclear devices. Many of them had been in the continental United States, first in New Mexico, then at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Test Site beginning on January 27, 1951. Many other more powerful weapons, including a number of hydrogen bombs, had been tested at the Pacific Proving Grounds, where the US made use of islands captured from the Japanese in World War II. And two had exploded over Japan in August 1945, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of human beings.
In 1957 alone, before Sputnik unleashed a different kind of explosion within the scientific community, the United States had tested twenty-nine atomic bombs, all in Nevada. Plans were underway to test more hydrogen weapons in the coming year in the Pacific, even as concerns about atomic fallout and worldwide protests were forcing reluctant national leaders to contemplate a testing moratorium.
The tests conducted by the AEC were of a dizzying variety. To most average folk, a Bomb was a Bomb, but the weaponeers of Los Alamos and Livermore, not to mention the Pentagon strategists who devised the ways and means to use them, knew better. Nukes came in all physical sizes and levels of explosive power, from small weapons that could fit in the back of a truck, shells that could be fired by artillery pieces, and huge, monstrous devices that weighed tons and could be carried only by airplanes or ships. Atomic weapons could wipe out soldiers on the battlefield, a flotilla of ships or submarines, an air or naval base, or an entire metropolitan area, including the suburbs. Explosive yields ranged from a mere few hundred tons of TNT to multimillions.
But wherever the weapons were tested, whatever their design, all the tests had been conducted with one of three main objectives: trying out a new weapons design; studying the immediate effects of the nuclear explosion on buildings, bridges, animals, materials, or people (psychologically if not physically); or devising military tactics for their use in warfare. The test series and individual “shots” (atomic detonations) were given odd, nonsensical code names such as GREENHOUSE or TUMBLER-SNAPPER or UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE1, and were complex logistical undertakings that took a year, usually more, to organize, and involved thousands of people, from scientists, military brass, and governmental administrators at the top all the way down to construction workers, technicians, and enlisted draftee soldiers at the bottom.
Testing Christofilos’s ideas would be quite a different proposition. It would literally be a scientific experiment on a global scale, using the entire planet as both laboratory and test subject. It wouldn’t require any special new weapons design—an off-the-shelf nuke would do fine, as long as it was detonated high enough in the atmosphere. The extreme altitude would ensure that any direct effects on people or things on the ground would be minimal if not nonexistent. As to the military utility of the entire enterprise—finding that out was essentially the whole point.
Though Christofilos wasn’t aware of it at the time, military planners had already been thinking about high-altitude nuclear explosions. According to the official history of the Defense Nuclear Agency, Pentagon strategists worried about what might happen with nukes in outer space. “Christofilos’ study was an extension of the DoD’s [Department of Defense] interest in the effects of nuclear explosions in the outer atmosphere. In the early years of the missile age, military planners feared that electrons emitted by such large-altitude nuclear blasts could become trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere and might possibly block the operation of ballistic missiles and defensive radar systems.” A 1955 test series in Nevada, TEAPOT, had raised concerns about an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by atomic weapons, and “there were numerous questions about the effects of missile-launched weapons and detonations in space, especially the effects of EMP on radio communications and equipment.”2 Now that the Soviet Union had made the missile age a dangerous reality, leaving America struggling to catch up, such questions were more urgent than ever.
The next big nuclear test series, dubbed HARDTACK and set for the Pacific in the new year, included some high-altitude shots, but none high enough to test Christofilos’s theories. And there was another wrinkle that Christofilos himself introduced soon after approaching York. “A week or so after Nick first opened the floodgates on this stream of new ideas, he came in with an addendum. He had made a new calculation that showed there is already a ‘background’ of electrons of natural origin trapped in the Earth’s magnetosphere, and he said we had to measure it before we did any experiments with a bomb.”3 Otherwise, how could scientists possibly tell the artificially generated radiation apart from the natural background? It made sense to York, and fortunately James Van Allen and his colleagues at the State University of Iowa had already designed instruments capable of detecting electrons in space.
Unfortunately, of course, such instruments would have to actually be placed in orbit, something that the US had yet to accomplish. “Such devices were coming along, but we had not yet flown any,” York noted. For the time being, at least, Christofilos would have to do something which went against the grain of his usual predilections: he would have to wait. Or so York counseled him.
He was not about to do that. Neither were other people, especially after Sputnik. Herbert Scoville, for one. As the Deputy Director for Science and Technology at the CIA, Scoville had read Christofilos’s classified paper on Argus and was also aware of the concerns about high-altitude nuclear explosions. Thinking ahead to the near future when America would finally get its own satellites aloft, Scoville “worried that the Soviets might be thinking along the lines of Christofilos’ paper and use a nuclear weapon to form a long-lasting trapped radiation belt and interfere with US satellites.”4 It might not be as apocalyptic a scenario as Christofilos’s fears of incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, but it was far more likely, and something that the US would be helpless to counter.
The flipside of the coin, of course, would be that if the United States did it first, it could be a powerful weapon against the Soviets. Or perhaps a quasi-weapon, since it wouldn’t involve any sort of direct military attack—which only made the whole idea more intriguing.
Anxious to get moving, and persistently prodded by Christofilos, York decided to go to the President’s Science Advisory Committee, otherwise known as PSAC. Chaired by James R. Killian, PSAC authorized further study of Argus and its military potential. In early 1958, Christofilos got the chance to strut his stuff in a presentation of his Argus paper before the entire PSAC in Washington. “Christofilos presented, in his brilliant and vigorous way, his theories about the ‘Christofilos effect,’” Killian recalled. “By temperament effervescent, intense, and highly emotional, Nick could make any meeting explosive in discussion. [He] was in good form that day.”5
PSAC was duly impressed, both by Christofilos’s arguments and the other considerations that had already been circulating among Pentagon officials for months. They knew of the upcoming high-altitude HARDTACK shots, and that, while they might provide some interesting data, they wouldn’t conclusively settle the question of the widespread effects of such detonations. Argus promised to do so.
PSAC recommended that Christofilos’s theory be tested “as soon as possible.” The wheels were turning now. On March 6, Killian and Herbert York, now ARPA chief scientist at the Pentagon, briefed President Eisenhower, who approved undertaking further study in preparation for testing the Argus concept. He also approved the idea of launching a satellite to monitor the Argus effects.
An alphabet soup of governmental agencies were now involved. Aside from ARPA, Eisenhower instructed that efforts be coordinated among the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP), which was in charge of atomic weapons development across all the military branches; the Department of Defense (DOD); and of course the place where it had all started, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the defense-oriented offshoot of Ernest Lawrence’s University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL). Conferences, consultations, and secret meetings ensued in Washington, California, and elsewhere.
In the meantime, the United States had finally begun successfully launching satellites. At least, it had managed to put two of them into space, Explorers 1 and 2. Both of the satellites, and the upcoming Explorer 4, carried scientific instruments designed and built by James Van Allen, who, along with rocketeer Wernher von Braun, was suddenly a scientific superstar in the public eye.
Nicholas Christofilos’s own superstar charisma may have been hidden in the classified shadows, but it was of little concern to him. As long as he could focus on proving his theory and, in doing so, protect the United States, Christofilos was perfectly content to work away in the dark. If he had any frustrations about anonymity, he took them out on his piano at night, playing Beethoven and Bach, mostly all fortissimo, to the consternation of the neighbors. Meanwhile, he continued work on the Astron project.
On April 21, 1958, Killian and the White House received the official approval for the Argus operation from both the Secretary of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission. Now it was solely up to one man to give the final go-ahead: the president. Killian promptly scheduled a meeting with Eisenhower on Thursday, May 1.
THAT SAME DAY, JAMES VAN ALLEN WAS IN WASHINGTON AT THE GREAT HALL of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for one of the biggest moments of his life. This one promised to surpass that crazy night only a few months past, when Explorer 1 became America’s first satellite in orbit. That had really been more von Braun’s and William Pickering’s triumph, since they’d been the men who put Explorer into space, while Van Allen’s instruments had just been along for the ride. (Von Braun would later make light of his celebrity status, telling Van Allen and his colleagues, “You’re the important ones. I’m just the trucker.”)6
But today, it was all about science and discovery in their purest forms. Van Allen and his team at the State University of Iowa (SUI) had spent the months since that January night collecting and analyzing the data from their instruments on Explorer 1, as well as its follow-up satellite Explorer 3. As required under the rules of the International Geophysical Year, under whose aegis the Explorers had been launched, Van Allen had reported his discoveries to IGY officials in April. Now the time had come to tell the rest of the world.
The session began promptly at 9:45 AM at a joint scientific conference of the NAS and the American Physical Society, with Van Allen reporting his findings to an amazed audience of colleagues, followed by a press conference at which Van Allen explained things in less esoteric terms for the benefit of reporters. One reporter asked for clarification, asking the scientist if the radiation he’d detected could be described as a “belt” encircling the Earth, and Van Allen agreed. The term “radiation belt” was born, to be further codified: “At a scientific conference in Europe soon after, NRL [Naval Research Laboratory] physicist Robert Jastrow used the term Van Allen radiation belt for the first time and the name quickly defined a permanent new landmark in the heavens,” wrote historian Abigail Foerstner in her biography of Van Allen.7
While Van Allen was enjoying his moment in the scientific spotlight, a few blocks away at the White House, James Killian was laying out for President Eisenhower all the plans and preparations for the Argus experiment that had been worked out over the previous months. The president listened, considered, and gave his approval for the nuclear tests and the rest of the operation. It became official with the issuance of ARPA Order #4: Argus was a go.
Before the day was over, Herbert York informed Van Allen that Argus was going ahead, and that he and his team at the State University of Iowa would be participating. Van Allen was pleased: it was another chance to go into space and do more science.
It did not come as a complete surprise, however. He had already known the broad outlines of Argus for a few weeks, and the probability that satellites would be tasked to detect the Christofilos effect. This practically guaranteed that Van Allen would be asked to participate, since he and his crack team of graduate students had more experience in building space-based radiation detectors than anyone else on the planet at the time.
A couple of months earlier in March, a meeting had been called at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), ostensibly to discuss the preliminary results from Explorer 1. Aside from people already quite familiar to Van Allen from Explorer, such as JPL director William Pickering and Army general John Medaris, the meeting was also attended by scientist Wolfgang Panofsky, who had been working discreetly with Christofilos on Argus ideas.
It seemed a bit odd at the time, since Explorer 1 had been in orbit just over a month, and it was early to be talking about any definitive “results” from anything. In effect, however, it was Van Allen’s audition for the Argus project.
Van Allen’s graduate student George Ludwig recalled in his memoirs: “Although the meeting was openly billed as a gathering to discuss Explorer 1 results, those results were still so tentative that, in retrospect, a meeting of such senior personnel for that purpose was certainly premature. No one in our small Iowa team had made any outside hint of our growing suspicion that the Earth might be surrounded by a previously unknown region of high-intensity trapped radiation. The stated meeting objective was certainly a cover for its true purpose—an early examination of the possibility of orbiting a satellite suitable for detecting and quantifying the Argus Effect.”8
Van Allen was far from naive. “There were vague allusions at this meeting to the possibility of radiation experiments at high altitudes by the AEC,” he remembered.9 After the JPL meeting, Van Allen kept in touch with Panofsky with phone calls about Explorer 1 results, picking up further hints here and there. As Ludwig noted, “Although none of us at Iowa knew of Argus planning by then, we subsequently became aware of it by degrees.”10
The following month, when Van Allen informed the officials of the space program and IGY of his Explorer 1 and 3 findings in April, he was formally read into the Argus planning. “At that time, I was introduced to the secret plans for the conduct of the high-altitude bomb tests, later called Argus,” he recalled.11 He found out that it had been his friend William Pickering at JPL who had suggested Van Allen and his Iowa stalwarts for the job.
There was another disturbing revelation. “I also learned that, despite the absence of definitive information, some officials of the Atomic Energy Commission believed that the Soviet Union might have already conducted such tests.”12 If that were true, it was suggested, then it was possible that the radiation belts Van Allen had detected weren’t a natural phenomenon—an alarming proposition not only from a military standpoint, but also from the viewpoint of a scientist who had just claimed to make a major discovery.
So Van Allen agreed to come on board, for a variety of reasons. “I was eager to participate in the Argus tests because of their apparent national importance and more particularly because of the possibility of distinguishing between a natural and an artificial population of geomagnetically trapped particles,”13 he wrote. He, like Christofilos, was sure that what he’d found was not the result of Soviet nuclear meddling. But learning how to distinguish between natural radiation and that caused by nefarious high-altitude atomic activity was obviously a high priority.
Van Allen brought George Ludwig and fellow graduate student Carl McIlwain into the secret. After the formal approval of Argus by the president, matters began to move very quickly. Less than two weeks later, another meeting was held at JPL, and there it was made official: Iowa would build the scientific payload for the upcoming Explorer 4, which would monitor Argus in space. Plans were coordinated between JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency that would launch the satellite, track the craft and collect data. But time was crucial in order to make the launch window for Explorer 4. “The meeting assigned Iowa an unbelievably tight schedule of deadlines,” Foerstner noted. Van Allen’s team had a mere seventy-seven days to get it all done.
For a research scientist like Van Allen, it all might have been something of a conflict. In a very real sense, he was in fact co-opting his scientific work to the military, an arrangement that many scientists would consider a deal with the devil. But Van Allen had already been working under the auspices of the military for most of his career. In World War II, he had worked on proximity fuses and, as a naval officer, helped test them in combat. His postwar sounding rocket and balloon research had been conducted hand-in-hand with the military, using their rockets, ships, and aircraft to carry his instruments to the upper atmosphere and into space. For him, this was a logical extension of all his previous work. Until the establishment of the civilian space agency—NASA—that would come later in 1958, the military controlled access to space.
“While he had fought against military control of scientific space research, [Van Allen] had no qualms about partnering with the military for a defense mission,” wrote Abigail Foerstner.14 They were the ones with the rockets, after all. And it was certainly not the same as building weapons, as many of Van Allen’s colleagues were doing. True, his findings might have defense applications, but they were also important science.
But secrecy had its own complications. “Explorer 4 was announced as part of a peaceful IGY satellite program, but the design and construction of the instrument package was top secret, and it was used for military purposes,” observed historian James Rodger Fleming. Scientific laboratories and workshops were traditionally bastions of openness and free access for everyone, at least for everyone who was a student or professor or otherwise part of the institution, but Van Allen and his team couldn’t work that way anymore. As they began a frantic quest to build the Explorer 4 instruments in less than three months—“breakneck speed” as Ludwig put it—somebody put up a sign in the lab: “This job is so secret, even I don’t know what I’m doing.”15