AS ARGUS PLANNING ACCELERATED, SECRECY SPAWNED FURTHER COMPLICATIONS. That was nothing new in the world of atomic weapons and the military, but Argus took matters to an entirely new level. Not only did the purpose and concepts of Argus need to remain classified, so did the very existence of the entire enterprise. The reasons were not just military, but also political, diplomatic, and even scientific.
If Christofilos was right and Argus worked—if electrons and charged particles generated by a high-altitude nuclear detonation could be trapped in the Earth’s magnetosphere to create an artificial radiation belt—the effect, by definition, would probably be global. The Christofilos theory predicted that particles would spiral around the magnetic lines of force, beginning at the point of generation, whizzing north or southward toward one of the Earth’s magnetic poles, then heading back in the other direction toward the opposite pole along the next magnetic force line, jumping from one to the next in an east-west direction. If intense enough, the net effect would be that the field of charged particles would spread longitudinally to eventually circumnavigate the globe and form a “belt.”
Obviously, such a phenomenon would not be a localized event like a thunderstorm or even a hurricane. As an official history later explained: “If an ARGUS detonation performed as predicted, it would produce worldwide disturbances in the upper atmosphere that could be monitored by any nation with properly emplaced instrumentation.”1
No one could do anything about the Soviet Union or anyone else getting lucky and detecting Argus all on their own, of course. That was a risk that had to be taken. But permitting the public or other governments to know about the tests in advance would make it much easier for the Soviets to eavesdrop. Both the US and the USSR routinely monitored each other’s nuclear tests and most other military maneuvers from a respectful distance, using aircraft, submarines, ships, and fishing trawlers (spy satellites, though in the works, were still a few years away). That was just an accepted part of doing business in the Cold War, and to be expected when atomic tests were announced in advance. But there was no point in making it easier for the Soviets, especially with something as potentially important as Argus.
Officials became even more troubled when the Soviets launched their third Sputnik on May 15. Unlike its two predecessors, Sputnik 3 featured a suite of scientific instruments to support its IGY mission. That was fine for science, but potentially threatening for Argus. “Since the satellite contained instrumentation for measuring atmospheric radiation, it might be able to detect Argus, if the Soviets knew when and where to look for it,” wrote Lisa Mundey. “American officials worried that the Soviets, should they be given advance warning, might send up specialized satellites to measure the American experiment.”2 Soviet space activity was yet another reason to keep a tight lid on the project.
Not everyone agreed. At the May 1 meeting at which Eisenhower gave Argus his final stamp of approval, the issue of secrecy versus a public announcement was discussed, briefly but heatedly. “While the DOD [Department of Defense] opposed an announcement,” noted Mundey, John Foster Dulles, then Ike’s secretary of state, “insisted on one.”3 AEC head Lewis Strauss, though no fan of governmental openness himself, also pointed out that because he would have to inform Congress of the test, as was the case with all nuclear tests, leaks would be inevitable.
Everyone at the meeting was quite aware that this was a wholly unprecedented case. The United States had only ever tested one atomic weapon in total secrecy, and that had been the very first one on July 16, 1945, in the midst of a world war. But now the world was at peace, and attempting to detonate atomic bombs in secret came with the possibility of various unpleasant international repercussions.
There was also the question of the ongoing International Geophysical Year, the IGY, led by the United States and USSR and meant to be a completely open, nonmilitary, purely scientific endeavor, with all data shared freely among nations. That didn’t matter when discussing a non-IGY activity such as setting off nuclear weapons, but launching satellites that were ostensibly scientific, such as Explorer 4, was another matter. How was Explorer 4’s true mission going to be kept secret if the US was obliged to openly publish its scientific data?
It was clear that Argus was simply going to be too big, too wide-ranging, too ambitious an effort to conceal completely. At the State University of Iowa, Van Allen and his graduate students could simply keep their mouths shut and put up a couple of funny signs around the lab, but that wasn’t going to work outside of Iowa City. Cover stories were going to have to be invented for practically everything. To make matters even more confusing, a new secret code word, FLORAL, was officially assigned to the Argus project in order to avoid the nuclear test connotations that the original “Hardtack Argus” designation had acquired. “These plans were to conceal the true intentions of all phases of the ARGUS operation, not only from other nations but also from the majority of DOD personnel participating in the tests themselves.”4
Which meant that at that moment, thousands of men serving in the US Navy, US Air Force, and US Army were now destined to participate in one of the most secretive operations of the twentieth century, completely without their knowledge. Aside from the problem of explaining the movement of men, ships, planes, and other military equipment to unknown and unspecified destinations, there would be the problem of organizing, supplying, and carrying it all out.
And where would they all go? Where was Argus to be conducted, particularly given the need and desire to keep its purposes obscured, if not completely secret? Obviously the usual test sites in Nevada and the Pacific were out. It would not be possible to detonate one or more atomic weapons several hundred miles above Las Vegas without the entire US west coast knowing about it. As for the Pacific, it might be easier to keep away curious eyes, but there were other considerations.
On March 1, 1954, the US had exploded a hydrogen bomb dubbed Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll. It was a test of a new H-bomb configuration, and it exceeded everyone’s expectations, including its own designers. Expected to produce a yield of about five megatons, it was a monster, generating three times that yield. Because of the unexpectedly high yield and tricky winds that shifted the predicted fallout patterns, Castle Bravo ended up dousing a lot of people with radiation, including the civilian crew of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat. All of them were affected with radiation sickness; one later died. It was a massive public relations disaster for the US and the AEC worldwide, and became a major impetus for protests that would ultimately lead to the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing.
Though the radioactive fallout of Castle Bravo had long since faded over the Pacific, the political fallout still persisted for AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. Though he had previously demonstrated little to no concern for the fate of Marshall Islanders or errant Japanese fishermen, he didn’t want to risk any further public or press outcry over the testing program. Better, thought Strauss and most others in the AEC and DOD, to find another place to give Christofilos his trial run.
It was bad enough to attempt something as huge as Argus under a shroud of secrecy and deception. But there was also a clock ticking, and it was one that could not be ignored.
Even though President Eisenhower had purposely centered much of his national security policy around nuclear weapons, a concept he called the “New Look,” he had been thinking about stopping the testing of atomic weapons for some time, at least since before the 1956 presidential election. From the time he took office in 1953, he had been dedicated to the notion of the “peaceful” atom, the use of nuclear energy for peaceful civilian purposes such as electrical power, scientific research, and medicine, and in general converting atomic swords into civilian plowshares. As a career soldier, he was intimately aware of the military’s endless thirst for more weapons and more resources, and the Strategic Air Command, AEC laboratories, and the rest of the nuclear establishment in particular were endlessly rapacious. The Pentagon fought him at every turn, whether by directly opposing his efforts or issuing dire warnings about the mortal danger facing America.
“Eisenhower … had long been concerned about the nuclear arms race and where it was leading us,” Herbert York recalled. “Ever since the ‘Bravo’ nuclear fallout accident in the Pacific in 1954 had raised world consciousness about nuclear tests, [Eisenhower] had mulled over the possibility of a nuclear test ban both as a solution to the fallout problem and as a means for slowing down the arms race.”5 Ike had been forced to back off the issue for political reasons when Adlai Stevenson adopted it as a major part of his platform in his 1956 presidential campaign against Eisenhower. But Ike had been re-elected, and the time was ripe to take action.
Earlier in the spring, Ike directed PSAC to examine the issues concerning a possible nuclear test ban or moratorium. Some scientists in the nuclear arms establishment, such as Edward Teller, were strongly opposed to such a move, arguing that it would gravely imperil America’s strategic position. Others, including the members of PSAC, thought otherwise, noting that the US had a firm technological lead in nuclear weapons technology and that the fallout problem needed to be addressed directly.
Eisenhower approached Nikita Khrushchev on April 20 to formally propose an international meeting of experts to talk over a moratorium, and Khrushchev agreed. Soon, serious negotiations were underway for a test moratorium to go into effect before the end of 1958.
That didn’t leave much time for an operation on the scale of Argus. The US already had the HARDTACK atomic test series in the works for 1958, divided into two parts: HARDTACK I in the Pacific and HARDTACK II later in the year in Nevada. Given the mind-boggling complexity of organizing and conducting HARDTACK, completing an entirely separate test series from scratch was going to require a herculean effort.
And while HARDTACK was scheduled to include some high-altitude detonations, they would be nothing like Argus: far lower in the atmosphere, far from outer space. That gave added urgency to the necessity of Argus. Another test-ban technical report, this one from a panel of both scientists and military men, observed: “If the high altitude shots at HARDTACK are successful, the U.S will possess weapons effects information important to AICBM [anti-ICBM] and other military developments that will not be available to the same extent to the USSR until a similar test is conducted. But much more effects information will be needed than HARDTACK is likely to provide because the instrumentation for the HARDTACK tests is incomplete, and there are likely to be further important effects that will not have been tested (e.g. ARGUS).”6
So Argus was carrying the weight of a great many hopes and expectations. And everything had to be completed before the year was out. The spring of 1958 had been one of secret meetings and conferences, but now that Eisenhower had given the green light, the time for talking was over and the time for action beginning. The first, most basic task was to decide a location for Argus, if not the Pacific or Nevada. Fortunately, Herbert York at ARPA had some good ideas. “I vividly recall poring over maps (something I’ve always enjoyed) looking for an appropriate site, discovering that Gough Island was in the right place, and then and there personally deciding on that location,” he wrote.7
Gough Island is a lonely place in the South Atlantic Ocean not far from an even lonelier place, Tristan da Cunha, and an extinct volcano called Inaccessible Island. They form an archipelago far from shipping lanes, tourist havens, and civilization in general, inhabited by exotic wildlife and a tiny population of several hundred people. From the point of view of Argus planners, the area also had the distinct advantage of being far distant from the Soviet Union or any of its various worldwide interests or allies. In other words, it was perhaps the unlikeliest place on Earth for any stray Russian trawlers, submarines, or aircraft to happen by.
Aside from its geographical obscurity, the area enjoyed another feature that especially recommended it for the Argus experiment. It lay east of a dip in the Earth’s magnetic field called the Brazilian or South Atlantic Anomaly, where the magnetosphere was closer to the surface and thus encountered more air molecules. If Argus electrons hit the Brazilian Anomaly, they would be absorbed by air molecules, interfering with and possibly derailing the expected Argus effect. Detonating the atomic devices just east of the Anomaly, however, would give the Argus radiation belt—if it formed—time to expand, grow, and spread eastward around most of the planet before dissipating, allowing ample opportunity to detect and measure it.
Also, it was imperative to observe the “magnetic conjugate point”—the area where the Argus effects were expected to be mirrored along the north-south direction in the magnetosphere. A detonation point in the South Atlantic near Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island placed the Argus conjugate point near the Azores in the North Atlantic, where naval ships could easily assemble and monitor the tests remotely—and without arousing any undue suspicions.
But such a remote operational area as the South Atlantic also posed some serious problems. For one thing, if all went according to plan, it would be August when Argus was conducted, which meant it would be winter in the South Atlantic, with rain, snow, and freezing temperatures—challenging conditions for naval operations under normal circumstances, much less while trying to launch a nuclear missile from the deck of a ship, something that had never been attempted before. Such weather conditions would also complicate routine matters such as the task force ships finding and rendezvousing with one another, refueling and supply, even communications. It was not going to be a pleasure cruise by any means.
An experienced sea hand and administrator would be needed to run the operation. Fortunately, one was available. Captain Lloyd M. Mustin, who was just preparing to assume command of the US Navy’s Destroyer Flotilla Two and accept a concomitant promotion to Rear Admiral, was wrapping up a family vacation in San Francisco and preparing to report to his new station in Newport, Rhode Island, when he received orders on May 19 to report to the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) in Washington instead.
The CNO informed Mustin that his new duty assignment, though not his promotion, was going to be delayed a bit. The Argus task force, which was going to include not only naval forces but Army and Air Force as well, needed a commander, and Mustin had been chosen. A Naval Academy graduate with considerable combat experience in World War II and a Navy family pedigree that stretched back as far as his great-great-grandfather and the War of 1812, Mustin had had no direct experience with nuclear weapons in his military career, but he had a lot of experience in commanding large, diverse military forces.
Mustin was given office space within the headquarters of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP) in the Pentagon and began receiving a flurry of technical briefings. The new task force would need a name as well. “We realized that we would need an operational designator of some sort, in order to get all of the communication facilities and the control and the command structure network and so on,” he recalled in an oral history. “We asked for, and got, from the commander in chief, that designator, Task Force 88 [TF 88].”8
Meanwhile, the skipper of the USS Norton Sound, Captain Arthur R. Gralla, was getting some unusual orders of his own. He discovered that his vessel, which had begun her unglamorous life as a seaplane tender in World War II and later become a guided-missile ship, had been selected as the launching platform for the Argus experiments. It was a natural choice, since the Sound had been conducting missile tests, launching sounding rockets, and sending off weather balloons since her conversion a decade earlier.
“It was pretty sure that the Norton Sound would be the launch ship,” Mustin recalled in a 1980 interview. “[She] had that big after-deck … in addition, Norton Sound had a lot of tracking equipment—telemetry, receiving equipment, so on … she was optimum.”9
This particular job, however, was not going to be her usual routine. The ship would require further extensive modifications in order to handle the missile that had been chosen to launch the Argus warheads—the multistage Lockheed X-17a—and to increase its fuel capacity for the extended voyage. Gralla got his orders, his briefings, and returned from Washington to his ship’s home port, Port Hueneme, California, to take his vessel up to the San Francisco Naval Shipyard for refitting. His crew had no idea as yet just what was going on, or where they would be sailing. But that was life for the average sailor.
Mustin put together the rest of his task force. Matters were somewhat complicated by the fact that while the Norton Sound was based on the West Coast as part of the Pacific Fleet, the remainder of the assigned ships were in the Atlantic Fleet, based on the East Coast. But if coordination and communications were affected by that reality, such complications also helped to enhance security and to bolster the developing cover stories as to the true purpose of Task Force 88 (TF 88): “TF 88 was identified as consisting of Atlantic Fleet units. This force ostensibly was established by CINCANTFT [Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet] to conduct a series of tests of new equipment being introduced into the operating forces. These tests were to be conducted over a wide range of sea and climatic conditions, necessitating a prolonged period of operations at sea.”10 As for the Norton Sound, she was said to be “involved in special missile operations requiring preliminary tests on the Pacific Coast Point Mugu Missile Range before conducting a series of firings in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.”11
For another TF 88 member, the USS Albemarle, the Argus assignment was going to provide a welcome break from some intense duty. The ship had been picked as the floating base of the Navy’s newfangled nuclear bomber program, centered on a graceful but ultimately impractical jet aircraft called the Martin P6M SeaMaster. In the era before nuclear submarines and submarine-launched ICBMs, the Navy had been desperately casting about for some entree into the nuclear business, since that was where the lion’s share of Pentagon money was to be found. Money had been pouring into the Air Force and its Strategic Air Command bombers for a decade, and the SeaMaster project was the Navy’s bid for a piece of the pie. But the project had been plagued with difficulty, including test-flight crashes and fatalities, and would ultimately be cancelled.
“The Albemarle was a seaplane tender that … had been taken out of mothballs, and millions of dollars spent in converting her into a tender for that jet seaplane, the P6M, that the Navy spent so much money and time on for so long,” recalled Mustin. “It was somebody’s supposed secret entry into the strategic nuclear bombing realm, I often thought. But it wasn’t very successful … the P6M program was about to be canceled, but it was delayed enough so that Albemarle was available.”12
For the summer of 1958, however, the Albemarle would get a break from SeaMaster tests and refittings to serve as the northern monitoring station for Argus in the Azores. She would be positioned at the conjugate point in the North Atlantic, watching for artificial auroras and measuring whatever other Argus phenomena might manifest themselves.
To preserve security, she was not officially designated as part of Task Force 88, but as a vessel that, having just undergone an extensive overhaul at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, was in need of a routine shakedown cruise. That would be her cover for the Argus voyage. The Navy also announced that the ship would be working with the Air Force on some long-range communications tests—which was true, after a fashion.
Mustin had other concerns besides security and logistics. One of them was just how many Argus shots would actually be fired. As an experienced sailor and ship handler, he knew very well how rough the seas and the weather could be in the South Atlantic winter, and worried about the prospect of trying to launch a ballistic missile from the deck of a ship—especially one carrying a nuclear warhead. Even disregarding the possible safety issues, it was reasonable to expect that such a feat would take more than one attempt.
It was an issue that, as Mustin discovered, had apparently been given little consideration. “I think initially that’s how the thoughts lay, that we would go down there and we would fire one, and that would be that.”13 When he found that several missiles would be available for Argus, he pushed for additional shots. “Somewhere along the line, it became apparent that we could get two of these X-17 rockets modified to carry the warhead. So immediately the plan was to take along two. I hadn’t been thinking this thing over very long before the word came from Lockheed that there were enough components around to assemble a third. So I took steps to get that done … when the Norton Sound sailed, she was actually carrying three … I know that my thinking, before we ever left, was that if things permit, I would certainly expect to fire all three.”14
The three-stage Lockheed X-17a rocket chosen for Argus was a thin needle-like research vehicle forty feet tall, developed for the Navy’s Polaris missile program as a test bed for heat shields on missile cones. In that capacity, it would be launched straight up, pass through the peak of its ballistic arc, then head straight back down through the atmosphere to subject a missile nose cone to the intense friction heat that would be encountered by a re-entering ICBM warhead.
“It had been used in places like White Sands proving ground and so on, out in the desert, just from crude, simply fixed launchers that you’d aim up in the sky and light her off, and off she’d go,” Mustin said. “We, on the other hand, had to launch it from the deck of a ship. It’s kind of a cliché to say from the deck of a rolling ship, till you stop and figure what the forecasts are for weather in that part of the world. Almost any time of the year, you name it, that part of the world is pretty uncompromising … down in that part of the Atlantic, there’s practically no data, because nobody goes there; the weather is so lousy. The average wind force was gale. We expected the weather would be a factor in anything we did.”15
But the X-17a had not been designed to carry nuclear warheads. It was simply too small and not powerful enough to loft most of the weapons in the US stockpile, which tended to be large, bulky, and heavy objects.
Still, the weapons labs had been making great progress in warhead miniaturization—one of the payoffs of all the testing in the Pacific and especially in Nevada. It was an effort driven by the ever-expanding plans for more diverse and versatile nukes made not only for the confined spaces of submarines but for use in artillery shells or backpack bombs. The W-25 warheads destined for Argus would be of this generation: low-yield weapons originally intended for air-to-air missiles. They were meant not to obliterate cities, but merely to knock enemy planes and missiles out of the sky.
Which, as Mustin realized, was of little comfort when considering the prospect of such a weapon accidentally detonating in the middle of a naval task force. “This nuclear warhead had nothing but the simplest fuze,” he recalled. “It was ignited by the acceleration of the rocket. It was going to run for whatever the time was—700 seconds, or thereabouts, as I recall it—at the end of which time it was going to detonate that nuclear warhead. That’s all there was to it. Once it was started, there was no way of turning it off.”16
In other words, it was not set to go off on impact, but at a fixed time after launch. If a missile were launched off the proper trajectory, or failed to reach sufficient altitude, a disaster could ensue. “The combination of fairly easily predictable malfunctions could find you coming down with a live nuclear warhead, with a fuze that had been armed and was going to go off at some unknown time. This could be anywhere within a radius of quite a few miles from you, at some launching accident or other. So the launching point we picked was more than 1300 miles from land, in all directions.”17
Quite aside from the possibility of inadvertently nuking someone else, Mustin well knew that “the hazard of this thing coming back down right within our own force was not negligible. And, of course, in later years, to conceive of the AEC ever agreeing to any such thing as this is just so remote that I can’t tell you how remote it seems to me. But I suppose the general consensus was that, ‘We have no choice; we’ve got to do it. This is absolutely the best that can be done. An alternate solution of let’s don’t do it is not permissible. So the heck with it, let’s get on with it.’”18
As spring melted into summer, that was the attitude that prevailed throughout all the various agencies, organizations, and institutions engaged in Argus. There was a deadline to meet, objectives to be achieved. It may not have been wartime, but it certainly felt like it. For those involved, nothing less than the survival of the free world seemed to be at stake.