THAT SUMMER OF 1958, NEWLY-MINTED REAR ADMIRAL MUSTIN WAS NOT THE only one with rockets on the mind. ARPA, which remained in operational charge of America’s space program until the new and decidedly civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) took over officially in the fall, was making preparations for the Argus satellite missions, Explorers 4 and 5. Two of the Army’s Jupiter C missiles, originally scheduled to launch inflatable spheres into orbit, were retasked for Argus, while James Van Allen and his team busily continued building the equipment payloads back in Iowa City.
Other rockets were also being readied. The Air Force was preparing to launch a bevy of sounding rockets from three different sites on the East Coast in conjunction with each of the Argus shots. The rockets would provide both a backup and a supplement to the data acquired by the satellites, passing through the Argus radiation shell at different altitudes and trajectories.
Although not directly part of the project, the fate of another pair of rockets would be watched closely by Argus personnel: the two Redstone missiles that would launch the high-altitude nuclear shots of HARDTACK, dubbed Teak and Orange. Everyone knew that while these tests wouldn’t negate the necessity or the motivation for Argus, they still held the promise of some intriguing results that would be directly related to and perhaps even markedly enhance the impact of Argus in scientific and military circles.
Unlike the comparatively humble X-17as that would carry Argus into space, the Redstone was a serious missile, almost seventy feet long with a thrust of over 61,000 pounds. In its modified Jupiter C configuration, it had carried America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit, but was capable of lofting far larger payloads, such as the hydrogen warheads of Teak and Orange, which were weapons that weighed about three tons and gave a nuclear yield of 3.8 megatons.
As with all the other Pacific nuclear tests, secrecy was not a major issue for these shots. Johnston Island, already well-established as part of the US Pacific Proving Grounds, underwent massive preparations before the shots, including the construction of a launching pad, liquid-oxygen fuel plant, concrete observation bunkers, and extensive instrumentation arrays for monitoring, photographing, and recording the proceedings. A variety of aircraft were assembled for observation, recording, and search-and-rescue operations, along with a flotilla of ships. Unlike the wilds of the South Atlantic, Johnston Island was one place where the US military and scientific establishment could set up everything precisely as they wanted it.
Originally, the Teak and Orange shots had been scheduled for launch from Bikini, but AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, in an uncharacteristic display of concern for the native Marshall Islanders, whose entire way of life had been disrupted by the test program ever since it began in 1946, worried that the high-altitude bursts, which would be visible over a far greater range than usual, might injure or permanently blind indigenous personnel, not to mention anyone else who happened to be in the area. The memory of the Castle Bravo debacle and the resultant bad publicity was still fresh in his mind.
Upon further study, the Department of Defense and the government labs concurred. “Results of theoretical calculations on the optical thermal yield of these weapons when detonated in the upper atmosphere became available indicating that such detonations would be bright enough to cause permanent retinal injury to observers of the bursts,” noted a Defense Department history of HARDTACK. “These calculations had only recently been completed by the DOD. Because some 11,000 Micronesians would have been close enough to view the very high altitude bursts at the EPG [Eniwetok Proving Ground], thus risking retinal damage, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the AEC decided on 7 April to change the location of the test to Johnston Island.”1 There were not going to be any further Lucky Dragon–type public-relations fiascos this time. Johnston Island was suitably remote, more than five hundred miles away from the nearest inhabited areas, even if moving the operation there entailed greater logistical difficulties.
But the shots would have other repercussions, which would not come as a surprise to Nicholas Christofilos and would also provide further impetus for Argus. Teak was launched shortly before midnight on July 31, 1958. Set to detonate over water some distance away from the island, a guidance system glitch instead caused it to explode directly over Johnston Island at the planned altitude of about fifty miles, causing something of a shock to observers on the ground. By all accounts, Teak was a spectacular sight, creating an enormous, brilliant, multicolored fireball in the sky that not only dazzled the official observers in the immediate area but was also visible as far as seven hundred miles away in Honolulu.
Hawaii got more than just a dazzling light show. The blast poured electrons into the ionosphere, blacking out radio and radar over a broad range of the Pacific as far as Australia. “The red glow remained clearly visible in the southwestern sky for half an hour,” recounted a Defense Nuclear Agency history.2 It was an apocalyptic sight: “One air force officer watching the display fantasized that this was what a nuclear war might look like,” noted James Fleming.3
The people on the scene at Johnston Island seemed to have suddenly dropped off the face of the planet—or perhaps, had been blown off of it. “In Honolulu, military and civilian air traffic communications were interrupted for several hours. At the AFWSP’s offices in the Pentagon, [AFSWP commander] Admiral Parker grew concerned for the personnel on Johnston Island as hour after hour passed with no word regarding the test. Finally, some eight hours after Teak had occurred, the word that all was well came from [A. R] Luedecke, the commander of Joint Task Force 7 … The communications blackout worried others as well. Later AFSWP learned that one of the first radio messages received at Johnston Island once communications had been restored was: ‘Are you still there?’”4
The Orange shot about two weeks later, though nearly identical in design, was something of an anticlimax, occurring at a lower altitude and proving to be considerably less picturesque. It also failed to produce the widespread electronic havoc of Teak, though some effects were still reported.5
The final verdict was somewhat equivocal. Though Teak and Orange, along with a low-yield balloon shot at low altitude called Yucca, weren’t enough to conclusively confirm or deny Christofilos’s ideas one way or another, they did demonstrate that something unusual happened up there when atomic weapons detonated in the twilight zone where the Earth’s atmosphere transitioned into the void of outer space. But not everyone was satisfied. “While some valuable information had been gathered from Teak and Orange, many scientists in the nuclear weapons community considered the tests to be only partially successful,” noted the DNA history. “Neither detonation had occurred where it had been planned and, due to cloud cover, detailed photographic coverage was incomplete.”6 There were some calls to repeat the Teak test, but these were dismissed in the face of the impending nuclear test moratorium.
All of which served to place further emphasis on Argus. As preparations accelerated relentlessly, anticipation grew. After all, Teak and Orange had not been specifically designed and targeted to create the Christofilos effect. What would happen with Argus, intended to do just that?
IT HAD BEEN A BUSY SUMMER FOR ALL CONCERNED, FROM THE HALLS OF THE PENTAGON and the offices of Admiral Mustin, to the basement lab of James Van Allen in Iowa; from the shipyards of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, to the decks and compartments of the Norton Sound. After completing refits in San Francisco, Captain Gralla had taken the Sound back into the Pacific off the southern coast of California, to the Naval Air Missile Test Center Sea Test Range. Under the tutelage of technicians from Lockheed Missiles Systems Division, the crew practiced assembling and preparing the X-17a missiles for firing in a ten-day training course in Van Nuys, California. While the Sound’s crew were experienced missileers, this particular vehicle was a new animal for them, and there could be no margin for error.
Back in Iowa, the Van Allen team was laboring to prepare the Explorer 4 and 5 instrument packages for launch. Fortunately, the importance of the project helped to grease the wheels: “The Argus Project was helped immeasurably by the assignment of a very high military priority that helped to cut through the red tape and delivery delays,” remembered George Ludwig.7 That was a good thing, because apart from the technical challenges, constant coordination was necessary among all the project principals. Ludwig, Van Allen, and the rest of the team had both civilian and military aircraft readily available to fly themselves and equipment between Iowa City, Washington, and Huntsville, Alabama, where the Jupiter rocket that would loft Explorer into orbit was being put together. Tests had to be made to ensure that the instrument package would work flawlessly with spacecraft systems, communications setups, and even that it would fit inside the confines of the rocket shell. Again, there was no margin for error. The satellite data was going to be all-important, because ground observations and sounding rocket flights were not going to provide enough hard data to confirm and characterize Christofilos’s predictions. That would require sustained measurements of the predicted radiation shell that could only be provided by a satellite. And with a project deadline of September 1, 1958, now firmly imposed by the powers that be, there would be no opportunities to repeat the Argus experiment. “We had to get it done by the first of September, or our name was mud,” Mustin recalled.8
Ludwig himself took two trips to Huntsville in June, carrying first the Explorer instrument package prototypes and then the actual flight units for various tests and preparations. The classified nature of the entire business was something of a mixed bag. “Despite the secrecy, we could build all of the equipment in the open, since the satellite and its instrumentation served officially as an International Geophysical Year (IGY) program to extend our investigation of the natural radiation discovered by Explorers I and III,” Ludwig wrote. “Only the second mission to study the nuclear blasts was held in strict confidence by a small group of us who were building the instrument. In fact, only Van Allen and [Carl] McIlwain had access to the full range of details. My knowledge was limited to a basic understanding of the mission and to details necessary to build the instrumented satellite, test it, and interface it with the launch vehicle.”9
He wasn’t the only one working in the dark. Out on the West Coast, the Norton Sound spent the month of July test-firing X-17a missiles from her fantail launching area. The test version—a configuration of the X-17a known as the Winder missile fitted with a special warhead loaded with telemetry equipment—turned out to be a tricky beast. While the first test-firing at sea went well, hurtling to an altitude of 302 miles, matters quickly became more problematic.
Navy missileman Dick Culp worked as part of the telemetry station team aboard the “Snortin’ Norton.” “The missile itself was originally designed as what was called a nail-driver,” he remembered. “The first stage would take it out of the atmosphere, then it would topple and the second two stages would fire and drive it down into the atmosphere.” The purpose was to test the reentry characteristics of different nose cone shapes and materials. But for Argus, Culp said, “we just sent them all straight up.”
As with many other rocket designs, the X-17a first stage employed a spin package—small retrorockets that would fire upon launch to send the missile spinning on its long axis, imparting greater flight stability. The spin motors would be automatically jettisoned once the missile was in flight and on course. “The idea was once it came off the launch pad, they would fire and they would get the ballistic motion going,” Culp noted. “In the early years, the retros were slightly overpowered and they unscrewed the rest of the rocket and it all collapsed.”
On the second test-missile firing, said Culp, “they used a captive fin configuration which worked well.” But not well enough, apparently. About twenty-five seconds after launch, “it basically took itself apart,” apparently because of resonant vibrations that were too much for the missile’s structural integrity. The third test suffered a similar fate.10
Something obviously had to be changed. A missile coming apart over the ocean loaded with nothing but telemetry equipment was a reasonably innocuous picture, but the same scenario involving a live nuclear warhead was not acceptable. After a tense conference, the missile team decided to dump the spin rocket package and make some adjustments to the stabilizing fins. That seemed to do the trick, and a fourth test on July 24 was successful, soaring to 362 miles.
Still, that made only a total of two successes in four attempts. A 50 percent success rate might be good enough for many endeavors, but nuclear weapons demanded a far greater batting average. Unfortunately, it would have to do, because time was rapidly running out. Only three more X-17a missiles remained available, and they would all be needed for Argus. And with a long voyage ahead of her, the Norton Sound needed to get underway.
The Sound left the Navy’s Pacific missile test range and returned home to Port Hueneme to get ready. Lockheed missile technicians worked twenty-four-hour shifts to finish the assembly and preparations of the remaining missiles and to get them loaded aboard ship. Sometime in those remaining few days, technicians from Sandia National Laboratory quietly loaded three 1.7 kiloton W-25 nuclear warheads aboard the Norton Sound, their presence known only to Captain Gralla and a select few.
Among the discreet visitors to the Norton Sound before her departure was a bespectacled civilian with a taciturn, serious manner: Dr. Frank Shelton, the technical director of AFSWP. “One of the things I wanted to discuss with Captain Gralla was the role and help the Sandia Corporation people would provide on board the Norton Sound,” he recalled. “They would take care of arming, fusing, safing and firing of the nuclear weapons. Having been employed at Sandia, I was very familiar with these people.” After witnessing one of the test launches on a brief trip aboard the Sound, Shelton returned to the Pentagon and met with Nicholas Christofilos to discuss the Explorer 4 and 5 Argus satellite measurements. Meanwhile, the ship’s company was joined by Commander Bob Wertheim, who would serve as Argus missile officer.11
Most of the rest of the crew had no idea of what they were about to undertake. “We knew we were going on a cruise that would be about sixty days,” recalled Navy electronics technician Keith Mayfield. “No information as to where or what for.”12 Dick Culp concurred: “We knew we were going to be doing something fairly major, and nobody had any idea where it was.” Everyone knew that the mission would have something to do with firing missiles—that was the ship’s job, after all. And obviously, it was reasonable to assume that they would be working with the same Lockheed X-17a system they’d been training and practicing on for the last couple of months. But firing the missiles from where, and carrying what, exactly? As usual in the military, such details were only for those deemed to have a “need to know,” and the crew, at least for now, didn’t need to know much.
Neither did many other people. “Secrecy was the watchword,” Admiral Mustin confirmed. “It was thought that if the Russians found out what we were doing, they might choose several courses of action, any one of which we wouldn’t like much.” For one thing, given the international feeling at the time regarding atomic testing and a possible test ban, Mustin thought that one thing the Russians could do “would be to raise a big hue and cry and appeal to the ban-the-bomb freaks and so on, and get the test called off.” Or on a less political, more practical level, “if things worked out more or less as expected, they [the Russians] could put up some instrumentation, too. They could learn a lot of technical results from our test and perhaps get as much information out of it as we did.”13
Security and secrecy involved not merely silence, but outright deception. “There was a lot of both cold weather and tropical weather gear brought aboard, so there was a lot of speculation as to where we were going,” Keith Mayfield said.14 The word went out that the Navy was going to be conducting unspecified test operations in the Arctic. Crew members were even shown films about the Arctic and cold weather operations. Such subterfuge extended all the way up the chain of command and beyond as Norton Sound departed Port Hueneme at 6 PM on August 1st, sailing for parts unknown to most.
“We had an elaborate cover scheme,” Mustin recalled. “She sailed from Point Mugu, Port Hueneme. She sailed west, and she was bound for test operations in the Pacific, ostensibly.” Unlike most vessels traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Sound would avoid the Panama Canal. As AFSWP technical director Frank Shelton explained, “We did not send the ship through the Panama Canal for security reasons. The Russians noted all naval vessels transiting the Canal.”15
Mustin continued, “All of the ship’s radio traffic was broadcast on the Pacific Fleet schedule. And we had made arrangements that all this traffic was then recorded by a naval communications station somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, encrypted in full, including the call signs—we didn’t have encrypted call signs in those days—and rebroadcast on the Atlantic schedule. So she, to anyone trying to find out anything about her by radio traffic analysis, was still in the Pacific, obviously, because traffic addressed to her was being transmitted to the Pacific. But it was reaching her completely covered.”16 Another tactic was the use of plain-language cover messages containing coded meanings.
With the ship safely underway and any contact with the outside world now strictly controlled, the crew learned a few more tantalizing details. “The crew was informed that we would be going to the South Atlantic,” said missile telemetry crewman Ken McMaster.17 Recalled Dick Culp, “It was after we left. That’s when they told us we’d be going around Cape Horn and firing in the South Atlantic. That’s basically all they told us.”18 Until the end of Argus—a term that even the Sound’s crew had not yet heard—the Norton Sound would be a ghost ship, alone, silent, cruising toward a mysterious rendezvous in the middle of nowhere on a most secret mission.
Which, of course, only encouraged speculation both above and below decks. “During the cruise I learned, through scuttlebutt, that we had atomic warheads aboard,” Ken McMaster remembered. Were they for testing purposes, scientific research, or was the Sound on her way to begin World War III? No one knew for sure, but such questions made for spirited discussions around the wardroom and in the berthing spaces.
The crew of the Sound had other distractions, however. Captain Gralla kept the missile-handling teams busy with repeated drills and simulated launches, not just in good weather and daylight but at night in the poorest conditions they could find. They practiced wrestling the X-17a onto its portable launch trailer on the Norton Sound’s fantail deck, trying to determine the worst conditions under which a launch might still be conducted. After much trial and error, the missileers found that launching was possible in winds of up to forty knots and sea swells up to sixteen feet, which were fairly alarming, if not uncommon, conditions. Finally, the crew demonstrated that they could get a missile out of storage, rolled out on the deck, secured in place, and erected in firing position in just about forty-five minutes. No one realized quite yet just how valuable all this exhaustive practice was going to prove.
In the days after Norton Sound set sail for the South Atlantic, the eight other vessels of Task Force 88 left their ports on the East Coast, including the Albemarle, the oiler Neosho, the destroyer Warrington, and the venerable aircraft carrier USS Tarawa, which would serve as Admiral Mustin’s flagship for the task force. Most of the ships sailed south, while the Albemarle headed for station at the Azores. Operating under the same strict security blackout as the Norton Sound, the crews aboard these vessels kept occupied with their own drills and exercises, which included launching small Loki/Dart antiaircraft missiles at sea to practice radar tracking and other Argus support functions.
Far above the Atlantic and Pacific, in an orbit ranging from 164 to 1381 miles, Explorer 4 was ready. It had been launched on schedule at 10 AM on July 26 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Missile Test Center, just in time for the Teak test that closed out the month. The Teak and subsequent Orange shots provided a bit of a shakedown for Explorer 4, but were still at far too low an altitude to do much more than gently tickle Van Allen’s onboard instruments. Most of the charged particles emitted by the blasts were soaked up in the dense lower atmosphere, as expected. But the satellite and its instrument package had proved to be healthy, functioning, and ready for Argus.
Unfortunately, Explorer 4 would be conducting its spaceborne observations of Argus all alone. After several delays, its intended companion, Explorer 5, launched from Cape Canaveral on the morning of August 24. But the final stage of the Jupiter C missile failed to fire, and Explorer 5, along with Van Allen’s painstakingly designed and crafted instrument package, fell back to sea to a final destination at the bottom of the Atlantic.
No matter. All was in motion: plans made, ships sailing, everything coming together. The first phase of Operation HARDTACK was wrapping up in the Pacific, to be followed by its Nevada phase in the fall, and then, assuming that international agreements and political goodwill prevailed, the nuclear test moratorium would take effect, for however long that goodwill persisted. Back at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, Nicholas Christofilos knew that the Argus tests would be among America’s last nuclear tests for quite a while—perhaps even forever, if some people got their way. If his theories were going to be proven correct, if he was going to be vindicated, this was the time, the only opportunity he might ever have.
It was now or never.