FOR MOST PEOPLE, THE SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN IS LESS A DESTINATION than just a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else. Very few tourists or other casual visitors venture there, probably due to the lack of amenities and easy communications with the outside world. Admiral Mustin described it as “almost a maritime desert. It’s just been a place that people stayed away from.”1 All of which made it a perfect stage for Operation Argus
Mustin, now aboard his flagship Tarawa and leading Task Force 88 southward, busied himself with various preparations. His meteorology officer had discovered weather maps of the South Atlantic drawn years before by South African observers, and poring over them gave Mustin a good idea of the fickle and infinitely changeable weather patterns in the area. Mustin brought together the captains of the other TF 88 vessels for highly secret briefings, ferrying them over to the Tarawa by helicopter. “I had told them what we were going to do, and why we were going to do it; and what the security implications were, and what the hazard implications were; and that they could tell no living soul except their exec [executive officer], and he could tell nobody,” said Mustin.2
Launching the Loki sounding rockets from the deck of the destroyer USS Warrington gave the task force practice at radar tracking and detection. “This gave us a pretty good rehearsal,” Mustin recalled. “It also added a lot of visible activity, of a perfectly innocent nature, for all the ships’ crews and so on to see. The story was that we were doing some high-altitude experiments.”3
The Tarawa and her aircrews also had the opportunity to practice what would be one of her main duties during the Argus operation: maintaining security. “We knew that we would need a considerable degree of surveillance around the area, for safety’s sake and others,” Mustin said. Airplanes and helicopters from the Tarawa would patrol a perimeter around the task force, keeping an eye out for Russian trawlers, submarines, and other suspicious observers. None were definitively sighted, but Mustin was ready for them, with plans in place to turn away from any unwanted company and if necessary even split up the task force, spread out his ships over a wide area, and rendezvous again later at some predetermined point.
An ocean away on the other side of the planet, Norton Sound continued ahead on her own solitary odyssey. The missile handling and launching drills were briefly interrupted by the traditional “shellback” initiation festivities for the “pollywog” crewmen who were crossing the equator for the first time. It provided a mostly welcome diversion from below-decks scuttlebutt, daily routine, and the mysterious mission on which the vessel was embarked, the details of which were still unknown to most of the crew. The official “Crossing the Line” certificates awarded to the new shellbacks had been among the various supplies loaded aboard the Sound and the other task force vessels before departure—in cartons all labeled Top Secret and delivered personally to ship captains in order to preserve security.4
Another highlight for the Sound crewmen came a few days later on August 17, as the ship went “round the Horn” of South America and entered the Atlantic. Becoming a shellback and going around the Horn on the same voyage granted them the exalted status of “horned shellbacks”—something of which few US sailors could boast.
It was obvious by now that whatever the Norton Sound’s ultimate destination, it was not going to be a tropical paradise, nor would it be the Arctic. But the transition from summer in the Northern hemisphere to winter in the Southern hemisphere was striking and obvious, marked not merely by the occasional iceberg passing by but also with the icy winds and choppy seas that lashed the ship. With a length of 540 feet and beam of almost seventy feet, the Sound was a fairly large vessel. The design of her hull made her stable to roll, but, as Mustin noted, “surprisingly prone to pitch.” As sea and weather conditions grew steadily more challenging, the value of all the practice drills insisted upon by Captain Gralla at the onset of the cruise became clear.
After steaming south for most of her voyage thus far, the Norton Sound now headed north, bound for the farthest place on Earth. The first vessel to arrive on her assigned station was much farther north, the Albemarle, which took up her post in the Azores on August 23. Meanwhile, the rest of Task Force 88 arrived in the Argus operational area, the lee of Gough Island in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, miles from the nearest land. “The weather was lousy,” said Mustin. “Gigantic swells were rolling past.” But then, they had been expecting as much.
Fortunately, they wouldn’t have long to wait for the star performer of the upcoming show. Late that afternoon, lookouts on the Norton Sound reported to Captain Gralla that they had sighted the Tarawa. The Sound’s radioman dispatched a droll message to Task Force 88: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”
One of the most unusual military operations in the history of the world had officially begun. In the next several days, the men aboard this small flotilla in the middle of nowhere would attempt to do something that had never been done before.
AS THE MILITARY CONTINGENT OF ARGUS CONTINUED TO GEAR UP, SO DID THE scientific corps. Data tapes from Explorer 4 poured into the Iowa City lab bearing data from Teak and Orange, all of which needed to be reduced and analyzed before the impending Argus shots added to the already impossible workload of Ludwig, McIlwain, and the other Van Allen acolytes. The failure of the Explorer 5 launch added to the pressure, since it left Explorer 4 the sole orbital observation post for Argus.
But there would still be some backup for Explorer. While the Explorers, blessed with the official imprimatur of the International Geophysical Year, were at this point the only public operation connected with Argus (though not, of course, to the public’s knowledge), other preparations were also coming together in August 1958. One was an audacious, frantically conducted effort by the Navy, originally conceived in the rush of post-Sputnik panic less than a year earlier.
Officially, the Navy already had a dog in the fight for American satellite dominance with the Vanguard program, notorious for its embarrassing launch failure on December 6, 1957. While the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) famously saved America’s pride at the end of the following month with Explorer 1, Vanguard also redeemed itself not long afterward by finally launching the second US satellite on March 17. The Vanguard project was destined to be taken over by civilian hands upon the birth of NASA on October 1, 1958.
Unofficially, however, while Vanguard and ABMA vied to even the satellite score with the Soviets as well as each other, the people at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in China Lake, California, where the Navy developed and tested weapons under top secrecy, had their own ideas. At first they focused on the conventional concept of launching satellites from the ground, but the ABMA had a lock on the requisite rocket technology. Then, an inspiration: what if a smaller rocket was launched from a jet fighter at high altitude to kick a satellite into space?
Much like Argus, it was another of those “so crazy it just might work” notions that flourished in the frenzied atmosphere of the Cold War, and the NOTS scientists and engineers set to work devising Project Pilot, later unofficially but universally dubbed NOTSNIK (NOTS for Naval Ordnance Test Station, with the -NIK suffix as a nod to Sputnik). The NOTS team proposed using a specially-modified Douglas Skyray F4D-1 jet to launch a small multistage rocket carrying an even smaller satellite. The reporters who had derided Vanguard’s first unsuccessful satellite as an aluminum grapefruit would have been even more amused by the NOTSNIK satellite package, an eight-inch-diameter plastic donut stuffed with rudimentary electronics weighing just over two pounds.
Still, the NOTS team managed to wrangle some research money out of Navy officials in Washington, and set to work under complete secrecy, hoping to startle the world. In a canny move, they soon got more money by proposing that NOTSNIK could serve as a backup for Explorer 4’s Argus observations. That hope became the driving force for the project—under, as with most everything else associated with Argus, impossible deadlines.
Unfortunately, despite its best intentions and clever conception, NOTSNIK would turn out much as Vanguard’s first effort, though thankfully wholly out of the public eye. Several launch attempts in late July and in August before the Argus shots were all unsuccessful, and the Navy pulled the plug. Still, some of the NOTSNIK ground stations did manage to collect some useful Argus data from Explorer 4 to supplement other observations. (It would not be the end of the concept of aircraft-launched space vehicles. The Air Force would revisit the idea in the 1980s as a possible means not of launching satellites, but of shooting them down.)
The quiet failure of NOTSNIK didn’t leave Explorer 4 entirely on its own, however, nor would the Navy get all of the Argus action. While the Navy was busy assembling task forces and attempting to launch rockets from fighter planes, the Air Force Special Weapons Center was preparing Project Jason, in which a series of high-altitude sounding rockets would be simultaneously launched from various sites along the East Coast to pierce the expected Argus radiation belt and make scientific measurements.
Though scheduled to coincide with the Argus launches, one Jason experiment was conducted early, both as a sort of dress rehearsal and also to provide a calibration measurement for the later shots. On August 15, several days after the Orange high-altitude nuclear test over Johnston Island in the Pacific, a Jason rocket was launched from Patrick Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral. As with the Jason shots that would follow, it was a five-stage solid-fuel rocket loaded with instrumentation, including radiation sensors and telemetry equipment. The three sites set for the big show were Patrick; the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) station at Wallops Island, Virginia; and Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico, with each station respectively dubbed Papa, Whiskey, and Romeo. Shortly after the Argus rockets left the deck of the Norton Sound, each site would send forth its rockets. Since they would penetrate the presumed Argus radiation shell from the ground up in a more or less perpendicular direction, and only for a brief period, the Jason sounding rockets weren’t expected to provide as comprehensive a data picture as that expected from Explorer 4. Still, they would serve as an important complement to and perhaps confirmation of whatever Explorer had to report.
Argus would also be heavily monitored from below, an effort officially designated as Project Midas. This would include the observations from Task Force 88 vessels, including the Albemarle at the North Atlantic conjugate point, as well as ground stations and aircraft from airbases in Portugal and Spain. Further monitoring would be conducted at other locations around the globe.
Whether visual phenomena, geomagnetic disturbances, radio interference, or something else completely unexpected, the effects of Argus were not about to go unobserved. Everyone involved realized that here was a unique opportunity that might never come again.
BACK IN THE FRIGID, TURBULENT SOUTH ATLANTIC ABOARD THE TARAWA, Admiral Mustin was worried about the weather.
It was not looking good. His meteorologist, Commander Max C. Jack, had continued to study whatever historical data he could find about weather patterns in the area. Most of the major storms in the South Atlantic, he discovered, appeared to originate around two major points: one just off the tip of South America, and the other near Buenos Aires. After formation, a storm would usually follow a very predictable path eastward across the Atlantic. Whichever origin point, the paths happened to converge in a most unfortunate location: “the spot that was our chosen launch point,” Mustin remembered.5
But that was only in theory. Reality was bad enough. “It snowed and all sorts of things,” Mustin said. “It really was truly winter. It would be bright sun one minute, and just horizontally driving snow the next. Wind from the east, wind from the west, whoever knew what. These circular storms would go by.”6 Even routine operations, such as refueling the task force vessels from the oiler Neosho, became hazardous tests of endurance in the rough, cold seas.
The only up-to-date weather observations available came from low-power radio stations broadcasting from South Africa, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or the Falkland Islands, and reception was spotty at best. Since the presence and purpose of Task Force 88 remained top secret, direct inquiries to outside civilian weather stations were out of the question. Further complicating matters was the fact that it was generally impossible to apply whatever limited data could be obtained from South American stations and those in South Africa to make any kind of coherent forecast. Mustin decided to deploy the two destroyer escorts in Task Force 88 to serve as a weather picket. “The reason was that the prevailing winds were from the west, and the storms approached from the west,” he said. “These little ships were better in that kind of heavy weather than the World War II destroyers” (also serving in Task Force 88). The two destroyer escorts took turns on weather station, deploying about three hundred miles west of the main task force, which gave the main force about seven hours advance warning of bad weather.7
It was going to be a day-to-day, hour-to-hour situation. The value of the repeated missile drills, both those in good weather off Point Mugu on the other side of the world and those conducted in forty-knot winds and sixteen-foot swells was becoming painfully obvious. The Argus shots were not going to go off in ideal conditions.
As the man in charge of the entire ball game, Mustin had more to think about than simply launching atomic missiles off of a ship. The weather would also play a key factor in the observations that could be made and the data that would be collected. The worldwide network of other observers on sea, earth, air, and in space would be unaffected by the weather in the South Atlantic, but that was still where the action was going to happen, the ringside seat. The other ships of Task Force 88 would be conducting their own observations, as would specially instrumented aircraft from the Tarawa. Heavy cloud cover, much less snow and wind, would spoil the show for everyone, not to mention increasing the hazards. Mustin noted that he didn’t much like the idea of his aircraft “up there in the dark, above the clouds, then coming down through a 20,000-foot cloud layer, to land in the black of night on a deck with blowing snow on it.”8
For Argus to work, the X-17a missile had to be launched from the Norton Sound at a nearly vertical trajectory, which meant being able to predict and compensate for the winds as precisely as possible. The missile launcher was not designed for continuous adjustments, “like, for example, a modern naval gun that stays aimed at a fixed point in space while the ship moves around underneath it,” Mustin explained.9 Because of the great acceleration of the missile, the wind would have little if any effect after launch, but launching at a proper trajectory was critical.
One small consolation, both for Admiral Mustin and the task force crew in general, was that fallout was not going to be an issue. Almost all other atomic tests in the Pacific and in Nevada had to pay close attention to the weather not just to ensure optimal conditions at test time but also to predict and prepare for possible fallout wind patterns after the shot. With the Argus detonations occurring at an altitude of several hundred miles above the earth, there was no reasonable possibility of fallout. Whatever else happened, there would be no Castle Bravo/Lucky Dragon fiasco with Argus.
The issue of radiological safety had been a somewhat delicate subject for Argus planners, however. The typical procedure, as practiced for nuclear tests in the Pacific, was to issue film badges to all personnel who might conceivably be exposed to radiation. But in those cases, everyone knew going in that they were about to participate in a nuclear test.
Not so with Argus, being conducted in utmost secrecy at the bottom of the world. “The security aspects of the Argus experiments precluded the operation of the type of radiological safety program that is common to nuclear testing,” said the final task force report, adding ominously, “It was therefore decided that the interests of the government should be protected against possible future lawsuits by a radiological safety program that would not reveal to personnel of the task force that nuclear testing was involved in their operations.”10
Although as per standard practice, the Navy had obtained four thousand film badges, enough to supply every member of the task force if necessary, they were actually given only to select people, those already aware of the true nature of Argus. Norton Sound crewman Dick Culp wasn’t one of them. After developing bladder cancer later in life, he eventually received $75,000 through a compensation program established by the Department of Justice in 1990 for veterans who contracted certain types of cancer linked to atmospheric atomic testing. “I think there were a fair number of people who actually got compensation for that,” he recalled. “And even some that were not out on the high decks. In the engine room there were a couple of them that I know were compensated.” But without any kind of radiological exposure records, a direct causal link is impossible to establish. “Basically, if you could prove you were on the ship and you had medical records that proved you had one of the selected cancers, you got your payment,” said Culp. “I don’t know that anything can be taken from [that], other than it happened.”11
Said Mustin, “We couldn’t accept issuing every man in the task force a film badge … because this would establish beyond a shadow of a doubt the nuclear association of what we were going to do. We simply couldn’t afford to have that revealed until quite a bit after the fact.”12
So only select personnel, including the pilots of the aircraft who would conduct airborne observations and the personnel aboard the Norton Sound directly involved in handling the nuclear warheads, received radiation film badges. Additional film packets were surreptitiously placed in exposed open-air locations on all the task force ships to monitor post-shot radiation, if any. Meanwhile, during the shots, the Norton Sound would be buttoned up as tightly as possible under the same precautions prescribed for an atomic attack—just in case.
Such precautions, of course, did not preclude the possibility of a launch mishap bringing a 1.7-kiloton nuclear warhead down in the middle of the sea to obliterate Task Force 88.
The troublesome weather also helped to somewhat mitigate another concern, namely operational security. The Tarawa had already been conducting routine air patrols twice a day with her squadron of Grumman S2F Tracker fixed-wing aircraft, ensuring that no unwanted company came near the task force, whether accidentally or intentionally. While the patrols continued in the lead up to the test shots, the bad weather did help to ease fears about uninvited guests in the form of Russian submarines or fishing trawlers.
With Explorer 4 also up and humming along in orbit, yet another complication arrived for Mustin to deal with. “We were supposed to launch [the missile] so as to get the detonation at a time when the satellite was in a certain spot on its path around the earth.”
It all amounted to an intricate operational dance of ships and aircraft, which also had to be coordinated with the Albemarle up north at the magnetic conjugate point, the Jason sounding rockets, Midas observation planes, ground observers, and all the other monitoring stations around the world.
But there was time for one more dress rehearsal. On August 25 and 26, the Norton Sound fired off four small Deacon sounding rockets to simulate the main event, giving everyone a chance to practice their jobs and coordinate techniques. One of the most challenging jobs fell to the Grumman S2F Tracker aircraft. “We wanted—if we could get it—to have some kind of visual observation above the clouds. So quite a while before launch time, we would launch four S2Fs to struggle up to get on top of the clouds, which really was just about at, if not slightly above, their intended operating ceiling,” explained Mustin. The S2F was, after all, designed as an antisubmarine aircraft, intended to operate at relatively low altitudes above the water to search for enemy subs, not to pierce the heavens like a jet fighter. Unlike fighter aircraft, they also didn’t carry oxygen for the crews to accommodate high-altitude operations. The crews had portable oxygen equipment, but that limited their range.
“We would station them such that, at a certain point in the countdown, the four planes would be at the four corners of a square, centered above the launching ship. Each one would start in the same direction around the perimeter of this square so that, hopefully, when the rocket went by, they’d be in a position … [to] get a pretty good look at it.”13
Aboard the Norton Sound, Lockheed personnel along with select Navy missilemen and Sandia technicians prepared the first X-17a for launch. With the missiles on their portable wheeled gantry, “getting them out there [on deck] in the weather was rather interesting,” missileman Dick Culp wryly recalled.14 Again, this was where the repeated practice drills—not to mention the heavy cold-weather gear that had been loaded aboard back in Hueneme—paid off.
The September 1st deadline was rapidly approaching, the weather was closing in, and time was running out. The countdown to the first shot began.