ANOTHER COLD AND ICY NIGHT IN THE TRACKLESS VOID OF THE SOUTH ATLANTIC. Somewhere in the darkness, a small group of men clad in heavy hooded parkas clustered around a missile launcher on the fantail of the USS Norton Sound, illuminated only by a set of makeshift floodlights mounted on poles. As they worked, a biting wind whipped around them, blowing snowflakes across the deck, whirling around the tall, thin missile resting on the launcher, and passing beyond into the inky blackness of the ocean.
Their preparations completed, they slowly, cautiously, began raising the missile to its fully upright launch position. As it rose, seeming to grow in stature against the dark skies, some of the men rested their gloved hands on guide ropes or the launcher frame, as if to urge the missile on, or perhaps, to reassure themselves. Atop the narrow structure of the missile, looking like the end of a Q-Tip, was an odd bulge: a small nuclear warhead.
Finally the men withdrew, leaving the Lockheed X-17a missile alone on the deck, standing in defiance of the choppy twenty-five-knot winds that occasionally shook it on its launch platform. Everyone knew those winds weren’t nearly strong enough to tip over the forty-foot, six-ton rocket with its nuclear warhead, much less the launch gantry. Or so they hoped.
Most of the ship’s crew, save for the launch technicians and a select few others, were below decks and behind closed hatches, their only connection with the event about to transpire consisting of terse announcements over the ship’s public address system. In the superstructure above deck, in the command spaces and telemetry room and radio shack, officers and sailors busied themselves watching instruments, staying in contact with the other ships and aircraft of the task force, and waiting.
The final command to fire the missile and send it on its spectacular one-way journey would come not from a human being, but from a machine. When the ship’s skipper, Captain Arthur Gralla, issued the order, an officer would press an “intent to launch” button that released control of the firing to an analog computer system tied into the gyroscopes deep within the Norton Sound that helped her navigate. Only when the constantly moving deck of the ship and the waiting missile atop it were at the properly determined angle would the Thiokol XM20 Sergeant solid-fuel first stage fire with its forty-eight thousand pounds of thrust and start the rocket on its way.
Gralla’s command was accepted and executed at 0220 hours Greenwich Meridian Time on August 27, 1958. Even in the unsteady seas, everyone aboard felt the ship’s stern momentarily drop with a shudder under the sudden thrust of the missile, the brilliant light of its first-stage engine revealing other vessels of the task force nearby. Then the ship steadied and the light congealed into a hurtling, glowing ball, followed by a mere point of bright light and then nothing at all, as the missile vanished into the heavy cloud layer above. In a few minutes, if all went well, the skies would be illuminated again by the detonation of the 1.7-kiloton warhead far above.
The missile technicians and the crew of the Norton Sound breathed a well-earned sigh of relief. Whatever else happened, the X-17a had been fired safely and successfully, and there was now one fewer atomic warhead on board. They had made some history: for the first time, an atomic ballistic missile had been fired from the deck of a ship at sea. Argus 1 was on schedule.
Unfortunately, it was not quite on target.
“There was something wrong, and we couldn’t be sure just what it was,” recalled Admiral Mustin. “The first thing we were sure of was that our calculations of the ballistic wind, and its effect on the weather cocking of the rocket, had been wrong. The rocket had not achieved a vertical trajectory.” As the rocket climbed higher, tracking radars picked it up and calculated its course, and at least two of the S2F aircraft in the murky sky above the ocean had managed to see the rocket trail. The rocket was not about to fall back onto the task force or any other unsuspecting people on Earth, but it was quickly becoming apparent that it was not going to achieve its planned altitude.
Mustin initially suspected that the rocket’s second stage had somehow failed to fire. Later analysis more or less concluded that a combination of the tricky, ever-shifting winds nudging the Argus 1 missile unpredictably, along with errors in the trajectory firing calculations, had resulted in an improper launching angle. It remained to be seen whether the final altitude of the warhead detonation would be enough to achieve the Argus effect and vindicate the predictions of the “Crazy Greek.”
The W-25 warhead dutifully exploded about seven minutes after departing the deck of the Norton Sound, at an altitude of about 110 miles and a position of 38.5 degrees south latitude and 11.5 degrees west longitude. The pilot of one of the S2F aircraft was flying at 22,000 feet and reported “a great luminous ball” about 40 degrees above the horizon. Back on the surface of the ocean, the few men standing outside on the Norton Sound, as well as a somewhat larger audience topside on the other task force vessels, saw the cloud layer above them glow brightly from horizon to horizon, flickering, then dimming. There was no sound save for the cold, howling winds.1
Those who saw the fireworks, such as they were, of Argus were fortunate. Particularly aboard the Norton Sound, most of the participants saw little or nothing of the fruits of their months-long work. “We opened the hatches,” recalled Quintin Owens, one of the tracking radar operators aboard the Sound. “The sky lit up brightly with a green tint.” Dick Culp didn’t even see that much, working in the telemetry station. Ken McMaster recalls watching the launch while standing in a hatch near the hangar door—“the noise and fire [were] frightening”—but he didn’t see the detonation at all.
At first, Argus 1 seemed to be pretty much a dud, at least scientifically speaking. The warhead had obviously detonated, but not at an optimal altitude, probably too low for any definitive results. But the visual observers, at least those who were airborne, certainly got their money’s worth. “For the next 30 minutes the aircrew observed and photographed an awesome auroral display as colors and shapes changed,” noted a government report.2 The witnesses down at sea level weren’t as fortunate; the cloud cover prevented them from seeing much beyond the initial flash of the explosion.
Still, the presence of auroral phenomena was a good sign that something was going on up there. About an hour after detonation, the first of the Jason rockets was launched from Patrick Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral. In the ensuing hours, three more launch attempts were made from Patrick, Ramey, and Wallops, but only one was successful.
Martin Walt, a young physicist with Lockheed working under contract with the Air Force for the Argus project, was sitting in the telemetry center at the Cape, eyes glued to an oscilloscope, watching for signals from the radiation detectors aboard the rockets. “I watched intently during the 10-minute flights,” he recalled. Every one hundred seconds, he took readings and plotted the data, looking to confirm that the rocket had passed through the Argus band of electrons. “The results were disappointing as only the normal background had registered. At that point we ceased launching and reported that no significant effects had been seen”3—most likely because of the errant trajectory and relatively low altitude of Argus 1.
Those farther north in the Atlantic, up near the conjugate point in the Azores where the Albemarle was waiting, didn’t get to enjoy the show that the southern observers had witnessed. An Air Force C-97 observer plane reported an orange glow in the sky about twenty-two minutes after the detonation, and strong radar echoes were picked up by the Albemarle and other monitoring stations in the area, but no auroras or other visual fireworks were evident.
It took Explorer 4 to demonstrate conclusively that there was indeed an Argus effect. About three and a half hours after Argus 1, the satellite passed through the geographical region where the Argus radiation shell was expected to form. Sure enough, Van Allen’s instruments immediately began registering a sharp rise in electron flux, far above the natural background that had been carefully monitored and confirmed previously by Explorer 1 and over the past several weeks by Explorer 4. “The ‘Argus effect’ was easily and promptly observed,” Van Allen wrote later in a paper. “The great peak which was intersected at 0608 UT on August 27 had no precedent in four weeks of previous observations of the natural radiation. Moreover, it was encountered on the first observed intersection with the planned magnetic shell following the Argus I detonation.”4 Repeated passes by Explorer 4 showed an electron shell extending and spreading, following the Earth’s natural magnetic field lines—just as Christofilos had predicted.
Still, it wasn’t much of a payoff, considering the enormous amount of effort that had been expended thus far on the entire project. Even if the first shot had been an unqualified success, another shot, which would provide more confirming data, would have been an irresistible proposition. Since the results of this first attempt had been rather equivocal at best, and since the Norton Sound was already in place with two more missiles and atomic warheads at the ready, not to mention the rest of the task force, why not try again? The powers-that-be certainly agreed. “Because of the negative results from other projects … headquarters concluded that a second shot was required,”5 said an official history. Mustin recalled, “We told Washington … we were getting ready to launch the second one.”6 In a terse cable to the Pentagon about Argus 1’s faulty trajectory, he said, “Still seeking reasons.”7
Because the Albemarle and other northerly-located forces hadn’t seen much, the decision was made to change the launching site and thus the detonation point, which would move the all-important magnetic conjugate point farther north and hopefully closer to the Azores and the Albemarle. Mustin took his flotilla farther south, closer to the South Pole and into even colder, less hospitable seas. Sailors aboard the Norton Sound and the other vessels amused themselves by snapping pictures of passing icebergs.
Meanwhile, the Lockheed missile technicians checked and rechecked their charges. “These rockets were really just castoffs,” Mustin noted. “They were the leftovers of an earlier phase of the Polaris program, modified to our purpose.” That was the reason for the “a” part of their X-17a designation. “The main thing to calculate was how far off the vertical must we launch this thing so that it would fly a vertical track.”8 Nobody wanted another wonky trajectory, as with the first shot.
By the night of August 29, everyone was on station. The S2F planes were once again aloft, flying their observation box pattern. The weather was once again marginal, with winds at twenty-two knots, but everyone was used to that by now. Unfortunately, at about quarter after ten that evening, the missile beacon system began to malfunction. By the time it was fixed, it was well after midnight. Finally, at 3:10 AM, Argus 2 left the deck of the Norton Sound.
This time, things looked better. “We were satisfied that it had gone vertical,” Mustin said. “Everybody in the planes caught it right where it ought to be, as it came up … and our radar plots showed it going vertical.”9
The trajectory was good. Then a different problem: once again, the missile was not reaching proper altitude. “They saw the second stage ignite, but they didn’t see the third stage,” Mustin said.10 Several minutes later, the sky again lit up from horizon to horizon as the warhead detonated. Except for the aircrews, however, the light show was more disappointing than with the first shot, not only for Mustin and his South Atlantic forces but also for the Albemarle up north, again thanks to heavy cloud cover. Neither the observer aircraft nor the radar stations in the North Atlantic detected much, if anything, from Argus 2. No aurora, no glow in the sky, no doubt to their considerable disappointment.
The Jason team was considerably more successful, however. This time, they managed to successfully launch ten out of twelve rockets, beginning just under half an hour after Argus 2 and continuing until about four days later. The readings from the rocket instruments provided a good picture of the Argus 2 radiation belt. “We all felt elated at that point,” Walt remembered.
And Explorer 4 came through again as well, although with a bit of confusion. The initial data reports seemed to be coming from an orbital position that should have coincided with the Argus 1 shot, not the Argus 2 event. Finally the analysts realized that Explorer 4’s course had shifted several minutes in latitude, throwing off the predictions. Compensating for the orbital shift solved the discrepancy; the Explorer data nicely complemented the Jason results as well. “The rocket instrumentation was more elaborate and gave the best determination of the energy spectrum of the electrons,” explained Walt.11
“But we hadn’t done what we set out to do, so we got the third rocket ready,” Mustin remembered.12 The third and final Argus shot would prove to be the most memorable of them all.
MUSTIN AND THE REST OF TASK FORCE 88, NOT TO MENTION ALL THE OFFICIALS at the Pentagon and ARPA and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and everyone else even tangentially aware of Argus, had done everything possible to maintain the most scrupulous security from the very beginnings of the enterprise. No less a personage than President Eisenhower himself had emphasized from the start that Argus had to remain top secret for reasons both military and political. Even by the time atomic warheads began exploding in the midwinter darkness over the South Atlantic, many of the participants in Argus, from the sailors at sea to technicians at ground observation posts and labs around the world, still had only a vague notion of what was really going on.
So confidence in the clandestine nature of the proceedings remained high. Even Frank Shelton, Argus technical director, was confident that it would be possible to “indefinitely maintain that [Argus] had never occurred.”13
Unfortunately, secrecy and security are concepts of the human mind, not the natural universe. As scientists such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and their brethren throughout history have repeatedly warned those in power, the so-called “secrets” of nature are open to anyone and everyone who cares to discover them, whether they involve how to make a fire, carve a better arrowhead, or build an atomic bomb.
Van Allen’s discovery of the natural radiation belts girdling the Earth did more than simply galvanize Nicholas Christofilos into making Argus a reality. It also inspired countless other scientists around the world and aroused their scientific curiosity and inventiveness, getting them to ask questions and propose experiments to find answers. Among them were Edward Ney and Paul Kellogg, a pair of scientists from the University of Minnesota.
“Upon hearing of the Earth’s newly discovered trapped radiation in May 1958, [they] suggested that a nuclear device might be detonated some 250 miles high near the southern auroral zone to see what effect it might have on the radiation belt,” George Ludwig recounted.14 There was no frantic talk about stopping Soviet missiles or defending the US from the Red hordes, or knocking out enemy satellites that might be spying on us or preparing to drop H-bombs on America from outer space. Ney and Kellogg were simply scientists, excited about a new discovery and eager to explore its nature and implications, for no motivation or purpose other than pure intellectual curiosity. “Those discussions took place in the absence of any knowledge by Ed or Paul of the Argus Project,” Ludwig emphasized.15 Perhaps, thought Ney and Kellogg, the concept would be an interesting project for the ongoing International Geophysical Year, a way to extend Van Allen’s discovery into new areas of spaceflight and experimentation.
They took their idea to friends in Washington at the Office of Naval Research, the same folks who had been launching (or trying to launch) Vanguard satellites. The response was decidedly chilly. Cease and desist, the researchers were told in no uncertain terms—though they were not told why. Undeterred, Ney and Kellogg next decided to approach Herbert York at ARPA, but were firmly dissuaded from that notion as well.
Finally, they settled on the time-honored practice of all scientists: publishing in the open scientific literature, in this case, the venerable journal Nature. “When the Pentagon learned of that, their consternation changed to full-blown alarm,” wrote Ludwig.16 Gently but firmly, Ney and Kellogg were persuaded to hold off on publishing their work. No, we can’t explain why, but you’ll find out soon enough.
However, Ney and Kellogg might have been spared some grief had anyone at the Pentagon or CIA pondered the universality of nature and the evanescence of supposed “secrets.” Less than a year later, on March 8, 1959, two Russian scientists, I.S. Shklovskiy (who would later become famous for his ideas on extraterrestrial intelligence and his work with Carl Sagan) and V.I. Krasovskiy published an article in the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya reporting the detection of high-energy particles in the lower Van Allen belt—speculating that the phenomenon might be artificial. “It is not to be excluded that this zone has, if we may say so, an artificial origin,” they wrote. “High-altitude explosions would be fully sufficient for the formation of the lower zone of fast charged particles.”17 In their article, the researchers referred to some of the recent US tests in Nevada that had been conducted from high towers or balloons.
Such musings by Soviet scientists did not, of course, mean that the USSR either knew anything about Argus or was plotting such experiments itself. But it’s clear that Christofilos was hardly alone in his wild ideas of atomic bombs and radiation belts. “The idea of injecting charged particles into the Earth’s magnetic field by nuclear detonations did, as it turned out, also occur independently to the Soviets,” as Ludwig wrote. “It is unknown when the idea first occurred to them—it might have been either before or after they learned of our discovery of the region of high-intensity radiation.”18
A survey of foreign scientific literature on ionospheric research conducted for the US Congress about ten years after Argus noted, “It would appear much more likely from subsequent Soviet articles, however, that not only the USSR, but other countries, had foreknowledge of the [Argus] tests and were monitoring them.”19 That was a thought that would certainly have given Admiral Mustin, Nicholas Christofilos, not to mention President Eisenhower, a severe case of insomnia. The report also noted that the worldwide monitoring efforts encouraged and supported by the IGY program would have made the conduct of secret nuclear tests such as Argus very difficult if not impossible, another thought of which the Argus people were already keenly and painfully aware.
While Admiral Mustin’s patrolling S2F aircraft and destroyer screen kept away any nosy Soviet trawlers or submarines from the Argus operational area, the global nature of the Argus experiments and their effects couldn’t be so easily contained. Ludwig observed that “The Soviets also had ample opportunity to see the results of the Argus tests by receiving the Explorer IV signals at their receiving stations. On one specific occasion, as Explorer IV was transiting one of the Argus-generated shells, it was easily within range of their Tashkent receiving station.”20 Even worse, it wasn’t just the Russians: similar French geophysical stations also detected them.21.
At the time, neither the Soviets nor the French quite realized yet just what their instruments had stumbled upon, nor would they know conclusively until several more months had passed. For the moment at least, only the privileged few who were privy to Argus knew precisely what was going on down in the South Atlantic.