GIVEN HIS WARTIME NAVY SERVICE FOLLOWED BY YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC WORK using military resources, James Van Allen was no stranger to the peculiar world of official secrecy and classification. But there was always a fundamental tension there, between the requirements of secrecy and his identity as a scientist dedicated to the principles and long-standing scientific traditions of open research and freedom of knowledge. Most of the time, he had been content to walk that sometimes shifting line, reasoning that he was working with the military, not for it; under its tent, perhaps, but not under its thumb.
Now that reasoning was beginning to feel somewhat hollow, and the continued restrictions on Argus and his Explorer 4 results were beginning to chafe. He could understand perfectly why Argus had to be kept secret beforehand, and during the actual nuclear shots. But that was all over with now; mission accomplished, the job done. What possible justification, he began to ask, was there to keep everything in the dark indefinitely?
There were other considerations besides basic principles. Explorer 4 had been publicly planned, announced, and conducted as a part of the International Geophysical Year. The IGY’s raison d’etre was that it was completely public and international. All data was to be gathered by the sixty-seven participating nations in a spirit of complete scientific openness and collegiality. That meant all was to be shared freely. The IGY was supposed to represent the nations of the earth coming together in peace and friendship to explore and study the planet that they all shared in kind. Including even the USSR, and of course, the United States.
So all of the data collected by Explorer 4, as an IGY project, had to be shared with the world. There had to be time allowed to collate and analyze and interpret, but eventually, the data had to be made public. It was more than just a matter of scientific principle and cooperation—the US had signed an international agreement to that effect. If they held something back, if they refused to share some of their findings, then they were not only breaking that agreement, but everyone—most particularly, the USSR—would wonder just what the hell the US was hiding, and why.
This had been a topic of some concern from the very beginnings of Argus. A few of the scientists involved, such as Herbert York at ARPA, had pointed out the IGY issue, something which became even more of a problem with the necessity of borrowing (or perhaps, commandeering) various IGY equipment and resources for Argus in order to maintain the impossibly tight project deadline. That problem directly conflicted with another: the need to keep Argus hushed up so as not to endanger the ongoing negotiations for a test ban treaty or at least the prospects for a moratorium.
At first, such concerns were briefly considered and then mostly brushed aside, under the pressures of time and planning for Argus. But now that the operation had been successfully accomplished, the missiles fired, warheads detonated, data collected, and everyone sent home (and the testing moratorium safely in place for the moment), the questions arose anew, and at a greater volume than before.
As far as the Pentagon and the military were concerned, there was nothing to talk about. They were perfectly happy to keep Argus under wraps indefinitely. “The satellite instrumentation records that disclose the Christofilos effect are classified and are not being made available to International Geophysical Year authorities,” stated the Navy’s final Argus report from Task Force 88, and that was that.1
The problem was that events were transpiring to make such a position difficult to sustain, if not ultimately impossible. Not only were pesky scientists such as Van Allen pushing for more openness, so were others in government, including members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). As 1958 transitioned into 1959, the Argus secrecy that had been simmering along contentedly in a slow, rolling boil was threatening to boil over.
“A great debate within government developed as to what kind of public announcement should be made, if any,” Killian recalled. “There was a tricky question involved related to the International Geophysical Year because some of the data-gathering facilities that were employed were IGY facilities, and there was a general IGY commitment to publish the data from work done under the program … while recognizing that there were important military uses for the data yielded by the experiment and that this information should be kept secret, nevertheless there were strong convictions in PSAC that the experiment should be made public and such results as could appropriately be published should be made available for the benefit of the scientific community.”2
That community was already quite restless, both in and out of government. So were several members of the fourth estate, who, though so far unbeknownst to Killian or most anyone else in scientific or government circles, were already quite aware of the Argus saga.
Hanson Baldwin, longtime military correspondent for the New York Times, had found out about Argus at least several weeks before any missiles had left the deck of the Norton Sound in August 1958. Apparently the leak originated with someone from James Van Allen’s lab back in Iowa. Possibly a graduate student, possibly a technician—the identity of Argus’s own whistleblower has never been definitively ascertained, even after six decades. (Killian’s successor as PSAC chairman, George Kistiakowsky, later noted in his diaries that “Roy Johnson of ARPA has investigated this leak and has definitely traced it to the No. 2 man in the Van Allen Laboratories,” which would seem to indicate Carl McIlwain, though this is not confirmed.)3
Baldwin knew he had a big story, but as a Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent, graduate of Annapolis, and savvy observer of all things military, he knew the serious ramifications of revealing such a secret operation, especially before it even happened, not only for the military but for the delicate test-ban negotiations ongoing in Geneva. He decided he needed some guidance on the scientific aspects of it all, so he confided in his Times colleague, science reporter Walter Sullivan.
“About the end of June, 1958, [Baldwin] put his head in my office and asked if he could talk to me privately for a few minutes,” Sullivan later wrote in his book-length account of the IGY, Assault On the Unknown. “He had learned, he said, that the United States planned to fire several atomic bombs in space.”4
Baldwin explained his reluctance about going public too soon. In the meantime, Sullivan suggested consulting a friend of his who was “so centrally involved in the United States space program that he would be sure to know of the operation.” That was Richard Porter, chairman of the IGY Panel on Rockets and Satellites. Sullivan was sure that Porter would also “give us his candid personal opinion, rather than merely an official line.”5
Porter was “both horrified and amused” when Sullivan told him what he and Baldwin had already uncovered. “I can’t tell you not to print it, but I can say this: If you do, the operation will never take place,” he told the science reporter.
To emphasize the point, about an hour later Sullivan got a call from ARPA’s head of security, William H. Godel, imploring him to hold the story. Sullivan assured the nervous security chief that he and Baldwin had already resolved not to publish anything before the Argus operation actually took place, which seemed to calm Godel for the moment. In exchange, they had ARPA’s assurance that Argus would be officially announced and revealed to the world after it was all over, and that the Times would be informed in advance so they could be the first to break the story.
Realizing that they’d obviously struck a very sensitive nerve somewhere within the bowels of the Pentagon, Sullivan and Baldwin agreed to sit on the story—for the time being. Which didn’t, of course, preclude further probings on their part, as they attempted to piece together their fragments of information into some sort of coherent whole.
Whatever his own misgivings about secrecy, Van Allen himself was as yet unaware of impending leaks. Aside from busily continuing to analyze the treasure trove of Explorer 4 data and preparing for new space missions, he had been busy helping to publicize the aspects of Explorer 4’s accomplishments that could be publicized. In the fall of 1958, he contacted several of the companies that had provided components of Explorer’s instruments, sending them photos of their contributions and granting them permission to use them in advertising materials.
“The enclosed photo shows a few of the 2N338, 2N335, and 608-C transistors and diodes employed in the Explorer IV satellite,” he wrote to electronics manufacturer Texas Instruments (TI) on October 22. “You are free to use this photo for publicity purposes, advertisements, etc., provided only that the State University of Iowa is mentioned in the release … Explorer IV was developed on an extremely tight schedule [Van Allen couldn’t reveal exactly why, of course] and we wish to express our appreciation for the cooperation received from you and your Company which enabled us to carry the project through to a successful conclusion.”6 The company wasted no time in making good use of Van Allen’s offering, just a month later sending him a work-up of a full-page ad for the upcoming January issue of Scientific American mentioning the “added reliability and economy” of “TI transistors for Explorer IV.” Noted the cover letter, “Please note that credit for the photo is being given to your fine university in the ad.”7
Slowly but inevitably, the dark curtain of secrecy and security cloaking Argus wore thin. By the end of 1958, it had become little more than a veil, concealing details but not the general outlines of its subject. And to their increasing alarm, Baldwin and Sullivan began to feel their exclusive scoop beginning to slip away.
Much to Sullivan’s chagrin, in October 1958, the man who started it all, Nick Christofilos, presented his ideas of creating an artificial radiation belt of electrons around the Earth at the Chicago meeting of the American Physical Society. “The only major point he omitted was the use of an atomic bomb to provide the electrons,” Sullivan later complained.8 Instead, Christofilos proposed the rather outlandish idea of generating the electron shield with an orbiting nuclear accelerator, something like what he’d been working on at Brookhaven and then at Livermore labs. Perhaps because he already had a well-established reputation for engagingly bizarre ideas, no one seemed to take special notice. Of course, Christofilos neglected to mention that what he was proposing in theory had already been proven in fact experimentally over the South Atlantic several months earlier.
Then came the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C., just after Christmas, which Sullivan duly attended as part of his usual Times science beat. At the meeting came more rumblings of Argus from other quarters, including a paper presented by noted astronomer Fred Singer on “Artificial Modification of the Earth’s Radiation Belt,” and a press conference with Singer and James Van Allen. A Newsweek reporter kept asking Van Allen and Singer about any possible connections between the radiation belts and high-altitude nuclear explosions, such as the HARDTACK tests that had occurred that summer, and whether Van Allen’s Explorer 4 had detected them. Sullivan realized that his Newsweek colleague was really asking about Argus, albeit indirectly and perhaps somewhat shooting in the dark.
Old pros that they were, Sullivan and Baldwin realized that journalistically speaking, if other reporters had caught the scent, then the game was almost up. They decided to take more decisive action in order to guarantee an exclusive for the Times. Sullivan wrote to Herbert York, who had just been promoted from ARPA Chief Scientist to the Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Pentagon. Sullivan mentioned to York some, but not all, of what he knew of Argus, and requested a meeting to discuss going public, emphasizing that the Times didn’t believe it could continue to hold the secret indefinitely. “Because IGY data was open to all, I said that we—or anyone else—could unearth the Argus effect with a certain amount of ‘concentrated effort’,” Sullivan recalled.9
That was enough to set off some alarms at the White House and Pentagon. York consulted with James Killian, noting “I know that he [Sullivan] knows considerably more than he has written.” He also pointed out to Killian that while the AEC wanted to keep the secret, scientists such as Van Allen were increasingly pressing for publication of Argus scientific data, as required by IGY agreements.10
To help prove his point that Argus could be uncovered with a little “concentrated effort,” Sullivan checked with the IGY monitoring networks and casually inquired whether there had been any indications of unusual magnetic storms around the end of August and beginning of September. He was informed that yes, there had in fact been a “rather remarkable event” around that time that couldn’t be associated with any definite solar disturbance of the sort that generally created such phenomena. Sullivan also checked around with other official sources, including overseas, for reports of unusual magnetic or auroral activity around that same time period. He detailed his poking around in another letter to York.
In a meeting at the Pentagon with York and his assistant on January 14, Sullivan laid out the case for going public. “They had studied my letters and apparently had discussed them with James Killian,” said Sullivan. But they thought that the evidence Sullivan and Baldwin had collected was “inconclusive.” Sullivan argued that since knowledge of the radiation belts and ideas for Argus-type experiments were already quite public, any disclosure of the Argus shots wouldn’t tell the Russians anything they didn’t already know. York agreed in a general sense, but pointed out that information on the explosions, such as their altitude, yield, and geographic location, was indeed sensitive and had to be concealed for national security reasons, and again officially asked the Times to hold the story.
As York later remembered: “In the first week of January 1959, on my first or second day on the job as director of defense research and engineering, he [Sullivan] came to my office and tried to strike a bargain. We will, he said, hold the story indefinitely if you will promise to give us twenty-four-hours’ notice of any release on this subject. I was totally inexperienced in such matters, so I immediately reported the whole thing to Quarles and Killian. They rejected his proposal. The White House joined the Pentagon in trying to persuade the New York Times to suppress the story.”11
Sullivan was far from satisfied by the entire encounter, suspecting that the real reason the Pentagon wanted Argus kept secret was political. “I am convinced that the only reason we are being discouraged by the Pentagon … is to postpone the day of diplomatic reckoning,” he told Baldwin.12 Specifically, he thought that with the test-ban negotiations still ongoing in Geneva, the last thing the government wanted was to reveal that the US had been secretly blowing up atomic bombs in space. Scientists involved with Argus had been telling Sullivan the same thing.
There was indeed a rapidly growing rift between the scientists pushing for declassification and openness on one hand, and the Pentagon striving to maintain secrecy on the other. It had been inevitable from the beginning, as soon as Argus planners hitched their star and their A-bombs to the IGY wagon in the frantic rush to save time and complete Argus as soon as possible. Reluctantly, and under the relentless prodding of journalists such as Sullivan and scientists such as Van Allen, the administration and the Pentagon were beginning to realize and accept the reality that they couldn’t keep Argus secret forever. But if they couldn’t, how best to limit the damage, and just how should they go about telling the world?
A memo to Killian on January 14, the same day as York’s meeting with Sullivan, noted that “it is to be expected that fragmentary unauthorized releases and leaks will occur,” and that “enough have already occurred to have attracted the curiosity of many scientists.” Declassification “would have beneficial effects on our own scientific community since it would equip them with working knowledge and would stimulate them to develop new ideas and inventions based upon the newly demonstrated effects.” In other words, it might encourage the development of new weapons or defenses based on the Argus effect, not to mention saving money by, for example, not building radio equipment susceptible to interference from Argus-type effects.13
Aside from coalescing around military and scientific poles, the intramural debate began to settle down into two broad options, which were set out by Presidential Special Assistant Karl G. Harr to Killian in a memo on January 20. “There appear to be two contingencies: first, the publishing of information about the shots as a result of leaks and, second, the voluntary release of information by the Government … If the New York Times, or anyone else, breaks a substantial part of the story, our alternatives appear to be: 1. Neither to confirm nor to deny such leaks; 2. To disclose all that we may safely do from a national security point of view.” Harr pointed out that waiting for the story to break on its own would mean that “we would have lost control over the manner and timing of such release.” He proceeded to recommend, among other things, that “appropriate scientists prepare a report” and that Congress and the appropriate foreign powers, including the Soviets, be officially informed as well. He even provided a handy set of guidelines to govern such a public release, including emphasizing that “the detonations produced no radioactive fallout”; that “there was no violation of our IGY commitments” because unclassified satellite data had been released; and that “this was not the test of a weapon in the usual sense, but a scientific experiment.” The Administration and the Pentagon would find that last suggestion in particular quite handy over the coming few months.14
Sullivan and Baldwin as yet knew nothing of all the consternation they had caused within the hallowed halls of the White House and the Pentagon. As far as they were concerned, in the previous summer they had made a gentleman’s agreement to keep the secret of Argus until it was all over and made public, and now their reasonable expectations to at last publish the story were being summarily dismissed and endlessly delayed.
Sullivan decided that the time had come for a direct approach, one closer to the top. On February 2, James Killian happened to be in New York City to make a speech. Sullivan figured that was his chance.
After Killian finished his speech, wrote Sullivan, “I appeared on a dais with a letter in hand, summing up our case for publication.” He handed the sealed letter to Killian personally, making sure it wasn’t going to be intercepted and round-filed by some trusty assistant running interference for his boss.
As the banquet hall emptied after the speech, Killian and Sullivan took seats. Killian opened and read the letter as Sullivan waited.15
The letter patiently spelled out the Times’ position. “We were given repeated assurances that we would be given sufficient prior notice of any announcement so that we should be the first to publish it,” Sullivan had written. “To avoid inadvertent disclosure, knowledge of the project has been limited, on the Times, to Hanson Baldwin and myself.” Despite prior assurances, however, Sullivan noted that, apparently, “a policy decision was made some months ago not to make any disclosure about Argus.”
But that position, Sullivan argued, was no longer sustainable. He detailed the various reports on Argus effects that had come out in the scientific literature, not to mention “questions asked by science writers at the AAAS annual meeting” that “suggest that some of them are on the track of Argus.” Given all that, continued the letter, “we doubt that we can continue to withhold publication of at least a limited account of Argus.” Scientists they had consulted were unanimous that revealing Argus “would not disclose anything which was not already known, from the scientific and military point of view.” And Sullivan again pointed out the US obligation to publish Explorer 4’s IGY data.16
Killian didn’t argue with Sullivan’s reasoning, but sidestepped it by pointing out that disclosure of Argus could derail the Geneva test-ban negotiations. “The Russians would be handed the argument that the only untrustworthy participant in the talks was the one that had sneaked off to fire atomic bombs far from its own shores,” as Sullivan paraphrased him. When Killian said that he also couldn’t provide any advance notice in case the government went public, Sullivan asked if at least someone could tip off the Times informally. “His reaction to this seemed to be assent, but we were still left in an uneasy situation.”17
Providing still more ammunition for Sullivan’s position was a short article published in a British paper, The Observer, a couple of weeks later. Although it didn’t mention Argus specifically, and obviously the unidentified “scientific correspondent” who penned the piece had no knowledge of the project, the article, titled “Radiation Belt May Monitor A-Tests,” noted that “the newly-discovered belt of intense radiation surrounding the earth … may provide a new method of detecting high-altitude nuclear explosions.”18 The piece cited the work of Kellogg and Ney at the University of Minnesota which had earlier caused such consternation in the US government. Finally, they had been allowed to publish in Nature, proposing “a scientifically controlled high-altitude nuclear explosion to test the accuracy of their assumptions.” Now a foreign newspaper was onto it. Even the most obtuse governmental official had to realize that this did not bode well for the continued secrecy of Argus.
But the scientists were getting restless as well. Later in February, a highly secret ten-day scientific meeting was convened at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to talk over Argus results in detail. Along with the planned scientific discussions, a large part of the meeting ended up dealing with the question of Argus classification. According to George Ludwig, who attended along with Van Allen, “the arguments were, at times, heated.”19
As a later summary to York described, the debate split fairly evenly between scientific and military arguments. The memo summarized the scientists’ position as “the scientific value and possible scientific prestige associated with publication of full reports on the scientific aspects of this experiment outweigh national security advantages of continued security.” It was perfectly possible, argued most of the scientists, to separate out all the scientific aspects from the few military-type secrets such as the exact shot yield and firing locations.
Advocates of the “military” position, which turned out to be a decided minority, claimed that “the general national security value of the experiment outweighs the scientific and possible scientific prestige value to the country to be gained by release. Maintain necessary security. The impact on future military applications and implications may be larger than scientific or other values to be gained by open publication.”
After hammering out the wording of these two propositions at great length, the group decided to vote for either “Proposition 1” (the scientific viewpoint) or “Proposition 2” (the military viewpoint). Not surprisingly, most of the scientists, including Van Allen’s group, favored Proposition 1, which got seventeen votes to Proposition 2’s five. Even the usually militaristic Edward Teller voted for open disclosure and Proposition 1. Only Nick Christofilos, always the gadfly, decided that he didn’t quite like the wording of Proposition 1 but would vote for “a slight modification or reinterpretation” that he would write himself later.20
Van Allen felt strongly enough about the whole issue that, shortly after the Livermore conference, he sent an extended summary of his own views to Killian, using his unique preeminence within the scientific community to further emphasize and detail the virtues of openness. “Prompt and full public report of the tests and observations will contribute greatly to the international prestige of the United States as a leader in the application of atomic devices to scientific purposes,” he wrote.
“The possibility of conducting Argus-type experiments has been suggested publicly by a number of persons both in the United States and abroad,” Van Allen pointed out, noting that the existence and character of the Earth’s natural radiation belt were already widely known, including by the Soviets, who were perfectly capable of carrying out similar experiments. “It may reasonably be presumed that they are already preparing such experiments, if indeed they have not already conducted them,” he said.
And because the successful Argus tests “undoubtedly constitute the greatest geophysical experiment ever conducted by man,” trumpeting that success to the world would “contribute enormously to the international prestige of the United States as a leader in scientific endeavor.” Otherwise, he warned, “the US will quite likely be again ‘Sputniked’ in the eyes of the world by the Soviets.”21
Now that the Argus team had come down on the side of publication, it remained only for Killian’s PSAC to make their own judgment. At their monthly meeting on March 16, PSAC decided that “continued security classification … is not of significant military advantage to the US.” While PSAC had originally recommended that Argus be classified Top Secret, “there are no longer any scientific or technical considerations which can justify the continued classification of the FLORAL [Argus] tests.”22 PSAC also reiterated the argument that revealing Argus would enhance American prestige and thereby offset any political fallout that might result from inadvertent leaks. The upcoming meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in April would be the perfect venue to tell the world about Argus, thought PSAC.23
The participants in all this debate and discussion were fully aware that the New York Times was lurking in the wings, straining at the bit to publish the whole story but patiently awaiting some stamp of official approval. But they weren’t going to wait forever, particularly when Hanson Baldwin got wind of the rapidly building momentum within the government and even the Pentagon to go public. After being so patient and conciliatory for almost a year now, it seemed that Baldwin, Sullivan, and the New York Times were about to be scooped by their own government. “We feared that, once the decision was made in Washington, the machinery might move so fast that we would be left hanging in the dust,” wrote Sullivan.24
If that was the case, then it was pointless to sit on the story any longer. Baldwin and Sullivan went to the top: New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, president Orvil E. Dryfoos, and managing editor Turner Catledge. After hearing the case laid out for them by their long-suffering reporters, the Times brain trust gave the go-ahead for publication—with the proviso that Sullivan and Baldwin notify the White House first as a courtesy. If the White House protested that publication would seriously harm national security, the Times would continue to hold off.
Around 4 PM on March 18, Sullivan tried to call Killian, but the science advisor was out of the office. Sullivan laid out the situation for Killian’s assistant, R.M. Briber. “He said that matters had proceeded too far to withhold publication of the story any longer,” Briber wrote in a memo. “When I asked if this was an irrevocable decision, he said that it had certainly proceeded far enough to make such a change very difficult; that it was essentially irreversible.” Sullivan promised “to keep the yield, time, place, and height of the experiment in vague terms.”25
Baldwin called ARPA and spoke to its director, Roy Johnson, basically giving him the same pitch: the Times was about to publish. “After Johnson hung up with Baldwin,” wrote historian Lisa Mundey, “he immediately informed Deputy Secretary [of Defense] Donald Quarles of the conversation. Soon after, phones rang across Washington, as news of the impending story spread through agency circles. Before long, nearly every top official involved in Operation Argus in the White House, DOD, and AEC knew that a very public security breach was imminent.”26 The administration began to circle the wagons, deciding who would be responsible in which agency for answering what questions, and in general deciding on the officially approved story. Everyone settled in to await the coming onslaught.
Sullivan and Baldwin spent the rest of the evening scrambling to write the main Argus story along with supplemental material, and to prepare accompanying maps, photographs, and diagrams, all while waiting for a fateful call from the White House that could yet stop everything dead. “Hanson and I watched the clock tick away the final minutes until the great presses in the basement began to thunder. They rolled. No call ever came. And the world learned of Argus.”27
Much to the relief of Sullivan, Baldwin, and a great many scientists including James Van Allen, the White House for whatever reasons had apparently decided to bow to the inevitability of the free press and the might of the New York Times. On the morning of March 19, 1959, one of the greatest secrets of the Cold War became one of its biggest stories.