WITH THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION ENTERING ITS FINAL YEAR AND A PRESIDENTIAL election on the horizon, nuclear testing and the Cold War in general seemed to have settled into an uneasy lull. Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in the fall of 1959 had gone well and seemed to augur an easing of tensions, but there were major issues between the US and USSR yet to be resolved, such as the test ban treaty. The Geneva talks continued fitfully with US negotiators struggling to develop new strategies for dealing with the Soviets, but it was becoming increasingly probable that any substantial breakthroughs would have to wait for the next administration. Still, Eisenhower and Khrushchev were planning a summit meeting for May 1960 in Paris, and perhaps progress there would translate to other areas.
Meanwhile, the nuclear testing establishment kept itself occupied at a greatly reduced but steady pace. Scientists at the weapons labs still had mountains of data from all the tests of 1958 to analyze, and at the continental test site in Nevada, there were other non-weapons projects to keep things humming along. The AEC and NASA worked on experiments for Project Rover, with the aim of creating a nuclear-powered spacecraft, while the Air Force busied itself with Project Pluto, a nuclear ramjet cruise missile. Such efforts involved the use of nuclear reactors and radioactive materials, but not nuclear explosions, so they were fair game whether the test moratorium was considered in force or not. Livermore continued low-level work on Plowshare, their pet project for the use of atomic explosions for civilian purposes such as digging mine shafts and creating harbors. Although the moratorium prevented full-scale experiments involving Plowshare ideas, Livermore scientists were free to test concepts with conventional high-explosive devices at the Nevada Test Site. And it was also possible to continue technical work on finding ways to detect nuclear explosions through seismic and other kinds of sensors, research that was directly relevant to the Geneva test-ban negotiations.
“Tunnels were dug. Contractors kept working. Radiation safety and weather groups remained in place. Overall, a level of readiness was maintained so that nuclear weapons testing could successfully resume when needed,” noted a DOE history, also observing that “the moratorium was not entirely unwelcome in the testing community. After a record seventy-seven nuclear weapons tests in 1958, the testing system, noted one participant, ‘was tired, tired, tired.’”1
Ever restless, Nicholas Christofilos had already moved on from Argus, continuing work at Livermore on his main passion, the Astron fusion reactor, and supervising construction of a linear accelerator to test Astron concepts. Turning away from outer space to the depths of the oceans, he had also devised a system for communication with submarines using extremely low frequency radio waves.
He was also undergoing some profound personal changes. His divorce from Elly became final in May, and at the end of June he married a coworker from Livermore, Joan Jaffrey, in Chapala, Mexico.2 It would not prove to be a happy ending, however, as the emotional and legal fallout from the divorce would persist for some time to come.
James Van Allen was also deep into new projects and space missions, but still found himself talking and writing about Argus. Whether consciously or not, he continued to downplay the military aspects of the enterprise in favor of the scientific. Speaking at Ohio State University early in 1960, he echoed what had now become the standard Argus line, calling it “one of the greatest experiments in pure science ever conducted.” At the same time, noted Walter Sullivan, “he spoke out strongly against its secrecy, which he termed a ‘masterpiece of administrative stupidity,’ for when the project finally became known, it appeared to be ‘a sinister sort of military experiment,’ instead of the great scientific achievement that it was.”3
Despite such protestations, none of the direct participants in Argus such as Van Allen, nor those who had been more indirectly involved, as Sullivan had, harbored any illusions about the dual nature of Argus. Sullivan, still with the New York Times, had begun work on a book about the International Geophysical Year, and decided to devote an entire chapter to Argus, knowing a good story when he’d broken one. Van Allen was among the many experts Sullivan contacted for help and to read over drafts. Sullivan would also include a detailed account of just how he and Hanson Baldwin had broken the Argus story and the challenges of dealing with the byzantine world of government secrecy and official classification.
Unlike his colleague Hanson Baldwin, Sullivan apparently had no second thoughts about his role in revealing a classified story to the public. In one of his letters to Van Allen, he commented, “Yesterday I received the text of a talk you have recently given to some engineers in which you discussed the security aspects of Argus with forthright candor and also referred to a new, exciting—and secret—experiment to be carried out in space. I can only say that this time there is no soul-searching going on at the New York Times.”4 The “secret experiment” Sullivan refers to is unknown, but the jaded attitudes of both men about the vagaries of government classification comes through loud and clear.
As part of his research, Sullivan also tried contacting those who may have been the great invisible, if unwitting, audience for Argus: the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha. In March 1960, he sent letters to both the current British administrator, P. A. Day, and the one present during the time of the Argus shots, G. Francis Harris, inquiring about whether they or other islanders had seen anything unusual.
The mail service to the ostensible “farthest place on Earth” was painfully slow, so Sullivan’s inquiries didn’t reach the island until July—which turned out to be the first time that anyone on Tristan da Cunha had heard anything about Argus. “When the letter reached the island … its 294 inhabitants learned for the first time that on Aug. 27, 1958, an atomic bomb was fired sixty miles south of their island,” Sullivan later wrote in the New York Times.
In his response, which Sullivan didn’t receive until October, Harris recounted how the islanders had indeed noticed some strange things going on during that brief but odd summer of 1958, including the occasional passing Navy aircraft and mysterious shortwave transmissions. Somewhat more ominously, current administrator Day’s response to Sullivan included observations of fallout measurements on the island having increased to about three times their normal levels from late summer to October 1958. Sullivan checked with an expert at the New York AEC office, who told him that the brief rise in readings at Tristan was most likely not related directly to Argus but was simply a result of increased fallout all over the world during that period, given the high number of US and Soviet tests that had occurred that year: “October [1958] was a pretty darn meaty month all over the world,” said the AEC. There may have been a slight increase in fallout at Tristan from the first Argus shot, but “probably slight compared to the general world-wide increase at that time.”
It seemed hard to believe that anyone could be unaware of atomic bombs going off in their own backyard, but as Sullivan explained, “Official word of the staging of Project Argus was withheld for some time, and when the news was finally printed the location of the atom shots was not revealed. Hence the islanders and their British administrators may have heard about Project Argus without relating it to the September flight of planes over their island.”5
WHATEVER HOPES STILL REMAINED FOR EISENHOWER TO ACHIEVE A TEST BAN treaty or a more permanent detente with the Soviets evaporated on May 1, when an American U-2 spy plane was downed over Sverdlovsk and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive. Khrushchev was genuinely outraged, considering the incident a betrayal of the goodwill he believed he had been building up with Eisenhower. But more than that, he also recognized a golden propaganda opportunity, which he proceeded to exploit to the fullest. The initial US denials, disproved by the capture of Powers and the U-2’s reconnaissance equipment, didn’t help. Eisenhower refused to accede to Khrushchev’s demands for an apology, and the Paris summit rapidly collapsed in rancor and recrimination. A disappointed Eisenhower had to return home knowing that he had failed in his great dream to leave a legacy as a peacemaker.
Fortunately, the U-2 affair didn’t completely destroy prospects for a test ban treaty. In the wake of the episode, both Eisenhower and Khrushchev reaffirmed their commitment to pursuing disarmament. The talks continued in Geneva, but with the atmosphere chillier than ever. The spirit of trust, or at least wary friendliness, that had been slowly blossoming between the US and USSR had vanished, and it would be left to Eisenhower’s successor to pick up the pieces.
One of the many contentious issues in the Geneva talks was the problem of verification: if both sides did agree to stop testing nuclear weapons, how could they be sure the other side wouldn’t cheat? In other words, was it possible to set off a nuclear explosion without anyone knowing about it? As Sullivan had discovered in his correspondence with the Tristan islanders, it was at least theoretically possible, since apparently they hadn’t known about Argus until he told them about it. But if anyone on Tristan had happened to be awake in the middle of the night and looking up at the time of an Argus shot, they may have seen something.
It was clear that atmospheric tests in the open air wouldn’t escape scrutiny for long. Even if they were conducted in a remote enough location, fallout debris would inevitably spread around the world for anyone to detect; indeed, that was how the US had initially learned about the very first Soviet A-bomb. And since one of the major motivations for a test ban was to stop atmospheric testing and the spread of fallout, detecting such tests wasn’t really an issue. The sticking point was whether tests deep underground or at very high altitudes—in the upper atmosphere or outer space—could be effectively concealed. A joint US-Soviet conference of scientific experts in summer 1958 had concluded that methods for detection of clandestine testing were largely reliable, which helped convince both sides to undertake the temporary moratorium.
The prospect of policing a permanent test ban was still daunting. Detecting underground tests with seismometers posed the problem of distinguishing a nuclear detonation from natural earthquake activity. Detecting high-altitude tests might be possible with satellites or earth-based means, but it wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed.
Some disquieting news also came out of the Soviet Union near the end of 1960, when Russian geophysicist Valeria I. Troitskaya, who had headed the Soviet IGY effort, reported that her analysis of data from various Soviet “telluric current” monitoring stations had picked up unmistakable signs not only of the Argus shots but also of the Orange high-altitude H-bomb test in the Pacific. Troitskaya’s work had already demonstrated that magnetic storms caused by solar activity can “twang” the natural geomagnetic current in the Earth’s crust. As her detectors demonstrated, the Argus shots and Orange had done essentially the same thing. The data pinpointed both the times and the locations of each detonation, and the publication of Troitskaya’s data was in fact the first public announcement of the actual shot times. “Dr. Troitskaya pointed out … the official times given by the United States for the shots erred somewhat. This, according to scientists associated with the project, was so because they were required, for security reasons, to make the times approximate,” reported Sullivan in the New York Times.6
Although the Soviets hadn’t realized the true nature of their odd geophysical observations at the time, the reality that they had in fact detected the supposedly secret Argus shots was not comforting to Pentagon officials. But for those working and hoping for a permanent test ban, it provided further evidence that cheating would be readily uncovered. It did not help to resolve debates in Geneva over other issues, however, such as on-site inspections and yield limits for underground tests. The negotiators soldiered on, even as John F. Kennedy won the November election and Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave office.
In his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower famously warned against the excesses of the “military-industrial complex,” lamenting the fact that while in the past the United States built weapons only in times of war, in the new atomic age “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” In an often overlooked corollary to his warnings of the “undue influence” of the military, he also spoke of “the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Ironically, though perhaps with the best of intentions, Eisenhower himself had done much during his presidency to foster and expand both.
That irony did not escape the wise old warrior and statesman. Mentioning the imperative of disarmament, and with the failure to achieve a permanent nuclear test ban weighing on him, he said, “I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war, as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years, I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight … so much remains to be done.”
The work of achieving “a lasting peace” would now fall to John F. Kennedy. He took office as something of a contradiction, part “peacenik,” part dedicated Cold Warrior. Although he had campaigned against a nonexistent “missile gap” between the US and USSR, and now promised to “oppose any foe” to “assure the survival and the success of liberty,” proclaiming that “only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed,” he also called for “serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms.” During his years in the Senate, Kennedy had been a strong and outspoken supporter of a nuclear test ban, and many test-ban advocates were confident that the new president would finally achieve that goal.
The Soviets also seemed reasonably optimistic and receptive to renewed discussions. Nikita Khrushchev himself began pressing for a summit meeting with Kennedy even before the new president was inaugurated. For a brief but heady moment, the “New Frontier” seemed to be more than lofty rhetoric. And although both sides had publicly declared themselves no longer bound by the testing moratorium, they were continuing, quite voluntarily, to observe it anyway, based on a gentleman’s agreement of “I won’t do it unless you do it first.”
Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the new administration. The Pentagon and the AEC were growing increasingly restive, uneasy with the ongoing moratorium, fearful about falling behind the Soviets, worried about hanging on to their scientists, struggling to maintain some kind of operational readiness to resume testing while uncertain what form it might take if it did resume. Despite the relentless worldwide public opposition to atmospheric testing that had led to the moratorium in the first place, many in the testing establishment knew that there were no guarantees that the USSR would continue to play along. Perhaps for now, it suited their propaganda purposes to do so, but that could change abruptly. And who was to say that the Soviets couldn’t—or wouldn’t—test in secret while still professing to be observing the moratorium? And if that happened, how badly would it affect American security and the effectiveness of our own atomic stockpile?
Even assuming good faith on the part of the Soviets at present, it was still quite conceivable that for whatever reason the US could decide to resume testing on its own accord. If so, would it be underground? In space? In the atmosphere? Would it take place in Nevada or the Pacific? Both? Someplace else entirely—even back in the frigid South Atlantic? As the Kennedy Administration settled in, such questions were endlessly discussed, both in administration circles and within the halls of the Pentagon and the AEC.
Kennedy’s new team of advisors and cabinet members also debated options for the next round of test-ban negotiations, which, after closing down the previous December to await the new US administration, resumed in Geneva in March 1961. It was not an auspicious start. Perhaps reenergized by the break and deciding to test the mettle of the new administration, the Soviets assumed a tough stance, rejecting American proposals on verification and inspections and offering problematic counterproposals. Any hopes for a quick and substantive breakthrough were quickly dashed.
Matters only grew worse as spring turned to summer. The abortive Bay of Pigs fiasco in April didn’t help US-Soviet relations, nor did the first meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev in June in Vienna. The young president tried to hold his own against Khrushchev, but the domineering chairman seemed to largely overwhelm him, especially as Khrushchev issued an ultimatum on the long-troublesome Berlin situation. Kennedy left Vienna feeling demoralized, while Khrushchev went home newly confident. Before the summer was over, the Berlin Wall would be raised, and two months after that, US and Russian tanks would confront each other in a brief but tense standoff at a border checkpoint between East and West Berlin.
After all the hope and optimism with which 1961 had begun, it was hardly the climate for sweeping disarmament agreements. As if to emphasize the point, the USSR finally decided to abandon the test moratorium. On August 30, they announced that they would resume testing, laying the blame squarely on the United States for its failure to accept its supposedly reasonable proposals for the test ban and disarmament. The Soviets proceeded to conduct their first nuclear test since 1958 two days later—in the open air. They followed that up with more tests, with no concerns about fallout or public reaction. (In response to accusations that they had broken the moratorium, the Soviets had a convenient loophole: they pointed out that they had only pledged not to test as long as the “Western powers” did likewise—and that “Western powers” included France, which had indeed continued to explode bombs quite independently in utter disregard of any US-USSR agreements.)
Kennedy’s reaction, reported his special assistant and speechwriter Ted Sorenson, was “unprintable.” He had tried to avoid it for as long as possible, but politically, practically, and militarily, he no longer had a choice. On September 5, he announced that “In view of the continued testing by the Soviet Government, I have today ordered the resumption of nuclear tests.” But Kennedy still had a political card to play. The new American tests would only be conducted “in the laboratory and underground, with no fallout.” The USSR might be cavalier about nuclear fallout and world opinion, but not the US. “We have taken every step that reasonable men could justify,” said Kennedy. “We must now take those steps which prudent men find essential.” He also noted that “our offer to make an agreement to end all fallout tests remains open until September 9.”
Underground tests resumed in Nevada ten days later under the name of Operation Nougat. Compared to the renewed Soviet activity, it was a fairly modest effort, though the weapons labs and test personnel were pleased to be back in business. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s promises about “no fallout” didn’t quite pan out: some of the Nevada tests nevertheless ended up venting some radioactive debris from their underground tunnel shafts into the air. Still, it was minor and limited only to the immediate vicinity, unlike the product of the new multi-kiloton and megaton Soviet tests.
That disparity, however, started to grate on some within the testing community. Why should the United States continue to restrain itself while the Soviet Union had resumed open testing of all sorts of large, dirty weapons aboveground without any regard at all for the rest of the world? Aside from that nagging question, there continued to be new weapons designs and problems that could only be effectively resolved with the testing of larger devices, either aboveground or at high altitudes. Pressure began to build on the Kennedy Administration to return to a full-fledged program of atmospheric testing instead of one timidly hiding away in deep underground caves and tunnels.
All of these alarming developments had not escaped the notice of American popular culture. In the midst of international tensions, a minor yet oddly appropriate movie was released in July of 1961 called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Directed and co-written by Irwin Allen, previously known mostly for nature documentaries and an adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Lost World, Voyage centered on the advanced scientific research submarine USOS Seaview, designed and built by genius scientist and engineer Admiral Harriman Nelson. When meteors ignite the Van Allen radiation belts, lighting a fire in the sky all over the world that begins to melt the polar ice caps and literally cook the entire world, Nelson devises a plan to use the Seaview to save the Earth by launching a nuclear missile to explode within the belts, extinguishing the fire and presumably wiping out the belts as well.
Although a scientifically preposterous scenario, Allen’s fanciful premise is oddly reminiscent of Project Argus. Unlike Argus, Nelson’s scheme is quite public and vocally opposed as too risky by many scientists and governments, forcing an obsessive Nelson to evade various obstacles before he ultimately achieves his mission and saves the planet. It’s unknown whether Allen and his co-screenwriter Charles Bennett were directly inspired or influenced by Argus in conceiving the story, but it’s likely that they were at least aware of the project, and attempting to tie in their film with current newsworthy events, including not only Argus but also the International Geophysical Year, nuclear testing, and especially the recent launch of the world’s first nuclear submarine USS Nautilus, using the canny commercial instincts on which Allen built his subsequent career in film and television. (And of course, the film’s themes of worldwide catastrophe, melting icecaps, and attempts to stave off worldwide climate change in the face of political denial and opposition have a sad new relevance in the twenty-first century.)
While hardly the equal either artistically or technically of other contemporary films involving themes of nuclear testing and weapons, such as 1959’s highly influential On the Beach, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which spawned a successful television series several years later) is an intriguing cultural artifact of a tense era, a moment in history in which imminent catastrophe seemed to hang over the entire world, not in the form of a burning sky but of nuclear Armageddon. Although neither Irwin Allen nor almost anyone else realized it at the time, his potboiler film would prove eerily prescient of the very near future, if not to such an apocalyptic degree.
The sequel to Project Argus was about to be born.