ON OCTOBER 30, 1961, THE LARGEST EXPLOSION EVER CREATED BY HUMANS occurred over the remote Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. It was a hydrogen weapon called the Tsar Bomba, designed, built, and tested by the Soviet Union with an announced yield of fifty megatons, but actually somewhat higher than that, with later analyses revealing a yield of fifty-seven megatons. Though the bomb had originally been designed to create a 100-megaton explosion, that was apparently too much even for the Soviets, who modified the weapon for a lower yield after realizing the amount of fallout such a weapon would create, not to mention the fact that it would certainly immolate the bomber crew dropping it and even from that desolate location possibly kill or injure a number of Soviet citizens. It was the ultimate in saber-rattling.
It did not come as a surprise. That past summer, Khrushchev had already warned that the Soviets might test a 100-megaton weapon, and earlier in October he had announced his intention to test a fifty-megaton version of that weapon. But the advance warning did little to diminish the political—and physical—impact of the test.
Even in its more modest form, the bomb’s effects were felt around the world. Buildings were damaged and windows shattered hundreds of miles away, and the seismic shockwaves traveled around the world three times, echoing both the voice of doom and the defiance of the USSR.
Despite all the wrangling in Geneva about test detection and cheating and on-site inspection, this was not the sort of test that could be kept secret. Nor was that the point. Nikita Khrushchev had intended it as a demonstration of his country’s strength, determination, and stubborn independence. And on a more visceral level, Tsar Bomba was simply meant to scare the world. Khrushchev wasted little time in boasting of the Soviet achievement and warning that the USSR possessed far more powerful weapons.
As might be expected, worldwide reaction outside the Communist bloc was universally negative. It wasn’t only the monstrous scale of the weapon—seemingly beyond any reasonable military purpose—but the callous disregard of the fallout from such an enormous detonation, particularly since the USSR had voluntarily refrained from atmospheric testing for almost three years previously (though they had resumed almost two months before Tsar Bomba). The Vatican called the test “an insane decision, morally, politically, socially, economically, and humanely deprecable,” that had shown the world “the true face of Communism … reflecting the tension of hatred.” The Norwegian Parliament, geographically closer than most to the site of the detonation, declared that it “showed a cynicism unparalleled in history,” while West Germany accused the USSR of “ruthlessly risking the health of all mankind.”1
The US was also critical. Former presidential candidate and outspoken test-ban advocate Adlai Stevenson, now US ambassador to the United Nations, proclaimed that the Soviet Union had “started a new race for deadly weapons.”2 Also predictable was that this latest Soviet provocation increased by orders of magnitude the pressures upon Kennedy to resume testing in the atmosphere, rather than limit the US to innocuous “no fallout” underground detonations. After all, if the Soviets weren’t going to restrain themselves, why should the United States?
Also, the problems that had arisen during the extended moratorium—such as maintaining test capability and resources—hadn’t gone away, even with the resumption of underground testing in Nevada. And the labs continued to insist that certain categories of new weapons and their effects couldn’t be effectively evaluated without full-fledged atmospheric testing. Opinion was almost unanimous that, as presidential assistant Arthur Schlesinger later wrote, “This final atrocity made it impossible to put off our own preparations for atmospheric testing any longer.”3
Still, a reluctant Kennedy continued to resist. Although he announced shortly after the Tsar Bomba test that the US was preparing to resume atmospheric testing “in case it becomes necessary,” and approved funds for such preparations, he balked at issuing final, definitive approval. Even in the face of domestic and international outrage over Soviet testing, he met opposition from certain quarters, most notably from British prime minister Harold Macmillan. That was a major difficulty, since test planners had decided that with the deteriorated resources of the US’s former Pacific testing sites, new tests would require a fresh site: Christmas Island, which happened to be British territory. In a December summit meeting with Kennedy in Bermuda, Macmillan agreed to go along with the resumption of US atmospheric tests and the use of Christmas Island, as long as the US made one more sincere attempt at Geneva to achieve a test ban treaty.
That seemed to clear the path to resume, but Kennedy continued to drag his heels. His new AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg, who was, naturally, deeply involved in the discussions, wrote that “following the Bermuda summit, the decision to test in the atmosphere seemed to have been made. Yet two more months were to elapse before the decision was announced. During this period the president repeatedly sought reassurance, in meeting after meeting, that it was the right thing to do, that there was no alternative … what Kennedy seemed to hope for was some eleventh-hour agreement with the Russians that would make testing unnecessary.”4
Alas, it was not to be. On March 2, 1962, Kennedy gave a lengthy address to the nation outlining the reasons for deciding to resume atmospheric testing. “It was as though he were addressing the judgment of history,” Seaborg noted.5
Kennedy discussed the continued Soviet tests and the technical and military gains they were achieving, and explained that resuming US atmospheric tests would make the Soviets realize that the United States would no longer sit idly by and allow the USSR to catch up and surpass us—which might make them more open to further negotiations and the long-sought test ban treaty. Furthermore, he said, “If the Soviet Union should now be willing to accept such a treaty, to sign it before the latter part of April and apply it immediately—if all testing can thus actually be halted … there would be no need for our tests to begin.”6
The Geneva talks resumed a couple of weeks later, but the impasse continued with the Russians over technical and verification questions. The United States moved ahead with its preparations in the Pacific, including at Christmas Island, where the UK had officially granted access more than a month earlier.
The new series, officially dubbed DOMINIC, would be an ambitious, wide-ranging operation, with thirty-six shots planned, from airdrops to weapons on barges and towers, and the first operational test of the Navy’s new Polaris submarine-based missile system. As if to make up for lost time since the interminable moratorium, it would be the largest nuclear test series yet conducted by the United States. And in a major part of DOMINIC called Operation Fishbowl, the US would once again detonate nuclear weapons in outer space for the first time since Argus. But this time, the project would be conducted without the same constraints and uncertainties. The Argus/Christofilos effect was real. What could be done with it? It was time to extend the intriguing results of Argus into an entirely new level of power and technical ambition.
The Fishbowl events wouldn’t be the first nuclear detonations in space since Argus, however. As part of their busy operations since abandoning the test moratorium, the Soviets had already fired several high-altitude shots, including at least one experiment in which they fired a missile through the fireball of another detonating warhead to observe and measure the effects. That was disquieting for Pentagon planners, since it indicated that the Russians were aware of the possibilities of “fratricide”—the inadvertent destruction of one warhead by another aimed at the same target—and trying to find ways to either mitigate it or use it to advantage.
“One of the grave concerns felt by the administration about the Russian tests of 1961 was that they might have made progress toward an antimissile missile,” said Seaborg. “It was evident from our analyses of the tests that the Soviets had made an effort in that direction. The implications of this were frightening. If one side could prevent penetration by the other side’s missiles it would have achieved an enormous and tempting advantage.”7 Further high-altitude tests by the US were needed to keep pace.
Planning for Fishbowl had been in progress for quite a while before Kennedy announced the resumption of US atmospheric tests. Anticipating that possibility not long after the Soviet fifty-plus megaton supertest, he had ordered the testing facilities to make serious preparations, including the establishment of a new joint military task force to conduct tests in the Pacific. Joint Task Force 8 (JTF-8) was formed under the command of Army Major General Alfred Starbird. To command the naval forces of JTF-8, Starbird tapped Argus veteran Rear Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin.
“There was a lot of scurrying around the Navy Department to see who would be the Navy deputy,” Mustin remembered in an interview. “Well, I had never had any interest in being involved in the nuclear weapons business, in any way … But people began looking at me pretty closely because of that Argus business.”
Mustin wasn’t happy about the idea. “Nobody wanted the job,” he said. But as it happened, he was the only naval officer with the necessary rank and experience. “I said, ‘I’m pretty sure that I can do the job, but it’s certainly not something I’m asking for.’” But “be that as it may,” orders were orders, and “I found myself ordered to be the Navy deputy of Joint Task Force Eight.”8
Mustin would not be quite as directly involved with the high-altitude Fishbowl tests as he had been with Argus, however. The shots would be launched by Thor missiles, placing them under the aegis of the Air Force part of JTF-8. A preliminary planning document was already completed in November 1961, months before Kennedy actually gave formal approval for DOMINIC and Fishbowl to proceed. Long before then, plans and proposals for additional high-altitude tests had been under discussion, stalled at first by the test moratorium and later by Kennedy’s reluctance to resume testing. But now speculation and possibility had become reality.
According to the initial November 1961 plan, Fishbowl would consist of three shots: Bluegill, Starfish, and Urraca, each at different altitudes and nuclear yields, all launched by Thor boosters from Johnston Island, the same place from which Teak and Orange had been launched in 1958 and the only spot in the Pacific with the necessary launch facilities. (Conveniently, it was US sovereign territory, avoiding the need for any pesky negotiations with allies.) The objective was to further study and define the various intriguing phenomena that had been revealed by the earlier Teak, Orange, and Argus tests, and to evaluate their defensive—and offensive—military implications. The earlier tests had been interesting, but as a Pentagon official commented, “poorly instrumented and hastily executed,” such that the data provided by them, including Argus, was of only limited value. But a series of dedicated high-altitude tests, carried out with all the elaborate instrumentation, measurements, and control of a laboratory experiment, would fill in all the blanks and answer all the questions remaining from 1958.
“It had begun to become desperately clear that there were, indeed, all sorts of results to be expected from detonations at altitude that we simply had to have information on,” Mustin recalled. “They could be of catastrophic proportions on a national basis, if they were not adequately known, so that adequate considerations could be made for them.”9
One of those considerations was what came to be known as EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. Although the existence of EMP as part of the phenomena accompanying a nuclear blast had been known to scientists almost from the beginning of the atomic age, it had been considered a relatively unimportant side effect compared to blast, radiation, and the other far more obvious phenomena. But the Teak event in 1958 had started to change minds, and Orange and Argus only served to convince more people that EMP was something that had to be better understood. “I had never even heard the term during [Argus], but in the interim, some pretty alarming possibilities had begun to be recognized in this country,” Mustin said. Such as knocking out the entire US power grid and communications network “by one single nuclear burst above Kansas, or some such thing.”10
Another consideration involved the possibility that the intense X-rays generated by a high-altitude or outer space nuclear burst, unimpeded by atmosphere, might cripple or destroy enemy warheads—a sort of extension of Nicholas Christofilos’s original idea. If so, perhaps defensive missiles could be designed to maximize their X-ray output for better efficiency and killing power.
So there was much to learn, much to catch up on, all driven by the omnipresent Cold War fear that the Russians would learn it all first and go on to use it against us. Now armed with the president’s reluctant approval and full authority, preparations moved ahead quickly, if not smoothly. Getting the vast American nuclear testing machine fully back up and running after such a long layoff, especially for such an ambitious and extensive enterprise as DOMINIC, proved to be a daunting task. Under the pressures of an impending deadline, Project Argus had managed to go from an odd idea in the mind of an eccentric scientist to a successfully completed operation in less than a year. But DOMINIC dwarfed even the massive undertaking that was Argus. And while Starbird, Mustin, and the various other planners of DOMINIC weren’t facing the same deadline pressure of 1958, they did have orders to be prepared to begin testing anytime beginning in April of 1962.
There were facilities to be built, observation stations and instrumentation to be set up, equipment to be moved, and endless administrative and logistical problems to be resolved. Somehow, it all got done, and Operation DOMINIC opened on April 25, 1962, with Adobe, the first airdrop shot at Christmas Island. More tests followed in short order, including the first firing of a live nuclear-armed Polaris missile from a US Navy submarine, the Ethan Allen. Making a return appearance in that operation was the Argus veteran USS Norton Sound, now serving not as a missile platform but as Admiral Mustin’s flagship for the operation. Immediately after the Polaris test, the Norton Sound returned home to Port Hueneme, her cameo appearance in DOMINIC completed, and with it, her career in nuclear test operations. The vessel continued to serve as a testbed for various Navy weapons systems until finally decommissioned in 1986.
Meanwhile, as preparations for the high-altitude Fishbowl tests continued over at Johnston Island, some decidedly nontechnical complications arose. One of them, which had already been somewhat taken into account in the planning of the operation, was the eyeburn problem. Detonating a nuclear weapon at high altitude meant that the intense light of the fireball would be visible over a much broader area than in a surface or tower shot, thus exposing civilians far removed from the test area, even as far as Hawaii, to the possibility of temporary or permanent eye damage if they happened to be looking in the wrong direction when a bomb went off. The problem had first been recognized back in 1958 with Teak and Orange, when some native islanders had been affected. But the Fishbowl events would occur at much higher altitudes, exposing a much wider area to danger. Aside from choosing the most remote and sparsely populated location possible for the tests and evacuating any potentially affected areas, the only solution was to make certain no one strayed into the danger area around shot time. That task would fall to the Navy’s patrol planes and ships.
Another complication was more political and thus, less easily resolved. As had been the case ever since both the USSR and US resumed testing, protests had commenced worldwide. Three thousand people demonstrated in Tokyo after the first DOMINIC shot, and 350 protesters were also arrested on the other side of the world at the US embassy in London. On April 29, President Kennedy hosted a formal White House reception and dinner for forty-nine Nobel Prize laureates and other scientific luminaries, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former scientific leader of the Manhattan Project. But another dinner guest, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, was outside the White House, part of a huge crowd picketing against nuclear testing. Several anti-nuclear advocates even went to more extreme lengths, sailing boats into the quarantined safety zones around the Pacific island testing sites, attracting the attention of Admiral Mustin’s ever-patrolling security screen of P2V aircraft and destroyers.
For those in the atomic testing game, such annoyances had become part of doing business. But the announcement at the end of April of the impending high-altitude tests brought protests from an entirely different quarter: the international scientific community. The pioneering British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, worried that the Fishbowl shots, particularly the test planned for the highest altitude, Urraca, would seriously disrupt or even destroy the Van Allen radiation belts, or at least the inner belt.
“The operators of this project should be restrained by all possible means from this presumption of moral right to interfere with the environment of the earth,” Lovell declared. “A small group of military scientists, unknown and unidentified to the world at large,” were doing nothing less than preparing a “sledgehammer blow at the radioactive environment of the earth.”11 The influential and persuasive Lovell managed to convince a large contingent of scientific colleagues, mostly British and European, that Fishbowl should be stopped, or at least delayed until the possible consequences could be thoroughly and properly examined.
As the more conventional atmospheric tests continued unabated in the Pacific, the Fishbowl controversy played out in the press and scientific community. It seemed to degenerate fairly quickly into an Old World/New World tiff, with the stodgy Brits and hidebound Europeans feeling put out over the Yanks insisting on some foolish childishness. Or at least it was portrayed that way, thus conveniently avoiding the real scientific questions that Lovell, astronomer Fred Hoyle, the International Astronomical Union, and others had raised.
Such an attitude wasn’t even strictly limited to this side of the pond. A BBC producer, writing to James Van Allen to thank him for a television interview on the controversy, opined that “It is clear that … there is still a considerable residue of resentment in this country against the Americans’ ability to do things which we can’t afford or haven’t the skill to carry out!”12 In other words, the objections of Lovell and his colleagues supposedly weren’t the result of legitimate concern, but simply professional and nationalistic jealousy.
Indeed, little of the protest seemed to come from American scientists. While British scientists such as Dr. Martin Ryle from Cambridge University feared that “the Van Allen radiation belt will be so badly bent that it may never be quite the same again in my lifetime,” Americans such as former IGY scientist Richard Porter denied that the Fishbowl tests would cause any lasting damage to the Van Allen belts.
So did the man who had discovered them, James Van Allen himself. Publicly at least, he declared the new high-altitude tests “a magnificent experiment” that “can and will add greatly to the knowledge of all mankind.” As to the concerns of Lovell and his other scientific colleagues abroad about the space tests, Van Allen noted that “within a few weeks I expect we would not be able to tell it had ever happened.”13 Privately, however, Van Allen was not as confident as his press statements implied. He would soon have cause to regret his sunny facade.
In the weeks leading up to the commencement of Fishbowl, the press remained ambivalent. While Walter Sullivan mused that the tests “may prove to be the greatest show in scientific history,”14 the Los Angeles Times noted that “It is at least possible that an H-bomb this country plans to fire high over Johnston Island in June or July will inflict a grievous wound on the bottom side of the thick radiation zone around the earth.”15 The Wall Street Journal declared that “If indeed any danger is associated with this experiment, there is also danger involved in not doing all we know how to do to explore those reaches of space about which much is conjectured and little is known … after all, the people who believed the world was flat thought it almost sacrilege when Columbus dared to try to prove it wasn’t.”16 England’s left-wing Guardian, however, felt that “a nation has no right to interfere with the environment of the entire earth on no wider authority than its own decision … assurances that all will be well by American scientists, however distinguished, have a tawdry, unseemly ring … [B]y carrying out experiments which affect the whole environment the Americans are setting a series of precedents … [S]ome procedure should be worked out for deciding which global experiments are acceptable and which are not.”17
The controversy was persistent enough that Kennedy finally decided to put together a committee to study the question, including Van Allen, Nicholas Christofilos, and other prominent scientists. Under time pressure and constrained to deliberate only on very specific questions, the committee quickly concluded that the Fishbowl tests did not pose any significant problem either to scientific research or to manned spaceflight. Van Allen would later characterize these conclusions as “tentative,” but for the time being, they were good enough for the government to proceed. At a press conference on May 9, in response to a question about whether the upcoming nuclear tests would jeopardize Kennedy’s stated position that the US would conduct only peaceful operations in space, Kennedy responded, “No, I don’t think so. I know there’s been disturbance about the Van Allen belt, but Van Allen says it’s not going to affect the belt, and it’s his!” The reporters laughed.18
In the midst of it all, the AEC found itself inundated with letters from concerned citizens, which had either been sent to the AEC directly or forwarded by other government agencies. Finally the Commission’s Deputy Director of Public Information, Philippe Jacques, was forced to devise a form letter in response, addressed “To Those Who Have Inquired Regarding the Van Allen Belts.” Jacques wrote reassuringly, “The reasons for our high-altitude tests over Johnston Island and their importance to our national security, together with the safety aspects of such testing, have been carefully considered at the highest levels of the Government.” He went on to explain that “outstanding scientists, including Dr. James Van Allen, discoverer of the belts which bear his name,” has concluded that any effects from the tests would be minor and would disappear quickly. Also, “none of the possible effects on the Van Allen belts would constitute a health hazard … there is no need for concern about any lasting effects on the Van Allen belts or associated phenomena.” Whatever comfort Jacques had hoped to provide may have been undercut by his remark that “Because these tests are being conducted for the purpose of acquiring significant national security information, it is not possible to reveal all the data concerning the tests.”19
A few weeks later, as June began, and Fishbowl was finally about to commence over Johnston Island, all the political, administrative, and technical obstacles seemingly vanished. But as challenging an endeavor as Argus had been, Fishbowl was about to prove even more fraught with adventure and danger.