THE UNPRECEDENTED LIGHT SHOW OF STARFISH PRIME HAD ONLY BEEN ITS MOST immediate and obvious manifestation, perceptible to anyone under the Pacific skies on that July night. But for those who had long planned, prepared, and finally carried out the operation, it was also the least important part. The purpose of detonating a nuclear weapon high in outer space was not to create pretty fireworks, after all. It was to evaluate its military potential.
The purpose of the entire Fishbowl operation was spelled out on the first page of a preliminary planning document: “The primary objective of the overall series is to obtain data regarding the interference to radar and communication systems produced by a high altitude nuclear burst.” Such data would be useful in more ways than one. Teak, Orange, and Argus had already demonstrated that “blackout has serious implications for critical defense systems such as BMEWS [Ballistic Missile Early Warning System], Nike-Zeus, ICBM penetration and many communication systems, and conversely that its employment may be an effective ICBM offensive tactic.”1 A later report described Starfish Prime’s major objectives including: “1. Evaluation of missile kill mechanisms produced by a high altitude nuclear detonation; 2. Evaluation of a high altitude nuclear detonation on electromagnetic surveillance capability; 3. Evaluation of the effects of a high altitude nuclear detonation on long range communications,” along with investigations of how such phenomena would affect systems that detected nuclear blasts.2
The ionosphere all over the Pacific had received a huge jolt, perhaps comparable only to what it would receive naturally in a major solar storm, with a massive sudden blast of electrons injected into the D layer, the radio-reflecting lowest region of the ionosphere. It was the Christofilos/Argus effect writ large—an electromagnetic disruption of enormous proportions.
As expected, the biggest effect on radio communications was at shortwave frequencies, which are most dependent on “bouncing” off the D layer to travel beyond the line of sight and along the curvature of the Earth. Higher frequency radio communications, such as those used by airliners and television, were less affected this time than by the 1958 Teak and Orange shots. Federal aviation authorities had made plans to ground all civilian Pacific flights for several hours after the test, but it proved unnecessary.
Meanwhile, the 266 scientific stations that had monitored the test now scrutinized the radio and radar spectrum across half the planet, making measurements, conducting experiments, checking propagation patterns. In fact, as the New York Times noted, it was “probably one of the most widely observed scientific experiments in history,” in notable contrast to the former “greatest experiment in history,” Argus. But while a large number of those observations “specifically included those frequencies of greatest interest in anti-missile missions,”3 a classified technical report noted that “Basic scientific studies—of the earth’s magnetic field, ionosphere and radiation belts, for example—will be decidedly secondary.” And while “the effects of the explosions on communications presumably were available to the world to observe and analyze,” the results that might be pertinent to anti-ICBM measures would be more closely held. That was ensured by the fact that “only approximate information about the timing, altitude and energy yield of the nuclear weapons has been or will be distributed. This would be enough for most basic scientific studies but insufficient information for those not in on the tests to gain much knowledge about certain of the military experiments.”4 It was another lesson learned from Argus: revealing some, but not all, of the scientific data, straddling the line between secrecy and openness.5
More lasting effects on the Van Allen belts, if any, would take a little longer to confirm. Most of that data would be coming from Injun 1, TRAAC, Ariel, and perhaps less directly from other satellites—US and otherwise—that happened to be in space. One pioneering spacecraft was about to have a fateful encounter with the aftermath of Starfish Prime.
The day after the shot, another momentous event occurred: Telstar 1, the world’s first dedicated communications satellite, was launched from Cape Canaveral. The first stage of its booster carrying it into orbit was a Thor rocket, nearly identical to the missile that had lofted Starfish Prime the night before. Built by Bell Labs and sponsored by ATT as part of an international effort to create a worldwide communications and television network, Telstar assumed an elliptical orbit with a closest approach to Earth of just under six hundred miles, moving out to about 3600 miles, circling the planet every two and a half hours.
It was an event of international import, especially after Telstar began relaying television broadcasts between North America and Europe on July 23. Since President Kennedy wasn’t quite set to go on the air before Telstar was ready, the first live public satellite TV broadcast turned out to be part of a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs from Wrigley Field in Chicago (the Phillies won, 5–3). For perhaps the first time since Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, Telstar demonstrated to the world at large that space travel could have a definite and tangible value that transcended scientific or military purposes.
The satellite quickly became a cultural touchstone. An English guitar band, the Tornados, even scored a #1 single on the US record charts with an instrumental dubbed “Telstar.” Unfortunately, although it would live long enough to secure its place in history, Telstar 1 was already doomed to an early demise. “Telstar was dying from nuclear effects while it was #1 on the Hit Parade,” wrote Stimson Center co-founder Michael Krepon in a 2011 online op-ed.6
With each circuit it made around the planet, Telstar passed through an intense band of electrons generated by the Starfish Prime explosion, an artificial radiation belt just as had been postulated by Nicholas Christofilos and first created and observed with Argus. But the Starfish belt would soon prove to be far more intense—and persistent.
Back on the ground, Starfish Prime made itself known even to those who weren’t out partying on the beaches of Honolulu under the summer skies. The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of the detonation created a massive induced electrical surge in Hawaii’s power grid, blowing fuses and instantly darkening about three hundred streetlights on the island of Oahu. Burglar alarms were set off and a telephone company microwave link on Kauai was knocked out. Initial speculations that the streetlights may simply have been automatically turned off by their photocell controls when the sky lit up with daylight intensity were soon disproved on more detailed analysis.7
From his own vantage point at Christmas Island, Admiral Mustin witnessed even more dramatic EMP effects. A low-frequency long-wave radio antenna, running from a ground station to a balloon, put on quite a display. “This field of electrical voltage induced on Johnston Island, as a result of that burst, was so intense that great big blue sparks were flying all over the antenna up to the balloon … it was a spectacle that people talked about for a long time. Even the most blasé of the scientists, I think, were seeing things that they had conjectured about, but now they knew they were real.”8
As the excitement over Starfish Prime passed and Johnston Island crews busied themselves in preparations for the next Fishbowl shot, discussion and argument continued over the effects of Starfish Prime on the Van Allen belts. Obviously they hadn’t been utterly destroyed as some had feared, nor set afire as in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but they had definitely been strongly affected. As were the satellites now regularly passing through the new belt created by Starfish, just underneath the natural Van Allen belts. The British satellite Ariel began to suffer electrical problems beginning only four days after the shot, as its solar panels were steadily being degraded by the high electron flux. Telstar was beginning to experience similar problems. For his own part, James Van Allen told a Cleveland rocket society meeting that while the natural radiation of the Van Allen belts might pose some hazard to manned spaceflight, he doubted that the recent high-altitude nuclear tests would either add much to the danger or seriously disrupt the natural belts.9
The next show over Johnston Island and the Pacific would be Bluegill Prime, the second try for Bluegill. By July 24, all was ready, another Thor poised on the Johnston Island launch pad, but bad weather pushed the shot to the next day. It would have to wait until July 25, at about 11 PM.
The Thor missile ignited, but failed to rise off the pad; there was insufficient thrust because of a stuck fuel valve. Then fuel began to burn around the base of the missile and the Thor erupted into flames. To ensure that the dying missile wasn’t about to haphazardly take off out of control with its live warhead, the range safety officer again hit his destruct button, and the Thor, the launch pad, and the immediate vicinity of Johnston Island immediately went up in a titanic—but safely non-nuclear—explosion.
“This time the disaster was even more horrendous,” remembered Mustin, who had been watching through binoculars from a command ship offshore. “This was really an awesome occurrence.” A sailor aboard one of the nearby ships remembered, “I got a real sick feeling knowing that there was a fully active A-bomb on the rocket. It gave a new meaning to ‘Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.’ I monitored the countdown and opened the outside hatch (against orders, but what the hell, if it blew, no one would know) when we heard the abort code. Hell of a fireball!”10
Fortunately there were indeed no casualties, with the few people still remaining on the island at a safe distance from the conflagration. It was bad enough, however. Even after the fires were extinguished, radioactive plutonium from the destroyed W-50 nuclear warhead was strewn all over the area. Any further launches from Johnston Island would require extensive decontamination procedures and weeks, perhaps months, of extensive repair work to restore the launch pad and support facilities. For the moment, Operation Fishbowl was at a standstill.
For the test personnel—frazzled and overworked from the repeated failures and continuing problems—it was perhaps a welcome break. Aside from those directly engaged in decontamination and repair operations, the Fishbowl portion of the DOMINIC task force withdrew to plan and prepare for the eventual resumption of activity. For the military, AEC, and administration, this latest fiasco posed an embarrassing problem. Fishbowl was already behind schedule, with no chance to be completed by the deadline originally set by President Kennedy—July 25. Which left only two options: cancel the remainder of the planned high-altitude tests, or extend the deadline. The first option meant the loss of valuable data eagerly awaited and desperately needed by the Pentagon and weapons scientists; the second option meant political complications for the continuing test-ban negotiations.
In the end, there was no real choice. Fishbowl would continue. “Although rumors were rampant that the President would call an end to the operation, this was really very improbable,” Ogle later wrote. “On July 22, 1962, the USSR had announced their intention to begin a new series of atmospheric tests. Kennedy was still trying to pressure the Russians about a test ban. Furthermore, in the game of international power it was bad enough for the US to have such publicly miserable failures; it would be even worse to stop the tests, admitting that we could not finish the job.”11 But even as Kennedy agreed to allow Fishbowl to continue, he demanded it be completed as soon as possible.
After laying low for most of the year, the Soviets resumed their own atmospheric tests at the beginning of August, including a forty-megaton shot that recalled their even larger test of the previous year. For now, until Fishbowl could be resumed, it would be the United States that was quiescent. Ideally, the remaining Fishbowl tests would be the final US atmospheric shots before a test ban treaty put an end to them all over the world. Or so Kennedy hoped.
As the repairs and cleanup continued at Johnston Island, new plans took hold. Urraca, the high-altitude test originally planned to open the Fishbowl series but repeatedly delayed, was finally cancelled by Kennedy, “both because of its possible effect on satellites and because the President really did not wish to develop another method of testing,” as Ogle described. “His objective was to prevent testing, not to help it.”12 If conducted, the Urraca test would have been at the highest altitude yet—about five hundred miles, twice that of Starfish Prime. Instead, along with the twice-delayed Bluegill, three new high-altitude shots were added to Fishbowl, named Checkmate, Kingfish, and Tightrope.
Two of those would not make use of the troublesome Thor booster. “People were getting a little touchy about this,” said Mustin. “Questions were beginning to arise: ‘Where’s all that 98% reliability that you Air Force guys told us had been in the record for this Thor missile?’” Aside from questions of reliability, there weren’t a lot of Thor missiles remaining to be used, since it was no longer in production by its manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft. So the low-yield Checkmate and Tightrope tests would be borne by smaller boosters. Air Force officials were quick to emphasize that the recent problems shouldn’t be taken to imply any lack of military readiness on the part of the United States, nor any particular flaw in the missile, since some of the failures were not related to the Thor’s military capabilities.
As they continued their new tests, the Soviets couldn’t resist needling the United States. “On August 11 we received word that the Soviet Union was anxious about the safety of its astronaut, Nikolayev, whose orbit around the earth was expected to last for several more days,” Seaborg wrote. “They sent us diplomatic signals that were essentially appeals not to conduct any tests that might endanger the astronaut’s life.” The State Department assured the Russians that the US wished their cosmonaut well and would do nothing to endanger him.13 Still, the Russian concerns certainly agreed with Van Allen’s statements about possible hazards for space travelers, specifically an upcoming Mercury flight by US astronaut Walter Schirra.
For the public and other observers not directly involved, the continuing debates about dangerous outer space radiation belts were decidedly confusing. On one hand, respected scientists such as James Van Allen declared that while there could be danger, the Fishbowl tests had caused no lasting damage to the natural radiation belts. On the other hand, official statements from the AEC and Defense Department stated that Starfish Prime had created a new artificial radiation belt that had not only knocked out three satellites so far—Ariel, TRAAC, and a Navy satellite—but that the new belt was stronger than previously thought and might persist for years. Arguments that orbiting astronauts, unlike satellites, would mostly travel at altitudes below the radiation belts were not always convincing.
By October, almost three months to the day after the Bluegill Prime disaster, Fishbowl was finally ready to pick up where it had left off, with another attempt at Bluegill, now called Bluegill Double Prime. Unfortunately, the third time, launched before midnight on October 15, was decidedly not the charm. Less than three minutes after leaving the launch pad, the Thor missile began tumbling out of control, and yet again the range safety officer exercised his prerogative and sent the destruct signal.
It was hardly an auspicious way to resume Fishbowl. “The Thor crews and, for that matter, everyone else were tremendously dejected,” Ogle recalled.14 Task Force commander Starbird was more than fed up with the Thor by this point, but he had no other ready option for the remaining high-yield shots.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, another collection of missiles, this time of the Soviet variety, was causing major trouble in Cuba. Thanks to some timely U-2 reconnaissance photography, President Kennedy was just finding out about the Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missile sites being constructed on Cuba, and he and his advisors were secretly debating how to respond.
For the next two weeks, the world tottered on the precipice of nuclear war, as Kennedy and Khrushchev made move and countermove, struggling to resolve what had become the gravest crisis of the Cold War. American strategic forces all over the world were reshuffled and redeployed in preparation for a possible Cuban invasion, a Soviet attack on Western Europe, or, perhaps, Armageddon. Some of them came from JTF-8, with aircraft and ships called away from the Pacific to reinforce preparations elsewhere. General Starbird was reassigned to Washington to head the Defense Communications Agency, which would soon set up the “hotline” link between Washington and Moscow in the wake of the crisis. As his deputy, Admiral Mustin became acting commander of JTF-8—once again the reluctant leader of a nuclear test series.
Despite international tensions at perhaps their highest level in history, the tests went on. It was probably in part due to simple inertia: the whole DOMINIC operation was simply too complex, too far-flung, and too far along already to shut down so abruptly for an indefinite period. But the saber-rattling element was also undoubtedly a factor. What better way to demonstrate one’s resolve to an adversary than to detonate nuclear weapons?
So, on October 19, five days after the humiliating failure of Bluegill Double Prime, the next shot of Fishbowl was launched. Called Checkmate, it was a more modest effort all around, using a smaller XM-33 rocket instead of the massive Thor, and with a much smaller yield: less than 5 kilotons. It detonated successfully at an altitude of just over ninety miles, creating a lovely light show, though not of Starfish Prime proportions. Ogle described “a green and blue ring with spikelike protrusions at the edge, surrounded by a blood-red auroral ring which faded in less than a minute. Auroral streamers to the north and south formed immediately. Pink streamers were still visible 30 minutes after the explosion.”15
Meanwhile, the USSR was following suit, having resumed their own high-altitude experiments. They fired off two high-altitude tests over the ensuing week, as if to match the US in saber-rattling belligerence and also to continue research on their own missile defense concepts. Although these tests were still smaller than Starfish Prime (around 300 kilotons), and at altitudes under two hunded miles, they created massive EMP effects over Russia, by design and in keeping with the scientific intent of investigating the military utility of EMP. In the midst of it all, the Cuban Missile Crisis was rapidly building to its climax. Whether that would mean a peaceful resolution or the end of civilization remained to be seen.
One way or another, it was not going to stop yet another try for Bluegill. Just before midnight on October 25, Bluegill Triple Prime was launched from Johnston Island—the fourth attempt for this particular test. To the enormous relief of all concerned, the Thor flew straight and true, and the 400-kiloton Bluegill Triple Prime warhead detonated at a relatively low thirty miles. But it was enough. The scientific experiments and photography all went well, and all three of the instrument pods were successfully ejected and recovered from the Thor booster. Notes the Defense Nuclear Agency history, “That was a good thing, for, as Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay pointed out, there were no Thor missiles left in case any failed.”16
There were, however, at least two casualties. After first being recognized as a danger in 1958, precautions against the eyeburn problem had become standard procedure for high-altitude operations. Test personnel were either issued eye protection or otherwise prevented from seeing the initial fireball, and a vast protected area was routinely established around the test location and kept clear of unauthorized civilian interlopers.
But that, of course, did not preclude accidents or simple misfortune. Two enlisted military men on Johnston Island, one Air Force and one Navy, were inadvertently caught without their protective goggles when Bluegill Triple Prime went off. Fortunately, neither was completely blinded, though both suffered eye damage.
Back in Washington and Moscow, Kennedy and Khrushchev had managed to step back from catastrophe over the Cuban crisis, partly through the auspices of their own better angels and partly through sheer luck. That did not change matters either in the Pacific or over the Soviet testing range. There were still bombs to test, experiments to be carried out.
But Fishbowl, at least, was finally approaching its long-delayed finale. On the evening of October 31, the last remaining Thor missile stood ready to launch the Kingfish device from Johnston Island. The weather and some last-minute technical problems delayed the proceedings until about 2 AM, but the launch and detonation of the 400-kiloton device at about sixty miles went off smoothly. Again, the central Pacific was treated to a light show of “a yellow-white, luminous circle with intense purple streamers.”17 Again, some EMP effects were recorded, but of very low intensity compared to Starfish Prime. Back on Johnston Island, “The rest of the night was spent in celebration.”18
Two nights later, the ill-starred yet spectacular Fishbowl operation would draw down the curtain. Tightrope—planned as a test for the Nike-Hercules air defense missile—exploded its low-yield warhead at about thirteen miles above the earth, demonstrating the ability of the Nike-Hercules system to knock out an incoming Soviet missile, at least theoretically.
For all the long-frustrated, sorely frazzled Fishbowl personnel, their work was done. Fishbowl and DOMINIC itself were over. Some were not exactly happy at the prospect, such as dedicated Pentagon weapons scientist Frank Shelton. “After observing the success of Tightrope, Frank Shelton returned to his living quarters in a melancholy mood. ‘That was the 65th atmospheric nuclear weapon burst that I have observed in the past 10 years,’ he recalled saying to himself, ‘and I think it is probably the last one that I will ever see conducted in the atmosphere.’”19
Although it wasn’t at the time officially planned to hold the particular distinction, Tightrope would, in fact, be the final nuclear weapon exploded in the atmosphere by the United States, closing an era that had begun with the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. With the conclusion of DOMINIC, US nuclear testing would retreat to underground caverns and tunnels, mostly in southern Nevada.
But not without a struggle. The Pentagon and the weapons labs, perhaps sharing Shelton’s gloomy feelings, pressed for new nuclear tests in 1963 and beyond, and not just underground. For the time being at least, the Pacific testing facilities were only being shuttered, not completely abolished. As far as the AEC and the military were concerned, there remained new avenues to explore, new phenomena to test and observe, and perhaps new weapons and defenses to develop. As always, there was the fear that the Soviets were pulling ahead somehow, in ominous ways that would ultimately threaten the security of the United States.
But there could be a way to counter the new threats. First Teak and Orange, and then Nicholas Christofilos and Argus had opened new frontiers of tantalizing military potential. Fishbowl and especially Starfish Prime had confirmed and expanded that potential, inspiring and firing the imaginations of the planners of war and the builders of its tools. So even as Kennedy and Khrushchev, sobered by their recent brush with oblivion and newly anxious to find some way to reduce the danger, continued to move fitfully toward some kind of lasting reconciliation, others in the Pentagon and weapons laboratories were taking a deep and thoughtful look at new possibilities. If the politicians and diplomats were still talking—striving toward concord in Geneva, striving for test bans and treaties—the generals, admirals, and weaponeers were imagining and planning for what might happen if peace failed.