EVER SINCE THE FISHBOWL TESTS HAD BEEN ANNOUNCED TO A WARY WORLD still reeling from the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, authorities from President Kennedy on down had been reassuring everyone that not only would the Van Allen belts remain unharmed from the atomic assault, but also that any fallout from the high-altitude shots would be nonexistent or negligible at best, taking years to drift down to ground level, by which time it would have decayed to safe levels anyway. Unlike the dirty, widely contaminating shots being fired off by the Russians, went the unspoken implication.
As the Cuban Missile Crisis passed into chilly memory and test-ban negotiations continued apace, those official reassurances began to feel less than reassuring. First, at the beginning of September, the Pentagon and AEC had issued a somber joint statement that the residual Starfish Prime radiation was stronger than predicted and might last for years, having already disabled three satellites. That statement had been vehemently disputed by James Van Allen, based on the data he had been collecting from the Injun 1 satellite. But he had noted that there might be some hazards to human space travelers passing through either the natural or Starfish-created radiation belts. The President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) backed the more alarmist assessments, despite protests from Van Allen that the public statements had been issued before the scientific evaluation of the satellite observations had been completely analyzed.
Then, in November 1962, Telstar began to have serious problems, and finally went dark altogether. The combination of Starfish Prime, some of the other Fishbowl tests, and the recently conducted Soviet high-altitude tests proved too much for its sensitive electronics to endure. Engineers did manage to coax the satellite back into operation briefly in January 1963, but it proved only a temporary reprieve, and the world’s first telecommunications satellite went out of business permanently the following month.
Van Allen continued to criticize the government’s handling of the matter. Throughout the remainder of 1962 and into early 1963, speaking at various scientific conferences and meetings, he derided the administration’s statements as “hasty, ill-considered” and inaccurate. Said the Washington Post, “There is a growing body of expert opinion which holds that the artificial Van Allen radiation belt created by the [Starfish] blast is neither as intense nor as long-lived as was officially suggested by Defense Department and Atomic Energy Commission scientists in August.” Noting that such concerns had led to the substantial revision of the Fishbowl testing plans (though overlooking the various technical problems that had also played a part), the Post continued, “there appears to be growing evidence that those scientists who foresaw only a temporary and relatively slight enrichment of the natural belts were correct … whether these questions will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction is debatable. The measurement and mapping of artificial radiation has become vastly complicated.”1
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, Van Allen took his criticisms beyond the technical and into the realm of the political, directly challenging the PSAC, calling it a “vague and authoritative machine.” Van Allen told his colleagues that “the PSAC meetings at which I’ve been present have been exceedingly intimidating sessions … They are essentially governmentally dominated.” The PSAC, in effect, was little more than a body of “highhanded autocrats” who tended to disregard independent, non-government scientists in favor of hasty decisions and political expediency. Not only that, but “our failure as a nation to produce a substantial study of the scientific consequences of these tests long before the decision was made to conduct them and before an announcement was made that they were to be conducted, is, it seems to me, quite inexcusable.” It was, said Van Allen, a “shabby” episode all around. “Van Allen Sees Science ‘Clique’; Says Data on Radiation Belt Reflect Hasty Judgment By Government Insiders,” read Walter Sullivan’s New York Times headline.2
Such broadsides from America’s most prominent space scientist in such a high-visibility forum could not go unanswered, particularly when other scientists began to speak out in agreement, both on the specifics of Starfish and on the government’s scientific policies in general. Government scientists soon began to respond, claiming that instead of any nefarious intentions to “intimidate” or ignore their non-administration colleagues, the early, dire reports on Starfish Prime effects had been due to “piecemeal leaks” of initial data that considerably exaggerated the danger both to satellites and to human space travelers. More intriguing was the contention that the government’s reports had also been intended to give the Soviets some second thoughts about conducting their own high-altitude tests, perhaps convincing them that there might be some tempting propaganda value to calling off or limiting their own plans. It had not dissuaded the Russians at all, of course, but it was at least a plausible explanation given the realities of Cold War politics. Administration scientists also pointed out that not everyone agreed with Van Allen’s criticisms, and he had had ample opportunity to speak up publicly before the reports had been issued. Attempts to discover how he may have been actually “intimidated” yielded nothing.3
Obviously, it had all been a routine scientific controversy, mostly originating from the fact that Van Allen had been relying mostly on Injun 1 data while the government had trusted measurements mostly from Telstar. A few weeks later, however, the AEC, Pentagon, and NASA issued a joint report that officially revised their earlier estimates and stated that the Starfish belt would likely vanish within a few more months, or even weeks.
But the controversy was not quite laid to rest. By this time, more detailed and careful studies of the Starfish data had been conducted by all the various sources, and papers were beginning to appear in scientific journals. In March, Van Allen changed his mind, announcing that he now believed that the Starfish Prime radiation belt would persist for a least a decade, with an intensity that would substantially interfere with scientific studies of the natural belts. He explained that his earlier position had been based upon “intuitive” scientific expectations, but that the new mass of hard data now appearing from the various satellites had proven him wrong. To his immense credit as a scientist, he had followed the data, readily reversing his previously strongly held position when new facts made it necessary, with no fears of saving face or embarrassing himself. “It’s the difference between intuitive expectations and actual observations,” he remarked.4
Scientific disagreements were one thing, and of little concern to the military and defense establishment. Far more concerning to them was the fact that the Soviet Union had been conducting their own high-altitude tests—and that they also had satellites in orbit capable of observing and collecting data on the US tests. Two Kosmos satellites had been launched in the spring of 1962 and had been in excellent position to observe Starfish Prime that June. It was not lost on Pentagon officials that, just as the data collected by US satellites could be employed for both benign scientific discovery and darker military purposes, so could the observations of the Kosmos spacecraft. And if the United States was detonating nuclear weapons in space to investigate their military relevance, then the Soviet Union was undoubtedly doing the same thing.
The prospects for any resumption in atmospheric testing, much less Fishbowl-style high-altitude and outer space shots, had receded to near-impossibility as the test-ban talks proceeded and the US and USSR sought to ease tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Fishbowl, with both its successes and failures, had fired up new concepts. The goal of establishing an anti-ICBM defense system remained elusive. But a fresh arena of possible conflict had opened, a new frontier of offense and defense: satellites.
America was already operating its first attempts at a spy satellite system with the CORONA project, and undoubtedly the Soviets would soon be doing likewise. But there was another disturbing possibility: nuclear warheads not on missiles, but on orbiting satellites. Air Force intelligence experts worried that the Soviets could bypass the low accuracy and range of their existing missiles by simply lofting warheads into orbit—allowing them to be “de-orbited” and brought down at will on any target. All such a capability required were huge multimegaton warheads and the massive rocket power to put them into space, both of which the Russians had already amply demonstrated. A State Department report observed that “a thermonuclear ‘sword of Damocles’ would seem to hang over everyone’s head in a way which, logic and military technology aside, ICBMs do not … in anticipation of the contingency of a Soviet weapon in space and recognizing that it may be necessary to undertake physical countermeasures, we should develop as rapidly as possible anti-satellite capabilities.”5
Fishbowl had already demonstrated just how such a capability might work by exploding nuclear weapons at high altitudes, carried aloft by missiles. “The Starfish Prime test results showed that a high dose of radiation could provide the basis for an ASAT [anti-satellite] system,” noted an Air Force historical study. Only two months after Starfish Prime, Major General Bernard Schriever, commander of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, proposed to Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert that the Thor launching facilities on Johnston Island could form the nucleus of an ASAT system. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara approved further studies and development work on November 20. By February 1963, Program 437 would be going full speed ahead.6
In many ways, Program 437 was the logical culmination of Project Argus. Argus had demonstrated that Nicholas Christofilos’s original concepts of a defensive shield against Russian missiles were intriguing but ultimately impractical, while suggesting tantalizing possibilities for further investigation. Fishbowl and especially Starfish Prime had shown the potential of these possibilities: not only for defense, but for offense. Slowly, steadily, the Argus idea had evolved from gathering plowshares into forging swords.
Program 437 was actually the second American ASAT system. Preceding and then overlapping it for a time was Program 505, an Army system based on its Nike-Zeus anti-ballistic missile (ABM).7 The Nike-Zeus was the centerpiece of a bitter, complex interservice rivalry between the Army and the Air Force over the ABM mission throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Program 505 was the Army’s bid to beat the Air Force at its own game. A Nike-Zeus ASAT battery based on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands seemed promising in initial 1962 tests during Fishbowl, but pesky technical limitations persisted, including tracking and guidance problems, a relatively short effective range, and the inability of Nike-Zeus to carry anything other than a fairly small warhead (low “throw-weight,” in missile jargon).
Program 505 would continue to drag on for several more years, but for the ASAT job, the Thor-based Program 437 seemed a better alternative, both to Secretary of Defense McNamara and, of course, to the Air Force. By the summer of 1963, President Kennedy himself declared it to be “in the highest national priority category for research and development.”8
But research and development didn’t necessarily translate to a fully operational and deployed system. An official meeting later that year chaired by McNamara showed that some in the administration had nagging doubts about both the practicality and advisability of Program 437. Noted an official Air Force history: “Most of the civilian leadership of both the State and Defense Departments were very nervous about even having a program of research and development for something like 437, let alone the prospect of having such a system operationally ready and manned by ‘blue suiters’ [i.e., Air Force personnel]. Certainly the aspect of detonating a nuclear weapon in space was politically unattractive to them.” Finally, journalist Edward R. Murrow, attending the meeting in his official capacity as director of the US Information Agency, calmly remarked: “If the Soviets place a bomb in orbit and threaten us and if this administration has refused to develop a capability to destroy it in orbit, you will see the first impeachment proceeding of an American President since Andrew Johnson.” That caused “about two minutes of total silence … Finally, McNamara said testily, ‘Well, it doesn’t cost much, and the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] want it, so let’s approve 437.’”9
The Johnston Island launch complex that had hosted Fishbowl became the home of the newly established 10th Aerospace Defense Squadron (ADS) of the US Air Force, with a backup and support facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Beginning in 1964, tests and exercises began, all using non-nuclear-armed missiles, and the 10th ADS was declared fully operational by the middle of the year. For target practice, the crews used spent rocket stages and other space junk in orbit. Two Thor missiles would remain on twenty-four-hour alert at Johnston Island, with two kept in ready reserve at Vandenberg.
Yet it was unknown to the public at large. President Kennedy had occasionally commented on a US ASAT capability, but made no official announcements of its existence. In fall 1964, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, “during a reelection campaign trip to Sacramento, disclosed that the United States had developed an ASAT capability to intercept a satellite that might be carrying a weapon that threatened US national security.” The following day, McNamara announced it officially, without giving up much in the way of details. It was unclear whether Johnson’s announcement had been inadvertent or intentional, but “whatever his reasons … President Johnson not only put the Soviets on warning that the United States had an operational ASAT system, but he also told the electorate that he was prepared to defend the country from any possible attack, even if it came from outer space.”10 No doubt Johnson’s proclamation didn’t hurt his landslide election victory two months later.
It may have been comforting to both the public and the Pentagon to know that Program 437 existed, but in reality it was far from perfect. As defense funding began to be increasingly siphoned away by the steadily growing demands of the Vietnam War, the Air Force found it difficult to keep paying for the Thor missiles needed for test launches and operational proficiency maintenance for the 10th ADS crews. Also, the single location at Johnston Island didn’t permit global coverage; the Soviets could conceivably avoid the Program 437 defenses altogether by choosing different launch and orbital profiles for their satellites. Another practical military consideration was that, tactically speaking, Johnston Island was hardly a stronghold, and could easily have been overwhelmed by a commando raid aimed at destroying the missiles and launch pads. Air Force commanders were quite aware that Soviet submarines routinely parked in international waters near Johnston Island to observe test launches. Any conceivable support forces against an attack were hundreds of miles away on Hawaii. Mother Nature posed another threat: “A more likely source of damage to Program 437 was from strong tropical storms that potentially could batter the island and reduce the site to rubble.”11
Perhaps the biggest problem of all harkened back to Program 437’s nuclear roots in Argus and Starfish. The effects of a nuclear explosion in space had no respect for national boundaries. Attacking another country’s satellite with a nuclear weapon—even if it was an orbiting warhead and not merely an innocuous weather satellite—could quite naturally be interpreted as the opening of an all-out nuclear strike, sparking general war. Even under the best circumstances, the EMP and radiation effects of a Program 437 strike could quite likely cripple or destroy friendly satellites, as Starfish Prime had so clearly demonstrated.
The supposed threat of orbiting Soviet nukes never materialized, and as funding continued to diminish, Program 437 slowly faded into oblivion. Attempts to keep it alive by altering or enhancing its original ASAT mission proved abortive, while the Pacific Ocean took its toll. “The Thor boosters stood alert on open launch pads, unprotected from the harsh environment and strong Pacific storms or other natural disasters. Over time the rocket bodies and launch support equipment were susceptible to the corrosive effects of the heat, humidity, and salt-water spray.”12 Launch equipment began to fail. By 1970 the Air Force began to shut down operations. Then, in August 1972, a hurricane passed close to Johnston Island, severely damaging the launch pads and other facilities and speeding the program’s demise, which finally became official in 1975. The notion of antisatellite weapons persisted, however, taking different and sometimes outlandish forms, such as the use of F-15 fighter planes to launch ASATs from high altitude, a sequel to the Navy’s old NOTSNIK idea.
Program 437 would not be the end of further talk of using nuclear weapons in space, however. Several years later, the grandiose schemes of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as “Star Wars,” would propose orbiting X-ray lasers powered by hydrogen bombs and other similarly apocalyptic devices as defensive countermeasures to enemy ICBMs. The electromagnetic pulse effects that had been first revealed by Teak, Orange, Starfish Prime, and even Argus were not forgotten either by SDI planners or by the military officials, scientists, and political strategists who followed them.
Some ideas, it seems, refuse to go away. As the more immediate descendants of Argus and Starfish such as Program 437 fizzled out and passed into historical obscurity in the years that followed, the original dreams of Nicholas Christofilos would continue to mutate into a dark specter, a shadow that persists into the twenty-first century and beyond.
ON MONDAY, JUNE 10, 1963, PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY DELIVERED WHAT would be one of the most influential and important speeches of his brief presidency, a commencement address at the American University in Washington, D.C. He and his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen had titled it “A Strategy of Peace,” but it would soon become better known as JFK’s American University speech, or more simply, his “peace speech.”
With all the Cold War crises and tensions that had haunted his presidency, and the nightmarish days of the Cuban Missile Crisis still fresh in his mind, Kennedy was anxious to set out on a new course, a more hopeful path to the future than the nuclear oblivion that, so often, had seemed inevitable. He spoke of world peace, “the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living … not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”
Too many, Kennedy said, “think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man.”
Kennedy went beyond such stirring rhetoric, however, to make concrete and practical proposals. Our attitudes toward the Soviet Union had to be reexamined. In the event of war, he noted, “our two countries would become the primary targets … all we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.”
To forestall that catastrophe, the president called for early agreement on a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, while also pledging that the United States “does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume.” He observed that while “such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty” or “a substitute for disarmament,” he hoped it would help achieve both goals.
The speech stands as one of the most remarkable statements ever made by an American president, not only in historical hindsight but especially considering the time in which it was delivered. And it would have an immediate impact, most importantly upon Nikita Khrushchev, who found Kennedy’s words profoundly inspiring and encouraging. Less than a month after the speech, Khrushchev proposed a partial nuclear test ban treaty, barring all but underground tests. Several weeks later, a formal treaty was signed by the US, USSR, and Great Britain. The Partial or Limited Test Ban Treaty, more formally designated as the Treaty Banning Nuclear Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water, was soon ratified by the US Senate and signed into law by Kennedy on October 7, 1963. It went into effect three days later.
After years of temporary moratoriums, diplomatic wrangling, military planning, successful and completely botched test operations, radioactive fallout and mushroom clouds and fireballs brighter and hotter than the sun, the days of open nuclear testing were over. At least for the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom. Other nations such as China and France would soon conduct their own atmospheric tests, quite unconcerned with any agreements concluded by their more powerful international rivals.
But since the Tightrope shot that concluded Operation Fishbowl in 1962, no nuclear explosions have yet taken place in or near outer space.
There are, however, no guarantees.