ONE DAY IN JUNE, 1999, REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE BARTLETT (R-MARYLAND) SAT in a Vienna hotel room along with ten of his colleagues and some congressional staffers, facing three members of the Russian Duma and a representative of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. The group had been busy hammering out a framework agreement to end the bloody war in Kosovo.
Tensions were high and tempers short, with the Russians feeling slighted that they had been brought into the negotiations on an almost after-the-fact basis by the United States and NATO powers. As Bartlett later recalled, the dominant member of the Russian group, former ambassador to the US and deputy Duma chairman Vladimir Lukin, “was very angry and sat with his arms crossed looking at the ceiling for a couple of days during these discussions.” Lukin was visibly offended by what he perceived as an American snub, complaining that “you spit on us, now why should we help you?”
Finally, Lukin made an offhand remark that stunned the leader of the American delegation, Curt Weldon, who spoke Russian. “Did you hear what he said?” Weldon asked Bartlett, before the translator repeated it in English.
Bartlett, who spoke no Russian, shook his head. Then the translator gave them Lukin’s words: “If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] from the ocean, detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and shut down your power grid and your communications for six months or so.” As if to emphasize the point, a younger member of the Russian group added, “And if one weapon wouldn’t do it, we have some spares.”1
It was a remarkable threat, chilling in its implications, plain in character, and entirely plausible. The Russians were talking about an EMP weapon—essentially a scaled-up version of Argus, Starfish Prime, or Teak, specifically designed to generate an intense electromagnetic pulse effect when detonated at high altitude.
It was a threat unlike the blustery Cold War boasts of Nikita Khrushchev—his “we will bury you,” or when he pounded his fists on his desk at the United Nations. At the time, as exercised as some Western leaders and strategists allowed themselves to become in response to such statements, some fundamental understanding remained that in the end, it was all talk, all sound and fury signifying very little, if not nothing.
But this was different. This was an unguarded, ill-advised remark made by a frustrated and exhausted man who would probably have never said such a thing under better circumstances. It was certainly not an official statement of Russian policy that required a decisive US response.
Yet it was its very casualness that gave it such impact. Aside from being a congressman, Bartlett was also a scientist, specifically a physiologist, and a former director of the Space Life Sciences Group at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, working on NASA contracts. He also served on the House Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The phenomenon of EMP was certainly not new to him. But until this moment, he had never really thought through its ultimate meaning.
Soon after, the Kosovo negotiations successfully ended with an agreement adopted by the G-8 nations, and the Russian and American delegations went home. But Bartlett continued to be haunted by Lukin’s words. He became a major force in calling for hearings on the EMP threat, which led to the formal establishment of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.
In a 2004 report, the Commission noted that while “EMP effects from nuclear bursts are not new threats to our nation,” they previously would have likely occurred as a consequences of general nuclear war, when their impact would pale in comparison to the wholesale obliteration of cities and populations. Defense against EMP meant deterring nuclear war, period. But now, the threat can come from “terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the US without regard for their own safety.”2
The Commission also noted that the threat didn’t merely encompass an attack on obvious vital US infrastructure targets such as the power grid. Other government agencies, including the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, conducted their own studies and issued their own reports, pointing out that EMP can also be used as an antisatellite weapon, as Starfish Prime had demonstrated back in 1962.
Since Argus and Starfish Prime, the United States and much of the rest of the world have come to depend on a robust and extensive infrastructure of satellites and communication networks. Losing them would affect far more than our economies and cultures. Satellites are indispensable for modern military forces—particularly those of the US. They are involved in intelligence collection, strategic planning, and tactical operations of all kinds. And that indispensability has made us more vulnerable than ever before.
Even a relatively small nuclear warhead, sent aloft by a small rocket to a humble altitude of as low as sixty miles, could cripple or destroy many vital satellites. It’s technology that’s within the reach of many countries, including North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan—nations not as dependent upon space resources as more advanced nations, and thus less likely to feel their loss. It’s perhaps one of the most underappreciated threats we face today. Just as a band of terrorists managed to shock the world with hijacked airliners and a few box cutters, any country or group with access to nuclear weapons and 1950s-era launch technology has the potential to bring twenty-first-century Western civilization to its knees.
After a long career in Congress that began in 1982, Roscoe Bartlett finally became a private citizen after losing a reelection bid in the 2012 midterms. Aside from being one of the longest-serving members of the House, he’s now famous for retreating to a distant mountain cabin in West Virginia to live completely off the grid, with no outside electricity, plumbing, or phone service. Instead of retiring to plush luxury in the usual tradition of career politicians, Bartlett lives with solar panels, wood-burning stoves, and composting toilets. Still active as a private consultant, he continues to crusade for measures to protect the US infrastructure from EMP, solar storms, and cyberattack, whether from natural origins or terrorist action. He is confident that he and his family are prepared for catastrophe. He still worries that the United States is not.
The congressional EMP commission that Bartlett helped to establish offered some words of hope: “The Nation’s vulnerability to EMP that gives rise to potentially large-scale, long-term consequences can be reasonably and readily reduced below the level of a potentially catastrophic national problem by coordinated and focused effort between the private and public sectors of our country,” its members wrote. “Such actions are both rational and feasible.”
More than a decade after that report, however, little if anything has been done. Tucked away on a remote mountain, Roscoe Bartlett remains frustrated that despite all the talk, all the commissions and studies and congressional testimony, and long after an annoyed Russian diplomat made an offhand remark in a Vienna hotel room, no definitive steps have been taken to address what he sees as an existential threat to Western civilization.
AFTER STARFISH PRIME AND HIS INJUN 1 SATELLITE, JAMES VAN ALLEN WAS FINISHED dealing with nuclear weapons. Even had he desired to continue any such involvement, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the subsequent Outer Space Treaty in 1967 essentially ensured that the only nuclear technologies that would henceforth be used in space would be wholly peaceful in nature. With the days of exoatmospheric nuclear testing over, the only radiation in space would be generated either by natural sources or by small devices generating power for deep space probes and Mars landers.
With one notable exception. The Starfish Prime radiation belt would continue to persist at a detectable level into the 1970s, and would indeed complicate scientific observations of the natural Van Allen belts and other solar and exoatmospheric phenomena. In the end, Van Allen had been proved right in discounting his scientific intuition and trusting the hard data that his instruments provided.
He would continue his distinguished career as America’s premier space scientist, extending his explorations past Earth’s orbital neighborhood to the outer reaches of the Solar System and beyond into interstellar space. Based at the University of Iowa3 for the rest of his life, Van Allen built instruments for almost all the major space probe missions of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Mariner spacecraft that went to Venus and Mars and Pioneer 10 and 11, the first probes that ventured beyond the asteroid belt to Jupiter and Saturn and ultimately left the Solar System entirely. He would teach and mentor legions of undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom, such as George Ludwig and Carl McIlwain, would go on to distinguished scientific careers and achievements in their own right. Even after stepping down in 1985 as head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa, he continued to work tirelessly as an emeritus professor, showing up bright and early every morning at the Iowa City campus building where he had spent most of his career, the building which now bore his name. He died in 2006 at the age of ninety-one.
Van Allen’s place in the history of physics and space exploration is unassailable. He did, after all, make the first true scientific discovery of the space age—the first step for transforming space travel from a nationalistic stunt into a serious human endeavor. Yet some historians view his career with a somewhat jaundiced eye, questioning the close, often inextricable relationship with the military that characterized and enabled so much of his work.
Van Allen, of course, never denied or tried to hide that connection, and readily acknowledged that he had been conducting military-related research since his days as a Navy officer in World War II. But until Argus, he had never worked with nuclear weapons, a fact that entails a new level of ethical consideration. He was never directly involved in designing and building nuclear weapons, like so many of his fellow physicists. But in a real sense, he used them to conduct and benefit his own research. Where, some have asked, should he have drawn the line?
To some degree, Van Allen had no real choice. Especially during the years of the Cold War, the tools of his trade, including rockets and high-altitude balloons, were almost exclusively under the control of the military, so any scientist who needed to use them had to deal with military authorities. But some argue that perhaps Van Allen went too far. “By participating in a project to detonate bombs in outer space aimed at disrupting and militarizing the magnetosphere, he was behaving quintessentially as a product of the mid-twentieth-century cold war,” wrote historian James Rodger Fleming. Referring to the effects of Starfish Prime, Fleming argues that “his actions, admittedly miscalculations, rendered the scientific study of a newly discovered planetary feature difficult if not impossible for over a decade.”4
That seems an unfair criticism; after all, Van Allen had nothing directly to do with the planning or execution of Starfish Prime, nor of Argus or any of the other high-altitude shots. While it could be argued that he might have used his status and prestige to protest against them more vigorously, ultimately he had no power to stop such tests. But he also didn’t hesitate to take advantage of them as a scientist. “He wrote about the science of it all, but he eagerly participated in the military aspects as well,” Fleming said.5
Unlike some of his other colleagues, Van Allen could hardly be characterized as a militaristic Dr. Strangelove type. Rather, he may have been something of an innocuous opportunist. Historian Lisa Mundey cites a 1981 oral history interview with Van Allen in which he explained, “I didn’t really know much about the bomb business. I thought, if they were going to make a test, [space] was a good place to make one, as far as absence of fallout goes and adverse effects.”6 Pointing out that Van Allen also fought for openness and making the results of Argus and the other tests public, Mundey concludes that “like many scientists of the era, he bought into the Cold War competition with the Soviets and engaged in defense-related research. His behavior after the public revelation of the [Argus] experiment, however, suggests that he wanted public credit for his achievements and so supported declassification.”7
Whether James Van Allen willingly compromised himself as a scientist by co-opting his work to the military or was merely doing whatever he had to do out of dedication to his profession is too complex a question to be ultimately resolved. As nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out, “Very little in good history boils down to easy ideological stances.” But James Van Allen’s connections with Argus and the other space nuclear tests—activities that were the first human attempts to intentionally alter the environment on a global scale—remain an inescapable part of his larger legacy. As Fleming observed, for better or worse, “his halo now has a decidedly nuclear glow.”8
FOR NICHOLAS CHRISTOFILOS, ETHICAL OR MORAL QUESTIONS ABOUT WHETHER or not a scientist had any business being involved with the military were a non-issue, nothing more than a foolish distraction. Following Argus and the subsequent analyses of the data, he returned to his pet project: the Astron accelerator at Livermore Lab.
Some people already considered Astron outlandish enough, but that didn’t stop Christofilos from continuing to generate other wild ideas, always with the same manic enthusiasm and persuasiveness. When he realized that Argus would not work as the impenetrable barrier to Russian missiles he had originally envisioned in his dreams, he refused to be discouraged. He simply moved on to other possibilities. “His ideas were grandiose and bizarre,” historian Sharon Weinberger wrote, “but usually so genius that they dazzled the physicists around him. What seemed to attract scientists was that the ideas themselves were scientifically sound but required technological miracles to make them work.”9
One of them was called Seesaw, a scheme for a massive particle beam weapon to knock down incoming Soviet ICBMs. It was just the sort of notion that would have fit in perfectly with the “Star Wars” schemes of the 1980s, except that Christofilos first proposed it in 1958. With the trademark Christofilos touch, nothing about Seesaw was modest or conservative. The weapon would have required massive amounts of energy, far more than any conceivable power source could provide. Conceivable, that is, to anyone but Christofilos. At one point, he proposed detonating hydrogen bombs to drain the Great Lakes, generating the necessary electrical power by using the resulting massive deluge of (radioactive) water. (He did at least recognize that such a measure would only be considered in an absolutely last-ditch scenario, such as when the US was already under massive attack.) Colleagues did the math and concluded that, absurd and unthinkable as it was, the idea would actually work—provided one accepted the immolation of the entire Midwest, of course. As Weinberger notes, “Christofilos’s imagination was not tethered to practicality.”10 As an indication of the bizarre desperation driving the Cold War, Seesaw continued to be seriously studied and considered, if only theoretically, for decades after Christofilos first proposed it.
Not all of Christofilos’s ideas were quite so apocalyptic. His Project Sanguine—a system for generating extremely low-frequency (ELF) radio waves using immense antennas buried deep underground to enable secret communication with submerged submarines all over the world—didn’t involve setting off nuclear weapons. The underground basing would supposedly render the system invulnerable, ensuring that America’s nuclear-armed submarine force would always be able to respond to a Soviet attack. The problem was the ELF antennas. Unlike conventional radio and TV signals, which range from millimeters to yards in wavelength, ELF waves are miles long, which means that the antennas must also be likewise. Christofilos’s ideas involved even longer ELF waves that would actually be transmitted using natural ground electrical currents and the ionosphere.
But burying such a system underground would entail digging up thousands of square miles and causing extreme environmental disruption. When the Navy’s plans to build a Sanguine site settled on northern Wisconsin, environmentalists and the public rebelled. “Isn’t it about time that we refused to be brainwashed as to the necessity of bigger and more terrible things in the name of peace?” asked one letter to the Chicago Tribune.11 Though experimental tests proved that the concept actually worked, Christofilos’s original Sanguine plans, conceived with his typical grand panache, were doomed. For years, however, the Navy employed a smaller-scale ELF system for submarine communications that used some of Christofilos’s ideas.
And there was always Astron. It had been his passion for particle accelerators that had first brought him to the United States and landed him his position at Livermore, and had burned continuously throughout his life. Its basic concept of using relativistic electrons to generate magnetic fields and contain plasma for fusion power had driven most of his other work, beginning with Argus.
Yet definitive success with Astron continued to elude him, despite years of experimentation, bureaucratic wrangling over funding, and controversy over the direction of the project. Christofilos achieved interesting results and intriguing insights, but never the grail of practical, controllable thermonuclear fusion. “No matter how tightly Christofilos clung to Astron’s reins, he could not force the electrons, or the resistors, or the pulser, or any other part of his apparatus, to behave as he wished,” observed a history of the project.12 Yet his stubbornness impelled him to keep working, keep pushing. When Astron was dismissed as a “dark horse” in the quest for fusion power, Christofilos responded, “No, it is just a white horse, standing in the shadows.”13
By the beginning of the 1970s, the Astron project was struggling to survive; Christofilos was under ever greater demands for concrete results while under ever stricter deadlines imposed by the AEC. Always a workaholic, Christofilos was driving himself and his assistants through twelve-hour days, punctuated only occasionally by after-hours drinking bouts at local bars.
His personal life was no source of solace either. After his messy divorce from his first wife, his second marriage also ended in divorce. His sons, one from each of his wives, lived with their mothers. Christofilos was essentially alone, with only his ideas, his work, and the elusive dream of Astron. His health deteriorated, his visions clouding over.
By the fall of September 1972, it all caught up with him. After a meeting with AEC chairman James Schlesinger at Livermore, Christofilos checked into the local Holiday Inn, a practice he’d adopted to avoid a long commute home to Berkeley on late nights. The next morning, September 25, his secretary went in search of him when he failed to appear at the lab on his usual bright and early schedule, and found him in his room, dead of a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-six years old. The Astron project joined him in oblivion the following June, officially and permanently cancelled.
The “crazy Greek” was gone, finally overwhelmed by the passion of his ideas and relentless strivings. Though some of the various press obituaries that followed mentioned Argus in passing, it was Christofilos’s thermonuclear work with Astron that got the most attention, ensuring that he would be remembered as an inventive, original thinker, not as a weaponeer or military scientist.
For an individual such as Nicholas Christofilos, who lived his life and conducted his work with an unapologetic, uncompromising spirit, it was appropriate that his final legacy should be based on his strongest and most long-lasting passion. As a friend once described him: “For Nick, all pieces are written fortissimo.”
But some of his darker and more apocalyptic visions—Argus and the power and fury of nuclear weapons extending from the surface of Earth into the heavens and beyond—also survive. Thus far, those visions are still only the “crazy ideas” of a uniquely imaginative scientist. We can only continue to hope that they become nothing more.