was James Killian. The president’s powerful science adviser, Killian had headhunted Bissell twice before, the first time in 1946 to work in the economics department at MIT, and then again in 1954 to manage the U-2 aerial espionage program for the CIA. For nearly twenty years, Killian had considered Richard Bissell not just a colleague but a friend. After the Bay of Pigs, Killian turned his back on his friend. In a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, Killian told the CIA’s historian Donald E. Welzenbach that he was terribly upset when he learned of Bissell’s role in covert CIA operations. In a Studies in Intelligence report for the CIA, Welzenbach wrote, “Killian looked upon science and technology almost as a religion, something sacred to be kept from contamination by those who would misuse it for unwholesome ends. Into this category fit the covert operations and ‘dirty tricks’ of Dick Bissell’s Directorate of Plans.”
It was hypocrisy of the highest order. James Killian had been up to his own dirty tricks, the true, perilous facts of which have remained buried until now. Unlike Richard Bissell, because of Killian’s powerful role as President Eisenhower’s chief science adviser, Killian did not get caught. But what Killian spearheaded in the name of so-called sacred science in retrospect hardly seems like science at all. In late 1958, Killian organized, oversaw, and then tried to cover up the facts regarding two of the most dangerous weapons tests in the history of the nuclear bomb. Two thermonuclear devices, called Teak and Orange, each an astonishingly powerful 3.8 megatons, were exploded in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at Johnston Atoll, 750 miles west of Hawaii. Teak went off at 252,000 feet, or 50 miles, and Orange went off at 141,000 feet, 28 miles, which is exactly where the ozone layer lies. In hindsight, it was a ludicrous idea. “The impetus for these tests was derived from the uncertainty in U.S. capability to discern Soviet high-altitude nuclear detonation,” read one classified report. Killian was in charge of the tests, and his rationale for authorizing them was that if sometime in the future the Soviets were to detonate a highaltitude nuclear bomb, our scientists would need to know what to look for.
Instead of being difficult to detect, a nuclear bomb exploding in the ozone layer was instantly obvious in horrific and catastrophic ways. The fireballs produced by both Teak and Orange burned the retinas of any living thing that had been looking up at the sky without goggles within a 225-mile radius of the blast, including hundreds of monkeys and rabbits that Killian authorized to be flown in airplanes nearby. The animals’ heads had been locked in gadgets that forced them to witness the megaton blast. From Guam to Wake Island to Maui, the natural blue sky changed to a red, white, and gray, creating an aurora 2,100 miles along the geomagnetic meridian. Radio communication throughout a swath of the Pacific region went dead.
“We almost blew a hole in the ozone layer,” explains Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who in the twelve years since Crossroads had wired over one hundred nuclear bombs, including Teak and Orange. O’Donnell was standing on Johnston Island, 720 miles southwest of Honolulu, on August 1, 1958, when the Teak bomb went off. Due to a “program failure” on the Redstone missile system (which carried the warhead to its target), the rocket went straight up and detonated directly above where O’Donnell and the rest of the arming and firing party were working. The bomb was supposed to have detonated twenty-six miles to the south. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky overhead. “It was scary,” O’Donnell sighs, remembering the catastrophic event as an old man, half a century later. There is a hint of resignation in his voice when he says, “But we were all used to it by then. The bombs had become too big.” In Teak’s first ten milliseconds, its fireball grew ten miles wide— enough yield to obliterate Manhattan. At H + 1 second, the fireball was more than forty miles wide, which could have taken out all five boroughs of New York City. It was not as if Killian, who was in charge of the project, hadn’t realized the potential for part of the ozone layer to be destroyed. “In late 1957 and early 1958, the question was raised as to whether or not the ultraviolet emissions from the Teak and Orange events would ‘burn a hole’ into the natural ozone layer,” states a 1976 review of the event authored by Los Alamos National Laboratory. But “the pre-event discussions were inconclusive” and the tests barreled ahead anyway. Why? “It was argued that even in case of complete destruction of the ozone layer over an area with radius 50 km, the ozone loss would amount to only 2 x 10?5 of the global inventory. The ‘hole’ would be closed promptly by bomb-produced turbulence and ambient motions in the atmosphere.” As astonishing and reckless as this was, the follow-up becomes even more unbelievable. “After the events, little attention was paid to this particular problem, evidently because no spectacular or unusual observations were made (because of lack of evidence one way or the other).” Apparently, no one thought to ask the dignitary on hand that day on Johnston Island, Wernher Von Braun.
In government archival film footage, Von Braun can be seen observing the Redstone rocket he had designed to get the nuclear weapon up to the ozone where it would explode. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt and sporting an island tan, Von Braun appears more playboy than rocket scientist. But Von Braun was so spooked by the Teak blast that he left the island before the second test took place. Von Braun was not one to scare easily. When he worked for Adolf Hitler, he and his colleague Ernst Steinhoff were known to dash up to Hitler’s lair, Wolfsschanze, in Steinhoff’s personal airplane to brief the dictator on how the V-2 was coming along. But the power of the Teak bomb sent Von Braun running. Immediately after the deadened communications systems were restored, Von Braun fled. He never publicly said why.
Killian’s high-altitude nuclear tests did not stop there. Two weeks later, another ultrasecret nuclear weapons project called Operation Argus commenced. Killian’s nuclear bomb tests had now expanded to include outer space. “Argus was an unusual operation,” a Defense Nuclear Agency summary from 1993 recalls. “It was completed in less than six months after Presidential approval, and it was completed in complete secrecy. Nuclear-tipped missiles were fired from ships for the first time.” Oblique words used to conceal another one of the most
radical, covert science experiments conducted by man. On August 27, August 30, and September 6, 1958, three nuclear warheads were launched from X-17 rockets from the deck of the USS Norton Sound as the warship floated off the coast of South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. Up went the missiles and the warheads until they exploded approximately three hundred miles into space. This “scientific experiment” was the brainchild of a Greek elevator operator turned physicist, Nicholas Christofilos. Christofilos convinced Killian that a nuclear explosion occurring above the Earth’s atmosphere — but within the Earth’s magnetic field — might produce an electronic pulse that could hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads trying to make their way into the United States. While the phenomenon did occur in minutiae, meaning the arming devices registered “feeling” the pulse from the nuclear blast, Christofilos was wrong about the possibility that this would actually stop incoming enemy nuclear missiles in their tracks. In other words, the tests failed.
To cover his tracks as to the sheer waste and recklessness of the experiment, in the month following the nuclear detonation in space, Killian wrote a memo to President Eisenhower attempting to put a congratulatory spin on how quickly the project occurred and how terrific it was that secrecy was maintained. Dated November 3, 1958, Killian’s letter began by describing Argus as “probably the most spectacular event ever conducted.” More egregious self-congratulation came next: “The experiment was in itself an extraordinary accomplishment. Especially notable was the successful launching of a large, solid-fuel rocket carrying a nuclear payload from the heaving deck of a ship in the squally South Atlantic. Scarcely less so is the fact that the whole experiment was planned and carried out in less than five months… Impressive, too, is the fact that no leaks have occurred.”
When the New York Times’s senior science writer Walter Sullivan hand-delivered a letter to Killian letting him know the New York Times was in possession of leaked information about these secret tests, the White House went into denial mode. “Neither confirm nor deny such leaks,” the president’s special assistant Karl G. Harr Jr. wrote in a secret memo to Killian. “If the New York Times, or anyone else, breaks a substantial part of the story,” one possible response would be to say the White House had disclosed “all that we may safely say from a national security point of view.” In regards to brazenly violating the White House policy of announcing every nuclear test, Killian’s position was to be that “it was a scientific experiment utilizing a nuclear detonation to discharge electrons into the Earth’s magnetic field.” It was semantics that gave Killian the authority, or cover, to declare that a nuclear test was not a nuclear test. Adding one last ironic touch of deception, the president’s special assistant told Killian that were the New York Times to make the Argus test public, a panel of scientists “should meet with the press in the Great Hall of the National Academy of Science in order to emphasize the scientific aspects of this experiment.”
Were the president’s top science advisers really making America safer? Or were they abusing their power with the president? Couple their power with the total lack of oversight they enjoyed, and it was the president’s scientists who paved the road for the U.S. militarization of space. “It was agreed that I would be protected from congressional inquisition,” Killian wrote in his memoirs, adding, “I think now this was the wrong decision. It would have been of help to Congress to have been more fully informed about the work of PSAC [President’s Science Advisory Committee], and help me to have a better feeling for congressional opinion.”
Beginning with Argus, the president’s science advisers were using space as their laboratory, conducting tests
