The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  With ARPA in charge of the test program, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Projects prepared to launch three nuclear shots in a ten-day period in August and September 1958. To carry out the tests, the navy created the top secret Task Force 88, which included nine ships and forty-five hundred personnel. The plan was to launch a low-yield nuclear weapon into the upper atmosphere from ships using an X-17A three-stage ballistic missile. From start to finish, the entire operation was unprecedented. The military had only a few months to prepare the tests, instead of the typical time of more than a year. It was also the first launch of a nuclear weapon from a ship at sea, and the only atmospheric test series conducted in secrecy (Trinity, in 1945, was a single test). To keep Task Force 88 secret, the navy was required to come up with elaborate cover stories for the ships involved. The USS Norton Sound, selected to launch the first test, was completely split off from the Atlantic Fleet with the pretense that it would be involved in a series of “preliminary tests” for special missile operations in a remote part of the Pacific. In fact, it was on its way to the selected test area in the South Atlantic.

  On August 25 and 26, practice rockets were launched from the Norton Sound, under the code name Pogo, as a dress rehearsal for the real shot. Finally, at 2:20 a.m. on August 27, amid rough seas, the ship launched the first missile as other ships and circling aircraft stood by to capture the event and record the effects of the blast. Those aboard ship assigned to monitor the missile stared at the night sky wearing high-density goggles meant to protect them in case of early detonation. On the observation aircraft, one pilot was instructed to keep the protective goggles on for a full sixty seconds, to make sure that in the worst-case scenario, an unimpaired pilot could control the aircraft. After the X-17A launched, everyone watched and waited.

  At the thirty-six-second mark, the missile reached 100,000 feet and detonated, and the shipboard observers saw a flash light up the clouds. One of the observation pilots reported “a great luminous ball” about forty degrees above the horizon. As expected, the nuclear blast triggered a visual aurora, created by photons of light emitted from the electrically charged particles decaying back to a lower-energy state. For the next half hour, the crew looked on in awe, photographing the brilliant green and blue colors as they swirled into different shapes like a giant kaleidoscope projected into the night sky. The fruits of Christofilos’s fertile mind were a spectacular sight, but was it really a force field?

  Two more tests were carried out, on August 30 and September 5—also successes, so far as ARPA was concerned. In a memorandum for the president, dated November 3, 1958, and classified top secret, James Killian, the president’s science adviser, effusively praised Argus as a “historic experiment, probably the most spectacular ever conducted.” Killian’s words would soon be echoed in a much more public forum. On March 19, 1959, The New York Times revealed the top secret nuclear tests, with the headline that declared it the “greatest experiment.” The article brought worldwide attention to Argus and also to its idiosyncratic creator, Christofilos, who became the object of public fascination.

  It was never clear who leaked the details on Argus; George Kistiakowsky, who succeeded Killian as Eisenhower’s science adviser, suspected it was someone in the Van Allen lab, while York pointed the finger at a navy science official. Whatever the case, it probably did not matter in the end. Christofilos’s shield never came to fruition. Despite all the praise heaped on the tests, the experiments ultimately showed that earth’s magnetic field was not strong enough to keep the killer electrons in place for long enough to be useful as a giant shield; the “death belt” would decay too quickly. Even when the Argus shield proved impossible, politically and technically, York gave a tongue-in-cheek defense for having pursued the idea. “There could, however, be another earth, another planet with opposing superpowers, where such a shield might actually be possible and make a difference,” he wrote.

  Soon after he started Argus, York approved another outrageous—or ambitious, depending on one’s point of view—project: an interplanetary spaceship. Dreamed up by Theodore Taylor, a former Los Alamos nuclear weapons designer, Project Orion was a grandiose idea for a spaceship powered by nuclear explosions, thousands of them, according to York’s description. In the summer of 1958, ARPA agreed to provide about $1 million to General Atomics to fund preliminary design work on Orion. Roy Johnson, for his part, tolerated the project, telling Congress that he thought Orion was a “screwball” idea when it was first proposed just the year prior, “but not quite as screwball today.”

  Actually, it was a completely screwball idea, even if the science behind it was sound. Just launching Orion required some two hundred nuclear explosions. George Dyson, the son of the physicist and Orion participant Freeman Dyson, described the spaceship as “egg-shaped and the height of a twenty-story building” with “a 1,000-ton pusher plate attached by shock-absorbing legs.” Johnson, in his congressional testimony, explained to lawmakers that the shock waves from the nuclear explosions acting against the pusher plate would function like a spring to propel the space plane forward. The tricky part was to do this in a way “so the inhabitants are not killed.”

  The most obvious problem with Orion was the sheer impracticality of launching a spaceship by setting off hundreds of nuclear explosions. If the ship crashed, it risked massive radioactive contamination. Even if it did not crash, the fallout from the nuclear explosions used to launch and propel the spaceship would leave radioactive fallout in its wake; Freeman Dyson recounted that at one point scientists estimated that a single mission would result in about ten deaths on earth as a result of increased levels of radiation.

  After just eighteen months, ARPA ended its support for Orion, though the air force funded it for several years after. In the end, the spaceship never got far beyond a scale model (and President John F. Kennedy was reportedly “appalled” by the mock-up’s five hundred nuclear warheads), but it inspired a cult following among those who believed that nuclear fission and fusion were the most feasible method of interplanetary travel. In August 1958, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to halt atmospheric nuclear explosions, bringing dreams of space shields and atomic spaceships to an end.

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  ARPA’s turbulent first year of existence was caught up in the much larger debate over who would ultimately control space. While the industrialists brought to Washington seemed to hold sway in the administration, Eisenhower was listening to his science advisers, who were pushing for the establishment of a new civilian agency; ARPA’s role as the nation’s space agency was merely a place holder. The unresolved question then was over whether ARPA would have a longer-term role in military space, and if so, what would military space encompass? Roy Johnson might not have been a scientist, but he had an instinctive understanding of technologies and their applications. The Soviets’ focus on engine thrust is what had enabled them to launch Sputnik, and Johnson knew a powerful rocket would be needed to get anything big, like a space vehicle capable of carrying humans, into orbit. ARPA had already proposed a space plane, called the Maneuverable Recoverable Space Vehicle, or MRS-V (ARPA employees pronounced it “Missus Vee”), and Johnson decided the next step was to fund a booster for the space plane.

  In ARPA’s version of history, two of its technical staff members came up with the idea of clustering between seven and nine engines to produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust, and then Johnson proposed the idea to von Braun’s team, offering to fund it. Von Braun was more equivocal about the rocket’s paternity. “We were firm believers in the feasibility of clusters, and the question [of] who made the opening statement is a little bit like who started a love affair,” von Braun later said. Regardless of who first proposed the idea, Johnson decided, without consulting anyone in the Pentagon or the White House, to fund von Braun’s group to work on a super-thrust booster. Such a rocket would, in theory, take MRS-V into space.

  On August 15, 1958, ARPA authorized the start of the new von Braun rocket program, called
Saturn, with the rather creative explanation that the clustered booster would be used to put up a variety of large military payloads, such as spy satellites. No one really bought the official explanation for Saturn, particularly not Johnson’s chief scientist, who knew that the ARPA director’s primary goal was to cement the agency’s future role in manned space missions. York also knew full well that Johnson was bucking the White House’s clear guidance that the mission to put a man in space would belong to a civilian agency, not ARPA or any other defense agency. Saturn became Johnson’s obsession, particularly as the agency was about to face its biggest challenge yet.

  On October 1, 1958, ARPA was ordered to turn over its scientific satellite programs to the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, the civilian agency that Eisenhower’s advisers wanted from the start. Losing the scientific satellites to NASA was no heartbreak for Johnson. Those were nothing but “a sorry string of failures and struggles to throw up relatively dainty” satellites. Johnson fought to preserve the ability of the Pentagon, and particularly ARPA, to pursue military missions in space even as Eisenhower made clear that this would be NASA’s mission, not the Pentagon’s, and certainly not ARPA’s. “If the DOD decides it to be militarily desirable to program for putting man into space, it should not have to justify this activity to this civilian agency,” Johnson told lawmakers, in a flat contradiction of the very legislation that Eisenhower with his science advisers had crafted.

  Johnson’s clashes with the president’s scientific advisers, including York, were beginning to divide the agency. Meanwhile, he also faced opposition from the military services, which looked at ARPA as an unwanted competitor to be struck down as soon as possible. “Beset by enemies internally, subjected to critical pressures externally, and starting from scratch in a novel area of endeavor,” was how an early ARPA history described the agency’s first few months. ARPA in its early days was at war with other parts of government, and with itself, as York and Johnson competed over power and vision. The agency that emerged bruised and battered from those battles was not a purposeful creation, as was often later claimed, but an accidental by-product of those rivalries.

  CHAPTER 4

  Society for the Correction of Soviet Excesses

  The week after the Soviets launched Sputnik, William Godel was in Oahu, Hawaii, trying to rein in the rapidly expanding National Security Agency, which was in charge of the country’s eavesdropping sites. According to heavily redacted top secret documents released under the Freedom of Information Act nearly fifty years later, Godel was visiting the NSA’s cryptologic units as a senior member of the Robertson Committee, a top-level panel that had been created at the behest of President Eisenhower in 1957. Godel’s trip to Hawaii was part of a broader look at the NSA’s presence in the Far East, and the panel was expected to recommend “radical funding reductions” to the NSA’s sprawling intercept sites.

  As it had the rest of the national security community, Sputnik caught the NSA off guard, underscoring Eisenhower’s belief in the need for immediate intelligence reforms. Godel at that point had spent two years at the NSA, when suddenly he was offered a senior position at the newly established ARPA. He was not a scientist, but then again, neither was its newly appointed head, Roy Johnson. In any case, the agency would be organizing, not conducting, scientific research. At ARPA, Godel’s appointment and responsibilities were a constant source of mystery. There were rumors that Godel had been passed over for a top intelligence job and was given the ARPA appointment as a consolation prize, but it was never clear what he did and whom he reported to. “I don’t know how he got there,” said Donald Hess, one of the earliest employees of ARPA.

  Even Godel later said he was unsure who proposed his transfer to ARPA. He knew his name had been dropped in the hat for one of the top jobs at the NSA—the director or deputy director—but the ARPA job came up, and he jumped at the chance to be involved with the secret spy satellite work, which was about to be transferred to ARPA. The former marine was a logical choice in many respects; he had experience managing complex science and technology projects from his time detailed to the NSA. He also had his wartime experience rounding up German scientists. “Godel knew quite a bit about recruiting scientists,” recalled Lee Huff, a close associate.

  Godel said only that he was asked to be a part of the agency to represent the intelligence community, an account confirmed by early employees of ARPA. He was told, he recounted, that he and his assistant should meet with Roy Johnson about joining ARPA. “Since the Soviets are involved, the Intelligence Services must be involved,” Godel wrote. He ended up being a fortuitous choice for ARPA. Initially appointed the head of the Office of Foreign Developments and serving as ARPA liaison to the intelligence community, Godel had a profound and wholly unexpected effect on the agency. He was a military strategist who had minimal interest in futuristic technology and even world-class science. Yet had it not been for Godel, ARPA might not have survived beyond 1959.

  Herbert York and Roy Johnson did not get along, but for Godel and Johnson “it was love at first sight.” The marine turned intelligence bureaucrat had more in common with the business executive than one might expect. Both were intrinsically clever individuals who knew how to manage technical projects. They also both had an aura of mystique as outsiders brought in to resolve a crisis. In Johnson’s case, it was at General Electric, where he was often dispatched to solve a specific problem, while Godel was sent to hot spots around the world to negotiate foreign-government cooperation. Johnson admired Godel’s ability to push ambitious ideas through red tape. Godel admired Johnson’s vision and fight, even if he recognized it was sometimes to ARPA’s detriment.

  From the start, Godel understood that the United States was involved in a war of public perception as much as it was in a technological competition with the Soviet Union. When ARPA got off the ground in the first few months of 1958, it was managing the same rockets that had been started years earlier by the services, and none of those projects were going to spark the type of excitement that Sputnik had generated. At best, the United States was going to be playing catch-up. The space race was a propaganda war, and it was a war that the United States was losing badly. Godel wanted something that would temporarily steal the headlines away from the Soviets and their orbiting canines. The United States needed to put something really big up in space.

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  Godel found his response to the Soviet Union’s head start in San Diego. Officials at Convair, a division of General Dynamics, pitched ARPA on the idea of launching an entire missile into orbit. Convair was working with the air force on the Atlas, a liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile. One of the keys to the Atlas was a lightweight design that gave it an impressive range and payload. Its “balloon” tank was made of extremely thin stainless steel and was so delicate that it would collapse under its own weight if not fueled; when empty, it had to be pressurized with nitrogen gas. Convair had a stockpile of the missiles, but one Atlas in particular, numbered 10B, was unique, Godel wrote, because it was “one of the early production models in which every critical parameter came together with maximum rather than nominal performance values.”

  Convair believed that with just a few modifications to the fuel and the nose cone, “the delicate beast,” as the engineers called the missile, could actually make it into orbit. At first glance, it did not seem like much of an offer, because the von Braun team’s Explorer had already put a satellite into orbit. Convair was proposing to hurl the entire missile into space, which would, if taken at face value, be the world’s biggest satellite. Of course, it would only stay up for about two weeks before its orbit would decay, and the missile—together with its modest-size payload—would burn up in the atmosphere. What usually matters in the rocket game is payload, or the cargo the rocket carries into orbit. Typically, the payload once in orbit is separated from the stages of the rocket that carry the engine and the propellant. The payload on the Atlas was very small, but by
throwing the entire missile into orbit, even briefly, Godel and Johnson hoped that the public would focus on the overall size. Godel, who sensed the potential for a public relations coup, pitched the idea to Johnson, who liked it so much that on a trip to Convair he chalked his name on the missile.

  The project was named SCORE, officially, short for Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment. For the few select people cleared into the program, the unofficial name was the Society for the Correction of Soviet Excesses, because that was its more important goal. Launching an ICBM into space was an audacious stunt that played on the public’s ignorance of satellite technology, beating the Soviets at their own psychological operations game. “The stated objective was to demonstrate the U.S. interest in peaceful uses for outer space,” Godel wrote. “In reality, it was a propaganda ploy designed to put a really big, heavy object into space as a means of silencing press, and congressional complaints about small payloads, and rocket failures.”

  York hated the idea. “They’re going to say that it’s ‘the biggest satellite’ and somebody, somewhere is going to say ‘nuts, it just isn’t,’ ” York later explained of his objections. “It’s a big empty shell with a 100 lb. [payload].” Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles did not like it either, looking at it as “a publicity stunt rather than good science.” York thought it was too transparent a stunt to even work as propaganda. Johnson “felt that this young man from Livermore just doesn’t understand about public opinion. I’m not sure he understood it either but I know that he thought I didn’t,” York recalled. And so, as York put it, Johnson went “merrily on his way with this Score Project.”