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 high-altitude 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.