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.”