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 that a Defense Nuclear Agency review board would later call “poorly instrumented and hastily executed.” They did so with total disregard for potentially catastrophic effects on the planet, not to mention the effect it would have decades later on the arms race in space. According to the same report, Killian was aware of the risk and took a gamble. There had been discussions regarding the possibility that the Teak and Orange shots really could burn holes in the ozone. But those “pre-event discussions were inconclusive,” the report said. And so the scientists went forward on the assumption that if a hole happened, it would later be closed.
In reality, Killian and others had no idea what would or would not happen when the megaton bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere. “And they didn’t factor in to their equations what could have happened if they failed,” recalls Al O’Donnell. “We were lucky. When the Teak bomb exploded right over our heads on Johnston Island, we thought we might be goners. It was an enormous bright white-light blast.” The men did not have radio communications for eight hours. “All the birds on the island that had been pestering us during the setup, these big fearless birds we called Gooney birds, after the bomb went off, they just disappeared. Or maybe they died.” When Admiral Parker of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project finally reached O’Donnell and the rest of the EG&G crew by radio from his office in the Pentagon, his words were: “Are you still there?”
If American citizens were in the dark about the megaton thermonuclear weapons tests being conducted by the American military in space, the Russians certainly were not. They forged ahead with an unprecedented weapons test of their own. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsar Bomba, detonated over northern Russia, flattened entire villages in surrounding areas and broke windows a thousand miles away in Finland. Anyone within a four-hundred-mile radius who was staring at the blast would have gone blind. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the United Nations Assembly that the purpose of the test was to “show somebody Kuzka’s mother”—to show somebody who’s boss. The world was racing toward catastrophe. Would the A-12 spy planes heading to Area 51 really help, or would overhead espionage prove to be nothing more than a drop in the bucket?
CHAPTER TEN
Wizards of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy
Harry Martin stood on the tarmac mesmerized by the beauty of the Oxcart. With its long, shiny fuselage, the airplane resembled a cobra with wings. As the master fuels sergeant, Martin had been at Area 51 since the very first days of the Oxcart program, back when the tarmac he was standing on was being poured as cement. Now, something big was happening at Area 51. The Oxcart had arrived and it was getting ready to fly. For more than a week, Martin had watched dignitaries come and go, touching down and taking off in Air Force jets. The generals would inevitably show up in the hangar where Martin worked because it was the place where the airplane stayed. Martin’s job was to prep the aircraft with fuel, which for weeks had been leaking as if through a sieve.