Page 227 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

that they should try to destroy or disrupt what had just been discovered. They
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did this with the full cooperation of astronomer James Van Allen. A specially
equipped naval convoy launched and detonated three 1.7-kiloton atomic bombs
at altitudes ranging from 125 to 335 miles above the South Atlantic ocean to “seed”
the exosphere with electrons. The participants hyped it as the “greatest scientific
experiment of all time” and claimed it was a test of a geophysical theory proposed
by Nicholas C. Christophilos of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In scale it was
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indeed impressive, involving nine ships and 4,500 people, with “nuclear observa-
tions” taken by the overflying satellite Explorer 4, a barrage of high-altitude five-
stage Jason sounding rockets, airplane flights, and ground stations—but there was
very little science, apparently. Test results and other documentation remained
classified for the next twenty-five years. The military purpose was most likely to
see if and how nuclear explosions disrupted communication channels. Since an
atmospheric test-ban treaty was then under negotiation, the military was quick to
point out that this test was not in the atmosphere but “above it.”
other nuclear tests in near space ensued, such as the much larger Starfish
explosion of July 1962 above Johnston Island, which disrupted the Van Allen
belts and created an artificial magnetic belt and an “aurora tropicalis” visible as
far away as New Zealand, Jamaica, and Brazil. Three Soviet high-altitude explo-
sions that year had similar effects. A New Yorker cartoon depicted a serious-look-
ing technocrat questioning a colleague in a high-tech laboratory setting: “But
how do you know destroying the inner Van Allen belt will create havoc until you
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try it?” It was quite a year for near-space fireworks, with the British, Danes, and
Australians issuing formal protests, led by the astronomical community. During
the tests, some hotels in the Pacific apparently offered “rainbow” bomb parties
on their roofs so guests could watch the light shows.
one of the more bizarre items that crossed Harry Wexler’s desk at the U.S.
Weather Bureau in 1961 was a technical report simply called “Weather Modifi-
cation,” by M. B. Rodin and D. C. Hess at Argonne National Laboratory. The
authors made the reasonable suggestion that applying heat directly to a rain
cloud, or to a moist air mass with rain potential, might alter the natural precip-
itation in a given geographical region by increasing the buoyancy of the cloud
or air parcel. This was James Espy’s century-old convective theory. The modern
twist: they favored using large, hovering nuclear reactors “wherever safety crite-
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ria can be met” to deliver the huge amounts of heat required (figure 7.4). Such
nuclear-powered aircraft were never built.
Not all space seeding was nuclear. In 1960 the Department of Defense and
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory announced a plan to launch 500 million tiny copper
wires into an 1,800-mile orbital ring to serve as radio antennae. Since the Earth’s

210 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control