Page 236 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

increased rocket exhaust polluted the stratosphere or if near-space “seeding”
experiments went awry: “The exhausts from increasingly powerful and numer-
ous space rockets will soon be systematically seeding the thin upper atmosphere
with large quantities of chemicals it has never possessed before or only in small
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quantities.” He was also concerned that the cold war and the space age might
provide rival militaries with both the motivation and the wherewithal to dam-
age the ozone layer. He cited a 1961 study by the Geophysics Corporation of
America on possible harm to the Earth’s upper atmosphere caused by the oxidiz-
ers in rocket fuel. He was also aware that operations Argus and Starfish, Proj-
ect West Ford, and Project High Water constituted recent significant interven-
tions in the near-space environment that were accompanied by unknown and
unquantified risks.
on the topic of purposeful damage, Wexler turned to the 1934 presidential
address to the Royal Meteorological Society, in which the noted geoscientist
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Sydney Chapman had asked, “Can a hole be made in the ozone layer?” That
is, can all or most of the ozone be removed from the column of air above some
chosen area? Chapman was thinking of an event that would provide a window
for astronomers to extend their observations some hundreds of angstroms far-
ther into the ultraviolet without the interference of atmospheric ozone. Pos-
sible health effects of human exposure to shortwave radiation did not appear
to Chapman to be an important issue, since the hole he was contemplating
would be localized, probably in a remote area (he suggested Chile), and would
be short-lived, somewhere between a day and an hour, timed for the benefit of
astronomers only. Cutting such a hole, Chapman continued, would require “the
discharge of a deozonizing agent” perhaps by airplanes, balloons, or rockets.
Chapman proposed two possibilities: a large amount of a one-to-one destruc-
tive agent such as hydrogen that would reduce o molecules to o or “some
3
2
catalyst which, without itself undergoing permanent change, could promote the
reduction of large numbers of ozone molecules in succession” (134). Although
the choice of the agent would have to be left to the chemists, Chapman con-
cluded that “the project of making a [temporary] hole in the ozone layer [a 90
percent reduction for the benefit of astronomers] does not seem quite impos-
sible of achievement” (135).
In November 1961, Wexler gathered weather bureau staff for a briefing on
ozone depletion and circulated this memo, titled “Deozonizer”:

Sydney Chapman proposed making a temporary “hole” in the ozone layer by
inserting a substance which could be oxidized by the ozone. He suggested that
hydrogen might be dispersed but wondered if there might be a catalyst gas or fine

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