In Memory of Rainbarrel

At a Pentagon ceremony last week, a tall, grey-haired chemist received one of the U.S.'s highest civilian honors: the Distinguished Civilian Service Award. For Peter King, 49, now associate director of research for materials at the Navy's Washington, D.C. research laboratories, the medal had been a long while in coming: it was granted for a dramatic but generally unknown service performed eleven years ago.

In 1948 King was working in paint chemistry at the Naval Research Laboratory when a colleague asked him why the lab's Geiger counters had recently been clicking faster after rainstorms. King collected rain water from the roof of N.R.L.'s building, found that it was slightly radioactive, suspected that the activity came from U.S. A-bomb tests in the Pacific about six months before. To make sure, he needed rain water from just after the A-bomb tests--and that meant getting some that could be certified as almost six months old. A Navy commander recalled that in the Virgin Islands most drinking water is in fact rain water collected in cisterns, and that the natives know almost precisely when it fell.

Unofficial Watch. Peter King sent an assistant on a rush trip to the Virgin Islands; soon the aide was back with jugs of sludge precipitated chemically from 2,500 gal. of six-month-old rain water. The stuff was faintly hot, containing the radioactive cerium and yttrium that are typical products of nuclear fission. As of then, King knew he had a quick and easy way to detect nuclear explosions.

At that time, the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and many experts believed that the Soviet Union would not break the monopoly for many years. Less confident, Peter King set up an unofficial sort of watch for Soviet A-bomb tests. He arranged to have Navy planes bring him once-a-month jugs of rain water from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, relatively close to the U.S.S.R. He called his low-key project Operation Rainbarrel.

Rush Message. For many months, the air over Alaska remained free of man-made radioactivity. But in September, 1949 King heard from the Air Force of indications that the Russians might have successfully tested an atomic bomb. He sent a rush message--"To hell with the monthly schedule"--for fresh rain water from Kodiak. Within a few hours, he was able to identify radioactive cerium, which could only have come from a nuclear explosion. The U.S. had had no recent A-bomb tests. There was only one possible conclusion--and a few days later, President Harry Truman announced to the world the news, picked up by Peter King's Operation Rainbarrel, that the Russians had broken the U.S. atomic monopoly.

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