Argus-Eyed Russians

In the autumn of 1958, the U.S. exploded three rocket-launched nuclear bombs 300 miles above the South Atlantic. Purpose of the explosions, known as Project Argus, was to test the theory that charged particles released by the blasts would be trapped in the earth's magnetic field like the sun-borne particles of the Van Allen radiation belt (TIME, March 30, 1959). The experiment worked fine, but when the New York Times finally broke the story six months later, U.S. authorities were disturbed at the "breach of security" involved. And even after most details of Project Argus became public knowledge, the exact times of the blasts were never announced--apparently because Washington officialdom hoped the Russians could not get this information by themselves.

All signs are that Washington was wrong. In a recent bulletin issued by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet woman scientist, Geophysicist V. A. Troitskaya, reports that the shots showed up almost instantly on Soviet instruments designed to measure minute electric currents flowing through the earth. Apparently the explosions caused disturbances in the earth's magnetic field, and these spread as waves, moving with almost the speed of light. At almost the same instant, Soviet monitoring stations in the Pacific, in Central Asia, on the Black Sea, and near Murmansk in extreme northwestern Russia recorded the waves clearly. After studying the records, Dr. Troitskaya decided that the final Argus blast on Sept 6, exploded a small fraction of a second from 10 hr. 12 min. 34 sec. p.m. Greenwich mean time. At last week's end this figure was still classified information in the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.