For Survival's Sake

(See Cover)

Dawn's first light broke through a heavy haze, diffusing Christmas Island's end-of-the-world ugliness. The barren stretches of sand and scrub, the grey hulls of freighters and barges in the tiny harbor, the naked steel testing towers, the exposed beams of half-completed buildings, all took on a weird beauty. It was already a humid 76DEG. An 8-knot breeze rippled the coconut fronds. In a small operations building, about 15 technicians sat amid the coffee-cup litter of a sleepless night.

Alone in a darkened room, an electronics technician pressed a microphone switch and began the countdown on Operation Dominic--the U.S. series of nuclear tests in the atmosphere that the free world did not want, but for its survival's sake could not avoid.

Loudspeakers carried the countdown across the claw-shaped coral atoll to scientists huddled in and around instrument-filled trenches. Radio carried it to some 40 ships and 100 aircraft of Joint Task Force 8 deployed over 6,000,000 sq. mi. of the Pacific. One of those aircraft, an Air Force B-52, sped at high altitude toward the island. In the operations center, Dominic's scientific director, William Elwood Ogle, wearing khaki shorts and a green aloha shirt, nodded to Joint Task Force 8's commander, Major General Alfred Dodd Starbird, a tough, tall (6 ft. 5 in.) veteran of atomic testing at Eniwetok and former chief of military applications for the AEC.

All instrumentation was ready. In separate control posts, the Air Force deputy, Brigadier General John S. Samuel, and the Navy deputy, Rear Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin, checked their radarscopes: all ships, all planes were in position. No unwanted craft had strayed into the danger zone. At 5:45 a.m. (Christmas Island time), the countdown reached zero. The B-52 dropped its nuclear payload. A flash pierced the haze. The tests had begun.

Laconic Statement. A special circuit carried the news to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg in Washington. The AEC relayed the word to President Kennedy, then cruising on his yacht, the Honey Fitz, on Florida's Lake Worth. The President's casual surroundings were deliberate--they were part of a major U.S. policy decision to underplay the resumption of atmospheric tests.

Kennedy had no comment about the test, stood on the March 2 speech in which he explained why the U.S. felt the new series necessary. All that the U.S. Government had to say was contained in a laconic, one-paragraph statement from the AEC, which announced that the detonation had taken place at 10:45 a-m-E.S.T.. and was in the ''intermediate-yield range." Two days later, the U.S. fired a second shot, also in the "intermediate range." That term meant that the power of both explosions was of more than 20 kilotons, but less than one megaton--insignificant in comparison with Russia's 58-megaton terror blast last year. A low-power test was also held underground in Nevada.

Despite the puniness of the U.S. shots, Washington had been fearful that they would set off a wave of anti-American, ban-the-bomb reaction and rioting around the world. Against this, the Kennedy Administration had clamped the strictest sort of secrecy on the Christmas Island operations--admittedly more for psychological than for security reasons (after all, the Russians could learn with instruments just as much about these tests as the U.S. learned about theirs). There were to be no eyewitness news reports from Christmas Island, no photographs of mushroom clouds over the Pacific. A medical officer returning from Christmas told reporters in Hawaii: "I can't even tell you if we've got any Band-Aids out there." Arranged Reaction. Such secrecy precautions seemed superfluous. Most of the world's peoples were well aware that it was the Soviet Union that last fall broke a three-year test moratorium and made such advances as to endanger the world's balance of nuclear power. They also knew that Russia's Khrushchev had rejected repeated U.S. offers to forgo testing if he would only sign a meaningful no-test agreement, controlled by on-site inspectors.

There were, to be sure, ban-the-bomb demonstrations, but most had a prearranged, perfunctory quality about them.

In Japan, which has good cause for hating A-bombs, a drizzle discouraged demonstrators, but about 600 chorused antibomb songs in front of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer later was heckled by 800 students at Kanazawa University, where he was lecturing on modern Japanese history. Some 800 leftist Zengakuren youths pushed and got pushed by cops who rather easily kept them away from the U.S. embassy. In Great Britain, where peace movements are strong, 1,500 marchers paraded past the U.S. embassy in London's Grosvenor Square, chanting "No more tests." Read some of the signs: "God Save the Queen, the Bomb Won't."

Among the neutralists, India's Prime Minister Nehru told his Parliament: "I am not here to blame either party, but I beg and appeal to all the nuclear powers to refrain from these tests while the Geneva conference is on." Cairo's Algumhuria wrote: "As the world cried in panic from Soviet explosions in Moscow a year ago, it does cry in panic today from the Washington explosions."

In Turkey, only one newspaper even put the news on Page One: some ignored it completely. Radio Iran approved the test resumption. There were no demonstrations in Buddhist Burma, but the Rangoon Guardian said that the nuclear race now "endangers mankind with annihilation." In the Philippines, apathetic reaction was summed up by citizens who asked: "Where's Christmas Island?"

In Europe, France's anti-American leftists failed to hold even a single meeting or publish a petition. Christian democrats and moderate socialists in Belgium organized a five-minute strike for May 8, but the U.S. embassy had not had a single protest. Stones were thrown through a few windows at the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen. 50 demonstrators were held back by police, but the newspaper Berlingske Tidende said, "The U.S. was given no choice," had "a duty to restore strategical balance." No demonstrations were reported in Latin America or Africa.

Communists, predictably, fussed about the tests. At the arms-control talks in Geneva. Soviet Delegate Zorin charged the U.S. with "hypocrisy, an aggressive act against peace, pushing the world closer to an abyss of atomic war." There were no immediate demonstrations in Moscow or in Communist China, although the Chicoms sounded angriest of all. Peking newspaper Ta Rung Pao charged that the tests showed that President Kennedy is "more vicious, more cunning and more adventurist than his predecessor."

Across the U.S., most ban-the-bomb groups seemed simply dispirited. Thirty motorists in Boston turned on their headlights, followed a black station wagon filled with flowers through downtown Boston in a mock funeral staged by two women's peace groups. About 20 pickets huddled at Chicago's Congress and Michigan Avenues under a banner proclaiming: "Nuclear Tests Threaten Mankind." Admitted their leader: "It's awfully hard to keep up a sustained campaign." In Washington, Nobel Chemist Linus Pauling was among marchers outside the White House.

Along the Road. Behind the comparatively mild reaction to the tests lie the lessons of experience. The tortuous route from the first U.S. atomic blast at Alamogordo, N. Mex., to the latest at Christmas Island stretches over nearly 17 years; it includes nearly 200 atomic explosions, about 100 megatons of nuclear energy set free in the atmosphere, 353 fruitless diplomatic test-ban meetings. The men who traveled that road were filled with doubts about their eventual destination, and at every crossroads they argued bitterly over which turn to take. Much of the history of atomic testing has been forgotten, but once recounted, its meaning is clear.

Judged against the proven nuclear capability of the U.S.S.R., the doubters, those who preferred to stand still or even retreat, were always shown to be wrong. If their advice had been heeded, Khrushchev would now be the world's military master.

Christmas Island's Scientific Director Ogle is one of a strange breed of professional weapons testers who have traveled the atomic route in the conviction that what they are doing will make the U.S. stronger. They are fascinated by their wondrous weapons, whose forces even they do not fully understand. Another such tester, Physicist Walter Goad Jr. of the University of California's Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, puts their view simply: "Everyone here recognizes that these weapons are terribly destructive and that we don't know what will ultimately happen. But we feel that in a world of so much force, we have to be able to do as well as anybody else." "We Puny Things." In the predawn darkness of July 16, 1945, dance music echoed from loudspeakers as men smeared their faces with sunburn cream and waited ten miles from a 100-ft. tower in the desert near Alamogordo. Some had been working and waiting three years for this moment--and when that tower ignited at 5:30 a.m. in the world's first atomic explosion, the flash was so blinding that those who looked directly at it, even with dark glasses, never really saw it. General Francis Farrell, one of the military supervisors, told of his feelings: "Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against the people, followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty." Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the creation of this weapon at the Los Alamos lab, was reminded of a passage from the Hindus' sacred Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One."

Also watching from a mountainside that morning was Los Alamos Physicist Ogle, barely a year past his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Though his role was minor, he had caught the fever of the race to make the bomb.

J-7. After the war, many scientists, appalled at the human toll their work had taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deserted the field of nuclear-weapons development. Ogle was not one of them. Says he of the wartime deaths the bombs had caused: "Our purpose was to do just that." Congress placed atomic development under a newly created, civilian-controlled Atomic Energy Commission in the hope that its pursuits would be mainly peaceful. Yet some scientists were already warning that the U.S. atomic monopoly could not long be maintained, that the Russians were making progress. A far-sighted AEC commissioner. Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, argued for a high-altitude patrol and seismographic network to detect Russian atomic explosions when and if they came. But AEC's idealistic first chairman, David Lilienthal, decided it was not needed. Finally, aroused by Strauss, the Pentagon picked up the tab, got AEC to furnish the technical knowledge to set up a rudimentary net.

The commission was even torn by doubts over whether atomic-weapons development should continue at all. In April and May of 1948 it conducted a supersecret Operation Sandstone at Eniwetok in which 9,800 men of Joint Task Force 7 fired three explosions from atop 200-ft. towers -- the biggest U.S. blasts up to that time (unofficial estimate: 120 kilotons). Ogle manned Sandstone instruments as part of the Los Alamos team.

The tests convinced AEC that it should set up a permanent nuclear-weapons division at Los Alamos, and Ogle became one of its seven-man experimental nucleus, known as J-7.

Ivy & Castle. When the test-detection system that Strauss had demanded disclosed that the Russians had set off their first A-bomb on Aug. 29, 1949, a new controversy split AEC and the nation's atomic scientists. Should the U.S. start a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb? Strauss pleaded for it, but Lilienthal and the other three commissioners argued that the U.S. had a sufficient atomic superiority. J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of a general advisory commit tee of scientists to AEC, maintained that the doubtful project would only divert personnel from the proven A-bomb program. To Strauss's side, however, came AEC Physicist Edward Teller, whose studies indicated that the H-bomb was scientifically feasible, Connecticut's Democratic Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and finally AEC Commissioner Gordon Dean. On Jan. 31, 1950, President Truman ordered the H-bomb to be built.

Many of the tests that followed are just vaguely familiar names now, but they loom large in the memories of the weary scientists, including Ogle, who sweated them out. There was Ranger at Frenchman Flat near Las Vegas, Greenhouse at Eniwetok, Buster-Jangle and Tumbler-Snapper. With Ivy in November 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was exploded, wiping out the tiny island of Elugelab, and digging a crater a mile long and 175 ft. deep in the ocean's floor, near Eniwetok. During Castle, near Bikini in the spring of 1954, miscalculations on power and meteorology caused radioactive ash to fall and injure 23 Japanese tuna fishermen--one fatally--on their trawler, Lucky Dragon, which was 14 miles outside the restricted zone. Ogle was a top technical official at Ivy and Castle, ironically considers Castle the test "which gave us more of practical value than any other." The U.S. H-bomb success came a mere nine months before the Russians fired their own hydrogen superbomb--proving again that the doubters had been wrong.

The Bitter Debate. The U.S. continued testing, at Nevada and in the Pacific, from Operation Teapot through Operation Hardtack in October of 1958. During that period, the scientists tested tactical atomic weapons, dropped an H-bomb from a B-52, fired a depth charge, triggered a missile warhead 100 miles high, tried fallout-free underground testing.

The Russians had been testing furiously, too--and the world was embroiled in a bitter debate over the fallout effects of such things as strontium 90, carbon 14, cesium 137, iodine 131. Adlai Stevenson had fanned fallout fears in his presidential campaign of 1956, urging the U.S. to stop testing. Now Russia announced it would stop its tests unilaterally. While President Eisenhower pondered about halting U.S. tests, the nation's scientists were at one another's throats.

Teller and then-AEC Commissioner Willard Libby, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, asserted that the fallout dangers were highly exaggerated. Teller said that the U.S. must keep testing, since there was no sure way to detect Soviet cheating in low-power or underground tests. AEC Chairman John McCone doggedly opposed a test stop. Physicist Edward U. Condon prophesied that "many thousands of persons will die agonizing deaths from bone cancer and leukemia." Nobel Chem ist Pauling cited the mutation threats to future generations. Cornell Physicist Hans Bethe, who had opposed H-bomb development, headed a presidential study, reported that detection of Soviet tests was technically feasible. Reluctantly, Eisenhower said that the U.S. would refrain from tests for one year beginning Oct. 31, 1958, if the Russians would start talks on an inspection system by that date. Thus the tiresome talkathon and the tricky moratorium began.

Time for Tinkering. The moratorium was a period of frustration for the weapons specialists at Los Alamos and at the University of California's other AEC laboratory in Livermore. They had no way of knowing when -- if ever -- their nation might desperately need their rare knowledge again. As the moratorium continued, they gleaned every last value out of past data, developed new theories that lay useless without test confirmation. Some began drifting into other fields.

Ogle shifted easily into the AEC's pro gram to develop nuclear rocket propulsion, ostensibly a peaceful venture -- but with obvious military possibilities. After spending more than a quarter of the previous twelve years away from home (he had not missed one U.S. atomic-test series either in the Pacific or Nevada), he enjoyed being with his wife Minnie and their five children, now aged three to 20.

He could tinker with his four battered used cars, catch up on his avid reading of Arctic exploration (sample title: Narra tive of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions, published in 1859), spend weekends working on the ranch house that he and his sons were building on a lonely 13-acre site near Los Alamos.

Ogle is a lively man who loves western clothes, detests neckties and big cities, and barely tolerates strangers. "Nature's a lot easier to grasp, because you can take a specific natural law and be sure it'll repeat itself--not so with people." He excels at his unusual specialty because he thinks straight, argues his points forcefully, easily bridges the gap from the theoretical problem to its technical solution. Says a colleague: "His particular talent is to function essentially as a science chairman--hear all the arguments, draw conclusions. His being attached to any experiment increases the odds on its success. People have confidence in him." Ogle's fascination with the bomb is shared by others of his breed. Says his friend, Physicist Goad: "It is such a great phenomenon, so far outside the field of human experience, that it remains awesome." These men are tough-minded about their jobs, yet not insensitive to its portents for civilization if misused. Says Los Alamos Physicist George Cowan: "I think there is more honest-to-God worrying on this hill than you ever find among the bleeding hearts outside. But there aren't too many scientists around who know how to do this job--so you do it, and do it as best you can." Adds Ogle: "This is a frighteningly dangerous world we live in--it's scary." Yet he is less nervous about nuclear testing than about the frequent air travels his job requires: his palms turn moist every time he takes off in an airplane.

The Clincher. The long moratorium was cynically prolonged when Soviet delegates at Geneva first agreed to the principle of inspection, even indicated willingness to permit on-site inspection stations, then retreated to their no-inspection stand. Meanwhile, U.S. nuclear strength clearly suffered. The nation was gambling its whole deterrent posture and billions of dollars on its Polaris, Minuteman and advanced Titan missiles. Theoretically, scientists were certain that these missiles' nuclear warheads would work--yet the complete systems had never been tried.

Thus, even before the Russians broke the moratorium, pressure was being exerted on President Kennedy by some scientists and Pentagon officials for a resumption of U.S. testing. They argued that the Reds probably were cheating anyway. After Soviet skies erupted in a scattershot array of 50 blasts last September and October, there could be no real doubt about what the U.S. would have to do.

The first analysis of the Soviet tests was not alarming, despite its fearsome megatomics and Nikita Khrushchev's boastful threats. Outside the Administration, some of the old voices were still crying against a resumption of U.S. atmospheric testing. Kennedy was then also getting go-slow counsel from his scientific adviser, M.I.T.'s Jerome Wiesner. The President immediately ordered underground testing to resume in longstanding tunnels in Nevada and, on Nov. 2, ordered preparations for atmospheric tests to proceed.

While Kennedy seemed to be weighing all the arguments, his mind was made up: the U.S. would almost certainly have to test in the air. The clincher came from old Testing Foe Hans Bethe, whose detailed study showred that the Soviet blasts had been badly underrated. That 58-megaton bomb, Bethe reported, actually was a 100-megaton giant tamped down by a casing of lead. The U.S.S.R. could hang this on its biggest operational missile and hurl the full 100 megatons across 3,500 miles to the U.S. The Russians had made great gains in putting a bigger punch into a smaller package (weight-yield ratio), thus could increase either the range or power of existing weapons systems. They had approached perfection in a clean bomb. (In some of their blasts, the fission trigger--which is the main source of a bomb's radioactivity--formed only 2% of the explosive yield.) They were able to fire warheads that survived the punishment of re-entry into the atmosphere, something the U.S. had not even tried. Most significant, their high-altitude tests indicated work on an anti-missile missile. The main reason that Kennedy did not order immediate U.S. atmospheric tests was that the scientists were not ready for a meaningful series.

Tools of the Trade. The presidential green light sent the testing pros at Livermore and Los Alamos into an explosive burst of activity. A thorough series takes up to 18 months to prepare; they were given five months. Each lab sent its suggestions on what to test to Washington for top decision by AEC Chairman Seaborg. Military experts fired off plans to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Actual programming was done by AEC's atom-wise general manager, Major General Alvin Luedecke, 51, and Defense's brilliant, abrasive research chief, Harold Brown, 34. At McCone's suggestion, Kennedy tapped Starbird for overall field boss; Starbird in turn selected Ogle to run the scientific end of the show. Since Eniwyetok and Bikini were uncomfortably close to sizable Asiatic populations and technically under the control of the test-skittish United Nations, Kennedy persuaded Prime Minister Macmillan to let the U.S. test at Britain's equatorial Christmas Island, 1,200 miles south of Hawaii.

Soon Starbird was organizing his task force behind the Lincoln Memorial in a decaying frame building recently vacated by the CIA. Amid cartons and bare walls, he summoned all the old test veterans he could find. As his force grew, so did the costs: up to $1,000,000 a day. Involved are some 1,700 airmen, 6,600 sailors, 600 soldiers, 100 marines, 1,000 civilian technicians, 1,800 civilian construction workers. Starbird's air armada includes highflying U-2s, workhorse C-130s, B-57s and

B-52s, versatile Neptune antisubmarine patrol craft.

For Ogle, getting ready for Dominic meant a frantic air chase between Hawaii, Omaha, Nevada, Washington and Denver --an average of some 1,000 miles a day.

Working to coordinate the plans of some 90 electronic, construction and research firms and Government specialists, he picked Denver as a convenient air stop to meet the company representatives periodically. As scientific director, he is in charge of all the experiments--and Dominic is essentially a scientific affair. He is also in charge of safety, which boils down mainly to fallout. To predict fallout patterns, he has 15 new weather stations, which cost $2,000,000 to assemble and stretch 4,600 miles east and west, 3,000 miles north and south. More mundanely, he frets about technicians who become homesick, scientists disabled by sunburn, engineers who gripe about chow.

To cater to his own personal quirks, Ogle carries a bulging attache case filled with odd items: a small compass ("I'm always getting turned around on these islands"), an altimeter ("to see if my Air Force plane is really getting off the ground"), some tin drinking cups ("for beer in the desert or coffee on a MATS plane"). With the attache case goes the ever-present padlocked briefcase enclosing the tools of his trade: a slide rule and sheafs of classified documents.

Worse than Alcatraz. The mass and machines--from construction bulldozers to fragile milliammeters--transformed 30-mile-long. 15-mile-wide Christmas Island. The island's two ramshackle towns, ludicrously named London and Paris by the British, were invaded by Stateside workers who groused about the heat, the lack of latrines, sun hats, soap and razor blades. This is the island that inspired acid poetry by a British R.A.F. man stationed there in 1958:

"The island abounds with monstrous ants/ Which affect our clothing, our shirts and our pants/ And since we came here we've done nothing but curse/ For even Alcatraz couldn't be worse." Amid the chaos and the complaints, JTF8 plunged ahead toward the April deadline set by the President in his nationwide television announcement in March--a notable speech in which he ticked off the Soviet test achievements and declared: "I must report to you in all candor that further Soviet series, in the absence of further Western progress, could well provide the Soviet Union with a nuclear attack and defense capability so powerful as to encourage aggressive designs." Noting the world's fallout fears, Kennedy said he found it "deeply regrettable that any radioactive material must be added to the atmosphere--that even one additional individual's health may be risked in the foreseeable future." He promised that the U.S. tests will add only 1% to the natural background radioactivity of the world's environment.

Coming Up. Right up to the countdown on Operation Dominic, the President offered to halt the whole massive operation if Khrushchev would sign on the controlled-test-ban line. The nyet left it all up to JTF-8--and the pragmatic Bill Ogle of U.S. science. Throughout most of the summer, the results of their work will glow in Pacific skies in some 35 explosions with a force up to 15 megatons to prove the reliability of present U.S. weapons, improve the efficiency of developing missiles, test the nuclear vulnerability of the nation's multibillion-dollar radar defenses. Polaris missiles will gush out of the ocean from submarines, Minuteman ICBMs will roar off island launching pads--and, unless the weapons theorists have been wildly wrong, their nuclear payloads will ignite as planned.

Hopefully, in the shots near the mid-Pacific's Johnston Island, the U.S. may progress toward the anti-ICBM missile, possibly by setting off a nuclear blast in the path of an Atlas missile speeding 40 miles high. As the testers testify, such experiments are both fascinating and frightening. But there is no choice.

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