Science: Test-Watching & Waiting

Apart from the bare announcement that two bombs, one of them in the “low-megaton-yield range” had been dropped from airplanes and exploded over the Pacific, the newest U.S. nuclear test series supplied little news last week. Neither diplomatic policy nor the need for military secrecy completely explained the comparative silence. There was, in fact, little to be told. Test bombs are not exploded merely to see if they will work or to admire the bang. The instrumental setup is enormously complicated, with seismographs, barographs, radiation detectors, photocells, and many more subtle instruments spread over hundreds of miles of sea, air and land. Information and analysis come slowly.

Merely to collect and compile all the data is a tremendous task. The bulk of the reports from the tests already fired —most of them in the form of magnetic tape or squiggly lines on film or paper—is converging first on Christmas Island, where the Atomic Energy Commission has a team of experts ready to make a quick preliminary search for scientific hints that may have an immediate effect on their handling of later tests. Eventually, the data will be sent to the birthplace of the bombs—Los Alamos and Livermore laboratories—for more detailed study.

Hints for Hercules. The military services will get a crack at the data, too. The Air Force is vitally interested in the effects of shock waves and radiation on its aircraft, and the Navy is equally concerned about its ships. The Army is waiting anxiously for the impact that the tests will have on its Nike-Hercules anti-missile program. It will be bad news for the Nike-Hercules if a test bomb exploded at high altitude makes the air opaque to radio waves. This might mean that an elaborate Nike-Hercules base could be blinded by a single nuclear weapon, even by one of its own rockets.

While the AEC and the military are claiming their blocks of information, a ship manned by scientists from the University of Washington is gathering fish, plankton and other oceanic fauna and flora to check for radiation effects. Specimens will be sent to Seattle for further study. A team from the U.S. Public Health Service is standing by to treat and study any unfortunate humans who tangle with test radiation.

Several of the tests, including at least one in the megaton range, will be exploded in space, as high as 100 miles above the earth. The purpose will be partly to observe the little-known behavior of nuclear explosions in a virtual vacuum, partly to test the effect of neutrons, X rays and other radiation on radio communication, missiles and satellites. The Air Force already has several satellites orbiting over the test area. The Russians may send observation satellites of their own, but the tests can probably be timed so that such foreign space snoopers will get no close look.

Dismay. Although most of the free world is reconciled to U.S. testing, the announcement of the powerful space tests caused a flurry among European scientists. A widely circulated press report predicted that the explosions in space would cause auroras visible over much of the earth and might even erase the inner ring of the Van Allen radiation belt (TIME, May 4, 1959). U.S. experts called the story overblown, but British Radio Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell of Jodrell Bank observatory protested with characteristic vigor: “All scientists who are searching for basic understanding of the solar system will be filled with dismay at the American proposal.”

Lovell’s leading rival, Professor Martin Ryle of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Cambridge, was also opposed to the space tests; he thought their effects were likely to be irreversible. But Britain’s famous Astronomer Fred Hoyle, a nonpanicking Yorkshireman, was not alarmed. If the radiation belt was damaged, said Hoyle, it would soon repair itself. In the U.S., the discoverer of the radiation belts, Dr. James A. Van Allen of the State University of Iowa, was not worried a bit. The space explosions, he said, would be “a magnificent experiment.” It might even reveal how the belt is nourished with high-energy particles.