Abstract
The 50-kiloton test that no one noticed
July 9, 1962. The Starfish Prime test, part of the Fishbowl series of Operation Dominic.
Take the case of a December 8, 2000, United Press International (upi) story headlined “U.S. Physics Blunder Almost Ended Space Programs,” penned by “Terrorism Correspondent” Richard Sale. The lead of the 1,300-word article claimed that in 1964 the United States detonated a 50-kiloton atomic bomb in the atmosphere's Van Allen belts as a “test for a new U.S. anti-satellite weapon system.”
Sale went on to report that the test–part of what he called “Project Century”–was exploded at an altitude of 300 to 400 miles, trapping a band of radiation in the atmosphere for more than a year and knocking out the power of satellites that passed through it. What Sale didn't mention is that had such a test occurred, it would have been noticed, and it would have been a serious violation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (which banned nuclear weapons tests in space, the atmosphere, and underwater), and would likely have brought about swift international condemnation.
The UPI story was forwarded to the Bulletin from Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist who for years has been using e-mail and the Internet to keep people informed about various nuclear-related issues.
The idea of a 1964 atmospheric test immediately raised red flags. “It's so obviously false that it's surprising that anybody let [Sale] publish it,” said Steve Schwartz, the Bulletin's publisher, who checked a few readily available government documents and published sources to establish the improbability of the 1964 date.
The article appears to be an amalgamation of facts from several pre-1963 U.S. tests.
Some of those tests were probably part of Operation Argus, the only clandestine atmospheric nuclear test series after World War II. The tests detonated warheads at about 300 miles altitude to study how the earth's magnetic fields trapped radiation, but the yield was 1.5-kilotons each, and the tests occurred in 1958. Plus, the secret didn't last long. The New York Times published an article on the test series less than a year after it was conducted.
An unexplained, lone reference to “the earlier Starfish blunder” suggests that Operation Dominic may have been what Sale and his sources were thinking of. The Starfish Prime test, conducted at Johnston Island, was part of the Fishbowl test series. A 1.45-megaton thermonuclear warhead was detonated at a height of 248 miles–in 1962. Neither Argus nor the Starfish Prime test had anything to do with an anti-satellite program, nor did they come close to ending U.S. space programs. Schwartz was also unable to locate a single reference to a “Project Century” and finds it hard to believe that a 50-kiloton A-bomb atmospheric test was kept secret for 37 years.
“People are going to take stories like this and rely on them,” said Schwartz. And that's just what happened to Smirnow, who estimates he sent the article to about 1,000 people–and there's no telling if it is continuing to make the rounds. To redress the mess, Smirnow plans to post an electronic memo that Schwartz wrote addressing problems in the article.
How widely the article was distributed outside of mass mailings and message boards is unknowable–UPi doesn't keep tabs on how many news organizations pick up its stories. The Bulletin, however, was unable to find any instance of the report's publication. But the cat's out of the bag. A New York radio program reportedly summarized the article, citing the 1964 date, as a brief news item.
“For the uninitiated, which is about 99.5 percent of the public, this [article] would come off sounding completely reasonable–and that's what's so troubling,” said Schwartz.
“Any time you're accusing the United States of violating an international treaty of long standing,” said Schwartz, “you really ought to make sure your facts are right.”
Sale is sticking to his guns. Schwartz sent the information he had gathered to Sale, who then wrote upi's December 30, 2000, story, “Space Blast Date Challenged,” in which he acknowledges that the facts are in dispute but does not rescind the story.
In Brief
When farmers in Montgomery County in western Pennsylvania complained that their pigs were turning purple, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to investigate. But the cause, according to the EPA, was not radiation poisoning from a local ore-processing plant, as farmers believed. In its report issued last December, the epa concluded that “radioactive elements and radiation are present at expected concentrations” only. The epa says improper use of pesticides and herbicides turned the porkers purple.
Military advisers expressed a number of wishes for new technologies at a Jane's-sponsored conference on non-lethal weapons held in Edinburgh last December (Sydney Morning Herald, December 18, 2000). Rand Corporation analyst Russell Glenn, for example, wants the U.S. ban on chemical weapons to be modified so that more non-lethals can be developed to subdue crowds of unruly citizens. “Chemicals can be our friends,” he explained. And Col. George Fenton, head of the Marine Corps' Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, added that he “would like a magic dust that would put everyone in a building to sleep, combatants and noncom-batants.” Fenton wants the biological weapons treaty rewritten as well.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on December 7, 2000, that two local men had been arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency for allegedly operating what was described as “one of the biggest drug laboratories ever seized” in a retired Atlas missile silo in rural Kansas. A dea spokesman told reporters that the lab had been producing tens of millions of doses of lsd a month. Earlier, the lab was operated in another missile silo near Salinas, but it was moved to near Wamego, Kansas, last July, after the family of one of the operators bought the Atlas silo as government surplus. The dea described the two suspects as “long-time clandestine chemists.”
In January, charges swirled throughout Europe about the dangers of the depleted uranium shells fired in the Balkans. At the height of the furor, British Nuclear Fuels (bnfl) revealed that it intended to dispose of 600 kilograms of depleted uranium by including a small amount in each of 30,000 ordinary plastic bags, which would be taped shut and sent to the municipal garbage dump at Preston, in Lancashire (The Guardian, January 16). This type of waste, explained a bnfl spokesman, used to be buried in concrete in a facility in Cumbria, but that site is getting full.
Late last year, the public learned that classified information was being mailed to unauthorized persons from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But as the Albuquerque Journal (November 30, 2000) explained, there was a problem with sending secrets to authorized recipients as well. “To send nuclear secrets in the mail to someone, lab workers were required to look up the recipient's address to make sure it was legal for them to receive it. But access to the computer database containing the addresses is tightly restricted because it contains too much classified information”–so workers could not discover if a recipient was on the list or not.
In December, nbc Nightly News reported that in Detroit Iraqi agents were buying up thousands of Sony PlayStation 2s, which anchor Tom Brokaw described as “games.” The games, said Brokaw, were being purchased not for use as toys, but for Iraqi military applications. (For one week last year the Japanese government restricted exports of the PlayStation 2 electronic game console, indicating that its computer chip and the 3D processor could be used in weapons delivery systems.) But the wildly popular and hard-to-find game consoles turned out to be no more available to Iraqi agents than they were to desperate, would-be children's toy buyers. Government investigators claim Iraqi shoppers bought 1,400 PlayStation Is instead.
Secret documents released on New Year's Day under Britain's 30-years-and-out rule suggest that up until 1970, personnel at the Scottish Office worried a great deal about how to bury the dead after a nuclear holocaust (bbc News, January 1, 2001). Officials especially fretted about what form of burial would be best if vast numbers of Scots perished. In 1948, the Ministry of Health said any casualty figures would be “highly speculative,” but by the 1960s authorities were projecting a minimum of 900,000 casualties. The papers released in January include blueprints for makeshift mortuary body racks and plans for huge burial pits, to be dug by “the unemployed.” Cremation was rejected because it would “require the use of great quantities of fuel, which would be needed for other purposes.”
It came from Ohio
In July 1997 Popular Mechanics revealed two air force saucer projects–Operations Silver Bug and Pye Wacket–that, shortly after World War II, attempted to build flying discs based on Nazi research. But hidden away as a Pentagon “black budget” item was a third project, declassified after 32 years in a mandatory review of old documents.
As told in Popular Mechanic's October 2000 issue, North American Aviation designed a 40-foot “flying saucer,” designated the Lenticular Reentry Vehicle (LRV), which the air force classified secret in 1962. The project was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where German engineers familiar with flying disc technology had resettled.
The LRV, flying in a low orbit of 300 miles, would have carried four “winged” weapons (which could be launched from space or parked in orbit) during a six-week mission. A four-person crew would ride in a capsule at the front of the disc. In an emergency, the rocket- and parachute-equipped capsule would become a “lifeboat” for a return descent to earth. A separate area of the saucer was set aside for living and work areas.
Although no launch system was specified in the design study, a separate engineering study suggests that a nuclear engine, then under development by the air force and the Atomic Energy Agency, could have been used.
In 1997, while attempting to explain UFO phenomena reported to have occurred near Roswell, New Mexico, the air force acknowledged that during the Cold War the military used balloons to lift unusually shaped air-frames to high altitudes for aerodynamic tests. Had such tests been conducted on an unpowered LRV saucer, it would have appeared to onlookers as if the craft had hovered silently and then shot upwards in an instant–a textbook description of a UFO sighting.
A loaded deck
Flying Buffalo, the game's publisher, calls Nuclear War “a comical cataclysmic card game” where play often ends with no winners at all. For $24.95, the company provides 140 cards printed with the world's favorite Cold War elements. Missile cards get matched with warhead cards to launch all-out nuclear strikes, or players can mix in propaganda and espionage cards to undermine attempts to bomb them. Beatnik pacifists, drunk ambassadors, and defecting little old ladies add to the fray that is sure to have you scrambling, duck-and-cover-style, for the underside of your desk.
If 20-megaton warheads and Polaris missiles aren't enough fun, Flying Buffalo also sells expansion sets. In “Nuclear Escalation,” the game ups the devastation with cruise missiles, space platforms, and “Skippy,” the supervirus. “Nuclear Proliferation” is even more “explosively funny,” with stealth bombers and Scud missiles, the company says. “It's a sarcastic, humorous look at the futility of atomic warfare in the post-Cold War 1990s.”
Unfortunately, Flying Buffalo's standard issue “radioactive nuclear mis-function die” (with a mushroom cloud replacing the number one) is no longer available. A glow-in-the-dark Death Die has been substituted until a new supplier is located.
Inside New York's Mars 2112.
The restaurant at the end of the suburb
The Mars 2112 restaurants in New York City and Chicago have an interim solution: 20,000 square feet of Mars-inspired “reality.” The name is based on the date nasa engineers originally predicted that humans would begin Mars colonization. “But it's not a theme restaurant,” stresses Linda Scheck, Chicago's director of sales. “It's an immersion experience. We want it to be believable.”
From the moment you step in from the street–or, at the Schaumburg location near Chicago, step in from the mall–it's Mars everywhere. Visitors get “Martian Federation Visas” at the door (authorized by Mars's Serene Royal Highness, Empress Glorianna herself), which give them complimentary Earth-to-Mars transport on the ZZUB-B719 Ether-Runner Space-Time Modulator. The craft seats 32, with room for one wheelchair. “The entire planet of Mars,” says Scheck, “is wheelchair accessible.” For space travelers with weak stomachs, there's the Zip transfer, which will “data-transfer” a diner's molecules to the Red Planet. On Earth, the Zip would be called an interesting hallway, but who wants to spoil the fun?
The Modulator is actually a 747 flight simulator with Space Odyssey-inspired decor and a viewscreen programmed to simulate a flight to Mars. After a bumpy four-minute ride, the doors open at the Martian spaceport. Then it's on to the Red Planet chow, including Soylent Greens (salads), Flying Saucers (pizzas), and Primary Orbits (entrees).
The interior of Mars 2112–created by ThemeScapes, the same company that creates rockscapes for Disney–is complete with lava flows, laser shows, and costumed aliens.
Mars 2112 in Schaumburg hopes to inspire a few lucky kids into careers as real astronauts. Elementary school students in the area will be invited to write on the theme of what life will be like on Mars in 2112. Ten winners will receive $1,500 scholarships to the United States Space Camp.