Fixing the Sky (40 page)

The army report speculated that these mirrors could be used by “the world group of nations” against a country that became aggressive or obnoxious to persuade it “to be more friendly and reasonable by the concentration of intensive heat on their country,”
⁴⁷
but did not discuss other possible hostile applications of these death rays.
Time
was considerably more blunt in its account: “If war should start on the earth below, the ‘aggressor' ... could be handily incinerated by making the mirror concave to concentrate its beam.”
⁴⁸
Time
also reported that the Nazis gave serious consideration to a space mirror for military purposes during World War II.

Other radiative effects on climate were also being considered. Beginning in 1913, William Jackson Humphreys explored the idea that volcanic dust might control the climate.
⁴⁹
Two decades later, astronomer Harlow Shapley and his associates realized that space is filled with interstellar dust that might be influencing their calculations by obscuring distant stars. Astronomers Fred Hoyle and R. A. Lyttleton further speculated that space dust may affect the solar constant and thus cause climatic change.
⁵⁰

Early in the space age, Leningrad mathematician Mikhail Aleksandrovich Gorodskiy proposed creating an artificial dust ring passing over both poles.
⁵¹
Shaped like a flat washer with its lower boundary at an altitude of 750 miles and its upper boundary at 6,000 miles, the Saturn-like ring would be made of
metallic potassium particles that were highly reflective, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive. Gorodskiy wanted the ring turned full face to the Sun in summer and oriented on edge in the winter, but his back-of-the-envelope calculations provided no details on the coherence or lifetime of the ring or how to shift its orientation. He imagined, however, that the ring would increase shortwave radiation between 55° and 90°N to values up to 50 percent greater than those at the equator! Permafrost would disappear, polar ice would melt, the cities of Siberia would flourish, and the entire planet would warm considerably (figure 7.3).

7.3 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Gorodskiy's plan for launching a Saturn-like ring of reflective particles into Earth orbit to warm the Arctic. (RUSIN AND FLIT,
MAN VERSUS CLIMATE
)

Another Soviet engineer, Valentin Cherenkov, proposed a much smaller orbiting cloud, formed from only 1 ton of opaque particles, that would direct the Sun's rays earthward (63–65). He estimated that the cloud would yield 1,300 billion kilowatts of power, the equivalent of about 500,000 large conventional power stations. This amount of energy could heat the Arctic and provide sky illumination of more than 500 lux, basically eliminating the long polar night. It would also eliminate the differences among the seasons and between the climate at the poles and that at the equator. Counterproposals existed at the time to cool the planet by positioning a sunshade over the equator between 30°N and 30°S—this about forty-five years before the current batch of proposals to manage solar radiation (chapter 8).

The scientists and cold warriors who meddled with the Earth's atmosphere and near-space environment believed that “they could control everything,” even radiation and nuclear fallout.
⁵²
They had supporters in high places, such as Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, chair of the Preparedness Subcommittee. The launch of
Sputnik 1
in October 1957 diverted the world's attention from the scientific concerns of the ongoing International Geophysical Year and heightened American apprehensions of a “missile gap” and possible national security threats from space. The launch of
Sputnik 2
in November further fueled these fears. Johnson warned in early 1958 that the Russian
Sputniks
were not “play toys” and proclaimed that the very future of the United States depended on its first seizing ownership of space and controlling it for military purposes.

Later that month, the United States launched its first satellite,
Explorer 1
, with a modified Redstone military missile, the Juno 1.

In August 1958, during the extensive series of bomb tests known as Operation Hardtack, the military tested its antiballistic missile and communication disruption capabilities with two high-altitude shots named Teak and Orange. In each test, an army Redstone rocket launched a 3.8-megaton hydrogen bomb warhead. Teak detonated at 48 miles altitude in the mesosphere, and Orange at 27 miles in the stratosphere. Each blast illuminated the night sky as if it were daylight, with the added excitement that due to a malfunction of the missile guidance system, the Teak shot occurred directly over Johnston Island, in the North Pacific, instead of at the planned spot 48 miles downrange. Apparently, the experimenters had no qualms about destroying either themselves or any sensitive or protective layers of the atmosphere.

In Operation Argus, conducted in August and September 1958, just six months after the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the satellites
Explorer 1
and
3
, the U.S. military and the Atomic Energy Commission decided
that they should try to destroy or disrupt what had just been discovered. They did this with the full cooperation of astronomer James Van Allen.
⁵⁴
A specially equipped naval convoy launched and detonated three 1.7-kiloton atomic bombs at altitudes ranging from 125 to 335 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean to “seed” the exosphere with electrons. The participants hyped it as the “greatest scientific experiment of all time” and claimed it was a test of a geophysical theory proposed by Nicholas C. Christophilos of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
⁵⁵
In scale it was indeed impressive, involving nine ships and 4,500 people, with “nuclear observations” taken by the overflying satellite
Explorer 4
, a barrage of high-altitude fivestage Jason sounding rockets, airplane flights, and ground stations—but there was very little science, apparently. Test results and other documentation remained classified for the next twenty-five years. The military purpose was most likely to see if and how nuclear explosions disrupted communication channels. Since an atmospheric test-ban treaty was then under negotiation, the military was quick to point out that this test was not
in
the atmosphere but “above it.”

Other nuclear tests in near space ensued, such as the much larger Starfish explosion of July 1962 above Johnston Island, which disrupted the Van Allen belts and created an artificial magnetic belt and an “aurora tropicalis” visible as far away as New Zealand, Jamaica, and Brazil. Three Soviet high-altitude explosions that year had similar effects. A
New Yorker
cartoon depicted a serious-looking technocrat questioning a colleague in a high-tech laboratory setting: “But how do you
know
destroying the inner Van Allen belt will create havoc until you try it?”
⁵⁶
It was quite a year for near-space fireworks, with the British, Danes, and Australians issuing formal protests, led by the astronomical community. During the tests, some hotels in the Pacific apparently offered “rainbow” bomb parties on their roofs so guests could watch the light shows.

One of the more bizarre items that crossed Harry Wexler's desk at the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1961 was a technical report simply called “Weather Modification,” by M. B. Rodin and D. C. Hess at Argonne National Laboratory. The authors made the reasonable suggestion that applying heat directly to a rain cloud, or to a moist air mass with rain potential, might alter the natural precipitation in a given geographical region by increasing the buoyancy of the cloud or air parcel. This was James Espy's century-old convective theory. The modern twist: they favored using large, hovering nuclear reactors “wherever safety criteria can be met” to deliver the huge amounts of heat required (figure 7.4).
⁵⁷
Such nuclear-powered aircraft were never built.

Not all space seeding was nuclear. In 1960 the Department of Defense and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory announced a plan to launch 500 million tiny copper wires into an 1,800-mile orbital ring to serve as radio antennae. Since the Earth's
ionosphere was vulnerable to enemy attack by a thermonuclear detonation, and undersea cables might be cut by a hostile power, the military wanted to be able to guarantee secure worldwide communication channels, regardless of the protests of other nations about space debris or the concerns of astronomers about visual or radio interference. The first launch, in 1961, failed, but two years later the detritus injected by Project West Ford (originally called Project Needles) was used to bounce radio messages across the continent.

7.4 “Weather Modification”: (
above
) schematic drawing of the layout for a hoveringtype aircraft equipped with a nuclear heat source (note the lead-lined crew cabin and the little pinwheel blowers for air inlet and mixing); (
below
) nuclear weather modification helicopter in action (1) suppressing rain on one side of the mountain and (2) filling a reservoir on the other. (WEXLER PAPERS)

This is indeed geoengineering. The experiment effectively created an artificial ionosphere, “better” than the original since it would not be disrupted by magnetic storms or solar flares. Wexler, however, was concerned that the environmental effects of the cloud of needles had not been fully considered, including their effect on the Earth's heat budget, magnetic field, and ozone levels. Astronomers protested bitterly, since the layer of needles interfered with their observations, especially in the new field of radio astronomy.
⁵⁸
Although the cloud of needles behaved broadly as designed and mostly dispersed after about three years, rendering it useless for radio communication, as of 2010 some copper “needles” are still in orbit. Occasionally, one of them reenters the Earth's atmosphere and flashes briefly as it burns up as an artificial meteor. Astronomers soon will be forced to oppose proposals for solar radiation management, since any attempt to attenuate sunlight will also attenuate starlight (chapter 8).

In February 1962, Wexler was informed of a review by an ad hoc panel at NASA convened to consider the “High Water Experiment,” the upcoming release of almost 100 tons of water into the ionosphere. The delivery vehicle was a Saturn test rocket to be launched from Cape Canaveral to an altitude of 65 miles and then destroyed. The panel, chaired by atmospheric scientist William W. Kellogg of the RAND Corporation, concluded, on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations, that “it was unable to predict exactly what would happen following the rupture of the Saturn tanks.”
⁵⁹
They supposed that the water would boil instantly in the vacuum of space and then form ice crystals in a cloud about 6 miles wide and up to 20 miles long that would gradually fall out and dissipate downrange (figure 7.5). Some of the water would also dissociate, forming atomic O and H. Noctilucent clouds should form, and the radio properties of the ionosphere might be affected, with possible disruption to stratospheric ozone. The members of the panel knew that “introducing more H would change
something
” (4), but they could not say what. Nevertheless, they considered the scale of this test, literally a “drop in the bucket,” and predicted that “no major change in the atmosphere will take place that will hinder human activities” (1). They also predicted, correctly, that “in fact it may turn out to be hard to detect any effects at all (alas!), after the first few minutes” (1).