Operation Argus: 66th Anniversary of the Top Secret, High-Altitude U.S. Nuclear Experiment

The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 04, 1957 shook the U.S. Defense & Military Planners as the Soviets had effectively demonstrated their capability to be able to hit the United States with ICBMs carrying thermonuclear warheads onboard. The U.S., in turn, scrambled to go ahead with a top secret nuclear experiment intended at testing the effects of detonating nuclear weapons at high altitude, which, as per physicist Nicholas Christofilos, were capable of creating an artificial radiation belt comprising of charged electrons high-up in the atmosphere which could hypothetically shield the United States from incoming Soviet nuclear-tipped ICBMs, as per a research paper proposed by Christofilos.

Preparation for the experiment, termed as Operation Argus, began in the summer of 1958 with the U.S. Navy's Task Force 88 (TF-88), comprising 9 Navy ships manned by 4,500 personnel, moving to their pre-designated locations in the South Atlantic for the launch of three missiles carrying low-yield nuclear warheads for launch. In July 1958, the Explorer-4 satellite was launched by the U.S. intended at monitoring and the tracking the resulting electron shield from space. Sounding rockets were also launched carrying instrumentation to measure the resulting effect.

On August 27, 1958, USS Norton Sound, one of the ships which was part of the TF-88, and positioned almost 1800 km South-West of Cape Town in the South Atlantic Ocean, launched the first shot, in form, of the X-17A missile carrying the W-25 nuclear warhead with a yield of 1.7 kt. The second and third shots of Operation Argus were fired respectively on August 30, 1958 and September 06, 1958 respectively with all the three shots using the W-25 warhead for testing. The resulting electron belts formed by the detonation of nuclear weapons at such high altitudes, ranging from 100 to 500 miles, did verify the hypothesis proposed originally by Christofilos.

However, the resulting electron shield only had the capability to impact radio & radar transmissions, in addition, to impacting the electronics carried onboard the ICBMs and the orbiting space vehicles in the LEO. The strength and the duration of the resulting electron shield, however, was insufficient to be able to protect against incoming ICBMs.

Nonetheless, Operation Argus, as the world's first high-altitude nuclear detonation experiment, was monumental, in terms of significance, as it further expanded and enhanced human awareness about the after effects of the use of nuclear weapons at high altitudes and in space, especially from a military purview and standpoint.

For more on Operation Argus and the Christofilos Effect, the following books are highly recommended:

Atoms of Doom: Seconds to Midnight - I - Fingers on Nuclear Triggers and Nucear Gambits, Confrontations, Tragedies, Disasters and Almost Apocalypses in the Atomic Age

Burning the Sky: Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space

Image: USS Norton Sound Launching the X-17A Missile carrying the W-25 Nuclear Warhead.