Word: argus
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...Secret nuclear test detonations at more than 300 miles above the earth were conducted by the United States early last September." So began last week the year's biggest news beat: a report by New York Times Military Editor Hanson W. Baldwin on Project Argus-an attempt to gauge the behavior of high-speed electrons in the earth's magnetic field (see SCIENCE). The story was much more than a beat. Working on Argus, Reporter Baldwin months ago got into the precarious position of having to decide when and how-if at all-to use material that could...
...when he graduated from Annapolis in 1924. He has been the Times's military analyst since 1937, won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1942 series on combat in the South Pacific that included the disclosure of the U.S. plight on Guadalcanal. Working his beat, Baldwin first came across Argus "some weeks" before the late August and early September tests, got together the outline of the project "without limitation...
...Unprepared Pentagon.Despite this tipoff, the Pentagon was totally unprepared when the Times hit the streets at 10 p.m. with accounts of Argus that slipped on a few details (e.g., the project's rockets used only solid fuel, not liquid and solid as reported). Uninformed public-information officers on duty at the Pentagon had nothing at all to tell the clamoring press. Characteristically, Murray Snyder, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (TIME, March 2), had warned a few top scientists to give only innocuous answers to newsmen. But the cry for information grew so loud that...
...cosmological terms an all but invisible presence on the surface of the earth, had flung aloft an apparatus which disturbed the order of the heavens themselves, made auroras flare in the skies, a hemisphere apart. Exploding nuclear bombs 300 miles above the South Atlantic, the men of Project Argus spun a veil of electrons around the earth, boldly using the atmosphere and nearby space as their laboratory...
Arching Lines. Project Argus began with a suggestion from Nicholas Constantine Christofilos, 42, a remarkable engineer-scientist of limited academic training but highly original ideas. For centuries, scientists have known that the earth behaves as if it had a great bar magnet inside it; lines of magnetic force make compass needles point to the magnetic north and south poles. As magnetic theory developed, scientists realized that the lines of force must arch high above the atmosphere. More than 50 years ago they began to speculate on how charged particles such as electrons would behave in the vacuum of space near...