Word: projects
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story (see PRESS) that the missile ship had fired three nuclear-armed rockets 300 miles into space in what one enthusiast called "the greatest scientific experiment ever conducted." If it was not quite that, it was certainly one of history's most spectacular scientific experiments. Its name: Project Argus. The glowing accounts of the scientific results (see SCIENCE) missed the point that Project Argus was also the most spectacular nuclear-missile-launching project in the history of a U.S. Navy that anchors its future in mobile, missile-launching sea power...
Urgent Questions. Before he sailed, Captain Gralla was called to Washington for high-level briefings on his part in the project. President Eisenhower was planning to announce in late August the U.S.'s willingness to suspend nuclear tests for one year and try to work out a test-detection agreement with the Soviet Union. Before entering into test-ban negotiations, the U.S. needed to try for answers to some vital questions: What would happen when a nuclear explosion took place in a near-vacuum 300 miles above the earth's surface? What were the prospects of coping with...
...questions were even more urgent than Captain Gralla knew when Norton Sound set off on Project Argus: two 100-mile-high atomic explosions carried out by the U.S. in August at Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific caused heavy interference with radio and radar over a distance of 700 miles...
Secrecy was absolutely essential. The U.S. did not want the Soviet Union to find out about Project Argus and monitor it. And President Eisenhower did not want the world to know, when he announced the one-year test suspension (beginning Oct. 31), that the U.S. was about to carry out secret nuclear tests in the South Atlantic...
...precisely the times when the U.S.'s orbiting Explorer IV satellite, sent aloft in July, was in position to monitor radiation from the explosions. Taking the high-wind and rough-sea difficulties into account, Navy experts had estimated Task Force 88's chances of fulfilling Project Argus requirements...