Word: thaler
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Personal Project. Thaler, then 31, did not wait for official encouragement, or even ask for it. Instead, he went ahead on his own. He borrowed radio equipment from a colleague, set it up and trained it in the direction of Nevada, where the AEC was about to fire a series of atom bombs. To his delight, the oscilloscope showed telltale wiggles. Two months later, he picked up the trail of the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik I. Enlisting the aid of other colleagues, he turned his attention to missile launchings at Cape Canaveral. There he ran into bureaucracy. None...
Soon Project Tepee was soaking up all the back-scatters it could handle. With experience. Thaler found he could distinguish and identify the special characteristics of everything from summer lightning to Polaris missiles, thermonuclear detonations and the aurora borealis. Last summer, in the line of his regular duty, Thaler directed the Navy's Argus Project, in which atom bombs were exploded 300 miles above the South Atlantic (TIME, March 30). In Washington, some 7,000 miles away, a Project Tepee set picked up the shots. The same set had also successfully registered the Teak and Kettle high-altitude thermonuclear...
Wrinkles Ahead. Navy enthusiasts point out that Tepee stations are low-powered and relatively cheap, talk of a system of six stations that would monitor any rocket the Russians set off or atomic bomb that they tested above ground. Thaler himself makes no such claims, recognizes that there are still plenty of wrinkles. "We know the theory and the equipment works.'' said Thaler last week, "and our experiments have been successful from the beginning, but we will have to learn a lot more before we will be able to say we have a system. We have been trying...
...mouse, in this case, is the ionosphere. Says Thaler: "We just don't know enough about the propagation of radio waves through the ionosphere. It is not well understood.'' Other scientists chipped in with equally cautious remarks. "It is not the greatest thing since beer," said one; and an M.I.T. researcher pointed out that "obvious countermeasures [radio jamming] could be used against it." But the Defense Department's careful-going Research Director Herbert York concedes that "the ionospheric backscatter principle is a sound one." Give him a year. Thaler predicted, and he hoped he could...
Tepee has nothing to do with Indians, merely stands for the initials of "Thaler's Project." The physicist more or less backed into long-range detection through his involvement in nuclear testing: now director of the field projects branch of the Office of Naval Research and chairman of the Navy's special weapons effects planning group, he has watched almost every U.S. nuclear test explosion in the past ten years...