Voyage of Norton Sound

As the broad-beamed U.S. Navy missile-test ship Norton Sound pulled away from her dock at Port Hueneme, Calif, shortly after dusk one day last August, a dockhand bellowed to Captain Arthur Gralla, the skipper: "What time tomorrow ya coming back, captain?" Yelled Gralla in reply: "I'll let you know." To all appearances, Norton Sound was off on another of her one-day, routine, rocket-testing trips to the Navy's offshore test range. But Gralla knew, even before opening the sealed orders in his cabin, that Norton Sound would not be docking at Port Hueneme (pronounced Wye-nee-mee) the next day, or for weeks afterwards. Her destination: a secret rendezvous with a special Navy task force off the Falkland Islands, some 10,000 miles around the Horn and off in the South Atlantic.

Last week, nearly eight months after Norton Sound (a 15,000-ton converted seaplane tender) steamed out of Port Hueneme, the world finally learned where she went and what she did. Warily, the Defense Department confirmed the New York Times's 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 oncoming enemy ballistic missiles by exploding nuclear warheads high above the earth? Could the Soviet Union use high-up explosions to cheat on a test-ban agreement? How much would high-up nuclear explosions disturb radio communications and the radar detection that is indispensable to U.S. defenses against bomber or missile attack?

The 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.

No Answers. To keep out of sight, Gralla and his 650-man crew bypassed the Panama Canal, churned southward and around the Horn, keeping radio silence all the way.-Meanwhile, a five-ship task force--the carrier Tarawa, the destroyer Warrington, the destroyer escorts Hammerberg and Courtney and the oiler Neosho--slipped inconspicuously out of Newport, R.I. and steamed southward. From Norfolk, Va. steamed the destroyer Bearss and the oiler Salamonie. Together, the eight ships made up Task Force 88, under the overall command of the Navy's Rear Admiral Lloyd Montague Mustin, 47 (Annapolis '32), aboard the Tarawa.

By pushing Norton Sound at 95% of full power, even through the iceberg-menaced waters around Cape Horn, Captain Gralla reached the South Atlantic rendezvous three days ahead of schedule. Picking up first the Falkland Islands and then Tarawa on radar, he radioed a signal: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Replied Admiral Mustin from the carrier: "Greetings from 3,000 shellbacks." Back came Gralla: "Six hundred and fifty horned shellbacks are ready to shoot now."

One Chance in 200. What Gralla and his crew had come to shoot were three 57-ft. X-17A solid-propellant rockets, each tipped with a 1.5 kiloton atomic warhead (equivalent in blast to 1,500 tons of TNT). Since he had no target to hit except the wide sky, Gralla's job might have seemed simple, but in fact it was fantastically difficult. To enable the rockets to travel 300 miles up, he had to get them fired in an almost perfectly vertical course, a delicate task in rough seas. The rockets had to go off at 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 at one in 200.

Captain Gralla and his crew spectacularly beat the odds. The weather was foul for all three shots--in the third, Norton Sound was hidden from her escorts by a snowstorm--but the rocketmanship and the seamanship were superb. Each countdown, with 60 Navy and civilian technicians briskly at work, took six hours. Minutes before firing, rocketmen removed the heated blanket draped around the bird to keep electrical relays from freezing up. Then they took cover, while the firing officer waited until the ship was at the right degree of pitch and roll to enable the rocket to get off in straight-up flight. At firing time, Gralla. standing on the unsheltered wing of his bridge to spot possible trouble, was the only man out in the open. Says he: "That's what skippers are for."

On Aug. 27, Aug. 30 and Sept. 6, within the three-minute timing tolerance that orders prescribed, the rockets zoomed off, beautifully vertical. Then, mission accomplished, Task Force 88 steamed smartly into Rio for a well-deserved five-day spell ashore. To Admiral Mustin and Captain Gralla, the Navy decided to award the Legion of Merit. And from Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke came a radio message for all hands: "A most hearty well-done" for a splendidly fulfilled pioneering task.

-When word reached the ship that the wife of one of the seamen had been killed in an auto accident and his two children injured, Gralla would not permit the radio operator to break silence to acknowledge the message. Six weeks later the crew pitched in $1,000 to send the seaman home from Rio on a commercial plane.

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