Getting Ready

Even as President Kennedy made his test-resumption announcement, U.S. scientists and military men worked day and night to get ready for the U.S. series of shots. In the Government's nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, N. Mex., and Livermore, Calif., scientists were turning mock-up models of weapons into hardware that could be exploded. In Washington, a shabby grey building named Barton Hall, tucked away near the Lincoln Memorial, suddenly became one of the most important structures in town. There Joint Task Force 8--the nucleus of the U.S. testing effort--was preparing for the huge job of transporting the scientists' devices to the far islands of the Pacific, firing them off under complex testing conditions and recording the results.

The size of the blasts will probably range from about 1 kiloton to 15 megatons--about the size of the largest weapon ever detonated by the U.S. For the present, the U.S. has no plans to explode a superbomb such as the 58-megaton device detonated by the Russians last fall. But U.S. scientists will have plenty to keep them busy. They have been itching for months not only to try out experiments suggested by the Russian tests, but to move forward along the lines of progress already laid down by the last U.S. tests, and to experiment with a host of new weapons and techniques that have been developed in the labs since then but never tested in the atmosphere.

During the two or three months of testing, the Task Force 8 team hopes to:

>"Proof-test" weapons already in the U.S. atomic arsenal--something the Pentagon is particularly anxious to do. The series will include the first full tests of the Minuteman and Polaris missile warheads, and operational tests for ASROC (antisubmarine rocket), an ingenious, nuclear-tipped weapon that seeks out its target under water.

>Conduct "effects tests" to discover how well the Minuteman can ride out a nuclear attack in its "hardened," underground silo. Other tests will seek to determine how well the hulls of submarines--including the subs that carry the Polaris missile--will stand up to nuclear attack. Nuclear weapons will be detonated at high altitudes to check the effect on ground communications and radar. In previous tests, ionization caused by nuclear explosions wreaked havoc with electronics gear, raised the possibility that an enemy might try to knock out the electronic network of U.S. defenses by exploding warheads at high altitudes.

>Try to develop "clean" hydrogen bombs with little or no radioactive fall out by improving the efficiency of the fission "trigger" that produces most of the fallout in nuclear explosions.

> Improve the vital weight-yield ratio-a bigger punch in a smaller package--that determines how many bombs an aircraft can carry or how great a destructive force a missile can pack. U.S. experts fear that the Russians have made great strides in this area.

> Experiment with anti-missile devices and techniques, particularly by testing the warhead of the anti-ICBM Nike-Zeus.

By any scale, the preparation for such projects was a gigantic undertaking. At least 14 to 18 months of painstaking preparations had gone into each of the previous U.S. test series. But J.T.F. 8 will have had just four months to get ready for April's blasts. What is more, the task force had to begin virtually from scratch. President Kennedy long ago gave up any idea of testing from the familiar sites at Bikini and Eniwetok because of their small size, the proximity of populated islands and the inhibiting fact that the U.S. administers both atolls by U.N. mandate --a point that roused international ire during past tests.

All but Ruined. Last November President Kennedy asked John McCone, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission and now Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to suggest the right man for the tough job of building Task Force 8. McCone's answer was brief: "Get Starbird." Within days, Major General Alfred Dodd Starbird, 49, was squeezing his lanky frame (6 ft. 5 in.) behind a desk in Barton Hall, a building saved from the wrecker's hammer by the sudden need for a temporary headquarters for the task force. A handsome, scholarly and reserved West Pointer, Starbird finished a respectable seventh in the pentathlon at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As McCone claimed, he had all the credentials for the nuclear job: he was deputy chief of staff for Joint Task Force 7, which tested at Eniwetok after World War II, helped to organize SHAPE, and later spent six years as the top military man in the Atomic Energy Commission.

Starbird began drawing up general plans long before the British agreed two months ago to let the U.S. use Christmas Island,* a coral atoll some 30 miles long that lies 1,200 miles south of Hawaii. In some ways, Christmas Island was ideal. Big enough to support an airfield, it was far removed from populated islands and prying Soviet monitors. In 1957 and 1958, the British had launched their tests from the island.

But Starbird soon found that long disuse and the corrosion of the salt-laden ocean air had all but ruined what was left of the British facilities on the island. The harbor was silted with sand. The water supply system was nothing more than a deep ditch cut into the coral to catch rain water. The airstrip was pocked with holes that would snap off a landing gear. The buildings were ready to fall down.

Wild Blue Yonder. Last week Starbird's team was rebuilding Christmas Island from the coral up. Shallow-draft lighters ferried in materials from ships anchored in deep water. Huge water-distilling plants arrived piecemeal in great crates. Engineers got ready to lay down an entirely new airstrip. A forest of long-range communications masts and antennas began to rise. Back in the U.S., task force ships docked on both the East and West coasts prepared to sail for the Pacific.

When $25 million worth of construction is finished, and more than $100 million worth of equipment is imported, Christmas Island will be the headquarters for the test series. A few balloon-carried shots may be launched from the balmy, low-lying atoll itself, but most of the weapons and devices to be tested will be dropped far out in the blue wastes of the Pacific from aircraft that will take off from its airstrip. Other planes will carry the monitors of the blasts. Late in the series, Johnston Island, a U.S.-owned atoll 1,200 miles northwest of Christmas Island, will be the launching site for some nuclear-tipped missiles.

Getting ready for this comprehensive series, Major General Starbird had his task force moving at flank speed, last week flew out himself to inspect the progress. From a sheaf of paper plans, Joint Task Force 8 has already grown to 40 ships, 100 aircraft and 12,000 men. Starbird is spending $500,000 a day, soon expects to double that figure. In a week or so he is scheduled to abandon Barton Hall, head out for Christmas Island to take command on the spot. Said one JTF 8 official last week: "We'll meet the President's deadline of April."

*So named because Captain James Cook discovered it on Christmas Eve 1777.

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