Ready to Fire

Everyone knew what the answer would be, but President Kennedy arid Prime Minister Macmillan went through the exercise anyway: off to Moscow last week went another appeal to the Russians to join the Western powers in an effective nuclear test ban treaty. Even while awaiting the Soviet nyet, which came three days later, the U.S. moved full speed ahead on preparations for resuming its own nuclear tests in the vast and silent stretches of the Pacific.

The big buildup for Operation Dominic combines 12,000 men, 100 planes and 40 ships into Joint Task Force 8, which will conduct the tests. Says William Ogle, scientific director of JTF 8 (see box): "We're cutting corners right and left. Not on safety. But on organization, bookkeeping and that sort of thing. Normally it takes two years to set up one of these things. We're doing it in four months."

Payload Preparation. Each day last week a dozen or so lumbering Military Air Transport planes took off from Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii and headed south for British-controlled Christmas Island, the curving strip of sand and coral that will be the headquarters of Operation Dominic. Working far into the night, construction crews were finishing up the work of renovating decrepit or outmoded facilities. The resurfacing of the two runways was nearly done, mess halls and barracks were mushrooming, and, after weeks in which the men had to take to the bush, enough latrines had still not been installed.

As time grew shorter, freighters out of Pearl Harbor anchored off the tip of Christmas Island, transferred cargos of awkward monitoring gear to shallow draft lighters for the trip ashore. The big payload arrived aboard a deep-draft freighter, which gingerly carried a 1,500-ton load of critical nuclear material all the way from the Oakland Naval Supply Depot.

In forgotten corners of the Pacific, engineers and scientists put the finishing touches on some of the 15 new weather stations that will study and forecast how wind currents might carry radioactive fallout. Another web of 16 monitoring stations will record the effects of the blasts; one radiation monitoring station clings to the lip of a 10,000-ft. volcanic crater on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Out of Bounds. Christmas Island is in the center of an imaginary rectangle 600 nautical miles wide and 800 miles long that will be closed to ships and airliners for the duration of the tests. Last week the U.S. added a 120-mile by 240-mile rectangle to the Christmas reservation (see map). The new area contains no islands or atolls, will probably be used for underwater explosions. Some 1,200 miles to the northwest is the second test center of Johnston Island, where the U.S. will probably conduct high-altitude shots.

The basic aim of the U.S. test series is to gather the data necessary to maintain the nation's nuclear lead over the U.S.S.R., a lead that was threatened by the progress made by the Russians in their te,sts last fall. The Russians' series of seme 50 shots included superblasts up to 58 megatons. In contrast, the U.S. will detonate only about 35 explosions, none of which is expected to be more power-fill than 15 megatons. The three general classes of tests:

> Proof tests of existing weapons, such as the warhead of the Polaris missile.

> Effects tests to see how well U.S. equipment and facilities, particularly electronic-communications gear, stand up under nuclear explosions.

> Development tests of new weapons. Ogle's scientists will be trying to improve the vital weight-yield ratio--a bigger blast from a smaller package. Special attention will be paid to the nuclear warhead of the Nike Zeus, the missile being developed by the Army to intercept enemy warheads as they hurtle down on the U.S. To find out how the blast of a Nike Zeus will affect a missile at high altitudes, the scientists will make at least one test of the weapon on the warhead of an Atlas, one of the prime missiles in the U.S. arsenal.

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