And before the week was out, I was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, again looking at the developments the army had made in the development of portable nuclear reactors.
• • •
Portable Atomics
A challenge posed to us directly by the army’s retrieval of the Roswell craft and our further discovery that the craft was not propelled by a conventional engine—either propeller, jet, or rocket—pressed upon us the critical realization that if we were to engage these extraterrestrial creatures in space we would need a propulsion system that gave us a capability for long-distance travel similar to theirs. But we had no such system. The closest form of energy we had that did not rely on a constant supply of fuel was atomic power in a controlled, sustained reaction, and even that was far away from development. However, at the close of the war the army had operational control over atomic weapons because, under Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the army had established the bureaucracy that developed and deployed the atomic bomb.
So for army engineers, struggling to find out how the Roswell spacecraft was powered, atomic power was the easiest form of propulsion to seize upon, in part because it was the most immediate. However, by 1947, a struggle was already breaking out within the Truman administration over who would control nuclear power, a civilian commission or the military. As the nation was making the transition from wartime to peacetime, the specter of a General Groves secretly dictating how and in what manifestation atomic power would be used frightened Truman’s advisers. So in the end, President Truman made the decision to turn control of the nation’s nuclear program over to a civilian commission. Thus, by 1947, the army was getting out of running the nuclear power business, but that didn’t mean that research into the military applications of nuclear power plants stopped. We needed to develop nuclear reactors, not only to manufacture nuclear power propulsion systems for naval vessels and for on-site installation of power-generating stations, but to experiment with ways nuclear power could be made portable in space by assembling systems in orbit from component parts. This would enable us to maintain long-term outposts in space and even to power interplanetary vessels that could serve as a defensive force against any extraterrestrial hostile forces. If this sounds like science fiction, remember, it was 1947, and the nation had barely gotten out of World War II before the Cold War had begun. War, not peace, was on the mind of the military officers who were in charge of the Roswell retrieval and analysis of the wreckage.
The army, I discovered from the “Army Atomic Reactors” reports at Fort Belvoir, not only had a very sophisticated portable reactor program under way, but had already built one in cooperation with the air force for installation at the Sundance Radar Station six miles out of Sundance, Wyoming, early in 1962. This was a highly sophisticated piece of power-generating apparatus that provided steam heat to the radar station, electrical power for the base, and a very precisely controlled separate power supply for the delicately calibrated radar equipment. But this wasn’t the first portable power plant, as most people thought it was.
The first portable nuclear reactor plant anywhere was for a research facility in Greenland, under the Arctic ice cap, designed for Camp Century, an Army Corps of Engineers project nine hundred miles from the North Pole. Ostensibly operated by the Army Polar Research and Development Center conducting experiments in the Arctic winter, Camp Century was also a vital observation post in an early-warning system monitoring any Soviet activity at or near the North Pole and any activity related to UFO sightings or landings.
During the years when I was at the White House, the UFO working group had consistently pushed President Eisenhower to establish a string of formal listening posts—electronic pickets staffed by army and air force observers at the most remote parts of the planet—to report on any UFO activity. General Twining’s group had argued that if the EBEs had any plans to establish semipermanent Earth bases, it wouldn’t be in a populated area or an area where our military forces could monitor. It would be at the poles, in the middle of the most desolate surroundings they could find, or even underneath the ocean. The polar caps seemed like the most obvious choices because during the 1950s we had no surveillance satellites that could spot alien activity from orbit, nor did we have a permanent presence at the two poles. It was thought that we wouldn’t be able to put any sophisticated devices at the poles, either, because doing so would require more power than we could transport. However, the army’s Nuclear Power Program, developed in the 1950s at Fort Belvoir, provided us with the ability to install a nuclear-powered base anywhere on the planet.
In 1958, work was started on the Camp Century power plant, which was to be constructed beneath the ice in Greenland. Initially this was supposed to be top secret because we didn’t want the Soviets to know what we were up to. Ultimately, however, the high security classification proved too unwieldy for the army because too many outside contractors were involved and the logistics, transportation to Thule, Greenland, then installation on skids beneath the ice pack created a cover-story nightmare. So Army Intelligence decided to drop the security classification entirely and treat the entire plan as a scientific information-gathering expedition by its polar research group.
Just like the whole camouflage operation that had protected the existence of the working group, Camp Century provided the perfect cover for testing out a procedure for constructing a prefabricated, prepackaged nuclear reactor under arduous conditions and flying it to its site for final assembly. It also provided the army with a means of testing the performance of the reactor and how it could be maintained at an utterly desolate location in the harshest climate on the planet.
The plant was the first of its kind. It had a completely modular construction that had separately packaged components for air coolers, heat exchangers, switchgear, and the turbine generator. The power plant also had a mechanism that used the recycled steam to melt the ice cap surface to provide the camp’s water supply. The entire construction was completed in only seventy-seven days, and the camp remained in operation from October 1960 to August 1963, when the research mission completed its work. The entire operation was successfully taken apart and placed in storage in 1964, and the site of Camp Century was completely restored to its natural state.
I received reports about the camp’s operation during the later months of 1962 after General Trudeau had asked me about the feasibility of the army’s portable atomics program as a way to instigate research into a launchable atomics program for generating power in orbit. I was so enthusiastic about the success of our portable atomics and the way they provided the research platform for the subsequent development of mobile atomics that I urged the general to provide as much funding as R&D could to enable the Fort Belvoir Army Nuclear Power Program to construct and test as many mobile and portable power plants as possible.
Each power plant gave us a kind of a beachhead into remote areas of the world where the EBEs might have wanted to establish a presence because they believed they could go about it undetected. They were a kind of platform. Once we had demonstrated the ability to protect remote areas of the earth, we’d be in a better position to establish a presence in space.
The atomics program, which was in part a direct outgrowth of the challenge posed to us from our analysis of the Roswell craft, ultimately helped us develop portable atomic power plants, which are now used to power Earth satellites as well as naval vessels. It showed us that we could have portable atomic generators and gave the army a longer reach than anybody might have thought. Ultimately, it allowed us to maintain surveillance and staff remote listening posts. It also provided the basis for research into launching nuclear power facilities into space to become the power plants of new generations of interplanetary vehicles. The portable atomics program allowed us to experiment with ways we would develop atomic drives for our own space-exploration vehicles, which, we believed, would enable us to establish military bases on the moon as well as on the planets near us in the solar system.
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sp; And from our successes with atomics, we turned our attention to the development of the weapons we could mount on surveillance satellites in orbit, weapons we developed directly from what we found in the flying saucer at Roswell.
CHAPTER 16
“Tesla’s Death Ray” and the Accelerated Particle-Beam Weapon
Embedded in the army field reports and Air Materiel Command engineering evaluations analyzing the Roswell craft were descriptions of how the spacecraft might have utilized a form of energy known as “directed energy,” powerful beams of excited electrons that could be precisely directed at any target. We didn’t know very much about directed energy back in 1947, or more precisely put, we didn’t know how much we knew because in reality we knew a lot. But the information that had been readily available since the 1930s was lying sequestered at a public storage facility, under the authority of the federal government, over on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the notes of the mysterious inventor Nikola Tesla, whose experiments and reputed discoveries have become the stuff of bizarre but exciting legend.
The laser surgical cutting tool found in the Roswell wreckage was one form of directed-energy beam device whose ability to fire rapidly and with precision revealed that the extraterrestrials had a potential in weaponry far superior to ours. However, if the craft had been brought down by lightning, itself a directed-energy beam of one of the highest magnitudes, then it revealed their vulnerability to bolts of electrons. That stimulated the thinking of army scientists and researchers into the analysis of the potential of a directed-energy beam weapon. Today, fifty years after the crash of the spacecraft at Roswell, these weapons are far more than the device that the Emperor Ming aimed at Earth in the Flash Gordon serials; they are a reality that can be launched on a guided missile, separated from a booster, aimed by an internal computer-guidance system at any incoming device, whether an ICBM warhead or a space vehicle, and fired with devastating effect. This weapon has been a true Army R&D success story.
• • •
“The possibilities for benefits to the military are enormous,” I wrote to General Trudeau in my 1962 analysis of the potential for directed-energy weapons. “Although, as we have seen, even the most rudimentary of directed energy products, the microwave oven, has more than repaid the initial research and development overhead through consumer product sales, it is the military that will see the greatest benefits from directed energy and is already seeing the potential from it in the applications that are being projected for the laser which is only two years old.”
The concept of a weapon that relied on a directed-energy beam, whatever the nature of that beam was, was not a completely new concept to the military community, although its origins were totally shrouded in secrecy. The first test of a directed-energy weapon, a particle-beam accelerator code-named Seesaw whose beam was to be aimed at incoming guided missiles, was first conducted in 1958, two years before the successful demonstration of the laser, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Although the test took place the year that I was in Red Canyon, New Mexico, I had known about the project first when I was on the National Security Council at the White House and then again after the successful experiments against a simulated target.
In theory, the particle-beam weapon looked like it would work, assuming the technological development of power generators, electrical storage apparatus, and the computer software to aim and fire the weapon. We already had a rough model for the particle-beam weapon in nature: the lightning bolt, a pure, intense beam of electrons firing between opposite poles and destroying or incapacitating anything it hit that was not grounded. Scientists from Benjamin Franklin to Nikola Tesla have tried to chain the force of lightning as a power source. Now the Advanced Research Projects Agency was experimenting with the theory to apply it to a new and deadly weapon. If they could build the hardware and write the software, the developers at ARPA decided they would be able to generate an intense beam of either electrons or neutral hydrogen atoms, aim it at an incoming target, and fire the particle beam in pulses that would travel near the speed of light and excite the atoms in the target until they literally blew apart. Whatever didn’t blow up would be destroyed electronically and rendered useless.
Officially, the project would remain secret until funding could be acquired and the technological development of the components moved far enough along to allow us to build working prototypes. The great fear of the developers at ARPA was that the Soviets, realizing what we were trying to construct, would maximize their effort to build one before we did, rendering our newly developed Atlas ICBM obsolete before it even got to the launching pad.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency was a highly secretive network of defense scientists, members of the industrial defense contractor R&D community, and university researchers operating either under the formula of a government grant or the tacit acknowledgment of the Defense Department that their research would come under government control at some point. ARPA was founded in 1958, in part, I believed, because up to then Army R&D had been a disorganized department barely able to manage the core research necessary to keep us technologically superior to our enemies. This created a gap in research that the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to fill. Working on military defense-oriented research, many times far in advance of any concrete proposals for the development of a weapons system or a product, ARPA often acted as a forward skirmish line for the development of military weapons or simply facilitated the basic scholarship necessary for the more concrete items to be developed. However, too many times it was in conflict with the military because ARPA had its own separate agenda, especially after General Trudeau had reorganized the entire military R&D apparatus and refocused it so that it ran like a machine.
In 1969, during the era of large mainframe computers, under a contract to develop a network of networks linking universities, defense contractors, and the military, the ARPANET was born. And in the 1970s after the Advanced Research Projects Agency changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, it instituted a project to create an “internetting” of all the existing computers on its system, instituting the software protocols that would link networks running on different operating systems. By 1974, the Transmitting Control Protocol/Internet Protocol was born and the ARPANET became the Internet. In the late 1980s, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics launched a hypertext language, originally conceived of by Vannevar Bush, as a search mechanism on the Internet and by 1990 married it to a graphics user interface that combined hypertext and graphics. The World Wide Web was born.
In 1958, when it was first developing the concepts behind the particle-beam weapon, ARPA was only a year old. It was formed in 1957, when I was still at the White House, in response to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik because the government realized that the United States needed an independent research organization to marshal the resources of the academic, scientific, and industrial communities. ARPA was formed to fund basic research, and even though it didn’t have a military orientation at the outset, it quickly became associated with military projects because that was where the government saw the greatest need for basic research into scientific and technical areas.
There was another reason for the formation of ARPA that, at least in theory, had a lot to do with the perceived threats facing the United States and the need for basic research to respond to them. ARPA, because it was a network deep inside the government and ultimately the Department of Defense, could engage in research ostensibly far afield from the immediate needs of the military services whose research and development organizations were part of the command structure. ARPA wasn’t. Although it reported to its own higher-ups in the Defense Department and at the White House, it was not part of a command structure and didn’t have to confine itself to the agendas of the heads of the various special military corps.
ARPA didn’t just come into existence out of nowhere. Its ancestor, the National Research Council, had been formed under Pre
sident Wilson to organize and marshal scientific research for defense purposes and as a rival to the Naval Consulting Board, which was run by Thomas Edison, who had gone on record as saying that the country didn’t need a Naval Consulting Board at all. He invited scientists he called a bunch of “perfessers” down to his laboratory in New Jersey to walk around the “scrap heap” to see how real inventions were created. University researchers and corporate heads of research and development were naturally appalled at what Edison thought about government-sponsored research for the war effort and rallied around the NRC. If there were government grants to be handed out for basic defense research, the scientists who worked for corporations, who needed help in basic research no matter what its primary purpose was, were anxious to become associated with this new organization.
University researchers argued, through the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, that the National Research Council should be an “arsenal of science” to protect the United States through the application of its great brain trust in academia and industrial contractors to issues of national defense through technology. President Wilson agreed, and the NRC was born. One of the first tasks given to the National Research Council was the development of a submarine defense. Aircraft had not yet made a decisive appearance on the battlefield at the outset of World War I, but the German U-boats were ravaging the Atlantic fleets. The navy was desperately searching for a way to detect submarines, and although Nikola Tesla had submitted his plans for an energy-beam detector that would send low-frequency waves through the water to reflect off any hidden objects, the National Research Council thought the idea too esoteric and looked for a more conventional technology. Tesla’s low-energy wave didn’t work well in water anyway, but years later Tesla’s description of his invention was the basis for one of the most important devices to come out of World War II, “radar.”
The Day After Roswell Page 29
