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Don't know where to look
https://ia601505.us.archive.org/30/items/StarfishPrimeInterimReportByCommanderJTF8/Starfish%20Prime%20Interim%20Report%20By%20Commander%20JTF-8.mp4
There is a lot of scientific data holdings from EG&G, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories regarding Bluegill Triple Prime shootdown, crash and retrieval. These excerpts of transcripts from the Nevada Test Site Oral History archives by former EG&G staff involved in the Operation Fishbowl tests describe the scientific instruments used in the Bluegill Triple Prime shot, the KC-135 platforms they operated from and how they were calibrated. (Interviewer questions in italics).
Interview with Peter Henry Zavattaro (EG&G) May 31, 2005 https://special.library.unlv.edu/ark%3A/62930/d19g5gr4z
"Shortly after I got started in this, we got involved with Los Alamos [National Laboratory] oratory] on a project called—well, we were building a system called a Z system, and this was designed to—this was a pre-Vela [Uniform] activity and it was designed to look at air fluorescence of a nuclear burst out of space, out in the outer atmosphere. The X-rays would impinge on the atmosphere and light it up at certain precise wavelengths. So we built this system to look at that. And it was deployed around the world. (pg 2)
Dominic was the Pacific test program and, was kind of a period where we tested, I guess it was over 100 tests, every day almost. And I was supporting a branch of the Air Force at the time. And we had a KC-135 that was filled with instrumentation, cameras, antennas. We looked at electromagnetic pulses and photographed things. And we flew on the airplane. Whenever there was a test, we would fly down to Christmas Island or wherever the test was, collect data, and fly back. Lived in Oahu, so we worked out of Hickam Air Force Base [Hawaii] for months and months.
In July of ‘62, I think it was ‘62, [07/09/1962] we started the high-altitude series, which the first test was Starfish. Starfish was a large-yield device, 400 miles up or something. It’s in the book someplace. [DOE/NV—209 Rev 15 December 2000]
But anyway that lit up the whole sky. You could see that the sky turned green from Hawaii to Samoa. It was just spectacular. I had a copy of Life Magazine that had that on the cover and I can’t find it.
It would be in ‘62; ‘62 issue of Life. But after that particular test, there was concerns about what the Russians were doing, and the plane that I was supporting went to Russia. I stayed in Hawaii and took a trailer of equipment, and the government rented a freighter, a Portuguese freighter called Private Frank J. Petracka. My trailer was strapped to one of the holds on this freighter and we went down to Johnson Island, and I spent forty-six days anchored off Johnson Island looking at the rest of the high-altitude series plus some atmospheric shots. The shots down there, the famous one was Bluegill because it took them three tries to actually get that successfully fired. The first one blew up on the pad. The second one blew up shortly after launch, so there were parts of rocket motors and things falling down. And the third test was successful. (pg. 4)
(Zavattaro is mistaken here - it was the 4th test of the Bluegill device that was successful).
But after Dominic was over, I became more involved with Los Alamos. The first thing that happened after the test series was over was coming up with a readiness program for resuming testing in the Pacific, and that was called the Future Off-Continent Program, FOC. And I worked on that until the program was cancelled. Basically, it was a clause in one of the safeguards, Safeguard C, that said we had to be prepared to promptly resume atmospheric testing in the Pacific. So they came up with a concept for that exercise. The concept was that to so that to solve some of the logistics problems of the past test series—because weather in the Pacific is really spotty. You never know where you can see things. So the concept was they would have a flying experiment. They would have the drop plane fly and they would have an array of airplanes follow it and they would find some nice clear place in the Pacific and fire the test. So this was the concept, and to support that, each of the labs had designed an aircraft for experimentation. Sandia had their own, [Lawrence] Livermore [National Laboratory] had their own, and Los Alamos had their own. So they modified these three aircraft, which were called NC-135s, which were refuelable KC-135s, at Fort Worth [Texas]. General Dynamics modified the planes. And I supported—we would go down and we designed the camera mounts and a lot of the stuff that went on the air—a lot of the supporting infrastructure, cameras and things, that went on the airplanes. And then after they completed them, they moved them to Kirtland Air Force Base [New Mexico]; Holmes and Narver designed an array of pad, three pads, for the aircraft, and they were stationed down there. And we had an array of trailers and we staffed it with people from Boston. The first test of this system was called Crosscheck, and we had an experiment. We went out to the Pacific and checked out with a flare and cameras and the whole nine yards to see if everything worked. (pg 5)
What was going on in Boston, supporting Los Alamos, was looking at the high altitude data. We were digitizing all the thousands of frames of data that we had from the highaltitude tests with very sophisticated digitizing equipment at the time. And the lab felt that the arrangement was too costly to have this interface, so they wanted us to move our resources that supported them to Los Alamos, and that’s when we basically opened the office there. I moved to Los Alamos in ’70 to set up an engineering department; and I moved about, I think it was thirteen or fourteen people that worked for me from Boston to Los Alamos."
Now, which division or group were you supporting at Los Alamos?
This was J-10.
J-10 was the field division, the real test division, and at that time that was the biggest, the key group. It was headed up by a guy named Herman Hoerlin who was a quite famous scientist from Germany, and he was a very interesting guy. (pg 9)
And who was the head of J-Division then?
It went through a few people. Herman Hoerlin, after Herman left, God, I can’t— A whole bunch of people. Don [Donald M.] Kerr was there for a while. Hard to remember all these things. It’s been so many years. (pg.11).
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Interview with James Arnold Hodges (EG&G) January 17 2005 https://special.library.unlv.edu/ark%3A/62930/d16m33f80
"Well, not originally. Actually, I went into that pretty quick, too, into the taking pictures. I worked with Harry Smith who had some cameras called, oh, well, what were those called? We were up at Building 400 and we had rotor cameras. They had a rotor in them that turned 4,000 rps [rotations per second] and they would—oh, streak cameras, that’s what they were called. When the bomb went off, they made a streak with time and that showed you, since you knew what the speed of the rotor was and how long the film was, it showed you how big the fireball got. They used that for measurements on the yield, yield measurements. And I did that quite a while. When I wasn’t doing the streak camera measurements, I was working in the office in the other photo camera stations. We had photo stations everywhere sitting out there with cameras in them, all types of cameras, all speeds from Rapatronic cameras that took a picture in four billionths of a second to so-called cloud cameras that took a picture every few seconds and traced the cloud as it was going up. (pg. 4)
Some of the pictures that we took are still classified. One of them was taken by a Rapatronic camera. I had a streak camera with a sixteen-foot telescope on it and it looked right into the cab of the tower and you could see the case of the bomb. We have a picture of a crack appearing in the case as it started to blow up. That picture’s still classified. And then I took one at Johnston Island from the deck of the Boxer, that’s an old aircraft carrier with an old wood deck, it was an old one. And they classified the picture because it was some clouds which had, of course, the aerial bomb went off way up in the atmosphere and there was a cloud shaped like an angel, so they said, Oh, we don’t dare publish that picture. People will say we’re punching a hole in the sky and all the air’s going to run out and everything else. And so they classified that picture, and as far as I know, it’s still classified. I don’t think it was ever released. (pg.6)
I was there for the so-called high altitude sun tests. We took pictures from a high altitude airplane.
So you took pictures from the plane.
Yes. Of the sun. I don’t remember just why.
And did you take those, or again did you have equipment set up to do that?
We had equipment set up to do it. I shot some stills from Johnston Island, from the deck of the carrier, I shot some of those stills. That’s in fact the one where the angel was, I shot that one. And like I say, that one’s hid somewhere far, far down in the—
So none of your stuff ever went out to the media or the press.
No.
This was just all for in-house EG&G?
Yeah. I guess since then they released some of the shots. (pg.25)
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Interview with Vernon Henry Jones (EG&G) October 4, 2005 https://special.library.unlv.edu/ark%3A/62930/d1q23rb6p
"Right. Now physically what happened with the film? Because I have no idea. The cameras are there. You remove the cameras. How does that work?
Cameras, no. We would remove the film only from all of them. Some of them, you just take the film reel out of them and we had regular film-carrying cases that we would put the film in. Some of them had film magazines on top of them. Some of them were quite large. Like the Fastax camera had a thousand-foot roll of 35-millimeter film on top of it. The Fastax, the name of the camera, it was a real high-speed camera, and it would go through that whole thousand feet of film in one and a half seconds.
No way!
Oh, yes! You should hear that camera when it ran. It was like, stand back!
In what sense?
Noisy! The noise would scare you, hearing that thing wind up the way it did. That camera had a drive motor on the film feed and the take-up spool. That’s how fast that turkey went. So there was probably an average, I don’t know, six to eight cameras in each station. Some were small; some were there for just cloud cover, to see which way the cloud went after the shot. Of course they were real slow-speed cameras. And the others, we had the Mitchell that generally ran at a hundred frames per second. I don’t know offhand what they were really after, but it was one of the cameras, and various other ones in there. We had some high-speed Eastman cameras, slowspeed Triads, and others, I don’t recall their names. (pg.11)
Photo. Setting up field photo. Now there were other people helping me some at times, but for the most part I did the majority of that by myself. A lot of the cameras were mounted on a tripod, small cameras. The camera was called by letters GSAP, which stood for Gunsight Aerial Photography-type camera. It’s a little bitty thing, run on 24 volts, had a fifty-foot roll of 16-millimeter film in them. These were all over the place, taking pictures of all these different things (pg. 52)
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Interview with Wayne Albert Violette (EG&G) January 12, 2005
https://special.library.unlv.edu/ark%3A/62930/d1h12vk31
"This was actually done on film. When the bomb would go off, there would be oscilloscope traces recorded and it would record like the alpha growth rate of the bomb. The first few thousandths of a millionth or nanoseconds of the bomb going off is what the critical information was because after that it was all over.
And is that what you guys looked at?
Yes, the first few nanoseconds. That’s where they would get most of their information as far as the effectiveness of the bomb and the efficiency of it, and I’m not sure what the physicists were really looking at, but the alpha growth rate was primarily what we were looking at, right at the very beginning. (pg.10)
I was also sent for two or three weeks to Albuquerque to work on some of the—I think KC-135s, they’re 707s, I believe—was the civilian name for the planes. We went back and we worked on those for putting equipment in them; they were preparing if they went to atmospheric testing again. These had a big window on one side and the equipment was set to where they could take pictures out of it. I had my particular little thing to do, installing certain equipment, so I wasn’t privy to a lot of the details of what they were doing. But that was very interesting, too, to go back there and just be part of it. Sandia built the bombs, and Sandia Labs was back there. (pg.13).
We didn’t process—we came up with negatives. They would look at the negative. It was actually a negative image. It looked like a dark image on a light background, rather than the white image on the dark background. When we would set the equipment up, we would have to get them focused exactly. Very critical on focus and getting the right intensity so they would be the best image possible. We used a lot of Polaroid film doing that. We’d go through boxes and boxes of Polaroid film on the setup of it. The actual photo, though, was then done on an actual negative. So I know Polaroid must’ve made a lot of money off the test site because we used a lot of that, and yellow tape." (pg.15)
Military v Civilian control
It also appears that there were problems within the U.S. Government bureaucracy regarding the military maintaining control over nuclear weapons. This is rectified somehow by the wording in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and is explained here by the Defence Special Weapons Agency's Associate Dean Byron L. Ristvet.
Interview with Byron Leo Ristvet, (DSWA) April 17, 2006 https://special.library.unlv.edu/ark%3A/62930/d1qf8jw7j
"So the British never had that civilian control quandary that we did. And let me just tell you bluntly, when Truman wanted the Atomic Energy Commission created and in civilian control because he didn’t trust the military, guess who was his strongest supporter? George C. Marshall. Leslie Groves. They both testified secretly at the time that they did not want the production of weapons under the services. They wanted the control of special nuclear material, the design, and the production to remain totally a civilian enterprise.
And what was, their reasoning there again? Was it the knowledge?
No, their reasoning was, is they just felt that the military shouldn’t be in control of such awesome power, that the Constitution had basically said civilians should be in power, and so this way it made it very positive. I think had the Goldwater-Nichols Act been in place where the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy had control over the CNO and over the chief of staff of the Army who at that time reported directly to the president. It would’ve been different. But the Defense Department really didn’t gain the civilian control power until ’85.
Well, you know, there were changes, and the biggest change to the Atomic Energy Act was ’54, when the military was allowed to have custody of special nuclear material. Prior to that it was always under the control of the AEC, and that was because we were going to these sealed designs, and even where the what’s called the capsule ball assembly was not inserted into the high explosive, it was still carried on the weapon; it was integral to the weapon and you couldn’t manually insert it in flight, it was automatically inserted in flight, and as a result, you had to grant the custody—plus the response times were getting less and less and less. You know, the late forties, three days. By the time you were in ’54, you were getting down to three-or-four-hour kind of response times, about half the time it takes to fly over the poles. By the time you were in the late fifties, you had missiles. Of course we didn’t know the missile gap was sort of nonexistent, but in ’58 the response time was getting down to thirty minutes. And by the time you were in the ’66-’67 time frame, when the Russians had their first fleet ballistic submarines, you were now down to fifteen-minute response time. That’s why the Cuban missile crisis in ’62 was such a huge thing, because now you were looking at seven-or-eight-minute response times. (pg.32)
This is of interest here because according to the Majestic Documents, it was claimed by Allen Dulles that these changes to the Atomic Energy Act 1954 allowed him exclude President John F. Kennedy from knowing the details of the MJ-12 program:
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Dulles response to President Kennedy
https://majesticdocuments.com/pdf/mj12opsreview-dulles-61.pdf
It would be interesting to know if Pharis Williams and Oke Shannon had any involvement with the J-10 group at Los Alamos or have knowledge of the Bluegill Triple Prime anomaly.
For the past five years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs and a crack team of film experts, archivists and software developers have been on a mission to hunt down, scan, reanalyze and declassify film recordings of the U.S. atmospheric nuclear tests. In this video, Lab science communicator Maren Hunsberger interviews Greg Spriggs to answer some of the most frequently asked questions we've received about the test films since sharing them on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsOrRWzmmUU&list=PLvGO_dWo8VfcmG166wKRy5z-GlJ_OQND5&index=99
Digitization of atmospheric test films ongoing at LLNL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY&list=PLvGO_dWo8VfcmG166wKRy5z-GlJ_OQND5&index=1
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The Pentagon doesn't seem to be trying too hard to find the data.