“We almost blew a hole in the ozone layer,” explains Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who in the twelve years since Crossroads had wired over one hundred nuclear bombs, including Teak and Orange. O’Donnell was standing on Johnston Island, 720 miles southwest of Honolulu, on August 1, 1958, when the Teak bomb went off. Due to a “program failure” on the Redstone missile system (which carried the warhead to its target), the rocket went straight up and detonated directly above where O’Donnell and the rest of the arming and firing party were working. The bomb was supposed to have detonated twenty-six miles to the south. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky overhead. “It was scary,” O’Donnell sighs, remembering the catastrophic event as an old man, half a century later. There is a hint of resignation in his voice when he says, “But we were all used to it by then. The bombs had become too big.” In Teak’s first ten milliseconds, its fireball grew ten miles wide— enough yield to obliterate Manhattan. At H + 1 second, the fireball was more than forty miles wide, which could have taken out all five boroughs of New York City. It was not as if Killian, who was in charge of the project, hadn’t realized the potential for part of the ozone layer to be destroyed. “In late 1957 and early 1958, the question was raised as to whether or not the ultraviolet emissions from the Teak and Orange events would ‘burn a hole’ into the natural ozone layer,” states a 1976 review of the event authored by Los Alamos National Laboratory. But “the pre-event discussions were inconclusive” and the tests barreled ahead anyway. Why? “It was argued that even in case of complete destruction of the ozone layer over an area with radius 50 km, the ozone loss would amount to only 2 x 10−5 of the global inventory. The ‘hole’ would be closed promptly by bomb-produced turbulence and ambient motions in the atmosphere.” As astonishing and reckless as this was, the follow-up becomes even more unbelievable. “After the events, little attention was paid to this particular problem, evidently because no spectacular or unusual observations were made (because of lack of evidence one way or the other).” Apparently, no one thought to ask the dignitary on hand that day on Johnston Island, Wernher Von Braun. In government archival film footage, Von Braun can be seen observing the Redstone rocket he had designed to get the nuclear weapon up to the ozone where it would explode. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt and sporting an island tan, Von Braun appears more playboy than rocket scientist. But Von Braun was so spooked by the Teak blast that he left the island before the second test took place. Von Braun was not one to scare easily. When he worked for Adolf Hitler, he and his colleague Ernst Steinhoff were known to dash up to Hitler’s lair, Wolfsschanze, in Steinhoff’s personal airplane to brief the dictator on how the V-2 was coming along. But the power of the Teak bomb sent Von Braun running. Immediately after the deadened communications systems were restored, Von Braun fled. He never publicly said why. Killian’s high-altitude nuclear tests did not stop there. Two weeks later, another ultrasecret nuclear weapons project called Operation Argus commenced. Killian’s nuclear bomb tests had now expanded to include outer space. “Argus was an unusual operation,” a Defense Nuclear Agency summary from 1993 recalls. “It was completed in less than six months after Presidential approval, and it was completed in complete secrecy. Nuclear-tipped missiles were fired from ships for the first time.” Oblique words used to conceal another one of the most radical, covert science experiments conducted by man. On August 27, August 30, and September 6, 1958, three nuclear warheads were launched from X-17 rockets from the deck of the USS Norton Sound as the warship floated off the coast of South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. Up went the missiles and the warheads until they exploded approximately three hundred miles into space. This “scientific experiment” was the brainchild of a Greek elevator operator turned physicist, Nicholas Christofilos. Christofilos convinced Killian that a nuclear explosion occurring above the Earth’s atmosphere — but within the Earth’s magnetic field — might produce an electronic pulse that could hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads trying to make their way into the United States. While the phenomenon did occur in minutiae, meaning the arming devices registered “feeling” the pulse from the nuclear blast, Christofilos was wrong about the possibility that this would actually stop incoming enemy nuclear missiles in their tracks. In other words, the tests failed. To cover his tracks as to the sheer waste and recklessness of the experiment, in the month following the nuclear detonation in space, Killian wrote a memo to President Eisenhower attempting to put a congratulatory spin on how quickly the project occurred and how terrific it was that secrecy was maintained. Dated November 3, 1958, Killian’s letter began by describing Argus as “probably the most spectacular event ever conducted.” More egregious self-congratulation came next: “The experiment was in itself an extraordinary accomplishment. Especially notable was the successful launching of a large, solid-fuel rocket carrying a nuclear payload from the heaving deck of a ship in the squally South Atlantic. Scarcely less so is the fact that the whole experiment was planned and carried out in less than five months… Impressive, too, is the fact that no leaks have occurred.”ترجم الى اللغة العربية  ترجمة تحريرة .