Nation Ready to Fire Friday, Apr. 20, 1962
The U.S. moved full speed ahead on preparations for resuming its 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.
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.
Freighters out of Pearl Harbor anchored off the tip of Christmas Island, transferred cargo of awkward monitoring gear to shallow draft lighters for the trip ashore.
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.
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. The new area containing 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 USSR, a lead that was threatened by the progress made by the Russians in their tests last fall. The Russians' series of some 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 powerfull than 15 megatons.