What America Did After Reaching Space?

In 1958, it was the earliest days of the space race, months before Sputnik 1 and 2 had been launched by the Soviet Union. The US eventually followed up with Explorer and Vanguard. Space was a new and unfamiliar territory with many questions as to what should be done about it. And the US in their typical style decided they should shoot it with nuclear weapons just to be sure. Operation Argus was a series of tests where they launched nuclear weapons into space. The idea was to test something called the christophal effect whereby a nuclear explosion would generate an intense radiation belt above the surface. And this belt would be so intense it would disable any complex electronics passing through it. It would make America immune to Soviet nuclear warheads. For this experiment, they also launched a pair of upgraded Explorer satellites, similar to the satellite that had discovered the Van Allen belt, but with some new technology on board for better radiation measurement. The weapons themselves were launched from the USS Norton Sound. They were launched on modified X17A missiles. The warheads chosen were the compact W25 warheads. These were small, less than 100 kg, designed to be launched on air-to-air missiles. They were unboosted fishing weapons that generated a yield of about 1. 7 kilotons. There were three tests and we know that film and photographs were shot, but as far as I can tell, none of this has ever been released. So, this is what the Starship Prime explosion looked like. It was a whole lot bigger and a whole lot higher. In the end, the test showed that the radiation belts would be created, but they would also dissipate far too quickly to be useful.