Two forces or dual functions (coping with the reality of living)
• to ‘understand earthquake’ (un-e)
■ ...
• to ‘manipulate earthquake’ (ma-e)
■ “They also wanted to remind the Bureau that there was evidence that reservoirs actually cause earthquakes.
“For example, in 1935 the Colorado river was damned, creating the large reservoir called Lake Mead. In the next ten years, 6,000 minor earthquakes occurrred in what was previously an earthquake-free area. The underlying rocks──had 10 cubic miles of water set on top of them.”, p.234, Charles Perrow, Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies, 1999
■ “Denver, Colorado, had a mild earthquake in April 1963. It was a surprise, since there had not been an earthquake in the area in eighty-one years. Small ones continued for several years; one in 1967 did a little damage to the city. It turned out that the army caused them.
“The army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal is 10 miles from Denver. It manufactures toxic materials, such as nerve gas, and had to get rid of large amounts of contaminated water. For a time they just put it into holding ponds, but this led to the death of crops, livestock, and wild life. So they dug a well, 2 miles deep, and forced the garbage into it under high pressure. Six weeks later there was the first earthquake, and then an almost daily series of minor tremors. The source of the earthquake was suspected within a year, but the army denied it could happen and went on pumping. The water, under high pressure, force the old cracks in very old rocks to grow, and this allowed the rocks, under pressure from tectonic movements, to slide in jerky movement over one another. Even after the pumping stopped, for a time the pressurized water continued to force open the cracks. About two years after the army finally stopped the practice, the earthquakes also stopped.
“National Center for Earthquake Research
“The National Center for Earthquake Research took over part of the field for deliberate experimentation. When they pumped water in, earthquakes occurred; when they pumped the water back out, they stopped.”, p.243, Charles Perrow, Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies, 1999
____________________________________
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017
pp.99-104
p.99
ARPA was assigned nuclear test detection under the code name Vela at the end of 1959 as a counterweight to the CIA's and the air force's secret test detection network. ARPA got the work, quite simply, because President Eisenhower did not trust his spooks and wanted an assessment that was independent of the CIA and its assets.
p.99
brought renewed focus and funding to the Vela test detection program.
By 1961, Vela had three parts:
Vela Uniform, to detect underground nuclear tests;
Vela Sierra, to detect nuclear explosions in the atmosphere; and
Vela Hotel, which would launch satellites with sensors to detect nuclear tests from space.
99 Vela had three parts: The two most significant parts of Vela ended up being Vela Hotel and Vela Uniform. Vela Sierra, which involved ground-based sensors to detect nuclear tests in space, was eventually folded into Vela Hotel. Some of the Vela work, it turns out, did not really require any exotic science. For example, detecting underwater explosions required little new research. ARPA conducted some underwater tests using conventional explosives under the code name CHASE, short for “cut holes and sink 'em”. Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VII-15. “The ocean detection system was a nonproblem”, Frosch said. Frosch, interview with author. [p.390]
p.99
The academic discipline of seismology, at the time, was a backwater. Robert Frosch, who was recruited to ARPA to run Vela, recalled going with the director, Robert Sproull, to visit what was supposed to be a start-of-the-art seismic vault, one of the underground bunker-like structures that were used to measure tremors. The two men came out of the vault in shock, feeling as if they had just emerged from a time capsule. The seimologists there were using pen recorders and primitive galvanometers, an analog instrument used to measure electrical current.
p.99
Vela began to change that with an influx of funding for seismology that was almost unimaginable in scale for most areas of science. The military's need to distinguish earthquakes from nuclear tests brought seismology “kicking and screaming” into the 20th century, according to Frosch. At one point, he said, he funded almost “every seismologist in the world, except for two Jesuits at Fordham university” who refused to take money from Pentagon.
p.100
Large Aperture Seismic Array, or LASA,
a massive nuclear detection system that comprised 200 “seismic vaults” buried across a 200-kilometer-diameter area in the eastern half of Montana. For it to work, more than a dozen of these enormous sites would have to be constructed around the world to monitor the Soviet Union.
There had been smaller arrays, including one in the United Kingdom,
The air force hated the idea,
p.100
Bilings, Montana
What was amazing about LASA, according to Frosch, was the scale of the work, which was completed in just 18 months, a schedule unimaginable for government projects that typically take years, if not decades.
When ARPA needed to have a center where all the seismic data could be collected and analyzed, the agency ended up renting space in downtown Billings, where data from the array was routed to an IBM computer.
p.100
ARPA also began funding the placement of seismograph stations around the world that were operated by scientists.
pp.100-101
the CIA and the air force, who up to that point had a monopoly on advice to political leaders about what was theoretically possible to monitor a [nuclear explosion] test ban.
p.101
local scientists only needed to agree to operate them and share the data.
p.101
a growing tension between secret and open research
p.102
air force and the CIA refused to release data from their network of sensors.
bête noire - Fr. Anything that is an object of hate or dread; a bugaboo. [< F, black beast]
p.102
The bête noire of the nuclear detection would was Carl Romney, a scientist who worked for the Air Force Technical Application Center, or AFTAC, the agency responsible for nuclear test detection.
p.102
Whether deliberate or not, the problem with secret data, as Ruina pointed out, was that “nobody could argue with it; they could just question it.” The secret data problem came to a head in 1962, when the United States carried out a test called Aardvark, a part of the first series of tests conducted completely underground.
p.102
Aardvark, a 40-kiloton nuclear device intended for nuclear artillery, produced reliable seismographic data on a nuclear underground explosion, and Romney suddenly realized he had been wrong about a critical national security issue.
p.102
He had been arguing that it would be difficult to distinguish small underground nuclear tests from earthquakes, which would make verifying a nuclear test ban treaty difficult, if not impossible.
Now, with the Aardvark data, he knew he had been wrong on a key point.
During a July 3, 1962, meeting, Romney announced that the new seismic data let him to conclude that distinguishing between tremors and small nuclear tests might not be as difficult as he had previously thought.
102 Now, with the Aardvark data: Romney insisted the revisions were the result not of systemic errors but of getting more data. He had been relying on historical data of large Soviet nuclear tests and extrapolating down to make estimates about the detection of smaller tests, which might be confused with earthquakes. “The change came about as a result of additional information we got”, Romney insisted. Romney, interview with the author. [p.390]
p.102
it would look as if the government were “withholding information that would tend to ease the inspection problem in a nuclear test ban.”
pp.102-103
Ruina called it an “honest mistake”, but one that would have been avoided if other scientists had been given access to the classified data that Romney jealously guarded. “This is what can happen when you have one person interpreting data, there's no peer group reviewing it, and there's nobody duplicating the experiment”, the ARPA director wrote in a three-page letter, blaming the mistake on secrecy.
p.103
Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
played a key role in test ban negotiations.
“VELA seemed to indicate that the detection capability was better than had been thought by American experts in the period from 1959 to 1961”, Seaborg wrote in his memoir detailing the negotiations.
“”
─
p.103
plate tectonics
104 Following Kennedy death: As John Dumbrell points out in his book, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2004), President Johnson approved the largest ever underground nuclear test ── Operation Boxcar, a 1.3-megaton explosion ── in the midst of negotiations over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. [p.391]
(The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
____________________________________
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
p.58
If the president was able to ban nuclear weapons tests, the Livermore laboratory would most likely cease to exist.
p.58
how to put an end to nuclear weapons tests once and for all.
The centerpiece was test detection.
ARPA would be in charge of overseeing this new technology, which included seismic and atmospheric sensing, designed to make sure no one cheated on the test ban. The program was called Vela. Its technology was highly classified and included three subprograms: Vela Hotel, Vela Uniform, and Vela Sierra.
p.59
Vela Hotel (Vela Hotel)
devleoped a high-altitude satellite system to detect nuclear explosion from space.
Vela Uniform (Vela Uniform)
developed ground sensors able to detect nuclear explosions underground, and produced a program to monitor and read “seismic noise” across the globe.
Vela Sierra (Vela Sierra)
monitored potential nuclear explosions in space.
p.72
Harold Brown
Here in Geneva, Brown acted as Lawrence's technical advisor. In order to stop testing, both superpowers had to agree to the creation of a network of 170 seismic detection facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America. This technology effort was being spearheaded by ARPA through its Vela Uniform program. Technology had advanced to the point where these detection facilities would soon be able to monitor and sense, which close to 100 percent certainty, any aboveground nuclear test over 1 kiloton and, with 90 percent certainty, any underground test over 5 kilotons. Both sides knew that in some situations it was difficult for detection facilities to tell the difference between an earthquake and an underground test. These were the kinds of verification details that the experts were working to hash out.
p.59
ground sensors able to detect nuclear explosions underground, and produced a program to monitor and read “seismic noise” across the globe. (Vela Uniform)
p.240
DARPA's early work, going back to 1958, had fostered at least six sensor technologies.
Seismic sensors, developed for the Vela program, sense and record how the earth transmits seismic waves.
In Vietnam, the seismic sensors could detect heavey truck and troop movement on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but not bicycles or feet.
For lighter loads, strain sensors were now being further developed to monitor stress on soil, notably that which results from a person on the move.
Magnetic sensors detect residual magnetism from objects carried or worn by a person; infrared sensors detect intrusion by beam interruption.
Electromagnetic sensors generate a radio frequency that also detects intrusion when interrupted. Acoustic sensors listen for noise. These were all programs that were now set to take off anew.
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
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