Cold War Doomsday Machine Meets Own Doom

Once, when the world was a more dangerous place, Americans built a machine to imitate doomsday.

They called the device Aurora, after the dawn, but it was nothing so common. “Mind-boggling,” an Army expert reported, “is not even a mild exaggeration.”

It was the world’s largest X-ray machine: 7,000 tons, six stories tall, more than half a football field long. It contained 1.5 million gallons of mineral oil, and sat on rails in a concrete bunker a few miles from the Beltway.

It could take the energy contained in two car batteries, compress it and release it in 150 billionths of a second, thus exceeding (in those 150 nanoseconds) the electrical generating capacity of the United States by about 20 times.

In so doing, Aurora simulated the high-energy gamma rays created by a nuclear explosion, rays that could scramble the electronic controls of everything from toaster ovens to guided missiles.

Aurora gave the United States a way to test its shields against such rays. As much as any missile or bomber, it helped win the Cold War, for it was the kind of technological feat that the other side couldn’t duplicate.

When the Soviets needed to test-expose some weapons to gamma rays, they had to detonate an H-bomb at a cost of between $40 million and $75 million. Aurora cost $16 million to build, $15,000 a day to operate, and you could fire it twice an hour.

In this, and dozens of other cases, the Soviets couldn’t compete; they went broke trying.

In 1989, 10 months after Aurora’s operators were summoned to the Pentagon to receive an award, the Berlin Wall came down.

Now, as a result, Aurora is coming down. Joseph Murphey has come to watch.

*

Joseph Murphey was only 4 during the Cuban missile crisis, but he recalls duck-and-cover drills in school and Bert the Turtle, the civil defense mascot.

Now, at 36, he is sorting through the nation’s atomic attic, confronting the ghosts of his childhood, the Cold War.

Murphey is a historic architect with the Army Corps of Engineers. His job is to study the Cold War infrastructure that is being ripped up, turned over or simply abandoned. He calls it “material culture”--the places, spaces and other physical reminders of the great unconsummated struggle between East and West after World War II.

Under federal historic preservation law, the government must survey anything of “extraordinary significance” that it plans to change or destroy. So Murphey roams a bleak, hidden, sometimes spooky landscape, seeking mementos of the Armageddon that never came.

He has walked up the side of a 15-story concrete pyramid on the plains of North Dakota that housed radar for the Safeguard antimissile system. It took years to build, but was in use for only a few months in the early ‘70s before Safeguard was scrapped in an arms control agreement.

He has posed outside an underground school near Walker Air Force Base in New Mexico with the words “Elementary School and Fallout Shelter” in front and shower heads for decontamination near the door. The school teams were nicknamed “The Gophers.”

He has photographed a blast door at a missile complex near Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota where workers painted a Domino’s Pizza logo with the inscription:

“WORLDWIDE DELIVERY IN 30 MINUTES OR LESS . . . OR YOUR NEXT ONE IS FREE.”

Some landmarks already have been changed. “Mole holes,” the runway-side, earth-bermed barracks where Strategic Air Command bomber crews lived on 24-hour alert (sometimes under armed guard) are storehouses.

At McGuire AFB in New Jersey, the windowless, 10-story concrete box that once housed one of the first big military computers is an office building. The original tenant, which processed the flood of radar signals from the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, is long gone, leaving only this grim monolith as a reminder that the computer made the Cold War possible.

Federal law doesn’t say its agencies must preserve such things--they only have to make a record of what they change or destroy--and Cold War landmarks don’t have much of a constituency.

It’s a time that many would rather forget, and its crucial weapons are too big, too ugly or just too scary for display next to the Civil War cannon in Courthouse Square.

So for the benefit of posterity, Murphey snaps their picture and takes down their story. This mission has brought him to Aurora’s lair, Building 500 at the Army Research Laboratory compound in suburban Washington.

You can’t turn a “pulsed radiation facility” into a restaurant, or sell tickets to see it, Murphey says. There’s no way to beat Aurora into plowshares.

*

World War II was fought in less time than it took to build Aurora. Few creations have been so big, so sophisticated and so important, yet so obscure.

Such was the Cold War, a conflict with the starkest of strategies--mutually assured destruction--and the murkiest of tactics.

The rivals strove for “survivability”--the capacity to withstand a nuclear first strike and then to counterattack. The latter, each side believed, was the only credible deterrent to the former.

But since there had never been a nuclear war, no one really knew how weapons would react in what was delicately called “the nuclear environment.”

U.S. military planners got an unpleasant reminder of this in 1962, when an H-bomb test in the South Pacific unexpectedly knocked out phone service in Hawaii, 800 miles away. The Pentagon reached a horrifying conclusion: Radiation from a nuclear explosion could incapacitate the electronics of its arsenal, from tanks to radar to missiles.

Hence, Aurora, which would help determine how to properly shield electronics from such rays. But after construction began, a problem threatened to derail the whole project.

Aurora passed an electric charge from its sea of mineral oil into four vacuum tubes that focused rays on the test object. There had to be a buffer between the oil and the vacuum--one pure enough to accommodate 10,000 volts and strong enough to withstand the pressure of 5,500 tons of oil.

The theoretical solution was a series of plastic acrylic rings. They’d be large--9 feet across, 4 inches thick--yet had to be precise to a fraction of an inch. They could not afford a single bubble.

After several others failed, the Aurora team turned to a fabricator named Ed Walsh. He liked challenges, but his shop was small, and its most notable government contract had been the plastic potty for the monkey shot into space in the late ‘50s.

Walsh leased a warehouse in a Camden, N.J., shipyard, where he built the machine to build the rings. He worked day and night, and finally put a cot on the second floor. But fumes bothered him, so he parked a trailer outside and slept there.

The entire first batch (40 rings at $10,000 each) had to be thrown out when they shrank too much during the curing process. But finally Walsh got it right; all 160 rings were installed, and in 1972 Aurora performed its first real test, firing electrons at almost the speed of light toward some flight controls.

Every month after that, each acrylic ring was rubbed lovingly with pump oil. When Aurora fired its last shot 23 years later, many of its rings were the originals.

Aurora’s rays focused on a comparatively small test cell, a steel tomb with walls 12 feet thick and a 50-ton door. The only light note was the stuffed dog with a plaid Sherlock Holmes hat that someone stuck up on the ceiling.

The dog did OK, but any human who stood in Aurora’s line of fire would have received 100 times a lethal dosage of radiation, and died within the hour.

Everything from tiny circuits to a mobile howitzer passed through the test cell. By the early 1980s, Aurora was booked nine months in advance.

Much of the work was classified; sometimes Aurora’s operators didn’t even know what they were testing. Still, Armageddon seemed far away.

“Our concern was, ‘How many amps did we get today?’ ” George Huttlin, a physicist, says over lunch at a strip mall down the road. “We weren’t thinking about the Cold War. We were thinking about the machine.”

There was never the urgency of World War II--Aurora “never messed up a Fourth of July weekend,” Huttlin grins--nor the secrecy. Aurora’s name was in the Congressional Record, its picture in Physics Today. Although specifics were classified, “the Soviets knew it was there,” says Jack Agee, former Aurora director. “We made sure they knew.”

Years later, with the Cold War winding down, two top Soviet engineers visited Aurora. They told Agee that they’d tried to create something like Aurora. What foiled them was the rings, they said; they couldn’t get the rings right.

The Aurora team saw the Berlin Wall come down on television, knew their war was over. But still they were shocked and saddened when word came that Aurora’s days were numbered.

Huttlin had joined Aurora in 1975, his first job out of grad school. “We liked our machine,” he explains. “We wanted to keep working it forever.”

The government planned to build a bigger simulator, and attempts to find Aurora another task came to naught; it was a Cold War creature, and typified the esoteric ends to which American brains and brawn were diverted.

Its final shot, No. 9,113, came at 10:51 a.m. Sept. 27. The last log entry read: ‘Aurora, you served your country well.” In 23 years, it had been on for a little more than a thousandth of a second.

*

Today, Building 500 has a half-abandoned feel to it. Security has been relaxed. There’s no guard or receptionist at the front door, and sometimes the phone rings awhile before someone answers.

Joseph Murphey and George Huttlin stand in the test cell, looking out the door at the great blue and yellow dinosaur on the floor below.

Soon, Aurora will be scrap. Its four armlike diodes, which focused the X-rays on the target, are already gone. Workers in yellow hard hats, the same men who maintained the machine, who rubbed oil on the rings, are smashing something with sledgehammers.

Translucent chips skitter across the concrete floor.

“I’m going down to get some samples,” says Murphey, heading toward the stairs.

“What’re they hitting?” a squinting visitor asks over the racket.

Huttlin looks back as if the answer were obvious. “The rings,” he says. “Those are the rings.”