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24 January 2002 |
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The five-year test program, based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Poker Flat Research Range, was to be part of the Army's efforts to improve its battlefield missile defenses, according to a still-secret environmental assessment obtained by Fairbanks author Dan O'Neill, a critic of the tests and of the use of Poker Flat for classified military research. The first two tests were to have been flown in daylight in April or May, according to the launch schedule. Neither Army nor Poker Flat officials would disclose what missiles were to be launched. But O'Neill discovered that the dimensions, fuel, design, range and portable launcher that are described and drawn in the environmental assessment fit the Russian-designed SS-1c, known in the West as the Scud B. "If you compare what the thing looks like and all the numbers, all the numbers match up," said David Wright, a physicist and missile expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "To be as careful as possible, it's either a Scud or someone's replica of a Scud." The Scud B is one of the most widely used of all the Soviet-era missiles. Among the countries outside the old Soviet bloc with that model are Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Army's Missile Defense Agency in Virginia, said the government would keep a launch of foreign-made missiles classified in part to avoid answering questions of how it obtained them. In its environmental assessment, the Army said it hoped to learn the radar signature of the rocket and its multiple warhead payload -- the kind that might carry chemical or biological weapons, Wright said -- to better design a tactical missile defense for U.S. and allied troops. American and Israeli forces fired Patriot missiles at incoming Iraqi Scuds during the Persian Gulf War with only mixed success. The Alaska test was not directly related to the national missile defense program, which is generally designed to protect North America from long-range strategic weapons. Poker Flat manager Gregory Walker said Wednesday he learned of the cancellation in a conference call with Army officials Tuesday morning. Walker had arranged the conference call to argue that the Army should publicly disclose at least some of its testing plans. A media announcement, written by a UAF official in October, had not yet been approved for release by the Army, and Walker was trying to pry it free in response to recent inquiries by O'Neill, the Daily News and neighbors at Poker Flat. Instead, he said he was shocked to learn that the entire program was canceled. It took all of 30 seconds to find that planning under way since last summer was for naught, but he stayed on the line another 10 minutes to ask why. "I was most concerned that it was something that we did or didn't do right," Walker said in a telephone interview. "They said, You weren't an issue.' " Lehner said the issue came down to the expense of executing the tests in Alaska, which "was quite high." "There were a number of logistical hurdles and technical challenges in terms of getting people up there," Lehner said. The project had its origins long before Sept. 11. A state Department of Natural Resources official in Fairbanks, Harry Bader, said Army officials told his agency that the helicopters originally planned for the experiment were diverted to Afghanistan. The Army was contemplating using tracked vehicles to haul radars, generators, personnel, clean-up gear and rocket debris between Coldfoot and the Chandalar Basin in the Brooks Range wilderness. The tests will now take place at a military reservation in the Lower 48, possibly White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Lehner said. The Army originally rejected White Sands because it was too small and because the Army lacked the permits and agreements with landowners in target zones outside the range, according to the environmental assessment. The Army asserted that the tests would fall within agreements with landowners and managers downrange in Alaska, but officials with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge said the military tests might have to undergo public hearings before the springtime launches. Officials with Doyon Ltd., the regional Native corporation, and Tanana Chiefs Conference, which represents Native villages in the Interior, couldn't be reached for comment. The Army promised to clean up after itself. All 25 to 50 simulated weapons in every payload, weighing between 33 and 55 pounds each, were to carry radio beacons to make them easier to retrieve. The rocket remains, and any fuel still inside, will also be hauled off unless buried too deep in the ground to remove, the environmental assessment said. Poker Flat, on Mile 30 of the Steese Highway north of Fairbanks, is mainly known as the launching pad for high altitude experiments on the aurora borealis and associated upper atmosphere phenomena. The facility, operated by UAF's Geophysical Institute, generally uses a variety of hand-me-down, multistage solid-fuel rockets provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, often from discarded military stockpiles. Its Davis Science Operations Center is a regular late-night center of academic collegiality among UAF faculty, visiting professors and grad students. Another building houses a 24-hour tracking station used by NASA and others to collect satellite data and control satellite orbits. Walker said he was directed by UAF officials to try to expand the scope of Poker Flat operations, in part to pay the overhead of the facility. When the Army approached him with its classified Arctic Debris Experiment, it seemed to fit that goal, though Walker thought "debris" was too inflammatory and got the name changed to "Arctic Dispersion Experiment." In August, the Geophysical Institute submitted a request for government funds for several scientific experiments it could run in conjunction with the Army tests. Walker said some were approved. O'Neill, author of "The Firecracker Boys," the story of government efforts in the 1950s to excavate a year-round harbor in Northwest Alaska with thermonuclear weapons, got wind of the proposal and began asking questions. Some involved safety. Poker Flat had never launched a guided, liquid-propelled rocket before, and the fuel for each test launch -- like the fuel for a Scud B -- was particularly hazardous. It consists of 268 gallons of benzene and kerosene, 485 gallons of oxidizer -- inhibited red-fuming nitric acid -- and nine gallons of initiator fuel that immediately bursts into flame when it contacts the oxidizer. An explosion on the launch pad, or shortly after launch, would send a deadly cloud of nitric acid vapor drifting in the area, according to Walker and the environmental assessment. While nitric acid is naturally neutralized in water, Walker noted, the mixture was deemed so dangerous that the Army said the rockets couldn't be launched at Poker Flat because they were too near the blockhouse and other buildings. Instead, they picked a gravel pit a mile away. At launch time, the Steese Highway would have to be blocked and residents in the area evacuated. In researching the propellant, O'Neill found the defense department itself blamed some cases of illnesses among gulf war veterans to chemical debris from exploding Iraqi Scuds. O'Neill said he was also concerned about an open unversity and how that might be compromised by classified research. In his regular column in the Fairbanks News-Miner, O'Neill wrote on Oct. 20, "A culture of secrecy may be intrinsic to military research, but it is anathema to a university." Walker, the range manager, said military-funded projects have helped pay for much of the equipment now being used for scientific research at Poker Flat. And classified research takes place at universities around the country, he noted. Reporter Richard Mauer can be reached at rmauer@adn.com. |
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Little doubt: UA planned
Scud launches |
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Government documents leave little doubt that the Pentagon and the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute intended to use Poker Flat Research Range to launch captured or otherwise-acquired Scud missiles into the Brooks Range. Citing restrictions imposed by the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), Poker Flat range manager Greg Walker wouldn't confirm or deny that Scuds were to fly from the university's auroral research facility in a pair of classified launches scheduled for April. But Walker does say that the launches won't occur after all. It's the first time in the range's 30-plus year history that the identity of a rocket has been kept secret. In another unusual move apparently intended to thwart journalistic inquiry into the project, the university restricted access to the normally-available proposal that sought $1.5 million federal dollars for the two classified launches. Nor was the public allowed to inspect the BMDO's draft environmental assessment. Through back channels, I obtained these documents, and they are illuminating. For example, Poker Flat and the Pentagon didn't hope to launch just two of these unnamed "liquid-fueled" rockets, as Poker Flat was saying, but up to 20 over five years. This will be news to the few folks who live along the Chatanika River near Poker Flat. At a Dec. 5 meeting for the locals, range manager Walker spoke of only two classified launches, and he couldn't say much about them--except that the people would have to evacuate their homes at launch time. He couldn't reveal the purpose of the experiment, other than to say that the payloads contained objects that would disperse on reentry and be retrieved by downrange personnel stationed near the impact zone. About the rockets themselves, he said only that they were single stage, liquid fueled. I attended that meeting and asked Walker if he could disclose the rockets' propellant. He said the fuel would be kerosene-based, and that the oxidizer would be inhibited red fuming nitric acid (IRFNA). Later, I asked Walker if the missiles might land either in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Range. He hastened to assure me that they would not, though they would cross the Yukon River. That put the range in the neighborhood of 150 miles, as there isn't much room between the two refuges. As it turns out, there just aren't many single-stage missiles in the world that burn kerosene and IRFNA with a range of 150 miles. The secret missiles were almost certainly Scuds--more particularly, Scud Bs. I called missile experts around the country and they agreed. But so what? Should we worry about firing Scuds into our landscape? Maybe. Popular among the client states of the former Soviet Union, the Russian-designed Scud is the most proliferated missile in the world. And, because of its use in the Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq War, it is probably the most famous ballistic missile in the world. It is also famously erratic. Pentagon documents note its "notoriously poor accuracy," its "crude guidance systems" and "unsophisticated gyroscopes." Iraqi versions fired during the Gulf War sometimes crashed near the launch site. Frequently, they broke up in flight, spewing brownish clouds of red fuming nitric acid. On the skin, this highly corrosive acid causes deep and painful burns. Breathed as a vapor, it can cause dizziness, anxiety, vomiting, burned lungs, choking, pulmonary edema and death. The Pentagon and the CIA ascribe some of the illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets, not to chemical warfare agents, but to IRFNA. Even barring accidents at launch or along the flight path, these 20 missiles were intended to crash into the Chandalar River Valley with an aggregate 820 gallons of unburned IRFNA on board. The military says it would have cleaned up its mess, but its environmental record in Alaska does not exactly inspire confidence. The Pentagon recently announced that the secret launches may be moved to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It seems sensible that this kind of testing occur on a dedicated military range. And it seems wrong that, while its faculty dozes, our university's auroral and atmospheric research facility is quietly being transformed into a proving ground for secret military projects. At any rate, it looks like Alaska has dodged a fusillade of rockets. But if I lived near White Sands, I'd be asking some questions. Like, will the Pentagon acknowledge these missiles are Scuds? What foreign country built them? How old are they? How well have they been maintained? And come launch time, I'd take a vacation. To Alaska. Dan O'Neill, author of "The Firecracker Boys," is an independent writer whose columns appear regularly on the Opinion page. |
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