Cosmos 954: An Ugly Death

Space age "difficulty"? It could have been a nuclear disaster

No cause for panic, said the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. It had merely been "a space age difficulty ... There is no danger."

The little difficulty that Brzezinski so soothingly soft-pedaled was the fiery return to earth of Cosmos 954--a Soviet spy-in-the-sky satellite carrying a nuclear reactor to power its ocean-scanning radar and radio circuitry. The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward earth near New York City--at the height of the morning rush hour.

The event gave the public a rare glimpse, fascinating and fearsome, of the two superpowers tiptoeing through a two-step diplomatic dance. It also offered a shocking reminder of the masses of hazardous hardware now orbiting through our heavens.

Both Washington and Moscow seemed to feel that the danger of widespread contamination in a densely populated area was minimal and wanted to cooperate in calming any public concern. Yet intelligence officials in both nations knew that Cosmos 954 was a rare and sophisticated Soviet bird designed to track deep-running American nuclear submarines. Should the Soviets perfect their surveillance methods, they might be able to track all U.S. subs, including the Trident when it becomes operational in 1981. Thus the intense search that was immediately mounted by the U.S. and Canada for remnants of Cosmos 954 was almost as much a pursuit of intelligence fallout as of radiation.

The nuclear package on board Cosmos 954 was itself not a total mystery to U.S. intelligence. The U.S. has long used similar power sources in space. The Cosmos 954 reactor included 110 Ibs. of highly enriched uranium 235. This is a long-lived fuel whose "half-life"--the time it takes for half the material to lose its radioactivity--is an astonishing 713 million years.

The diplomatic maneuvering over the Soviets' sagging satellite began in mid-December. It centered, at first, in a green-painted chamber housed half a mile deep within the solid pink granite of Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). There, technicians at the Space Defense Center track the 4,600 pieces of machinery now floating in space --including no fewer than 939 satellites.

The blue-uniformed analysts had followed Cosmos 954 since its launching on Sept. 18, 1977. The 46-ft.-long vehicle, weighing more than five tons, was in a 150-mile-high orbit designed to cover the world's oceans from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Its parabolic radar antenna scanned the seas for ship movement, and its radio transmitters relayed the collected information to Soviet ground stations. But in mid-December, Cosmos 954 began to droop in its orbit, slipping closer to earth with each revolution. The Soviets sent the satellite a radio command that should have caused it to separate into three sections, with the nuclear core soaring into an orbit up to 800 miles high, where it could circle for centuries--and yet still remain a lethal hazard if it finally returned to earth. But Cosmos 954 ignored the command.

By early last month, NORAD's computer analysis placed the probable re-entry point at somewhere over North America. On Jan. 12, Brzezinski opened the diplomatic dialogue by summoning to the White House Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, a former aerodynamicist who knew exactly what was at stake. Brzezinski politely pointed to the possible "serious hazard to the public" if Cosmos 954 fell in a populated area and asked the Russians to share any information that would enable "appropriate measures to be taken to obviate such dangers." The U.S. particularly wanted to know more precisely the enrichment of the uranium on board. Dobrynin's answer next day was "somewhat reassuring" to Brzezinski, "but not fully satisfactory."

In another meeting with Dobrynin, on Jan. 17, and in two phone calls, Brzezinski kept pushing for more detail. Could the uranium on board reach critical mass and explode either on re-entry or on impact with the earth? It could not, Dobrynin insisted. Brzezinski signed a National Security Council directive alerting the CIA, NASA and the Defense and State departments to the probable re-entry of Cosmos 954. Special U.S. Air Force teams trained in radiation detection and decontamination techniques were alerted to fly to any impact site.

By last Monday afternoon, NORAD had a better fix on the decaying orbit, projecting the terminal track across the Australian deserts, then northeastward over the Pacific and into the beginning of reentry over the Queen Charlotte Islands, off British Columbia. Before dawn, Brzezinski was aroused with the news that Canada indeed was it.

One of the first to see Cosmos 954's actual re-entry was Marie Ruman, night janitor in an office building in Yellowknife (pop. 10,000), a gold-mining town on Great Slave Lake, some 1,000 miles north of the Montana border. She saw what "looked like a jet on fire. There were dozens of little pieces following the main body, all burning and each with its little tail of fire just like the big piece." At a Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in Hay River, 125 miles south of Yellowknife, Corporal Phil Pitts saw a "bright white and incandescent" glowing object and reported it as a meteorite. Told later that it was a uranium-bearing satellite, he declared: "My gosh, I was standing on the roof watching it go by. Maybe I'm sterile."

From the various sightings, the satellite appeared to have fallen some 115 miles east of Yellowknife. Numerous small lakes dot the rolling rock and pine country. Such celebrated tourists as Prince Charles and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau have fished for lake trout there in the summer.

Trudeau first got the word at his home on the Ottawa River when Jimmy Carter called at 7:15 a.m., E.S.T., just 22 minutes after the satellite came down. The Prime Minister had known about the possibility of a Canadian landing at least since the weekend.

As soon as the landing was confirmed, Operation Morning Light, as it was christened, was swiftly launched. The U.S. dispatched a high-flying U-2 and a large KC-135, both carrying radiation sensors, to check for high-altitude radiation in the Canadian wilderness. A 22-man Canadian nuclear-accident support team, equipped with radiation-proof suits and ready to collect any satellite debris on the ground, flew from Edmonton to Yellowknife. A 44-man team of U.S. military technicians arrived from Andrews Air Force Base and Nellis Air Force Base.

After two days of searching, a low-flying joint U.S.-Canadian "sniffer" plane detected what Canadian National Defense Minister Barnett Danson called "an extremely dangerous" level of radiation. A U.S. intelligence official told TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin: "Obviously, some part of the satellite survived the burnout to hit the ground."

But next day Admiral R.H. Falls, chief of the Canadian Defense Staff, confused matters by announcing that the high radiation reading had not been confirmed by other aircraft and might, in fact, have been the result of a malfunction in the measuring equipment. "It is unlikely there is anything on the ground," he said about the Soviet reactor. That was puzzling, since the chief of the crew manning the equipment on the original sniffer plane was a U.S. Air Force specialist who is a highly respected nuclear physicist and unlikely to be confused by false sensor readings. Were the Canadians and Americans trying to bluff the Russians into thinking that their spacecraft had totally disintegrated? No one on the outside could be sure. The search for localized radiation continued into the weekend.

Understandably, Soviet officials informed both Washington and Ottawa that they would be more than willing to join the search. U.S. officials properly let the Canadians deal with the offer--and Trudeau obviously was in no hurry to accept Russian help. Plainly, the U.S. and Canadians wanted some time to study any recovered fragments. Western scientists could learn a lot about Soviet space engineering, its radar capability, and just how close the Russian spy satellites had come to being able to distinguish the movement of U.S. submarines in the oceans' depths.

As the search for the remains of the Russian satellite continued, much of the public fear over widespread radiation dangers dissipated. The Soviet nuclear package actually packed a punch equivalent to about 100,000 tons of TNT--a puny power in comparison with modern nuclear weapons. Yet it is also five times the explosive force dropped on Hiroshima. While a full explosion of the uranium 235 seemed technically impossible, the worst-case scenario of radiation damage was frightening. If Cosmos 954 had somehow survived re-entry and released all of its radiation in a city like New York, the death and disabling effect could easily have devastated an acre or more.

U.S. space experts contend that their nuclear power packages provide heavy protection against such disaster because they are encased in armor designed to survive both re-entry and impact with the earth. They can sometimes be recovered intact. And despite the tremendous interest in the fall of Cosmos 954, there have been at least six previous nuclear space accidents without known harm.

One of the Soviet predecessors of 954 broke up on re-entering the atmosphere in 1973 and fell into the Pacific north of Japan. Two Russian moon-bound craft, which used radioactive fuels to heat their capsules, went into earth orbit in 1969, but dropped back into the atmosphere and burned out with some release of detected high-altitude radiation.

The U.S., which has been using SNAP (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) power packs since 1961, has had three accidents. A Navy navigation satellite failed to reach orbit in 1964 and disintegrated in the atmosphere over Madagascar. A meteorological satellite was aborted on launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1968, and the nuclear package was recovered intact. As Apollo 13 returned from an unsuccessful moon flight in 1970, the three astronauts had to jettison their unused moon lander, and its power pack plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Australia.

If the harm to man so far seems negligible, the very fact that such nuclear space accidents occur is chilling. For all the talk of "fail-safe" systems, as man hurls more and more lethal nuclear power plants into space, the probability increases of further, and much more harmful, "space age difficulties." -

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