Burning the Sky: Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space

“Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth...The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” -Walter Sullivan, the New York Times, March 19, 1959

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-...