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.