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The commission was even torn by doubts over whether atomic-weapons development should continue at all. In April and May of 1948 it conducted a supersecret Operation Sandstone at Eniwetok in which 9,800 men of Joint Task Force 7 fired three explosions from atop 200-ft. towers — the biggest U.S. blasts up to that time (unofficial estimate: 120 kilotons). Ogle manned Sandstone instruments as part of the Los Alamos team.
The tests convinced AEC that it should set up a permanent nuclear-weapons division at Los Alamos, and Ogle became one of its seven-man experimental nucleus, known as J-7.
Ivy & Castle. When the test-detection system that Strauss had demanded disclosed that the Russians had set off their first A-bomb on Aug. 29, 1949, a new controversy split AEC and the nation's atomic scientists. Should the U.S. start a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb? Strauss pleaded for it, but Lilienthal and the other three commissioners argued that the U.S. had a sufficient atomic superiority. J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of a general advisory commit tee of scientists to AEC, maintained that the doubtful project would only divert personnel from the proven A-bomb program. To Strauss's side, however, came AEC Physicist Edward Teller, whose studies indicated that the H-bomb was scientifically feasible, Connecticut's Democratic Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and finally AEC Commissioner Gordon Dean. On Jan. 31, 1950, President Truman ordered the H-bomb to be built.
Many of the tests that followed are just vaguely familiar names now, but they loom large in the memories of the weary scientists, including Ogle, who sweated them out. There was Ranger at Frenchman Flat near Las Vegas, Greenhouse at Eniwetok, Buster-Jangle and Tumbler-Snapper. With Ivy in November 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was exploded, wiping out the tiny island of Elugelab, and digging a crater a mile long and 175 ft. deep in the ocean's floor, near Eniwetok. During Castle, near Bikini in the spring of 1954, miscalculations on power and meteorology caused radioactive ash to fall and injure 23 Japanese tuna fishermen—one fatally—on their trawler, Lucky Dragon, which was 14 miles outside the restricted zone. Ogle was a top technical official at Ivy and Castle, ironically considers Castle the test "which gave us more of practical value than any other." The U.S. H-bomb success came a mere nine months before the Russians fired their own hydrogen superbomb—proving again that the doubters had been wrong.
The Bitter Debate. The U.S. continued testing, at Nevada and in the Pacific, from Operation Teapot through Operation Hardtack in October of 1958. During that period, the scientists tested tactical atomic weapons, dropped an H-bomb from a B-52, fired a depth charge, triggered a missile warhead 100 miles high, tried fallout-free underground testing.