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Working to coordinate the plans of some 90 electronic, construction and research firms and Government specialists, he picked Denver as a convenient air stop to meet the company representatives periodically. As scientific director, he is in charge of all the experiments—and Dominic is essentially a scientific affair. He is also in charge of safety, which boils down mainly to fallout. To predict fallout patterns, he has 15 new weather stations, which cost $2,000,000 to assemble and stretch 4,600 miles east and west, 3,000 miles north and south. More mundanely, he frets about technicians who become homesick, scientists disabled by sunburn, engineers who gripe about chow.
To cater to his own personal quirks, Ogle carries a bulging attache case filled with odd items: a small compass ("I'm always getting turned around on these islands"), an altimeter ("to see if my Air Force plane is really getting off the ground"), some tin drinking cups ("for beer in the desert or coffee on a MATS plane"). With the attache case goes the ever-present padlocked briefcase enclosing the tools of his trade: a slide rule and sheafs of classified documents.
Worse than Alcatraz. The mass and machines—from construction bulldozers to fragile milliammeters—transformed 30-mile-long. 15-mile-wide Christmas Island. The island's two ramshackle towns, ludicrously named London and Paris by the British, were invaded by Stateside workers who groused about the heat, the lack of latrines, sun hats, soap and razor blades. This is the island that inspired acid poetry by a British R.A.F. man stationed there in 1958:
"The island abounds with monstrous ants/ Which affect our clothing, our shirts and our pants/ And since we came here we've done nothing but curse/ For even Alcatraz couldn't be worse." Amid the chaos and the complaints, JTF8 plunged ahead toward the April deadline set by the President in his nationwide television announcement in March—a notable speech in which he ticked off the Soviet test achievements and declared: "I must report to you in all candor that further Soviet series, in the absence of further Western progress, could well provide the Soviet Union with a nuclear attack and defense capability so powerful as to encourage aggressive designs." Noting the world's fallout fears, Kennedy said he found it "deeply regrettable that any radioactive material must be added to the atmosphere—that even one additional individual's health may be risked in the foreseeable future." He promised that the U.S. tests will add only 1% to the natural background radioactivity of the world's environment.