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When one thinks of a front in
the cold war, one might think of the Berlin Wall or Alaska
with the DEW line of early warning radars, not Wall Township. In fact, Wall
Township’s Camp
Evans was an active
atomic weapons surveillance
site and the home of a laboratory where America’s cold war defenses
were
improved with advanced electronics.
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The troops were not
home from WWII when the
cold war came to Wall. Science and
especially radar, the invention that saved democracy, was now called to
keep
democracy secure from the weapons advances of the Soviet
Union.
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The Soviet Union
and the allies made a grab for German rocket technology and German
scientists. America
had the
atomic bomb. The Soviet
Union was determined to develop its own atomic weapons and
the
rockets to deliver them. America
had to
be ready.
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America’s
first success was on January 9, 1946 in Wall Township
with Project Diana. Its
defense goal was
to advance radar technology to be capable of warning of Soviet rockets
heading
toward our county. Rockets traveled
above the ionosphere in space where the best radars could not track
them. Project
Diana showed radar could continue to
protect America
in the space age.
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In 1949 the Soviet Union, with the
help of a spy, developed atomic weapons technology.
They had long range bombers to deliver them.
The shortest air route to America
was over Alaska
and Canada. Camp
Evans engineers were
called upon to rework
mobile radar units to withstand the harsh 30 degree below zero
temperatures and
snows of Alaska. These units were deployed in Alaska until
the
permanent DEW line of radar installations was completed in 1957.
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America
needed to know how powerful the atomic weapons the Soviet
Union were testing. How
could surveillance be carried out from
across the globe in Wall? Camp Evans
engineers used acoustic and seismic sciences to develop detectors that
could
convert the vibrations in the earth’s crust created by an atomic blast
into
electric pulses. The special microphones
were placed in long pipes that were buried near Belmar Boulevard, in secret
locations in Turkey
and other friendly countries.
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The detectors were connected
to Wall from around the globe by teletype to report their data 24 hours
a
day. In a very simple concrete building
given the number 9400, the Top Secret 9677th Technical unit
did the
analysis of the mass of data. Reports
were prepared for the Pentagon each day.
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The work was routine except
two very eventful days. On October 20,
1953 Senator Joe McCarthy and his staff visited Camp Evans
as he was worried there were communists spies in the secret radar
laboratory. As a United States Senator
he had Top Secret clearance and he was allowed into building 9400. His demands to allow his attorney, Roy Cohn,
into the project were refused as he did not have clearance. The resulting arguments and threats
contributed to McCarthy’s eventual downfall.
On October 16, 1964 the vibrations of an atomic blast were
detected, but
not in the Soviet Union.
On that day, the 9677th staff in
Wall informed the Pentagon that China
had entered the arms race.
Today
the world knows the North Korean government has
atomic weapons. Somewhere, possibly in a
simple concrete building, the vibrations of the underground test was
detected. A more advanced implementation
of the technology pioneered at Camp
Evans once again alerted
America
of peril. |
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