Project Cannikin’s origins, purpose and politics pissed off a lot of people
By Steve Weintz in War is Boring
The
Cannikin shot tested a huge warhead the Pentagon planned to fit to a
controversial anti-ballistic missile system. Its novel design drew from an
equally controversial civilian nuclear explosive program.
And America’s most controversial
president demanded the test take place. And the tech in question inspired a
later president to propose another controversial ABM system.
You see? Controversial.
Amchitka is the southernmost link
of the Aleutian Island chain that swings across the Bering Sea from North
America almost to the Russian coast. The island lost its native Aleut
population in the 19th century. After World War II, the Pentagon abandoned the
airfield and base it hastily built there to repulse the Japanese invasion of
the Aleutians.
In the 1950s, the Atomic Energy
Commission investigated Amchitka as a potential nuclear test site but found it
wanting. Later developments renewed government interest in the remote
uninhabited island. After a successful 1965 underground test there, the
Pentagon prepared to hammer the island with a really big blast.
By the late 1960s, both the United
States and USSR pushed hard to develop defenses against each others’ huge
arsenals of ICBMs. At the time, the only workable solution was squadrons of
nuclear-tipped anti-missile missiles guided by gigantic high-powered radars.
The American system relied on two
different missiles—the very powerful Spartan space interceptor and the very
fast Sprint high-altitude rocket.
The Spartan would soar high into
space and detonate its special five-megaton warhead within range of incoming
Soviet ICBMs. The Sprint would rip into the high stratosphere at Mach 10 to
destroy any surviving warheads with its one-megaton blast.
The Spartan’s W-71
warhead was very “clean”—it produced little debris and killed
its target with a massive flood of X-rays. Essentially a multi-megaton “neutron
bomb”—though it gave off relatively few neutrons—the W-71 minimized fallout
effects that could blind American space-tracking radars during Armageddon.
Plowshare and
Greenpeace
Its design principles originated
in a noble effort to tame the atom for peaceful uses. Project
Plowshare looked into various ways nuclear explosions might serve
civilian purposes.
Concepts the U.S. government
seriously considered included blasting out a deep-water harbor in Alaska,
blowing up a mountain in southern California for a railroad cut and digging a
new canal across Central America.
Civil engineering projects
couldn’t proceed if radiation lingered, so weapons designers designed “clean”
bombs that produced little fallout. Nevertheless, Project Plowshare’s lofty
goals ran aground on public opposition to nuclear explosions and their effects.
Natural gas resulting from nuclear
fracking tests proved too radioactive to sell commercially, and nobody needed
to dig road cuts and harbors so fast and furiously.
Public attitudes opposing war and
supporting the environment hardened as the 1960s drew to a close. The
administration of Pres. Richard Nixon responded by both fighting and embracing
these shifting attitudes.
Even as he resisted the antiwar
movement and domestic dissent, Nixon signed new environmental legislation into
law. The two trends collided at Amchitka.
Amchitka is one of the most
tectonically unstable places in America. Scientists worried the island might
not handle the huge underground nuke shot. A preliminary test in late 1969
code-named Milrow exploded a one-megaton device at the bottom of a 4,000-foot
shaft engineers had drilled into Amchitka’s tundra.
Milrow’s purpose, a Department of
Defense documentary film claimed, was “to test an island, not a weapon.”
A few days after the Milrow shot,
anti-war and environmental activists formed a
committee in Vancouver to oppose the Aleutian nuclear tests. They
feared the explosions could trigger tsunamis, earthquakes and environmental
contamination.
This meeting led to the
establishment of Greenpeace, whose first major action was to protest the
Cannikin nuclear test.
Kicking the
can
Cannikin’s preparations matched
its superlative technical era. While astronauts walked on the moon during 1970
and 1971, engineers using an alignment laser for the first time bored a
seven-foot-wide, 6,000-foot deep hole into Amchitka’s rock.
They then lowered a full-size
mockup of a Spartan missile with its five-megaton warhead into the huge chamber
at the bottom of the shaft. Behind it came a 264-foot-long instrumentation
package hooked up to a fleet of truck trailers.
The trailers, parked half a mile
away from the hole, contained the test electronics including the first
field-recording computer.
Meanwhile Nixon faced opposition
to the forthcoming test from other quarters. The new Environmental Protection
Agency required an environmental impact assessment of the test’s effects.
Experts also voiced concerns that a major nuke test so near the Soviet Union
might jeopardize arms control negotiations.
A lawsuit opposing the test went
all the way to the Supreme Court.
Nixon worried that his efforts to get out of
Vietnam and come to terms with the Soviets and Chinese might leave him
vulnerable to attacks from conservatives within his own party. He told Gov.
Ronald Reagan that he would issue an executive order on the Cannikin test if
the Supreme Court sided with the test’s opponents.
Winds topped 124 miles per hour on
Amchitka the day before the test. The proto-Greenpeace activists had to abandon
their seaborne voyage of protest. On Nov. 6, 1971—just hours before a
four-to-three Supreme Court ruling approving the test, the president personally
ordered the Cannikin shot.
Cannikin generated a seismic shock
measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale. Ponds, lakes and dirt soared into the air
as 15-foot ground waves rippled through Amchitka’s rock. The instrumentation
trailers bounced around like kid’s toys on a shaken carpet.
Cliffsides fell into the sea and
the ocean boiled like foam. Thousands of seabirds and as many as 1,000 sea
otters died in the shock wave.
Aftershocks
Technologically and politically,
Cannikin succeeded brilliantly. Scientists recorded excellent data on the
weapon’s performance and detected almost no radioactivity. The dramatic seismic
effects were strictly local and no ocean-spanning tsunami formed.
The test’s success may have
bolstered Nixon’s negotiating stance with his foreign and domestic opponents.
The following year, his journey to China won great acclaim and his
administration negotiated its first strategic-arms limitation treaty with the
Soviets.
Neither move met with serious
domestic headwinds.
Opponents of the test succeeded,
as well. Greenpeace would eventually challenge nuclear testing around the
world, and arms-control activists helped defeat the deployment of the Spartan
missile and its ABM system. Project Plowshare died a quiet death in the
mid-1970s, perhaps hastened by the uproar over the Cannikin test.
One last controversy rose up from
the aftershocks of Cannikin. The success of the W-71 weapon design later
inspired weaponeers to consider another nuclear-powered X-ray anti-missile
idea. They concluded that the energy of a small nuclear bomb could turn special
rods into X-ray lasers and zap Soviet missiles in space.
Underground tests at the Nevada
Test Site between 1978 and 1983 investigated the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser concept, apparently with some success. The concept so excited Pres. Ronald
Reagan that he announced a massive new anti-ballistic-missile program.
Fittingly, the former Hollywood
actor’s idea got a Hollywood nickname— Star Wars. A curious aftershock of a big
bang a long time ago on an island far, far away.
The author is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and animator. He is a former
firefighter, archaeologist, and stuntman.
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