Once the army dropped a 5 megaton bomb on an American state.

Summary and Key Details: The five-megaton Kannikin explosion, the United States’ largest underground nuclear test, took place on November 6, 1971, on Amchitka Island, Alaska. A warhead was being tested for the Spartan anti-ballistic missile system.

-President Nixon overruled political and environmental concerns and ordered the test; This resulted in local seismic activity but met its technical objectives without global impact. The success of the test influenced subsequent arms control debates and led to more divisive missile defense projects such as President Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.

-The lasting effects of this trial on the environment and politics led to the founding of Greenpeace.

Cannikin Test: The Largest Underground Nuclear Explosion in U.S. History

On November 6, 1971, the United States conducted the most powerful underground nuclear test to date. A massive five-megaton explosion occurred a mile below the isolated, smoldering island of Amchitka in Alaska.

A large warhead that the Pentagon intends to install on a controversial anti-ballistic missile system was tested by a Kannikin missile. Its innovative design was inspired by the highly controversial civilian nuclear explosive program.

The Aleutian island chain, which stretches from North America almost to the Russian coast and crosses the Bering Sea, has its southernmost point at Amchitka. The original Aleut inhabitants of the island disappeared in the 19th century. Airstrips and facilities quickly established there by the Pentagon to prevent a Japanese invasion of the Aleutians were abandoned after World War II.

And the most divisive president in US history demanded the test take place. And the tech in question inspired a later president to propose another controversial ABM system.

The Atomic Energy Commission looked at Amchita as a possible site for nuclear testing in the 1950s but concluded that it was unsuitable. Subsequent events rekindled the government’s curiosity about the isolated, uninhabited island. After a successful underground test in 1965, the Pentagon prepared to demolish the island with a massive explosion.

In the late 1960s, both the USSR and the US continued to make significant efforts to build defenses against the other nation’s vast ICBM arsenals. At the time, the only practical answer was to use huge, powerful radars to direct a squadron of nuclear-tipped anti-missile missiles.

The American system used two different missiles: the fast and high-altitude Sprint rocket and the extremely powerful Spartan space interceptor.

When approaching an enemy spacecraft, the Spartan would release its unique five-megaton warhead far into the atmosphere 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 of Megaton Bomb

His design goals stemmed from an admirable attempt to subdue the atom for benign purposes. Project Plowshare investigated the potential uses of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes.

The US government seriously considered ideas such as digging new canals in Central America, blowing up mountains in Southern California to make way for railroads, and blowing up deep-water ports in Alaska.

If radiation persisted, civil engineering projects could not be completed, so weapons designers created “clean” bombs with minimal side effects. However, popular hostility to nuclear explosions and their aftermath undermined Project Plowshare’s ambitious goals.

When nuclear fracking tests produced natural gas that was too radioactive to sell commercially, there was no need to mine ports and road cuttings with such brutality.

As the 1960s drew to a close, the public’s stance against war and in favor of the environment hardened. In response, Richard Nixon’s administration opposed and welcomed these changing views.

Nixon enacted additional environmental laws while opposing the antiwar movement and internal dissent. At Amchitka two tendencies collided.

Amchitka is one of the most technologically unstable places in the United States. Scientists feared that an underground nuclear explosion would be too much for the island. In late 1969, during the first test known as Milrow, a megaton explosive detonated at the base of a 4,000-foot hole that engineers had bored into Amchitka’s tundra.

The Department of Defense video states that Milrow’s mission was “to test the island, not the weapon.”

Anti-war and environmental activists in Vancouver organized a committee to protest nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands days after the Milrow shooting. They were concerned that the explosions could cause earthquakes, tsunamis and environmental degradation.

This conference had an effect the establishment of Greenpeace, whose first major action was to protest the Cannikin nuclear test.

Kicking the can

Cannikin’s preparations corresponded to his exceptionally technical period. For the first time, engineers used an alignment laser to drill a hole seven feet wide and 6,000 feet deep in the granite of Amchitka during the 1970 and 1971 lunar missions.

The enormous chamber at the base of the shaft was then filled with a full-size model of a Spartan missile with a five megaton payload. A 264-foot-long instrumentation package is attached to several truck trailers behind it.

The initial field-recording computer and other test equipment were located in a trailer, which was parked half a mile from the hole.

Meanwhile, Nixon faced opposition to the impending trial from other directions. An environmental impact assessment of the test was mandated by the recently formed Environmental Protection Agency. Experts have also expressed concern nuke test so near the Soviet Union might jeopardize arms control negotiations.

Nixon was concerned that conservatives in his own party would target him for his efforts to withdraw from Vietnam and reach an accord with the Chinese and Soviets. He threatened Governor Ronald Reagan to issue an executive order on the Canikin test if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the test’s opponents.

On the day before the test, the winds at Amchitka were 124 miles per hour. Early Greenpeace campaigners were forced to turn back from their protest voyages at sea. On November 6, 1971, hours before the four-to-three Supreme Court decision to allow the trial, the President himself ordered the Cannicin injection.

Kannikin produced a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Amchitka’s granite was eroded by fifteen-foot ground waves, while lakes, ponds, and dirt spread above. Instrument trailers shook the flooring and flew like children’s toys.

The sea level fell and the rock faces fell and the water boiled like foam. The shock wave killed about 1,000 sea otters and thousands more seabirds.

Aftershocks

Cannikin was a great political and technical success. The scientists found essentially little radiation and gained a great deal of data on the weapon’s performance. The intense seismic activity did not cause an ocean-wide tsunami and was only localized.

The success of the test would have strengthened Nixon’s position in negotiations with his enemies, both domestically and internationally. His visit to China the following year was well received, and his government worked to establish the country’s first strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union.

Both moves had significant domestic obstacles.

Opponents of the trial were also successful. Eventually, Greenpeace would oppose nuclear testing globally, and arms control advocates contributed to the rejection of the Spartan missile and its ABM system. Due to the controversy surrounding the Canikin test, Project Plowshare quietly ended in the mid-1970s.

The last problem arose from Canikin’s aftershock. Later, the effectiveness of the W-71 weapon encouraged weapons designers to consider another nuclear-powered X-ray anti-missile concept. They concluded that a small amount of nuclear bomb energy could propel Soviet missiles into orbit and convert the unique rods into X-ray lasers.

The idea of ​​a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser was tested underground at the Nevada Test Site from 1978 to 1983, with some success. President Ronald Reagan was so excited by the idea that he unveiled a massive new anti-ballistic missile program.

The former Hollywood actor’s concept was aptly given the Hollywood moniker Star Wars. A strange remnant of a huge explosion on a distant island in the distant past.

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