The Story of Project Cannikin: In 1971, the U.S. Military Nuked Alaska

[DemolitionMan]

by Steve Weintz


On Nov. 6, 1971, the United States conducted its most powerful underground nuclear test to date. The massive, five-megaton blast detonated more than a mile below remote, windswept Amchitka Island in Alaska.

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.

EXCERPTED BY MOD1 - full story at http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-story-project-cannikin-1971-the-us-miltiary-nuked-alaska-21564

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtH0EDLcbwA

[DemolitionMan]

It would have worked.To test the system fully, the Army took control of Kwajalein Island from the US Navy, and began building an entire Zeus site on the island. By 1962 the system was ready for testing, and after some initial problems, demonstrated its ability to intercept warheads launched from California. Eventually fourteen "all up" tests were carried out over the next two years, with ten of them bringing the missile within the lethal radius of its warhead, sometimes within a few hundred meters.Zeus A was designed to attack warheads through shock effects, like the Hercules, and was to be armed with a relatively small nuclear warhead. As the range and altitude requirements grew, along with a better understanding of weapons effects at high altitude, the Zeus B was intended to attack its targets through the action of neutron heating. This relied on the interceptor's warhead releasing a huge number of high energy neutrons (similar to the neutron bomb), some of which would hit the enemy warhead. These would cause fission to occur in some of the warhead's own nuclear fuel, rapidly heating the "primary", hopefully enough to cause it to melt. For this to work, the Zeus mounted the W50, a 400 kt enhanced radiation warhead, and had to maneuver within 1 km of the target warhead. Against shielded targets, the warhead would be effective to as little as 800 feet.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-story-project-cannikin-1971-the-us-miltiary-nuked-alaska-21564

[Mod8 added link]