Posted by kieran_mulvaney on 08/25/2007 11:55 pm

When official announcement was made of the first planned nuclear test on Amchitka Island, the response of then-Alaska Governor William J. Egan was to declare that, “I am pleased that we have been selected as the hosts, so to speak, for this test, and I’m sure I speak for my fellow Alaskans.” He stated that 140 previous tests in Nevada had “proven that there is no danger from radioactivity being released in the test area.”

In fact, 56 of those 140 Nevada tests had leaked radioactivity. And so did that first Amchitka test, dubbed Long Shot, which was detonated on October 29, 1965.

The explosion, which had a force equivalent to 80,000 tons of TNT, was detonated 2,300 feet below ground. Even so, cracks appeared in the earth, there were rockfalls along the Bering Sea coast as far as 10,000 feet northeast of ground zero, water levels dropped in nearby lakes, lichens were literally drowned by subsequent flooding, and mud geysers burst into the air.

Long Shot was just the beginning of the nuclear age in the Aleutians, and but the latest violation of the island of Amchitka.

It is not known for certain how many thousands of years Native peoples had inhabited Amchitka before the arrival of the first Russian fur traders in 1761, but a little more than a century later, they were gone: some forcibly displaced by the Russians to work at nearby Adak, some killed by previously unknown diseases, others the victims of a society fragmented, disrupted, and ultimately destroyed by Russian and American colonizers.

In 1913, President William H. Taft signed an executive order setting aside the Aleutian chain, including Amchitka, as a wildlife reservation; but the declaration left open plenty of loopholes for economic and military activity, and was of little consequence when confronted with the specter of war.

After Japanese forces bombed Dutch Harbor, and invaded the far western Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska, in 1942, the United States military moved into Amchitka in force, building a dock and a landing strip, and housing up to 16,000 military personnel. With the cessation of hostilities, Amchitka briefly was allowed to return to its status as a wildlife reservation—albeit one that was now littered with ordnance, and that had been battered and bruised by the boots of thousands of soldiers and sailors.

But then came Long Shot, and four years after Long Shot came Milrow. The plan had originally been to dub the test “Ganja,” until somebody in Washington, DC discovered the word’s more common usage, prompting the name to be changed amid fears that the press would start referring to it as a “pot shot.”

By the time the one-megaton Milrow was detonated, the political climate, stirred by the Vietnam War, had shifted. For the first time since the War of 1812, the Douglas Border crossing between British Columbia and Washington State was closed down, blocked by 2,000 protestors.

Milrow, however, was but a rehearsal, a warm-up act for the main event. Milrow’s principal purpose had been to test whether Amchitka could withstand an even larger blast, and that blast, codenamed Cannikin, was detonated on November 6, 1971. At five megatons, it was 250 times the yield of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and it endured a series of protests, from the legal—the test proceeded only after withstanding a Supreme Court challenge—and the dramatic, most notably attempts by two vessels from a nascent group called Greenpeace to reach the test site and protest or even prevent the explosion.

Cannikin was the largest underground nuclear test ever conducted by the United States—so large that of it comprised 14 percent of the total yield of all 730 underground nuclear tests in US history.

The blast registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale and caused a subsidence crater over a mile wide and 60 feet deep, which filled with water and became the largest lake on the island. Rockfalls, containing over 46,000 square yards of material, smothered intertidal marine life. Nearly three hundred deceased rock greenling fish were found offshore, and subsequent catches of rock sole declined substantially. The remains of over 10,000 three-spined sticklebacks and 700 Dolly Varden were found in the island’s lakes, streams, and ponds. Perhaps 1,000 sea otters were killed, their skulls fractured by the force of the blast driving their eyeballs through the bones behind their sockets. Harlequin ducks were found with their backs broken and their legs driven into their bodies by the force of the explosion.

A 1996 Greenpeace survey revealed continuing traces of plutonium-239. plutonium-240, and a plutonium by-product, americium-241, in moss and algae species, as well as americium-241 in the waters of White Alice Creek, a fast-flowing stream that exits into the Bering Sea.

After Canikin, Amchitka was not used a test site again. Today, it is uninhabited, stripped of most of the infrastructure set up to support the WWII military presence and the testing program, and rarely visited.

“It was a very interesting five years,” said an official with the Atomic Energy Commission of the Amchitka nuclear test program, “but I don’t think I would want to go through it again.”

 

NOTE: Much of the above information was culled from “Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska,” by Dean W. Kohlhoff (University of Washington Press, 2002); and “Nuclear Flashback” by Pam Miller (Greenpeace, 1996).

 

 

Posted by stoweaway on 08/25/2007 4:50 pm

She has freckles, long eyelashes, a crooked smile and she's floating in the middle of the Bering Sea. There is no land in sight, no boats but ours. It is our job to rescue Overboard Annie.
How did she fall overboard? Actually, we threw her off, then circled the ship 'round to start our emergency drill. I was on the bridge talking to Captain Pete at the time, having forgotten all about the cryptic note on the blackboard this morning mentioning O.A. drill at 14:30. When I'd asked what it meant I was told it didn't involve me, as I'm only here for three weeks, unlike the rest of the crew who are mostly on for three month stints. So mid-afternoon there I was chatting blithely away to Pete when suddenly he responded to a message, moved to the control panel, pressed a red button and an alarm sounded.
People started running in.
First came Radio Operator Tom, looking surprisingly cute (Tom will not appreciate being called "cute", and as he's our resident computer genius will likely sabotage this blog later, even though "cute" is meant as a compliment --in bright yellow headphones pushed up on his forehead like some kind of cartoon bumblebee. Then Rao, 3rd Mate, with his million watt smile, which was not in evidence now. Tom and Rao rushed outside and began scanning the water.
I ran after them. "Where's Annie?" Tom shouted. The sea was uniformly blue-grey, peaked with small waves, and there was no sign of Annie's yellow head (a buoy, actually, which someone painted a face on) anywhere. Turning towards the stern we saw a few mates struggling to get a zodiac lowered from the stern. There seemed to be some problem...it wasn't moving.
Meanwhile about eight or ten other mates rushed onto the foredeck, ran to the bow and pointed out to sea, arms uniformly at shoulder height like dancers in a ballet. I felt strangely moved by them.
Rao and I followed the direction of their arms, but couldn't see Annie anywhere. "There," said Tom, his deep voice tinged with a Belgian accent, "Further out...further" until finally ahhh, WAY out there, about six-hundred feet, bobbing in the sea in an orange survivor suit stuffed with life-jackets.
I know the Bering sea is cold, but how much colder it looked suddenly. More mates rushed onto the foredeck, and we turned to the stern to see if the zodiac was down yet...no, still suspended aloft...what was taking so loooong? Finally it started down and after what seemed like ten minutes but was probably two hit the water, and Diek our poetic (you'll know why if you read his blog) Second Mate stuck his arm out too, pointing, and Marc (our Mechanic/Film buff) gunned the engine, and off they went.
How slowly they seemed to travel, like in a dream, or a nightmare. Now seagulls were pecking at Annie's head, and Diek reached for her, and she must have been awfully water-logged, because she looked so heavy and hard to hold as he hauled her in, and all of this seemed to be going in slow-motion.
Later we all assembled on the bridge, waiting in silence for the Captain to speak, and for once not a single person made a quip or joke. Captain Pete shared that if one of us fell off the boat "while looking at the moon and stars one night on deck, not that any of you would do such a thing" we'd basically be, well...He didn't need to finish. We all knew there'd be nothing but a bobbing head to see, not a bright orange and yellow shape buoyed up by life jackets.
Lying in bed that night I can't stop seeing my mates, all standing together, pointing out to sea. I keep seeing the zodiac, zooming towards Annie. I keep thinking of the Earth, and all the living beings on it, and I can't help being glad I'm here, with my mates, trying our best to keep Earth, and Annie, afloat.