Ernest Graves
A:
Yes. That's an amusing thing. I was scheduled to be the deputy district engineer in
Mobile.
Q:
In 1959.
A:
When I came home. Colonel [Robert W.] Love was the district engineer, and I was
going to be his deputy. I was really looking forward to that.
Q:
That would have been your first civil works assignment?
A:
That would have been my first civil works assignment.
And my little son Willy would tell everybody that we were going to "Oatmeal,
Alababa," which was the best he could do with Mobile, Alabama.
But about the time the orders were issued, there came on the scene this project to build
a sea-level canal through the isthmus using nuclear explosions. This changed my life.
I was drawn into this--I think, to a large extent--by Dodd Starbird, who, at the time,
was the director of Military Application at the Atomic Energy Commission, a job I later
had. Starbird had been at SHAPE when I was there, and had been the deputy secretary.
[General Robert J.] Bob Wood was the secretary; Starbird was his deputy.
The idea for this project came from several people, but the guy that pushed it ahead was
[Major General William E.] Joe Potter, who was the governor of the Canal Zone. He
was famous for being involved with some of the riots down there.
Potter felt that the solution to the problems with Panama was to get a sea-level canal
so that you wouldn't be involved in all the complexities of a lock canal. Also, the traffic
was growing. If you looked at the traffic projections, it looked as if the lock canal
would become a bottleneck in the future.
Q:
Was Potter the main proponent of this sea-level canal?
A:
At that point he was the one that was really pushing for it. The Panama Canal made a
large study in 1947 and had come up with all these different routes, all the way from the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico down to a whole series of routes that employed the
Atrato Basin in Colombia.
They had estimated all the costs of all these alternatives, and the costs were out of sight.
The following thing happened: in the test moratorium that started in 1958 and lasted
until 1961, the testing activities of the weapons laboratories were suspended. So you
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