Engineer Memoirs
had all these people looking at things. A lot of talented guys that had been working on
testing didn't have a lot to occupy them, except planning for tests when the moratorium
was over.
They came up with this idea of peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. They came up with
a lot of different uses. Excavation was the most straightforward.
They started looking around for excavation projects where this would be suitable. One
of the projects that looked good, technically, was a sea-level canal somewhere in
Panama, or one of the neighboring countries.
They sought data from the Canal Company on the topography, geology, and a whole
lot of other things. When they started asking for all this information--and this was done
by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore [California] and the Sandia
Corporation in Albuquerque--Potter's people wanted to know what they wanted all
this information for.
So they told him. When Potter found out about this idea, he got to thinking. These guys
believed that you could do this for a third of the cost of conventional excavation. When
you started looking at the costs that they were then estimating, it looked as if the canal
would be an economic proposition.
They decided to have a joint study--a study that would involve the Panama Canal
Company, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
You have to remember that the Canal Company and the Corps were separate
organizations, that there were engineer officers assigned to the Canal Company, but
their chain of command was to the Secretary of the Army, and the Corps wasn't directly
involved in the command line.
One of the concepts they had at this early stage was to take a young engineer officer
and put him out at Livermore to learn about this. They latched onto me.
I wrote protesting that I didn't want to get into this anymore because I wanted to go
on and do the district work, and I really didn't want to go back to the nuclear work.
However, I was overruled. My West Point classmate, [Colonel Robert R.] Bobby
Wessels, was in personnel in the Office of the Chief of Engineers. He wrote me the
most magnificent sales letter I have ever seen. He finished up with the following
sentence, which I thought was a masterpiece. He wrote, "I want to be able to tell my
grandchildren that of Goethals, Gorgas, and Graves, I knew the last the best."
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