Engineer Memoirs
That came about because the detection of underground testing was a very important
issue. As soon as we had concluded the limited test ban treaty, people who were
concerned with arms control wanted to pursue elimination of underground testing. A
big issue on verification became whether it was possible to conduct underground
explosions in a clandestine manner so that the other side couldn't detect them.
They came up with the idea, which was proved correct, that, if the explosion was
detonated in a cavity underground, there was a decoupling effect, as compared to
packing it simply in a small hole.
They did a whole series of chemical tests in the salt domes in Mississippi. They even did
a nuclear test down there where they built a large cavity in salt. They did this with
solution mining. They used water to wash out this cavity. Then they suspended
explosives in the middle of these cavities, set them off, and measured the seismic
effects.
As a result of these tests, they learned a great deal about how seismic shock from
nuclear explosions is transmitted in the ground. They concluded that if we dug this
canal on the SasardiMorti route, east of Panama, the ground shock at Panama City
was going to be ten times what we had estimated it would be when we first studied it
back in '59 and '60. If you look at the condition of Panama City, that meant that there
was going to be a tremendous amount of damage.
There was a whole string of things here that fit together. But I think the really important
thing was the politics. It just didn't fit in. Of course, we finally resolved the political
problem with a new treaty. Probably, as far as mankind is concerned, we are better off
to have done what we did than to try to have built a sea-level canal. I think a sea-level
canal in Panama would have been a failure financially.
Q:
When you left the cratering group to go to the War College in '64--
A:
This thing was still going on then. I've jumped ahead in the chronology here because
when I was at the War College, this was still going on. I wrote a paper at the War
College. My treatise was on the subject of the terms that might be appropriate if we
were to have a nuclear canal.
That paper addressed what would be the mechanics of having a canal, and if this was
the way that it was all going to work, what sort of a treaty structure or management
structure might you set up that would take advantage of and make allowance for the
situation? This was quite an idealistic paper because it talked about international
authorities and so forth and so on. I learned later, as we got further into this, that the
last thing Panama wanted was any kind of international authority.
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