-The Sugar & Orange folks.

Thanks for this interesting story on Amchitka. I justed wanted to remind
you (but you probably know this already) that the test lead to the first
action of Greenpeace who were against the explosion because inter alia
it would disturb the sea otter.

Yours sincerely,

Arend J.Meerburg
former ambassador of The Netherlands

That said, I’m still in awe of the acceleration capability of the Sprint missile.

See
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/w71.htm/

If you look at the picture of the W71 warhead on the Wikipedia page, there’s a cylinder at the large end of the device that I think is probably an x-ray window and maybe collimator next to the secondary.

Long Shot Video from Nuclear Testing Archive

Time Magazine Article

Cheers!

I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but he mentioned he’d been involved in the CANNIKIN test. He’d been to the very bottom of the shaft and said it was 130 degrees Fahrenheit down there.

(This period was also when the AEC really began to lose its luster in the public eye along a number of fronts, and to increasingly find its paternalistic applications of expertise, and secrecy, under general attack. Brian Balogh’s Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (1991) is a great source on this general development and its consequences.)

The DOD of course was not interested in declassifying the information, even though it was clear that a lot of the information was already pretty well known by the general public, because one doesn’t want one’s enemies knowing the details of your defense systems.

Here is an excerpt from a January 1971 memo that I found interesting. (Original memo is part of document NV0076111 in the Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV.) Written by Edward B. Giller (Major General, USAF, and AEC Assistant General Manager for Military Application) and Charles L. Marshall (Director, AEC Division of Classification), it is trying to argue the pros and cons about releasing the information, and strategizing on how to get the DOD to come around to AEC’s point of view:

Under these circumstances [of strong domestic opposition], we feel that we should do everything we reasonably can to increase public understanding of the need for and probable environmental effects of CANNIKIN. Providing the public with an official statement on the predicted yield and purpose of this test could be a step in this direction, a step which we feel might tend to decrease opposition to the test. Another consideration is the extent to which the yield and purpose of CANNIKIN are already known to the public. …
As far as our announcement of an accurate predicted yield for CANNIKIN, again we must agree with the DOD that this might tend to remove the uncertainty in the minds of the USSR and Communist China as to the yield of the SPARTAN warhead. This information would be helpful to the Communist side in planning the employment of their strategic offensive forces.
Although yields have been published for many weapons program tests, it has not been the practice to announce the specific purpose of such tests in terms of which weapon system warhead was being tested. Thus, our declassification of both the yield and _ purpose _ of CANNIKIN might be considered as constituting a major AEC policy change. It should be pointed out, however, that in view of statements made by authoritative government sources, e.g., Senator Jackson and Dr. Wiesner, the purpose of the test at the Amchitka STS is for all practical purposes already unclassified.
Authoritative statements about the yield have been less clear but the multimegaton nature of the event has been publicly stated. …
We believe careful consideration should be given to their reasoning in this matter before further attempts are made by the AEC to convince the DOD that declassification of this information would be in the national interest. It is pertinent, however, to note that in view of the fact, as illustrated above, that the information involved here is essentially already in the public domain, there can be little or no effect now on the national defense, as a result of formal declassification.