The Legacy of America's Largest Nuclear Test

Amchitka Island sits at the midway point on the great arc of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, less than nine hundred miles across the Bering Sea from the coast of Kamchatka, Russia. Amchitka, a spongy landscape of maritime tundra, is one of the most southerly of the Aleutians. The island's temperate climate has made it one of the Arctic's most valuable bird sanctuaries, a critical staging ground for more than one hundred migratory species. The island is also home to walruses, sea otters, and sea lions. Off the coast of Amchitka is a thriving fishery of salmon, pollock, haddock and halibut.

All of these values were recognized early on. In 1913, Amchitka was designated as a national wildlife refuge by President William Howard Taft. But these ecological wonders were swept aside in the early 1960s when the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission went on the lookout for a new place to detonate H-bombs. The old testing grounds in the Nevada outback weren't remote enough to handle the kind of mega-devices the bomb-makers had in mind.

There were several factors behind the selection of Amchitka as a test site. One was most certainly its proximity to the Soviet Union. These explosions were meant to send a message. Indeed, the tests were designed to calibrate the performance of the Spartan anti-ballistic missile, built to take out the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Internal memos, which surfaced years after the explosions, worried that "the experiment involves questions relating to a possible violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty." While these concerns were kept from the American public, it certainly wouldn't have escaped the attention of Moscow. Nuclear strategists on both sides were hardly enamored with the test ban treaty and the tests may have been a kind of wink-and-nod signal to the Soviet bomb-makers of how the treaty could be sidestepped.

Publicly, however, the rationale offered by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department was that Amchitka was a remote and, therefore, safe testing ground. "The site was selected--and I underscore the point--because of the zero likelihood--virtually zero likelihood of any damage," claimed James Schlessinger, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

What Schlessinger and his cohorts overlooked was the remarkable culture of the Aleuts. Amchitka may have been remote from the continental United States, but for nearly 10,000 years it had been the home of the Aleut people, who left Amchitka in the 1880s after Russian fur traders had wiped out the sea otter population. However, the Aleuts continued to inhabit nearby islands and relied on the waters near Amchitka for their subsistence needs. Indeed, anthropologists believe that the islands around Amchitka may be the oldest continuously inhabited area in North America. The Aleuts raised forceful objections, pointing to the risk of radiation leaks, earthquakes, and tsunamis that might overwhelm their coastal villages. These concerns were never addressed by the federal government. In fact, the Aleuts were never consulted about the possible dangers of the tests.

Amchitka became the site of three underground nuclear explosions, the first ones supervised by the Pentagon and not the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1965, the Long Shot test exploded an 80-kiloton bomb. The Long Shot test was really a trial run for bigger things to come. But small as it was, there were immediate problems. Despite claims by the Pentagon that the test site would not leak radiation for hundreds of years, radioactive tritium and krypton-85 began to seep into freshwater lakes almost immediately. But the evidence of radioactivity, collected by Department of Defense scientists only three months after the test, was kept secret for five years. The bomb site continues to spill toxins into the environment. In 1993, EPA researchers detected high levels of tritium in groundwater samples taken near the test site.

The contamination from Long Shot didn't deter the Pentagon bomb-testers. In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission drilled a hole 4,000 feet deep into the rock of Amchitka and set off the Milrow nuclear test. The one-megaton blast was ten times more powerful than Long Shot. The Atomic Energy Commission called it a "calibration test" designed to see if Amchitka could withstand a much larger test craved by Pentagon scientists. The evidence should have convinced them of the dangerous folly of their desires. The blast triggered a string of small earthquakes and several massive landslides, knocked water from ponds, rivers, and lakes more than fifty feet into the air and, according to government accounts, "turned the surrounding sea to froth."

A year later, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon announced their plans for the Cannikin nuclear test. At five megatons, Cannikin was to be the biggest underground nuclear explosion ever conducted by the U.S. The blast would be 385 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The Cannikin test became a rallying point for Native Groups, anti-war and anti-nuke activists, and the nascent environmental movement. Indeed, it was opposition to Cannikin by Canadian and American greens, who tried to disrupt the test by taking boats near the island, that sparked the birth of Greenpeace. A lawsuit was filed in federal court, charging that the test violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the newly enacted National Environmental Policy Act. In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court refused to halt the test. What the Supreme Court didn't know, however, was that six federal agencies, including the departments of State and Interior and the fledgling EPA, had lodged serious objections to the Cannikin test, ranging from environmental and health concerns to legal and international problems. Nixon issued an executive order to keep the comments from being released. These documents were known as the Cannikin Papers and came to symbolize the continuing pattern of secrecy and cover-up that typified the nation's nuclear testing program. Even so, five hours after the ruling was handed down on November 1, 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon pulled the switch, detonating the Cannikin bomb.

In an effort to calm growing public opposition, James Schlessinger dismissed environmental protesters and the Aleuts as doomsayers and took his family with him to watch the test. "It's fun for the kids and my wife is delighted to get away from the house for a while," Schlessinger quipped.

What the Schlessingers saw that day in the Aleutians was little less than a shuddering of the earth. The Cannikin bomb, a 300-foot long device implanted in a mile deep hole under Cannikin Lake, exploded with the force of an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The shock of the blast scooped a one-mile wide and sixty-foot deep subsidence crater in the ground over the test site and triggered massive rockfalls.

The immediate ecological damage from the blast was staggering. Nearly 1,000 sea otters, a species once hunted to near extinction, were killed, their skulls crushed by the shockwaves of the explosion. Other marine mammals died when their eyes were blown out of their sockets or when their lungs were ruptured. Thousand of birds also perished, their spines snapped and their legs pushed through their bodies. Neither the Pentagon nor the Fish and Wildlife Service ever studied the long-term ecological consequences of the Amchitka explosions.

Most worrisome was that a large volume of water from White Creek vanished after the blast. The disappearance of White Alice Creek was more than a sign of Cannikin's horrific power. It was also an indication that the project had gone terribly wrong from the beginning. The blast had ruptured the crust of the earth, sucking the creek into a brand new aquifer, a radioactive one.

In the months following the explosion, blood and urine samples were taken from Aleuts living in the village of Adak on a nearby island. The samples were shown to have abnormally high levels of tritium and cesium-137, both known carcinogens. Despite these alarming findings, the feds never went back to Adak to conduct follow-up medical studies.

But the Aleuts weren't the only ones exposed to Cannikin's radioactive wrath. More than 1,500 workers who helped build the test sites, operate the bomb tests, and clean up afterwards were also put at risk. The Atomic Energy Commission never conducted medical studies on any of these laborers. When the Alaska District Council of Laborers of the AFL-CIO began looking into the matter in the early 1990s, the Department of Energy claimed that none of the workers had been exposed. But they were forced to admit that exposure records and dosimeter badges had been lost.

In June of 1996, two Greenpeace researchers, Pam Miller and Norm Buske, returned to Amchitka. Buske, a physicist, collected water and plant samples from various sites on the island. Despite claims by the Department of Energy that the radiation would be contained for hundreds of years, the samples taken by Buske revealed the presence of plutonium and americium-241 in freshwater plants at the edge of the Bering Sea. In other words, Cannikin continues to leak. Both of these radioactive elements are extremely toxic and have half-lives of hundreds of years.

In part because of the report issued by Miller and Buske, a new sense of urgency was lent to the claims of laborers who said they had become sick after working at the Amchitka nuclear site. In 1998, the union commissioned a study by Rosalie Bertell, a former consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Bertell found that hundreds of Amchitka workers are suffering from serious medical problems, including cancers associated with radiation exposure. The research is complicated by the fact that many of the records from the Amchitka blast remain classified.

Bev Aleck's husband Nick helped drill the mile-deep pit for the Cannikin test. Four years later he died of leukemia. Aleck has waged a multi-year battle with the DOE to open the records and to begin a health monitoring program for the Amchitka workers. In April of this year, the Clinton administration finally agreed to begin the first health survey of the Amchitka workers. The study was supposed to begin this summer, but so far it is languishing without funding.

Will the victims of the Amchitka blast ever get justice? Don't count on it. For starters, the Amchitka workers are specifically excluded by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act from receiving medical assistance or financial compensation. Dr. Paul Seligman, deputy assistant secretary of the DOE's Office of Health Studies, writes it off as the price of the Cold War. "These were hazardous operations," Seligman said. "The hazards were well understood, but the priorities at the time were weapons production and the defense of the nation."