Atomic Testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons Treaty Verification in the Cold War Era by David Allen Burke (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Atomic Testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons Treaty Verification in the Cold War Era by David Allen Burke
This work, based on the author's doctoral dissertation, explores and explains a little-known pair of nuclear detonation tests—the only two conducted in the United States east of the Mississippi River—in Project Dribble. In October and December 1964, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) exploded two nuclear devices deep in a salt dome under the surface of rural Mississippi. The tests were conducted to determine whether nuclear weapons testing in an underground cavity could successfully evade detection by seismograph through "decoupling" the explosive force from the surrounding earth.
Prior to the signing of treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union limiting or banning underground tests, the AEC and the State Department wanted to know whether it would be possible to verify that the Soviet Union (or other nations, either signatories to the treaties or new nuclear weapon-equipped states) could successfully test weapons without being detected. Follow-up tests in the underground cavity created by the first test, named "Salmon," included "Sterling," a very small nuclear detonation. Later tests conducted up through 1970 with high explosives or explosive methane-oxygen gas mixtures in the cavity created by Salmon continued to evaluate the seismic effect of decoupled detonations.
In effect, the tests demonstrated that decoupling could not be employed reliably to evade seismological detection of nuclear weapons testing. With that information in hand, and with the results of other tests in Alaska and Nevada, the United States entered into the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1976 with the Soviet Union, which limited underground testing to 150-kiloton weapons. Detonations above that size, even in a previously blasted-out chamber, could readily be detected by seismic methods. In later years, weapons tests by Pakistan and North Korea, of smaller devices, have been detected.
Atomic Testing in Mississippi adds to the body of work on nuclear testing by focusing on the Project Dribble pair of underground nuclear detonations and the follow-on work with nonnuclear explosions, and it spells out the context just described here very clearly. The book provides good coverage of issues surrounding the tests, such as local politics, concerns over outsiders coming to the state, the handling of damage claims, and the possible cancer-rate links to the tests. Further, the book offers clear explanations of the geology of salt domes in the southeastern United States, the local history of the Tatum salt dome where the tests were conducted, and a condensed history of nuclear weapons testing and negotiations with the Soviet Union to end such testing. The technical details of the tests and their seismic effect are lucidly presented. [End Page 691]
The author worked through the redacted (or, as he says, "sanitized") official documentation at the Nuclear Testing Archive maintained at the Department of Energy's Albuquerque office. The details that have been obscured or hidden because of classification are probably not essential to the narrative the author develops. He also used a wide range of other primary sources, including local newspapers and manuscript collections in Mississippi, as well as selected secondary sources.
The book is marred by a few flaws, including an error of date in the first sentence of the introduction. (The date was correctly stated in the first sentence of the first chapter and elsewhere in the book.) Burke does not explore in any depth questions of technological innovation nor the relationship of testing to technology. However, he does situate the study in a number of larger contexts that have been developed by other authors, such as the place of atomic testing in the American psyche and culture, the hazards to public health and the environment created by such testing, local politics in Mississippi, and the broader issues of the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union over both testing and total nuclear arms.
