Weapons of Mississippi

12. NUCLEAR TESTING: WEAPONS OF THE ATOMIC AGE IN MISSISSIPPI

203 NUCLEAR TESTING WEAPONS OF THE ATOMIC AGE IN MISSISSIPPI When most people think of nuclear testing, they think of places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, or the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In spite of these larger and better-known sites, Mississippi has a history involving nuclear weapons. Two nuclear tests were actually conducted in Mississippi, and a massive nuclear earthmoving project was planned but rejected. The explosion of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 brought unprecedented destruction and suggested that warfare might someday reach the potential of annihilating the human race. The American monopoly on the bomb was broken on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded is first atomic device. In response, in January 1950, President Harry Truman formally authorized the building of the thermonuclear , or hydrogen, bomb. By the time Truman left office in 1953, the United States had nearly one thousand atomic weapons in its arsenal, and nuclear weapons were well on their way to becoming the centerpiece of America’s military and foreign policies.Truman’s successor,Dwight Eisenhower , championed placing even greater emphasis on nuclear weapons, and in January 1954, his secretary of state John Foster Dulles called for a 12 NUCLEAR TESTING 204 willingness to use“massive retaliation”in the form of a tremendous nuclear strike in response to Soviet aggression. The Soviets were moving in the same direction. In January 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened that if attacked, the Soviets would“wipe the country or countries attacking us off the face of the earth.” In October 1962, the United States and the Soviets went to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but even that brush with disaster did not curb the arms race. In fact, by 1967, the United States and the Soviet Union had reached a state of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, in which both countries could absorb a nuclear first strike and retaliate, unleashing a cycle that would leave both unacceptably damaged.1 As the world came to grips with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the potential devastation they might cause, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that prohibited testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere or underwater. Underground testing was not covered by the treaty, because the parties could not agree on procedures to verify such tests were not being conducted. The United States then set out to study underground detonations to learn more about how they could be detected. The result was Project Dribble, a program designed to investigate the possibility of hiding underground testing as a means of avoiding any future treaty provisions. Project Dribble included two underground detonations near Hattiesburg, the only nuclear explosions on United States soil east of the Rocky Mountain states.2 Also in the 1960s, there was an effort to find peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Project Plowshare, an Atomic Energy Commission effort “to find practical industrial and scientific uses for nuclear explosives,” began in 1958, but by the late 1960s it had come under attack by a variety of scientific, political, and other pressures. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the beleaguered program, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers to support nuclear excavation of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway through northwest Mississippi .The plan called for using over eighty nuclear bombs of 10- to 50-kiloton yields each to blast a 250-mile-long canal to connect the Tennessee NUCLEAR TESTING 205 and Tombigbee rivers. The planned canal would run within fifty miles of 340,000 people. Ultimately, health and environmental concerns defeated the project, but it still makes an interesting footnote to the story of nuclear weapons in Mississippi. The presence of nuclear weapons in Mississippi brings full circle the story of weapons in the state. From the earliest arms race that led to the invention of the atlatl to tests to investigate nuclear cheating in the midst of the Cold War, Mississippi has been a part of mankind’s quest for more and better weapons. A nuclear detonation would have been unimaginable to a prehistoric Mississippian armed with a spear, but the themes of control , technology, and centralization transcend all eras of Mississippi’s history as told by the history of its weapons. PROJECT DRIBBLE Most underground nuclear tests could...