My Father worked on Amchitka Island - Nuclear Site
The dull black cylinder on a mock Spartan anti-ballistic missile waited buried an incredible 6,000 feet beneath tiny Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. The signal was given and in one-tenth of a millionth of a second, Cannikin, code name for the most powerful underground nuclear test ever held by the U.S., exploded with the force of 5 million tons of TNT. TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager reported from the command bunker on Amchitka that half a second after detonation the earth heaved upward, hiding the test site in a curtain of dust and water, and aftershocks rumbled to the bunker 23 miles away. Seismographs registered a shock of the magnitude of seven on the Richter scale. But neither the earthquakes nor tidal waves that opponents of the test had feared in fact happened.
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Amchitka Island was the site for three underground nuclear tests. The first test, Long Shot (1965), was designed to determine whether the blast's shock waves could be distinguished from earthquakes. Milrow, the second (1969), and Cannikin (1971) were part of the U.S. anti-ballistic missile development program. Cannikin had a yield "under 5 megatons", the largest underground test ever conducted by the United States. Amchitka is no longer used for nuclear testing.
