Engineering the Commission

At the behest of the Johnson administration, Congress established the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission near the end of the 1964 session, eight months after the Flag Riots exposed the political unsustainability of the U.S.-run Panama Canal Zone. The law authorized the commander-in-chief to appoint “five men from private life” to conduct an investigation of enormous scope to determine where and how to build an isthmian sea-level canal. To oversee the collection and analysis of data pertaining to national defense, foreign relations, intercoastal and interoceanic shipping, and engineering feasibility, the law permitted the commission to draw on any federal agency and to spend up to $17.5 million.13 While the deadline was tight—June 30, 1968—the budget was not inconsiderable. By means of comparison, for example, Congress allocated $9 million for the 1965 fiscal year to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a federal bureau established in 1961 to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.14

Months later, Representative Dan Flood was still fuming over the law and Johnson’s surprise announcement about renegotiating the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty with Panama. The Democratic Pennsylvania congressman had been defending the sovereignty of the United States over the Canal Zone since the 1958 riots and had worked to ensure that the CSC members would not be the government officials desired by Johnson. However, the president’s delay in making the appointments, and press coverage that the cabinet officials Stephen Ailes and Thomas Mann had visited Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Panama in January 1965 to discuss canal options, led Flood to allege a cover-up.15 Convinced the commission would approve the Panama Canal Company’s 1947 recommendation to convert the present waterway to sea level, and that the nuclear routes were propagandistic distractions, Flood reminded his colleagues of why his hero Theodore Roosevelt had rejected the sea-level arguments back in 1906. He also eviscerated Johnson’s diplomatic overture on the grounds that “wresting control of the Panama Canal from the United States and its internationalization have been Red objectives since 1917.” Flood even praised the defiant students who sparked the deadly 1964 riots by raising the Stars and Stripes: “I would prefer to have children from our American high schools to formulate our canal policies rather than hidden appeasers and sappers in the executive departments.”16 Flood validated his status as the “all-time nut on the subject of the Panama Canal,” as one of Johnson’s aides later described him, by demanding that Ailes investigate the fiftieth-anniversary commemorative catalog published by the Canal Zone Library-Museum. Because it referenced only a few of his own speeches, Flood denounced it as pro-seaway “bibliographic sabotage.”17

Flood’s antics made for a persistent thorn in the CSC’s side. When, for example, Chairman Anderson declined Secretary of the Army Ailes’s offer to serve as a consultant, a colleague explained, “I assume this sensitivity about Pentagon influence stems from Dan Flood’s tirades about the whole thing being a rubber stamp operation to approve a foregone position that Ailes and Mann sold to the President.”18 When the commissioners objected to having their photos and detailed résumés included in their second annual report, the executive secretary responded, “May I offer the excuse that a number of people have criticized the Commission as not having competence for their jobs. I thought I had better put your background in there to show your competence—[to neutralize criticism from] Dan Flood, primarily.”19 Most significantly, later efforts to amend the authorizing legislation to provide additional funds and time had to be crafted with sympathetic members of the House committee overseeing the Panama Canal (Merchant Marine and Fisheries) so as not to attract Flood’s ire. At one pivotal point, Representative Leonor Sullivan confided that she would not be able to slip a requested change through by simply listing it on the committee calendar. “This time she fully expects it is going to be argued on the floor and Dan Flood is going to be in full bloom.”20

Flood’s diatribes, combined with the intensifying war in Vietnam, probably contributed to President Johnson’s seven-month delay in appointing the canal study commissioners.21 To keep the treaty negotiations and seaway feasibility studies interlinked, Johnson selected Robert B. Anderson, the special representative for U.S.-Panama relations, as CSC chair. The other members had a variety of distinguished backgrounds. Serving as vice chair was Robert G. Storey, a Nuremberg prosecutor who had since founded a legal foundation at Southern Methodist University. Milton S. Eisenhower, the president of Johns Hopkins University, had directed a commission on U.S.–Latin American relations during his brother Dwight’s administration; the resulting 1963 book predicted the escalation of anti-U.S. violence in Panama.22 Raymond A. Hill was a renowned water resources development expert and lead author of a 1938 compact that addressed long-standing water rights disputes over the Rio Grande.23 And finally, retired Brigadier General Kenneth E. Fields had commanded a famous World War II engineer combat group, assisted General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project, and served in the Atomic Energy Commission.24 Except for Eisenhower, the men possessed the kinds of expertise envisioned by Flood for his ideal committee of independent assessors, but the congressman still tried for months to have the “legislative monstrosity” establishing the commission repealed.25

Performing most of the commission’s day-to-day work, which included coordinating with the many subcommittee chairs employed by other federal agencies, communicating with members of Congress and the press, and drafting the annual reports, was Colonel John Sheffey. Having worked in Panama since 1961 as the military assistant for canal affairs to the secretary of the army, he was well versed in isthmian politics. Earlier in his career, he had also completed a three-year program in nuclear energy and weapons. Sheffey, then in his midforties, retired from the military to take on what he considered a prestigious assignment as the study commission’s executive director.26 Decades later he attributed his enthusiasm for the job to Plowshare’s two most outspoken spokesmen, the Livermore physicists Edward Teller and Gerald Johnson: “I changed my whole life because I believed them, and I believed that the greatest thing in the world for me [was] to be a part of that first great nuclear construction project.”27

The Anderson Commission held thirty meetings during its five-year existence (it received two congressional extensions, the final one until 1970). On occasion, high-level cabinet members attended, but the typical meeting featured presentations by representatives of one or more of the federal agencies responsible for the five study subgroups: foreign policy (State Department), national defense (Defense Department), shipping (Transportation Department), canal finance (Treasury Department), and most important for our purposes, engineering feasibility (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).

The postwar mandate of the Army Corps of Engineers emphasized flood control, navigation works, and other aspects of water resources development, but the agency retained strong links to the atomic energy establishment. The corps had played a key role in organizing the Manhattan Project, and in 1962 established the Nuclear Cratering Group at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Like the Livermore Plowshare physicists—and civil engineers more generally—corps personnel sought to reshape the landscape for utilitarian purposes. Due to their shared values, and the corps’s influence in Congress (a function of its pork barrel water projects), the Plowshare-Corps partnership was mutually beneficial.28 Accordingly, the CSC designated an Army Corps officer as its official engineering agent. The agent attended almost every meeting, and three men fulfilled the role over the commission’s life span (Harry G. Woodbury, Charles C. Noble, and Richard S. Groves).29 To provide additional updates on the engineering feasibility studies, other frequent guests were John S. Kelly (the director of the AEC’s Division of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives) and fellow AEC officials, who subcontracted the canal studies to both academic and private research organizations.

The canal study commissioners had much of their work cut out for them because the Livermore physicists and Nuclear Cratering Group engineers had been working on the sea-level canal project for years. As revealed at the most recent Plowshare symposium in 1964, they had focused on the two shortest, least-populated isthmian routes, both of which traversed the Darién: one, known as Route 17 or the Sasardi-Morti route, through Panama’s dense eastern forests bounded by the Sasardi and Morti Rivers, and the other, known as Route 25 or the Atrato-Truando site, through Colombia’s marshy Atrato River valley (map 1.2). Yet good maps, let alone subsurface geophysical data, remained elusive. More than 150 years after Humboldt had heralded the vast region’s potential for an interoceanic communication, even the exact height of the Continental Divide along Route 17 remained unknown. But the estimate of 1,100 feet above sea level posed an exhilarating challenge, as expressed by Nuclear Cratering Group leader Ernest Graves: “A cut this deep by any means would be an engineering achievement of the first magnitude. To do it in less than a minute with a single explosion staggers the imagination. Nevertheless, the scientists and engineers who have studied the problem have faith it can be done.”30 The construction of the Panama Canal, Graves reminded his audience, had been equally astonishing five decades earlier.

Because the atomic seaway would take ten to thirteen years to complete, Seaborg, Johnson, and Kelly testified before Congress in January 1965 that the field surveys and nuclear cratering tests should start as soon as possible.31 Yet the Anderson Commission did not begin meeting until the late spring, by which time it was already behind schedule. Due to the original three-year congressional limit and the short tropical dry season, which lasted from December/January to April, Corps of Engineers representatives had outlined an ambitious schedule of data collection and site surveys. Extensive supporting infrastructure—weather stations, field offices, camps, supply points, and roads—would have to be built to accommodate hundreds of workers responsible for collecting two kinds of data during the first two dry seasons of 1965–66 and 1966–67: (a) topographic surveys and geological, hydrological, and hydrographic studies to provide basic information about the drainage areas, sedimentation processes, coastlines, and seafloor along each of the routes in Panama and Colombia, and (b) more specific meteorological, air blast, seismic, and bioenvironmental data to assess the radiological safety of nuclear excavation. The final year of 1967–68 would be reserved for evaluating all the data to determine the most feasible, cost-effective channel designs, as well as the projected schedule of nuclear detonations and area evacuations.32 Meanwhile, if all went according to plan, Plowshare scientists and technicians would be conducting six experiments at the Nevada Test Site to see how various configurations of PNEs operated in nature rather than in theory.

Uncharted Territory

Not only was time not on their side but also, from the start, the commission members harbored deep concerns about the costs posed by the field studies. The infrastructural costs alone—constructing the camps and data collection stations, clearing center line trails across the isthmus, and providing communications and medical support along the two routes—would consume $2 million of the $17.5 million budget.33 Ideally, the equipment would be set up prior to the dry season of January 1, 1966, but Congress resisted releasing funds before the survey agreements with Panama and Colombia had been inked, making for yet more delays and logistical headaches.34

Another worrisome constraint over which the commission had no control was the test ban treaty restriction against depositing radioactive debris in adjacent nations. Despite the commissioners’ enthusiasm for PNEs, they knew there would be no point in conducting any sea-level canal studies if the administration had no intention of spending political capital to amend the protocol to allow peaceful nuclear experiments. Yet Plowshare’s unresolved relationship to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty did not discourage the AEC. At the second meeting as well as later ones, Kelly maintained that the Russian language text of the treaty provided for a more liberal interpretation of the ban on radiation outside national borders and that every test shot would release some radiation—which would not pose a serious health risk anyway.35

Other federal agencies, especially the State Department and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, viewed Plowshare as a threat to nuclear weapons nonproliferation initiatives. The third CSC meeting, in July 1965, featured a heated discussion among representatives of the AEC and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency about the potential of Plowshare experiments to cause an international incident by venting radiation across the border. The impasse seemed intractable; while President Johnson wanted the U.S.-Panama treaty negotiations to wrap up soon, the sea-level canal treaty hinged on the feasibility of nuclear engineering, which required experimental explosions at the Nevada Test Site.36

The scope of the engineering feasibility studies also occupied the agenda of the early meetings. From the start, the CSC and its AEC partners recognized the importance of researching isthmian food chains and ecosystems to determine how their human users would be affected by the radiation released by PNEs. Even as the AEC assured the public that radioactive fallout carried minimal health risks, the agency provided a major source of support for ecosystem ecologists during the Cold War.37

But might other kinds of bioenvironmental research also be needed to provide a yardstick against which to measure the changes caused by seaway construction? That query came from an unexpected source, Chairman Anderson’s deputy treaty negotiator. John N. Irwin II, a fellow Republican and Manhattan-based lawyer, attended the CSC meetings when his boss’s busy schedule kept him away.38 Irwin’s job was to brief the commission on the latest developments in the U.S.-Panama treaty talks, but he also bugged them about an interest that occupied his leisure time. As a trustee of the New York Zoological Society, Irwin mingled with elite conservationists, such as Laurance Rockefeller, as well as scientific employees of the Bronx Zoo.39 One of the zoologists asked him a question that he in turn posed to the commission in July 1965: Would the data collection efforts along the two Central American routes also seek to elucidate the non-radiation-oriented effects of a sea-level canal on marine life, and might the Smithsonian Institution take part in such a study?40

The zoologist had likely read the latest issue of Natural History magazine, which contained an article titled “Mixing Oceans and Species” by an up-and-coming marine biologist at the Smithsonian’s Panama research facility, which occupied an island in the drowned Chagres River valley, the reservoir of the canal. The essay addressed the “interesting biological problems” regarding the marine consequences of building a sea-level canal. Unlike the existing lock canal, which contained a large freshwater reservoir that prevented most marine species from transiting, a sea-level channel would join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the first time since the rise of the isthmian land bridge during the late Pliocene. Accordingly, the author, Ira Rubinoff, speculated on the evolutionary and ecological effects of intermixing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.41

Engineering Agent Harry Woodbury dismissed Irwin’s query, stating that many organizations sought to participate in the sea-level canal studies on aspects that fell “far beyond the scope which is of concern to the Commission.” He conceded that the corps had a history of working with the Smithsonian on archaeological issues raised by construction projects. But the Smithsonian’s proposed biological baseline survey surpassed the essential biological questions of seaway construction that did not involve radioactive hazards.42

When the two commissioners with engineering backgrounds likewise called for drawing a sharp distinction between desirable and essential data, Irwin provided a friendly word of warning: “I bring it up so that the Commission will know what will be in the minds of ecologists, zoologists, and others. You may or may not at one time consider whether or not you want to broaden this scope, not from the pure feasibility point of view, but from the point of view of being able to answer people on the effect.”43 Perhaps recalling what had happened with the Alaskan harbor proposal, Irwin again used his time at later meetings to caution that a narrow bioenvironmental study might generate criticism from scientific groups, even though “they may not be significant in the sense of popular reaction.”44

A Republican diplomat was thus the first nonscientist to give the Democratic appointed presidential commission a heads-up about the importance of paying more attention to broad-scale ecological assessment. Fifteen years later that would have seemed strange, but for the first seven decades of the twentieth century, moderate Republicans supported many facets of protoenvironmentalism, from wilderness preservation to utilitarian conservation to population planning, often in close concert with scientists.45

Knowing he was outgunned, Irwin conceded it would be sufficient for the commission to invite other agencies, such as the National Academy of Sciences, to contribute to a nonnuclear ecological assessment using their own funds. The group agreed, but otherwise did not understand Irwin’s concern. After all, the private research organization that had won the AEC’s bioenvironmental contract, the Battelle Memorial Institute, planned to collect terrestrial baseline data as well as information on oceanographic currents, temperature gradients, and marine life on either side of the isthmus. As Kelly explained, “I think our bioenvironmental program while it is principally addressed to preventing radioactivity getting to man, in tracing it from the time it is released by the explosive until the time it gets to man . . . will develop an awful lot of this ecological information you were talking about; and this information would be available for people to evaluate.” Besides, additional research could always be conducted later if the government decided to proceed with construction.46

When the discussion turned to another major concern of the Anderson Commission, the managing of public relations, Kelly invoked the infamous Project Chariot to draw a different lesson than that suggested by Irwin: “We don’t advocate a grandiose program of selling nuclear explosives, but I think we should be in the position of taking the initiative of explaining what we are doing.” When the Chariot project began, he explained, an agreement between the State Department and AEC had precluded the latter from taking a proactive stance, “and we got into trouble because that is all we could do, answer questions. People don’t want to detract from projects, but they never asked the questions the answers to which were meaningful.”47 By contrast, when the AEC orchestrated press coverage of the shots at the Nevada Test Site where they “were not limited to the requirement of just responding to inquiries” and could instead “take some actions to explain what [they] were doing,” public trust remained high.

Other members of the atomic energy establishment echoed Kelly’s attitude about the proper way to mold public opinion. As the former AEC commissioner and Nobel prizewinning physical chemist Willard Libby told a journalist in 1966, both of Alaska’s senators had supported Project Chariot and thus the plan should have proceeded. “But our overcautious preparations created a public-relations problem. If the test was so safe [people asked], why did the AEC spend $3 million to count all the birds and animals in the area? Our cautiousness gave the lie to our reassurances about fallout, and ruined the project. If we’d been that careful about using the open-hearth furnace, we wouldn’t be making steel today.”48 Libby’s interpretation overlooked the intense public opposition that had led the AEC to expand the scope of the Chariot feasibility studies (rather than the other way around), but it aligned with the AEC’s dismissiveness regarding public fears of radiation.49

The Thing That Makes the Inevitable Come to Pass

Unlike Plowshare’s assertive proponents, the Anderson Commission members stayed out of the spotlight, especially as they finalized plans to spend most of their $17.5 million on the two sea-level canal sites deemed most amenable to nuclear excavation, the Darién portions of Panama and Colombia.50 The other two routes Johnson had identified in his December 1964 announcement remained on the back burner. Despite Flood’s allegation that the commission would recommend converting the existing canal to sea level, as the Panama Canal Company had advised in 1947, the CSC invested little in that option. As for the Nicaragua–Costa Rica route, the group did fund the Inter-American Geodetic Survey to produce the first modern topographical maps of the area, but otherwise did not seriously consider it since, among other reasons, a seaway would drain Lake Nicaragua.51

The press release for the commission’s fact-finding trip to Panama in August 1965 proclaimed its impartiality: “Our Commission is only beginning its work. We begin without preconceptions.”52 But behind closed doors, the commissioners grappled with the preconceptions that permeated their mission. At their seventh meeting, in November 1965, they grilled National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy about the administration’s commitment to the atomic seaway. Commissioner Hill, who possessed the most experience in the contentious realm of water resources management, pressed Bundy about whether the sea-level canal decision would ultimately come down to economics or politics. Bundy hedged that a new waterway appeared to be on the horizon due to its technological and diplomatic superiority over the outdated existing channel, but stated that it was by no means a fait accompli. Yet when pushed further on the prospects of such an expensive megaproject, Bundy conceded, “I think you will find you are in a more realistic position if you assume that this is something that is going to happen.”53

Hill kept up his cross-examination, stating that prior reports had portrayed the seaway with an air of inevitability. “Let me say there is just a shade of that in the whole Plowshare exercise, too,” replied Bundy, “But the converse of that, Mr. Hill is that the thing that makes the inevitable come to pass is effort.” The chair ordered the ensuing discussion off the record, a sign of the topic’s immense sensitivity. Later, Bundy addressed one last question on the record, about how the commission should interpret the word feasibility as used in the authorizing legislation. “If we needed to dig a new canal and have to get it done by the end of 1968, we could do it,” he snapped. “Ergo, in the strict sense we already know that a sea-level canal is feasible.” That did not of course preclude a thorough assessment of costs “and all the other practical considerations that belong in a recommendation to the Government of the United States.” On his way out the door, Bundy reminded the commission of who was really in charge: “Obviously if we wanted it enough today, we could afford it, and we could drive it through.”54

Yet despite Bundy’s high-modernist mic drop, the ability of the world’s wealthiest nation to afford grand projects was eroding as the administration committed more and more resources to the war in Vietnam. As the president announced two months later, “The budget for 1967 bears the strong imprint of the troubled world we live in.”55 Several agencies faced major cuts; the AEC lost $103 million. Nonetheless, Seaborg insisted at the January 1966 CSC meeting that by consolidating the remaining nuclear excavation experiments, Plowshare personnel could answer the feasibility question by the June 30, 1968 deadline.56 Commissioner Hill took such optimism with a grain of salt: “I don’t think anybody here can deceive himself that you are going to know about nuclear excavation in time to complete a canal by 1980,” the earliest possible date of operation.57

Not only were budgets being cut left and right, political and meteorological impediments loomed large. The AEC had planned to conduct six shots starting with the Cabriolet experiment at the Nevada Test Site that spring. The timing of each test was essential to avoid potential releases of radioactive fallout during the grazing season. But Johnson postponed the Cabriolet shot during the critical 1966 window for fear of violating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and disrupting the current Soviet-U.S. nonproliferation discussions.58

Thousands of miles south of the Nevada desert, the Darién fieldwork also failed to start as planned. Gaining permission from the governments of Panama and Colombia proved more difficult than expected because legislators in both nations perceived the field studies as diversionary tactics. Panamanians sought to keep the diplomatic focus on abrogating the 1903 treaty, while Colombians objected to being used as leverage against Panama.59 Not until February 15, 1966, did the State Department secure a site survey agreement for the Route 17 studies in Panama, and the Route 25 negotiations with Colombia did not conclude until October 25, 1966. The late start cost a great deal of time and money, as did the unexpected allocation to Southeast Asia of military helicopters and other equipment needed by the Darién surveyors. Barely a year after its formation, the Anderson Commission was behind schedule and begging Congress for more funds.60

Except for the burning of a single U.S. flag, the second anniversary of the Flag Riots in January 1966 passed without incident in Panama.61 But Johnson had little to celebrate, as the treaty negotiations dragged on. Moreover, geopolitical, economic, and meteorological constraints were converging so as to subvert the technocratic “air of inevitability” and the assumption underlying the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission—that an engineering solution to the multifaceted problems posed by the lock canal could be achieved by mobilizing science and technology to reshape the political and hydrological geography of the isthmus. By the time the engineering feasibility field studies finally took place from 1966 through 1969, the commissioners found themselves having to adapt to obstacles that decelerated the institutional momentum underlying Plowshare.

Surveying the Space Age Jungle

Humboldt would have been stunned to learn how rudimentary the scientific knowledge of the Darién remained so many decades after he had called for it to be “levelled.” Although Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, in the middle of the canal’s drowned Chagres River valley, had become a premier site for tropical biological research, few researchers ventured east to the Darién. Its lack of infrastructure still made overland travel an ordeal, and thus the sporadic efforts of outsiders to drive the 310-mile-long gap in the Pan-American Highway between Chepo, Panama, and Quibdó, Colombia, generated widespread interest. As one explorer marveled, “even in today’s space age, man still has frontiers to cross in forgotten corners of his Earth.”62

In the 1960s, thick rainforests shrouded the Continental Divide’s mountain ranges and the lowlands of eastern Panama, and vast marshlands permeated the Atrato River valley of northwestern Colombia (the Darién biogeographic region encompasses both countries, but the political province of Darién is confined to Panama). Eastern Panama’s population of approximately fifty thousand consisted of Indigenous tribes, African descendants, and mestizo settlers. The Kuna, or Guna, famed for their independence and mola artwork, numbered twenty-one thousand and practiced subsistence fishing and slash-and-burn farming in the upper Chucunaque River valley and on the San Blas coast, near the Caribbean end of the proposed canal route. The fifteen hundred Indigenous Chocó (now known as the Emberá and Wounaan) occupied villages along rivers draining into the Gulf of Miguel, the Pacific terminus of Route 17.63

By the time the U.S. and Panama worked out the Route 17 site survey agreement in mid-February 1966, the dry season was well underway, and thus the corps’s Canal Zone–based Office of Interoceanic Canal Studies scrambled to build roads and base camps before the torrid humidity, fog, and rains returned. Colonel Alexander G. Sutton Jr. had taken charge of the office the previous summer, having spent four years directing the corps’s Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi.64 The facility’s large-scale models of the Mississippi and other rivers helped engineers predict the effects of flood-control structures and otherwise bridge the realms of hydraulic science and engineering.65 Yet despite their sophistication and utility, models constitute only abstract representations of nature. Taking the measure of the formidable Darién would entail very different kinds of considerations and actions than operating a control panel of knobs and switches.

The work did not begin well. The Johnson administration’s month-long delay in announcing the site survey agreement led to misunderstandings, as did a lack of transparency on the ground. The Panama American, a newspaper that primarily served U.S. residents of the Canal Zone, reported in mid-March that eyewitnesses had viewed a few dozen men setting up tidal and weather stations, as well as a coast-to-coast surveying track, across the eastern Darién. Yet when reached for comment, the U.S. embassy and other offices denied that the Route 17 work had begun. The author considered such secrecy pointless, given that land speculators had long since obtained what they could along the well-publicized routes. Two days later, another embarrassing article reported that Guna and Chocó delegates had traveled to Panama City to protest the unloading of heavy equipment on the north and south coasts without their consent (fig. 4.1).66

Behind the scenes, the Office of Interoceanic Canal Studies technical liaison staff blamed the negative coverage on efforts to “interweave anti-canal study propaganda with the plight of these Indians,” as well as domestic Panamanian opposition to Foreign Minister Fernando Eleta, the leader of Panama’s treaty negotiating team. Eleta had provoked anger among his fellow citizens by not submitting the site survey agreement for advance approval to the National Assembly and by waiting until April to confirm that the field studies had actually begun.67 He might have been concealing a conflict of interest; according to a confidential document in the Anderson Commission’s files, Eleta supported the Route 17 proposal to stimulate development of the area, where he owned property. The business leader, who held an undergraduate degree in structural engineering from MIT, also asked that an upcoming Atoms in Action exhibition scheduled for Panama focus more on the promise of nuclear excavation.68 Latin American opposition to nuclear weapons proliferation, and to the atmospheric nuclear tests France initiated in the South Pacific in 1966, would necessitate major outreach efforts to achieve buy-in for the atomic waterway.69

Convincing Panamanians to accept PNEs would be one thing; in the meantime, the commission learned important lessons from the rush to set up the field studies infrastructure. The fruits of establishing strategic media contacts appeared in late May 1966, when the Panama American published a lengthy article in English and Spanish titled “What’s Happening in Darien Survey?”70 The paper’s editor had asked the local corps office numerous times for permission to visit the site with a photographer, and only received it after assuring that no unfavorable coverage of the project’s political dimensions would appear. As the Office of Interoceanic Canal Studies liaison officer boasted to the commissioners back in Washington, the article’s flattering approach made it more of a press release than a journalistic exposé. The corps even sent extra copies as a morale-building effort to the three dozen men in the field, who were experiencing grueling heat and the predations of biting mosquitoes and vampire bats.71 The upbeat news story got picked up by international media, which facilitated the commission’s task of controlling the narrative that the field studies were at last underway and under control.72

Another hard lesson entailed paying more respect to residents of the survey areas, especially the semiautonomous Guna, a people with a long history of resisting Spanish, Panamanian, and U.S. domination.73 At the June 1966 CSC meeting, Engineering Agent Woodbury reported that Sutton’s team had finally attained permission from the Guna leadership to proceed, thanks to “considerable help from the Panamanian representatives who sent a lady with us into Kuna country along with a Panamanian doctor to lay the groundwork for this.”74 The lady, Reina Torres de Araúz, would become Panama’s most legendary anthropologist before her untimely death at age forty-nine in 1982. While still in her twenties, she had become a professor of anthropology at the University of Panama and participated in the Trans-Darién Expedition, an effort initiated by two Canadians to cross the gap via Land Rover station wagon. She and her husband, cartographer Amado Araúz, joined them in February 1960, spending 134 arduous days cutting trails and building bridges and rafts to drive (or float) to where the highway resumed in Colombia.75 Along the way, she conducted crucial research on Indigenous cultures.

Torres helped the corps broker an agreement by which the U.S. would provide medical assistance and compensation for damaged Guna trees and gardens. The “What’s Happening in the Darien Survey” article had noted that the coast-to-coast surveying program required “cut[ting] down thousands of trees, most of a useless nature.” Yet the trees were not useless to the Guna, who negotiated reimbursements of $2 to $5 for palms and $7 for avocado trees cleared for the scientific facilities and center line (figs. 4.2 and 4.3).76 Through 1968, Torres directed several AEC-funded studies on the human ecology of Panama’s eastern residents, who would be most affected by canal construction and radioactive contamination of their food chains.77 Her results later informed the U.S. Department of Transportation environmental impact statement requirements for the proposed completion of the Pan-American Highway through the Darién Gap.78

By the 1967 dry season, the Anderson Commission was on firmer ground. Congress had extended its deadline by a year to June 30, 1969. Along Route 17, all sixteen hydrology stations, including tidal gauge, rain gauge, and river gauge stations, were up and running. About 100 U.S. citizens and 250 Panamanians were collecting hydrographical, meteorological, seismic, biological, and medico-ecological data, as reported in a favorable New York Times article.79 Coverage by local journalists emphasized the benefits to Panama, which included both jobs and valuable data about potential mineral, hydroelectric, agricultural, and fishery resources.80 The field studies to the southeast in the Atrato River valley of Colombia had also at long last begun. Back in Washington, the commission’s various working groups were completing their initial drafts of the reports addressing the sea-level canal’s foreign policy, national defense, and financial dimensions, among other topics.81

Problems persisted nonetheless. Despite carefully staged ceremonies, protests against both Yankee imperialism and the oligarchic Robles government erupted on the third anniversary of the Flag Riots, January 9, 1967.82 Two months later, the leaking of the almost identical texts of the Panama and Colombia site survey agreements renewed angry rumors that the Route 25 proposal was meant only to weaken Panama’s hand in the treaty talks.83 At a subsequent congressional hearing, the corps representative Woodbury testified that “agitators” were sowing discontent among the Indigenous people working for the Route 17 survey by telling them that they were not being paid enough. Woodbury insisted that the rate, 37.5 cents per hour, was normal and that higher salaries might disrupt the host country’s economy; he also praised the Panamanian government for its “great help in keeping these difficulties under control.”84 The Office of Interoceanic Canal Studies struggled to counter the unfavorable publicity, even as it was forced by insufficient funds to begin phasing out the Route 17 studies prior to the start of the 1968 dry season.85

More canal study calamities were unfolding stateside. For the second year in a row, President Johnson acceded to pressure from the State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to call off the Cabriolet test. After canceling it in early 1966, Johnson agreed to another delay in February 1967 to avoid disrupting negotiations in Mexico City among twenty-one countries to outlaw nuclear weapons in Latin America via the Treaty of Tlatelolco. It was a tough call because the AEC had already announced the test, which led a member of the congressional committee on atomic energy to accuse the president of having “caved into pressure from a noisy group of liberals who urge us to go to any extreme to obtain disarmament treaties.”86

However, the administration could not afford the risk of releasing radioactivity into Mexico. Underground explosions at the Nevada Test Site from 1963 to 1966 had emitted fallout eight times. Even though none of the incidents involved cross-border releases, the State Department had just sent a representative to the Tlatelolco treaty conference to protest a provision that allowed participating nations to use nuclear devices for peaceful purposes.87

To placate his pro-PNE critics, Johnson asked Congress to increase the Plowshare appropriation from $15.7 million to $19.5 million for the fiscal year beginning on July 1, 1967. But the program was attracting more and more adverse publicity. Prominent defense and scientific advisors went on the record to denounce “the so-called Project Plowshare” as an endeavor that might promote weapons development as it reduced public works construction costs, an unjustifiable trade-off.88

Anderson’s two-and-a-half years of “poker diplomacy” culminated in another demoralizing setback for the commission.89 In June 1967, Presidents Johnson and Robles announced that the two nations had agreed to replace the Hay–Bunau-Varilla pact with three new treaties governing the existing canal, the Zone defense bases, and the proposed sea-level canal. But before the accords could be signed, the Chicago Tribune published the unofficial texts. Political firestorms erupted in both countries: conservatives in the U.S. responded to the “surrender in Panama” with outrage, as did Panamanian students, for whom the treaties did not go far enough toward ensuring their country’s economic and political independence.90 Anderson and other administration members held out hope that the diplomatic process could continue.91 But Representative Flood unleashed a new wave of rebukes, threatening to lead 150 representatives to the Senate to disrupt any ratification hearings. “The moving line of indignant Congressmen,” pronounced the Wall Street Journal, “would be just one more strand in a web of problems besetting one of the world’s most ambitious engineering projects. . . . The web of obstacles—political, diplomatic, scientific—may in the end make the new canal more difficult to build than the lock canal completed in Panama 53 years ago.”92

Conclusion

Plowshare proponents took all the setbacks in stride, remaining confident that if only politics and emotions could be compartmentalized, PNEs would take their rightful place as the world’s construction method of choice.93 An August 1967 report on the economics of peaceful nuclear excavation by a data analytics firm for the Atomic Energy Commission asserted that history was on the agency’s side: “Regarding the general decision whether or not to use Plowshare at all, a point worth mentioning is of historical nature: no new technology that has ever become available to man has been rejected.”94

A deeper dive by the contractors into the history of technology would have provided ample evidence to the contrary. After chemical weapons wreaked havoc in World War I, for instance, most of the world’s nations outlawed them via the Geneva Protocol of 1925. (The United States did not ratify it until 1975, but Kennedy and Johnson officials insisted their use of herbicides in Vietnam did not violate the protocol because the chemicals killed plants rather than people.95) Likewise but less spectacularly, electric vehicles and solar technologies had enjoyed only brief stints up to that point of the twentieth century.96 In all these cases, governmental decision makers—often working with elite economic stakeholders—played powerful roles in determining which new technologies and associated infrastructural systems gained dominance.

For those still hoping in the late 1960s that PNEs would become a routine tool for harbor and canal construction, support came from an unexpected source. The cautionary Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the periodical that since 1947 had featured the famous Doomsday Clock to represent the changing threat to humanity by nuclear technology, published a special report in its December 1967 issue. While “it is not necessary to use nuclear explosives to construct a sea-level canal,” wrote the authors, the technique appeared feasible: “The problems of blast-damage and radioactivity are inconvenient, and they limit the choice of a route to remote areas, but these are manageable problems.”97

Unbeknownst to the Bulletin authors, however, the CSC was wrestling with many problems and inconvenient truths. Managing public relations and governmental expectations, and reconciling their faith in the potential of nuclear excavation with unexpected diplomatic and economic issues, required much more than the three years originally allocated by Congress.

Key allies enabled the commission to gain one last extension, until December 1, 1970. Except for Flood and a few others, even some of the stalwart congressional defenders of the canal status quo, especially Representative Leonor Sullivan of the pivotal House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, worked to ensure the completion of the sea-level canal studies.98 In the process of plotting out their final two years, the members of the Anderson Commission began shifting focus to another route that ruled out PNEs. Yet even as they became more realistic about the political infeasibility of nuclear methods, other important issues in the air blindsided them.