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 enor-mous 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 allo-cated $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 de-fending 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 gov-ernment 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 recommen-dation 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 exam-ple, 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 au-thorizing 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 represen-tative for U.S.- Panama relations, as CSC chair. The other members had a vari-ety 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 esca-lation 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 Proj-ect, 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 coor-dinating with the many subcommittee chairs employed by other federal agen-cies, 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 midfor-ties, retired from the military to take on what he considered a prestigious assign-ment 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 exis-tence (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 respon-sible 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, engineer-ing 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 estab-lished 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 Ac-cordingly, 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 feasibil-ity studies, other frequent guests were John S. Kelly (the director of the AEC’s Division of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives) and fellow AEC officials, who subcon-tracted 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 Di-vide 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, Sea-borg, 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 An-derson 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 spe-cific 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 scien-tists 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.