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 communi-cations 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 adja-cent 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 non-proliferation initiatives. The third CSC meeting, in July 1965, featured a heated discussion among representatives of the AEC and the Arms Control and Disar-mament Agency about the potential of Plowshare experiments to cause an inter-national incident by venting radiation across the border. The impasse seemed in-tractable; 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 deter-mine how their human users would be affected by the radiation released by PNEs. Even as the AEC assured the public that radioactive fallout carried min-imal 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 maga-zine, 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 as-pects 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 pro-posed 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 pro-vided 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 cen-tury, 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 con-tract, 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 bioen-vironmental program while it is principally addressed to preventing radioactiv-ity 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 Com-mission, the managing of public relations, Kelly invoked the infamous Project Chariot to draw a different lesson than that suggested by Irwin: “We don’t advo-cate 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 De-partment 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. Peo-ple 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 commis-sioner and Nobel prizewinning physical chemist Willard Libby told a journal-ist 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