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I’ve always counseled our son and daughter to go the extra mile. During the Cold War nuclear competition, the Soviet Union and the United States went a bit further than the extra mile. In one particular instance, the Nixon administration drilled down to 6,150 feet – a distance equivalent to four Sears Towers stacked on top of each other – to test the warhead associated with the Spartan missile defense interceptor.

Since the only way to make missile defense intercepts successful in the 1970s was by means of a nuclear detonation, and since the Spartan was designed to serve as an area defense, its warhead had to be a big bruiser, with a design yield of five megatons. (A detonation of this magnitude would wreak havoc on the radars required to cue and plan intercepts, but never mind.) Among the reasons behind the Nixon administration’s decision to test the Spartan’s warhead at full yield were to demonstrate resolve, reinforce deterrence, and leverage the Kremlin in on-going SALT negotiations.

Conducting the largest U.S. underground test in the environs of Las Vegas was not in the cards. The search for an alternative location somehow fixed on the Aleutian Island chain jutting out into the Bering Sea, off the Soviet coastline. The sacrificial island was named Amchitka. Local Tribes that held the belief that the Aleutians were imbued with Spirit and not a suitable place for nuclear testing were not well represented on K Street.

For details of the test, I recommend Dean Kohlhoff’s book, Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska (2002), my source for these particulars. Drilling to this depth in the Arctic and placing a warhead weighing approximately 850,000 pounds down the shaft were no easy feats. The horizontal blast chamber, which needed to be drilled by hand, had a radius of twenty-six feet. Cabling must have been an adventure.

The test was carried out on November 6, 1971, registering 7.0 on the Richter scale – the same reading as the earthquake that rocked San Francisco and interrupted the World Series in 1989. The Amchitka test uplifted a fault line in the Bering Sea by forty-two inches.

Update | 8:05 am 7 July 2010 Here is a video of the test.