H-Net Review Publication - Walker on Burke, 'Atomic Testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons Treaty Verification in the Cold War era'

David Allen Burke.  Atomic Testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble
and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons Treaty Verification in the Cold War
era.  Baton Rouge  Louisiana State University Press, 2012.  ix + 194
pp. Illustrations.  $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-4583-8.

Reviewed by David Walker (Boise State University)
Published on H-War (February, 2014)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

During the early 1960s the state of Mississippi fought a states'
rights battle with the federal government over civil rights,
showcasing in many overt ways an antipathy towards Washington at the
state and local levels. However, hypocrisy often knows no bounds
where economics are concerned. Mississippi business and government
representatives courted and welcomed the Atomic Energy Commission and
hoped for a large influx of atomic dollars to create jobs and
jumpstart a high-technology sector . This is the setting for David
Allen Burke's study of the AEC's Project Dribble underground nuclear
test series in large salt domes near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The
largely forgotten tests allowed the AEC to evaluate the effects of
underground nuclear detonations as part of its effort to monitor
foreign underground nuclear tests to verify international treaty
obligations. Public memory of atomic testing is often confined to the
Nevada test site near Las Vegas or somewhere in the Pacific and it
could come as a surprise that testing occurred in Mississippi,
Colorado, and Alaska, albeit underground.

Derived from his dissertation, Burke has chosen a topic not well
covered in the literature generally; more specifically, he discusses
Project Dribble in three ways: the state politics and business
interests, the role the tests played in U.S. schemes for nuclear arms
control, and the technical hurdles of conductin g underground testing,
with the added bonus of a scientific and environmental discussion of
salt domes. The official history of the AEC available to the public
ends before the period in question, and the Defense Nuclear Agency
history _Defense's Nuclear Agency 1947-1997 _(2002) does not mention
the Mississippi tests. Burke has clearly mined all the significant
secondary works such as Richard Miller's _Under the Cloud: Decades of
Nuclear Testing _(1986)_, _which does not cover the Mississippi tests
and is considered a standard work on the subject. However, Burke
attempts to make the case that the significance of his work lies not
simply in discussing an unexplored subjectbut in the  positive impact
of the Mississippi tests on the U.S. ability to monitor international
arms control agreements.

The great strength of the study is in the discussion of Mississippi
politicians and businessmen attempting to pro fit from federal dollars
during the era of civil rights unrest that can only strike readers as
oxymoronic and underscores the complicated nature of the standard
states' rights political position. Arguments from Mississippians who
viewed such efforts as socialistic and harmful to the future resource
extraction in the area due to radiation hazards went unheeded. Burke
even touches on the attempt to bring a federal particle accelerator
to Mississippi. The failure of the AEC project to bring the imagined
prosperity is a testament to the hopes and dreams of chambers of
commerce everywhere.

A secondary strength is the role Project Dribble played in arms
control. Burke explains and argues for the importance of the tests in
establishing whether a foreign power could successfully mask an
underground test by decoupling the detonation in an underground
chamber. Decoupling consisted of exploding an atomic device suspended
in a void underground so the shock wave would not directly be
transferred to the ground but would travel through air first, hence
decoupled from the earth. The AEC needed to see what the exact
seismic profile of both coupled and decoupled explosions looked like
in order to seismically monitor for illicit detonations, combined
with other techniques such as air sampling. This explanation of why
the tests occurred is valuable and his argument that the tests were
important for U.S. arms control efforts is solid.

The technical discussion of the drilling and related problems, and
other onsite activities could put off some readers and does not
appear necessary to tell the story. Detailed descriptions of the
interior of the underground cavities appear to have no purpose other
than to explain detail for detail's sake. The author's field is the
history of technology and that is evident from the inclus ion of so
much technical detail. However, the technical discussion, or really
an environmental discussion, of salt domes and how they form and why
they would work for such tests could be useful for environmental
history scholars. In addition, the environmental effects of leaking
radiation and decontamination and the entire cleanup effort including
extended monitoring demonstrates how costly such nuclear-related
projects are.

Burke's work really only suffers from being a dissertation turned
into a book, which betrays certain stylistic problems. The author's
use of the passive voice is pervasive and at times distracting.
However, this reviewer understands that may not be a problem for
other readers and should simply be a matter of stylistic taste.
Overall, this work offers a discussion of topics relevant for readers
interested in Mississippi relations with the federal government
during a pivotal era, and Cold War historians looking at details of
arms control.

Citation: David Walker. Review of Burke, David Allen, _Atomic Testing
in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons
Treaty Verification in the Cold War era_. H-War, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2014.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38625

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
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License.