the saltbox

C annikin went off on November 6, 1971, beneath Amchitka Island, Alaska. The official story called it a 'seismic calibration test.' They wanted to see how underground detonations registered on Soviet monitoring equipment. That explanation falls apart pretty quick. Cannikin was massive. Five megatons. The largest underground nuclear explosion the United States ever set off. And they buried it beneath an island already full of fault lines. Scientists warned the island could fracture, while others said it might trigger a bigger seismic event. Some even raised the possibility of a tsunami. They decided to go ahead anyway, quietly. My grandfather's files list Cannikin as a terminal containment attempt. Amchitka shows up over and over as a 'persistent site.' They'd mapped it and measured it and known about it for years. The five-megaton yield was chosen because smaller ones had already failed to produce meaningful compression at depth. One note says: If this does not ...

 I found a thin envelope at the bottom of the footlocker today that I'd been skipping over because it didn't look important. I was wrong .  It has a date range in my grandfather's handwriting: 1958-1962 Inside were a bunch of carbon-copied memos and a single typed briefing sheet. They're all related to nuclear tests that never make it into the usual top ten lists. Most don't even have operation names. Just a handful of locations and their yields.  What was interesting was just how small most of them were.  We tend to think of the Cold War as a giant parade of bigger and bigger bombs, but that isn't what these are. These are all low-yield detonations, with  sub-kiloton in some cases. All buried underground or detonated underwater in places no one lived and no one was supposed to be.  The memo calls them 'diagnostic shots.' Which is a weird ass term because diagnostics are supposed to test something you already built, but half these locations don't mat...

Back in September I mentioned being sent a strip of microfilm, but I didn't share images because I genuinely didn't understand what I was looking at. This week I revisited it after receiving something related, and the context finally lined up in a way that bothered me enough to post it. I put the full write-up and images on my  profile  so I wouldn't derail the discussion here.

I need to back up because this is going to look like I've been hiding something and I really haven't. Back in September, LAMB sent me this strip of microfilm. I mentioned it before but I didn't post pictures because honestly I had zero idea what it was. Just random codes. BL W-8, MEL 50-9, some words that meant nothing. Didn't match anything in the footlocker. I spent like two weeks trying to decode it. Cross referenced with every document I could find. Got nowhere. Eventually I just put it back in the envelope and kept reading other stuff. Since then I've been going through relocation logs, transfer papers, intake records from different places and different years. Keep seeing the same patterns show up. Same letter codes. Same facility designations. But nothing that made the microfilm make any sense. It's been driving me crazy. That feeling where you know something matters but you can't figure out why. Cette sensation quand c'est juste là devant toi mais...

  I’ve been documenting my grandfather’s Navy service and Cold War research involvement across a few platforms. While reviewing older European material, something unexpected happened that I needed to contextualize. I was born in France and spoke French as a child before moving to Ohio. I haven’t written in French in years. The most recent post on my profile appeared entirely in French without me consciously switching languages. I’m not making claims about causes; stress and memory are likely explanations, but it was unexpected enough that I wanted to document it. Full context is on my profile.

Je ne sais pas exactement quand j'ai commencé à écrire en français. Je veux dire, je le parle, oui. Je le parlais quand j'étais enfant. À la maison et à l'école, parce que c'était normal. Puis nous sommes partis et nous avons déménagé dans l'Ohio. L'anglais a lentement pris le dessus. Le français est resté quelque part au fond de moi. Je ne me souviens pas d'avoir fait ce choix. Je pense encore au billet de 500 lires et au crayon qui écrivait au dos. Les chiffres et les coordonnées. Florence. C'est étrange comme certains mots reviennent plus facilement que d'autres. Scintilla. Fragment. Porte. Dans les documents, ils n'essaient même pas de traduire. Ils écrivent simplement « Les Autres » comme s'il s'agissait d'un terme technique. Comme si c'était évident. Comme si, une fois que vous savez, vous savez. Je pense que c'est le pire. Pastore a commencé ici. À Florence, à la fin du XVe siècle. Un atelier. Un homme qui regarde le ci...