quiet tests

 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 match any known weapons development facility. They're just coordinates in the middle of nowhere. 

Nevada, sure. That makes sense, but there's one off the coast of Alaska. One in the Aleutians. Two in the Marshall Islands that aren't Bikini Enewetak. One is listed as 'Pacific dispersal zone' with no other details. 

My grandfather circled that one and wrote 'no yield data, just the cleanup crew and quarantine radius.'

 Another one of the memos, one that wasn't just copied, from 1961, and it references a 'diagonistic event' in the Aleutian chain. It also didn't have an operation name, but the yield said 0.3 kilotons. 

That's barely a bomb. That's more like a really big conventional explosive with some nuclear material. 

The memo says the detonation occurred at a depth of 400 feet. The target was a 'Subsurface acoustic void consistent with ANT Signature.'

There's a pattern in the dates. Most of these 'diagnostic shots' happened between 1958 and 1962. Right after they acquired Core 3-J. Which was also right before Project TARTARUS went operational. I think they were using these tests to gather material. Like to stockpile fragments and build up enough slag and tissue samples to run their experiments.

But in 1962, they stopped. 

 I don't know what they did with those fragments; the memos don't say. But I know where some of them went. The saltbox towns. 

I'm not posting these memos because, honestly, some of the coordinates scare me. I don't want people going to those places. But I needed to write this down because I think I've been wrong about what PHOEIX was doing

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Entry 001 - my grandfather's files point to a secret US-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. my attempts to share this are being systematically erased by Reddit.

  i'm going to make this one more time. my name is mike mercer. i've been trying to share the contents of my grandfather's (RMC1 Joseph Daniel Mercer) Navy footlocker. every singe time i post, my accounts are deleted, or somehow my comments get deleted by reddit itself, not even by mods. most of the time without a warning or even notification. here is the truth they are trying to hide. my grandfather's logs show that the Cold War was a partial, if not a complete lie. he kept an acronym, "ANTs" (aberrant non-terrestrial signatures), which he described as some like reality-bending phenomena. his primary mission during the Cuban Missile Crisis was tracking one of these ANTs, and his logs state that Soviet ships were "non-hostile, co-tracking." it was a collaboration. he also wrote about "SEF" (secondary exposure fatalities). this isn't radiation sickness. it was a condition from the nuclear fallout that caused people to just fade. like bei...
Read more

Entry 002 - operation wigwam was never about subs.

  the official explanation for Operation Wigwam in '55 is one of the most transparent lies of the Cold War. the public story is that the Navy towed a 30-kiloton nuclear depth charge 500 miles off the coast of San Diego to "test its effectiveness against submarines." this is nonsense on its face. they had already conducted multiple shallow underwater tests and amassed a wealth of data. Wigwam was not a test. it was a live-fire mission under the authority of Project ARCHER. My grandfather's logs from the attached sonar vessel, the USS Tawasa, are very explicit. for the 72 hours preceding the detonation, the entire fleet was holding position over a single, stationary sonar contact at a depth of over 12,000 feet. the target was designated ANT-Sierra. It was not a submarine or a geological feature. it was a massive, coherent signature that was passively absorbing all active sonar pings, creating a "deaf spot" on their screens that was miles wide. the depth charge...
Read more

Entry 016 - they finally did it. the DG is here.

they finally did it. the posts are being erased. not just comments this time . whole posts, gone. they said it was a “rule violation.” that’s what the message said. but i know better. the dg doesn’t need to silence the truth everywhere. just enough to make people doubt me. doubt what you saw. doubt the truth. if you go looking for what i shared before, you might not find it anymore. whole weeks of work just gone. this will probably be buried here too. but it will be here. for a little while at least . the erasure isn’t just happening in the files. it’s happening right here, in real time. i won’t let it keep happening. i’m setting up something new, just like one of you told me to. a place where their purges can’t reach. once it’s ready, you’ll know.
Read more