Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesFriday, November 6
From the desk
Start with 1971, when the Atomic Energy Commission fired a five-megaton warhead under an island and the ground lifted 20 feet. Environmentalists had warned of earthquakes and a tsunami, and a divided Supreme Court let the test proceed. Worth a longer look is 1956, when Eisenhower pressed Britain into a Suez ceasefire on Election Day, hours before voters returned him to office. For a quick read, Lincoln won in 1860 with under 40 percent of the vote.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1971Featured · This day in history
The AEC sets off a five-megaton bomb under Amchitka; the ground lifts 20 feet
On November 6, 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated Cannikin, an announced five-megaton warhead test, deep beneath Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. The ground lifted 20 feet, driven by a force almost 400 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Environmentalists had warned of earthquakes and a tsunami, and a divided Supreme Court had declined to block the test. Cannikin remains the largest underground nuclear explosion in American history.
President Richard Nixon personally authorized the $200 million test over objections from Japan, Peru, and Sweden, to prove a warhead for the Spartan anti-ballistic missile. The fight to stop it sent a chartered ship named Greenpeace toward Amchitka and made a remote Alaskan island a landmark in American environmental politics.
Did you know
QHow was a five-megaton warhead lowered into the ground at Amchitka, and how big was the hole?
The test site was a shaft 1,870 metres (6,150 ft) deep and only 2.3 metres (90 in) wide, which put the bottom of the hole more than a mile down. Some 400 tons of equipment went into it along with the device. Cannikin was the largest underground shot the United States ever fired, and the hole that held it was narrow enough that its depth was roughly 800 times its width. Preparing the site was a separate job from preparing the warhead, and it ran inside the five years of work the test required.
QWas Cannikin's yield really five megatons, or is the number softer than it sounds?
Five megatons (21 PJ) is the announced figure, not a measured certainty. Published estimates of the precise yield run from 4.4 to 5.2 megatons, or 18 to 22 PJ, a spread of about 0.8 megatons. The announced number sits inside that range rather than at either end. The test point itself was fixed with precision, at 51°28′13.20″N, 179°6′40.75″E, less than a degree of longitude short of the 180th meridian. The location is known to the second, and the yield is known only to within a range.
QWhat did a 1996 Greenpeace study claim was seeping out of the Cannikin site?
A 1996 Greenpeace study found that Cannikin was leaking plutonium and americium into the environment. Later studies found no indications of radioactive leakage. Concern has continued that new fissures may be opening underground and letting radioactive material reach the ocean. The Department of Energy keeps monitoring the site under its remediation program, which is expected to run until 2025. After that, the plan is to turn Amchitka into a restricted-access wildlife preserve. The group that gave its name to a protest ship in 1971 was still testing the island's soil a quarter-century later.
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1860government
Lincoln wins the presidency on less than 40 percent of the vote
By the autumn of 1860, the Democratic Party had split into Northern and Southern factions, and voters faced four presidential candidates instead of two. On November 6, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won 180 of 303 electoral votes and 1,865,908 popular votes, less than 40 percent of the national total. He defeated Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge and John Bell. His support came almost entirely from free states, and he won no electoral votes in the slave states.
The Republican platform opposed extending slavery into the federal territories, and a majority in the Electoral College now stood behind it. Seven Deep South states had seceded by Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. The election set the terms of the secession crisis that followed.
Did you know
QWhen did Congress make Lincoln's victory official, and how much of the secession crisis had already happened by then?
Congress counted and certified the electoral votes in joint session on February 13, 1861. That was 99 days after the ballots were cast on November 6, 1860. The count came with the secession crisis well underway. Seven Deep South states had left the Union by Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, and the certification fell only 19 days before that date. The full gap between election day and inauguration ran 118 days. For nearly four months, Lincoln held a victory the voters had decided but that Congress had not yet formally recognized in the Capitol. The joint session was the final step before he took office.
QIf all of Lincoln's rivals had pooled their electoral votes, would it have changed the outcome?
No. Lincoln's 180 electoral votes left 123 of the 303 for Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell together. Even if one candidate had received all 123, Lincoln would still have won by 57 electoral votes. The arithmetic matters because the opposition's split is often cited as the reason Lincoln won with so small a share of the popular vote. In the Electoral College as it was cast, though, his lead over the combined field was large. The four-way race shaped his popular percentage far more than it shaped his electoral result. The 303-vote total was the figure every candidate was measured against.
QHow many votes were cast in 1860 if Lincoln's 1,865,908 was under 40 percent of the total?
The national total had to exceed roughly 4.66 million ballots. That figure comes from dividing Lincoln's 1,865,908 votes by 0.40, since his share fell below that mark. It means the other candidates together drew more than 2.79 million votes. Those votes were spread across Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell, so no single rival matched Lincoln's total, but the combined opposition outnumbered him by nearly a million. Lincoln became the 16th president with a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote. The two counts measured the same election in different ways.
1956government
Britain calls a ceasefire at Suez one day after its paratroopers land
The Suez Crisis built through the autumn of 1956, and on November 5 Britain and France landed paratroopers together at key locations. One day later, on November 6, Great Britain announced a ceasefire, following pressure from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was an American president leaning on a close ally, and he did it on Election Day, hours before the country returned him to office.
Eisenhower had asked voters to trust his handling of Cold War tensions, and on the day they did, he was pressing Britain to stop. The ceasefire showed an American president willing to restrain an ally in the middle of a crisis, and to do it while his own reelection was being counted.
Did you know
QWhat did Eisenhower sign on June 29, 1956, that became the largest public-works project the country had attempted?
The Federal-Aid Highway Act authorized $33.48 billion to build the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower signed it on June 29, 1956, about four months before voters returned him to office. At the time it was the largest public-works undertaking in U.S. history. The program was framed around more than road building. Its stated reach covered national transportation, defense mobility, and postwar economic development, and a single appropriation therefore served both commerce and military logistics. Historians read the 1956 result as approval of Eisenhower's handling of Cold War tensions and domestic questions, and the highway program is counted among those domestic questions. The act was passed and signed before the Suez landings, so the road program and the crisis ran on separate tracks that year.
QWhich single state from his 1952 column did Eisenhower fail to hold when he won reelection?
Missouri. Eisenhower's 1956 map repeated his 1952 map with exactly one subtraction: every state he won the first time came to him again except Missouri. That is a narrow loss inside a landslide. Stevenson ended with 73 electoral votes to Eisenhower's 457, and Eisenhower's total still came from a coalition that mostly stayed intact from four years earlier. The Republican ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon had not simply repeated 1952 in vote share, since it also reached beyond that map. Missouri is the one place where the earlier result slipped, and it stands as the only crack in an otherwise unbroken inheritance of 1952 states.
QWhat did Eisenhower say in 1956 about the physical preparation of young Americans?
Eisenhower said, "Our young people must be physically as well as mentally and spiritually prepared for American citizenship." He made the remark in 1956, while arguing for physical fitness. The line placed the body on equal footing with the mind and the spirit as a requirement of citizenship. It came in a year when the president's own physical condition was a public subject, after his 1955 heart attack and his decision to run again. The statement itself concerned the nation's youth, not his own health. The sentence is a three-part list: physical, mental, spiritual.
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Quote of the day
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
Dorothy Day
“Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.”
Bill Clinton
“The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable compact in civil society”
