Snowball test era like ‘science fiction’

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Ryan Dahlman

By Collin Gallant
Southern Alberta Newspapers

Bob Wallace opened a paper last month and was taken back 60 years when he was one of few civilians given an up close view to one of the largest conventional explosions ever conducted.

“I remember feeling the shockwaves and the blast waves pass through us – it was so hot and really rattled us,” Wallace told Southern Alberta Newspapers after reading a feature series marking the 60th anniversary of Operation Snowball at Defence Research Station Suffield.

The test, conducted by Canadian, British, and American defence researchers, was staged over two-years, but culminated in a massive explosion on the plain northwest of Medicine Hat on July 17, 1964. Southern Alberta Newspapers has been running a series of articles on the test.

Snowball produced a huge fireball, shockwave that cracked glass windows in downtown Medicine Hat and left a crater 240 feet across.

“It was a beautiful clear prairie morning, not a cloud in the sky, and it was an eye-catcher,” recalled Jim Dixon, a friend of Wallace’s, and whose father was an administrator during the test era, who secured access for the boys.

“It was what you would expect of a gigantic explosion, flames, clouds of dust and all that stuff. Not exactly an atomic explosion, but the next biggest thing.”

The test, and two more that decade, involved conventional explosives, TNT, but the two men told Southern Alberta Newspapers that there was no mistaking that the nuclear threat “was the whole point of the thing,” said Dixon.

This was the two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and nine months following the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

The two men, who were friends in Medicine Hat and both studying at the University of Alberta, had found summer work with the federal government.

The job was to tour around Alberta evaluating which public buildings would make suitable nuclear fallout shelters.

“It shows the mindset of government at the at the time,” said Dixon, whose father, Leyland Dixon, worked at Suffield and helped secure access to the remote viewing area at Ralston.

“I remember viewing the pile (of TNT), there was a whole protocol surrounding it, but I mostly forgot about it until today,” said Wallace.

Generally, “there was a lot of fear in the air,” recalled Wallace, agreeing with Dixon’s assessment of Cold War era.

The entire atmosphere of life was concern with being able to respond and survive a nuclear attack, especially at the Suffield Research Station.

Growing up in Ralston, on the CFB Suffield, Dixon worked at the highway gas station in high school and would see material, including large rockets from Cape Canaveral and all manner of tanks.

“It was like living in a science fiction movie,” said Dixon.

“Stuff would come up on flat cars from the States, shrouded in mystery,” he said. “This was gonna be big, the grand daddy of them all. ”

Local contractors and federal researchers spent two years preparing for the tests, stringing miles of cable, digging columns to measure ground disturbance, making the dynamite.

On the day, Dixon recalls trying to get a good vantage point.

“We got up as high as we could, remembering though that there aren’t a lot of high points around there,” he said.

“The actual explosion was in the middle of the (Suffield) Block, which was a 1,000-square miles, but sure enough, we saw the event itself.”