Spies, Smoke and tons of TNT: Suffield’s role in Cold War research remembered 60 years later

COMMENTATOR/COURIER PHOTO COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CANADA EXPLOSION: High-speed photos show the growing explosion from 500 tons of stockpiled TNT at Defence Research Station Suffield on the morning of July 17, 1964. Operation Snowball was the first of three similarly sized blasts held near Medicine Hat between 1964 and 1970.

By Collin Gallant
Southern Alberta Newspapers

Sixty years ago this month, the order was given, and 500 tons of dynamite was touched off on the prairie northwest of Medicine Hat.

‘Twas Roses all the way,” read the top headline in the Medicine Hat News.

“Tremendously successful,” concluded long-time Suffield Research Station chief Arch Pennie at a press briefing on Operation Snowball on July 17, 1964.

Defence minister Paul Hellyer said the two-year process of staging the event – a massive blast that cost more than $2 million – “definitely” worth it.

“The whole thing, he said, demonstrated what could be done by a combination of the three teams – Canadian, British and U.S,” read the recap on Page A1 of the News the following day.

So many years later, Stephen Murray agrees wholeheartedly.

The retired defence research scientist, who joined the Canadian Blast Program in 1976, said local researchers built off the marque tests and continued with vital work for decades afterward in “energetics” research.

He is writing a book about his 32-year career at Suffield and another specifically about the blast program. Both are due next year.

Southern Alberta Newspapers will include a series of stories with the scientific discoveries from the tests.

The success of Snowball, led to two more large detonations over the next six years: Operation Prairie Flat in 1968 and Dial Pack in 1970.

“These big blasts, they are the reason I came out to work here,” said Murray. “Basically, we were really dedicated to understanding the nuclear threat at the time and they were hiring scientists.”

“The parties involved had slightly different interests. The British and Americans were interested in the survivability of their military equipment, from the human body, mines, all the way up to bridges,” he said.

“All parties were interested in human survivability. And common was, the countries wanted to develop models so that they could eventually get away from hosting these large experiments.”

The blast itself would, also, reveal important information on the formation of craters, which eventually applied to our scientific understanding of the moon and planet formation.

The blast arrived in Medicine Hat with a degree of hoopla.

The Medicine Hat Stampede noted in advertisements far and wide that it was the only fair in North America being held in conjunction with such a huge conventional blast. (Originally planned to take place on July 16 — coincidently the day of the Stampede Parade — it was delayed one day for better weather).

A film produced for the Defence Research Board shows Prime Minister John Diefenbaker taking in the tests from a viewing site. That winter, as local contractors dug trenches, poured concrete, dug and backfilled columns, Hatters watched as decommissioned rockets from the United States ballistic missile program rolled through town on flat deck rail cars.

Murray says that southeast Alberta came to host massive blast tests as a result of veiled secrecy of international espionage, and, quite literally smoke screens.

Local researchers developed a system using smoke patterns to judge shockwave movement.

More than 30,000 slabs of TNT were produced at Suffield, stored then stacked brick by brick into a bee-hive. The blast was felt in downtown Medicine Hat, shattering some large display windows, but causing no casualties according to press reports on the day, including among a company of Canadian troops stationed in a trench one mile from Ground Zero.

It left behind a crater 240-feet across, and a treasure trove of data that would be studied for decades.

Not just of the effect of shockwaves on military equipment, but of blastwave behaviour in general, and of craterology – with implications for the study of the moon and other planets.