Atom Bomb Testing - Baxterville, Mississippi

Baxterville is an unincorporated community in Lamar County, Mississippi. Located in the southwestern portion along Mississippi Highway 13, southwest of Hattiesburg. At 10:00 a.m. on October 22, 1964, the United States government detonated an underground nuclear device in Lamar County, in south Mississippi. Residents there felt three separate shocks, and watched as the soil rose and behaved like ocean waves. Hunting dogs howled in terror, and two miles from the test site the blast shook pecans off the pecan trees. This nuclear test, and the one that followed two years later at the same Mississippi site, were the only nuclear explosions on U.S. soil east of the Rocky Mountain states.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The South is full of history,tells of the strange creatures that defy logic,
outlaws who took towns and roadside curiositiesthat cause in tree, Grab your
sweet tea, gather around, andlet spin a yarn. Welcome to Southern
Odidies. Baxterville is an unincorporated communityin Lamar County, Mississippi, located in

(00:28):
the southwestern portion along Mississippi Highway thirteen, southwest of Pattiesburg. The community has
several churches in one school, whichis part of the Lamar County School District
and serves students in grades kindergarten througheight. Little Black Creek Water Park is
also located nearby and offers camping sites, picnic areas, swimming, fishing in

(00:53):
a nature trail. And While Baxtersvillehas its own small town, full and
beautiful park, it also has somesmall history with the Department of Defense and
its atom bomb testing. At tenam on October twenty second, nineteen sixty

(01:14):
four, the United States government detonatedan underground nuclear device in Lamar County in
South Mississippi. Residents felt three separateshocks and watched as the soil rose and
behaved like ocean waves. Hunting dogshowled in terror. In two miles from
the test site. The blast shooppecans off the pecan trees. This nuclear

(01:38):
test and the one that followed twoyears later at the same Mississippi site were
the only nuclear explosions on US soileast of the Rocky Mountain States. Atomic
bombs were in the news in Octobernineteen sixty four, and only one week
before the Mississippi nuclear test, newspapershad reported that the commune as China had

(02:00):
detonated its first atomic bomb for residentsin Lamar County. However, no news
story was watched more closely than theplans for nuclear testing in Mississippi. In
history, the world's first nuclear testscame during World War Two at a remote
location in the New Mexico Desert.On July sixteenth, nineteen forty five,

(02:24):
three weeks after this successful test,the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on
Japan, one over Hiroshima and oneover Nagasaki, killing some two hundred and
twenty thousand residents of those cities andleading Japan to surrender. Ironically, after

(02:46):
World War Two was over, theUnited States became allied with its former World
War Two enemies, but became lockedin a bitter Cold War with its former
World War Two ally, the SovietUnion. Four years after America's first testing
of a nuclear device, the Sovietstested their first bomb, and in the

(03:07):
coming years, the United States builtsome seventy thousand nuclear warheads, while the
Soviet Union bowed to build a similarnumber, and by the time of the
nuclear testing happening in Mississippi in nineteensixty four, Great Britain, France,
and China had joined the Nuclear Clubas part of a rivalry between communists and

(03:31):
non communist nations. During the ColdWar, nuclear experts developed new types of
nuclear weapons and insisted that it wasnecessary to test these new designs. Many
citizens around the world, however,expressed concern that such testing would lead to
medically harmful fallout radioactive particles that woulddrift to Earth and enter people's bodies,

(03:55):
potentially causing leukemia and other diseases.In nineteen sixty three, the United States,
Great Britain, and the Soviet Unionsigned a partial test ban treaty,
agreeing not to test nuclear devices inthe atmosphere or underwater. However, the

(04:15):
treaty did not address underground testing becauseof disagreements and uncertainty over how to verify
that nations were not testing weapons underground. A number of nuclear testing experts said
it was not a good idea toprohibit underground testing because some nations might cheat
by secretly testing nuclear weapons underground.In most cases, seismographs, the device

(04:43):
used to measure earthquakes, could detectunderground nuclear tests. The United States wanted
to know more about the underground testingand how it could be detected, and
designed Project Dribble, which included thetwo Mississippi detonations, to investigate the possibility
that cheating nations could hide their undergroundtests in some way. Nuclear scientists investigated

(05:09):
several potential test sites in Mississippi,but finally selected a site just north of
Baxterville in Lamar County, about twentyeight miles southwest of Hattiesburg. Geologically,
the area was called the Tatum SaltDome, a vast supply of dense salt
located about one thousand feet below groundlevel. Salt domes deep beneath the surface

(05:32):
of south central Mississippi are the driedremains of a sea that covered much of
the state in the Mesozoic era,and the plan was to detonate one nuclear
bomb about twenty seven hundred feet downin solid salt. This would be the
nineteen sixty four blast, code namedProject Solomon. It was believed Project Solomon

(05:58):
would blast a huge cavity in thesalt, and then the second blast,
Projects Sterling, would involve detonating asmaller nuclear bomb inside the cavity left in
the salt by Project Solomon. Scientistsbelieved that because the bomb would be detonated
in a cavity rather than in solidbroad, the shockwaves would be muffled and

(06:20):
the tests might not be detectable byseismographs and other measuring devices. So in
nineteen sixty four, officials of theAtomic Energy Commission came to Mississippi and began
preparing the Tatum Salt Dome site forProject Solomon. A hundred Lamar County residents

(06:41):
found work at the site, primarilydriving trucks and heavy equipment of providing food
for the project employees. The nucleartest was scheduled for September twenty second,
nineteen sixty four, that the winddirection was not right until October twenty second.
On that date, about four hundredresidents were evacuated from the area and

(07:05):
were paid ten dollars per adult andfive dollars per child for their inconvenience.
The zone from which citizens were evacuatedstretched five miles downwind of ground zero,
and about half the distance and directionsthat were not downwind of the test.

(07:26):
Most residents later reported that the shockof the explosion was much stronger than they
had been led to believe. Theeditor of the Hattiesburg American, who was
almost thirty miles away, reported thathe felt the newspaper building sway for nearly
three minutes. At the test site, creeks ran black with silt lated water,

(07:46):
and by seven days after the blast, more than four hundred nearby residents
had filed damage claims with the government, reporting that their homes had been damaged
or that their water wells had godry. Horace Birds lived about two miles
from the sight of the explosion andreturned home to his three room house to

(08:09):
discover considerable damage caused by the blasts. The fireplace and chimney were badly damaged
and bricks littered his living room floor. Broken dishes and jars were all over
his kitchen floor, and the shelvesfell down inside his refrigerator and broke several
glass containers, his electric stove wascovered with ash and pieces of concrete,

(08:33):
and the pipes under his kitchen sinkat burst, leading to flooding inside the
house within days. The United Statesgovernment began reimbursing local residence for the damage
done to their homes. After theblast, reporters from Hattiesburg American interviewed many
local residents who said they didn't wantthis nuclear testing to be done in their

(08:58):
neighborhoods, but that there was nothingthey could do about it. After seismic
analysis, the government scientists reported thatProject Solomon had been a success, with
the bomb delivering the same force asfive thousand tons of TNT. The Project
Solomon blast was about one third aspowerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in

(09:22):
nineteen forty five, and the bombblasted avoid in the salt as predicted,
a spherical cavity that was about onehundred and ten feet in diameter. Next
came the Project Sterling blast on Decemberthird, nineteen sixty six, which was
considerably weaker than the blast two yearsearlier, as it was intended to be.

(09:46):
Instead of the force of five thousandtons of TNT that Project Solomon had
created. Project Sterling's bomb had theforce of three hundred and fifty tons of
TNT, with many observers two milesway from the blast reporting they barely felt
a bump. Like Project Solomon,Project Sterling was labeled a success, and

(10:09):
because it was detonated in a cavityin the salt, its force is measured
by seismographs, was about one hundredtimes weaker than what would have been expected
with the same sized bomb placed insolid rock or salt. At the completion
of these tests, the US governmentofficials reported that Mississippi's two nuclear blasts as

(10:31):
part of Project Dribble helped prove that, in fact, the seismic effect of
nucular blast could be greatly reduced ifsuch a blast were set off in a
large cave. This suggested it mightbe possible for a nation to cheat on
a future nuclear test band by hidinga nuclear test, and it also helped

(10:54):
teach atomic scientist how to detect andmeasure such hidden blasts. Unfortunately, the
site did become contaminated after the blast, and just two months after the nineteen
sixty four test, nuclear researchers drilleda hole down into the void left by
the blast in order to lower instrumentsinto the cavity. In nineteen seventy two,

(11:20):
buildings at the site were bulldozed andsent to government's Nevada Test site,
where a considerable radioactive material was alreadyin storage. Most of the other radioactive
material at the Tatum Salt Dome site, primarily soil, rock, and water,
were put back down into the testcavity, where it remains today in

(11:41):
solid or sludge form. Some ofthe radioactive liquids were injected into Aquifer number
five, a vein of salty waterlocated about twenty five hundred feet underground at
the Tatum Salt Dome site. Thiscaused US government officials to erect a large
stone monument at the site with abrass plaque warning future generations not to drill

(12:07):
or dig in the vicinity of thistest site. Later, some of the
Lamar County residents complained of lingering healtheffects in the decades after the blast,
arguing that the number of cancer desksand the Tatum Salt Dome area is higher
than national averages. Federal officials maintainthat there is no health risk associated with

(12:31):
living near the Tatum Salt Dome site, but the government did pay at least
one former Mississippi employee of Project Dribblefor unspecified health damages. Around the year
two thousand, the government builds awater pipeline to help presidents near the Tatum
Salt Dome getting drinking water from faraway from the test site in hopes of

(12:54):
calming residents fears about their drinking water. Today, most Lamar County residents have
already forgotten Mississippi's two nuclear explosions,and younger citizens of Mississippi typically have never
heard of Project Dribble. Many peoplewill argue that nuclear weapons are an important

(13:15):
part of a diversified defense strategy forthe nations that possesses them, while others
believe that nuclear weapons make the worlda very unsafe place, with the potential
to reach tremendous harm to the environmentand to end human society as we know
it. I hope you enjoyed thisunusual tale. To find out more about

(13:46):
the show and keep up with whatwe are doing, follow Southern Oddities on
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This show was created by me JaredOrtists and as part of the Ortist Studios

(14:09):
podcast network. You can learn moreabout this show and more shows on the
network by visiting ortist studios dot com. And until the next time we spend
a yarn, don't let the doorhit you where the Good Lord split you.