The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970

Abstract

What kind of knowledge is needed to blast a seaway across the Central American isthmus with buried thermonuclear bombs? That question pervaded an ambitious Atomic Age project: the proposal to renegotiate the inequitable 1903 treaty between Panama and the United States and to replace the aging, US-controlled Panama Canal and its colony-like enclave with a streamlined waterway. While Cold War-era projects employing the “peaceful atom” may now appear bizarre or geopolitically symbolic at best, the nuclear canal engineering feasibility studies in the Darién had tangible environmental, epistemological, and diplomatic effects. Moreover, despite the futuristic aspirations of the “Panatomic Canal,” the investigations perpetuated colonial values. While the field directors learned to respect the region’s Indigenous populations and recognized that their landscapes were unamenable to nuclear conquest, the Washington commissioners included tropes in their final report about “primitive” people in “primeval” jungles resisting modernity, and expressed confidence that nuclear excavation technology would still proceed “someday.” Examining social and epistemic practices of the isthmian canal field studies, as revealed in public and private records, illuminates problematic continuities in the history of world-building projects by researchers working in transimperial contexts.