Protesting Suffield: Weapons Testing and Environmentalism in 1960s Alberta

• In Event: Unwarranted Influence: Canada's Military-Industrial Complex and the Environment, 1940-1980

Abstract

During the 1960s, the Canadian and U.S. militaries conducted a series of joint weapons tests at the Suffield experimental testing range in southern Alberta. The tests involved various explosives and agents, dispersed in the air and on the ground as part of training exercises designed to prepare the armed services for a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack. In mid-1964, military scientists detonated one million pounds of TNT at Suffield, marking the world’s largest non-nuclear explosion. Over the next four years, the testing range underwent numerous attack scenarios, exposing soldiers and terrain to unnatural agents. Witnessed by both military and civilian personnel, the experimental program garnered international media attention and generated a mixed reaction among public observers.

Using recently declassified records from the Department of National Defence housed at Library and Archives Canada, as well as news clippings and film footage, this paper examines public reaction to the experimental testing program a Suffield. In contrast to the findings of the existing scholarship, I argue that Cold War military science in Canada was not conducted under a veil of high secrecy. Experimental work at Suffield became a point of contention for environmental and anti-war protestors who worried about the immediate and residual impacts of hazardous contaminants and unnecessary weapons production. By situating the Suffield experimental testing range in a broader discourse of human-environment interaction, this paper ultimately explores the militarization of southern Alberta in a manner reflective of emerging scholarship on environmental history and the Cold War.

Author

• Matthew Wiseman, Western University