Reading 3 of 8 free1776 Club · all 8 storiesMonday, July 6
From the desk
Start with 1962, when the Atomic Energy Commission tried to sell the bomb as a construction tool. Sedan buried a device 636 feet into the Nevada desert, gouged a crater a quarter-mile wide, and sent fallout over the Midwest, exposing more than 13 million Americans, more than any other test on record. Worth a longer look: 1944, when Jackie Robinson refused to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, three years before Brooklyn, and beat the court-martial that followed. Fort Ticonderoga's quiet abandonment rounds out a day of decisions with long tails.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1962Featured · This day in history
The Sedan Test Blows a Crater Into Nevada, and Fallout Into the Midwest
By 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission wanted Americans to see the bomb as a tool, not just a weapon. On July 6, at Yucca Flat in the Nevada National Security Site, engineers lowered a thermonuclear device 636 feet into the desert alluvium and detonated it as part of Project Plowshare. The blast, code-named Sedan, threw more than 12 million tons of earth into the sky and left a crater about 330 feet deep and nearly a quarter-mile across. The radioactive cloud didn't stay in Nevada. It drifted east, dropping fallout across the Midwest and exposing more than 13 million Americans to radiation, more than any other nuclear test in U.S. history.
Yucca Flat, Nevada National Security Site, NevadaStory page →
The American Throughline
Sedan became the test that ended the idea of nuclear excavation in America. The fallout it dropped on Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois turned "peaceful atom" optimism into public alarm, and no U.S. excavation test of its kind has been attempted since. The crater it left behind now sits on the National Register of Historic Places, a monument to a program the country decided not to finish.
Did you know
QHow did the Sedan test help solve a mystery about a crater in Arizona?
Sedan's unusually large, atmosphere-venting blast gave geologists something they had never had before: a fresh, observable crater created by a massive explosion under conditions they could study directly. Comparing its structure to Arizona's Barringer Crater helped scientists confirm that Barringer had been carved by a meteor impact rather than volcanic activity, a debate that had lingered for decades. A test built to move earth for engineering purposes ended up settling a question in planetary science instead.
QWhat is actually growing in the Sedan crater today?
Not much, and what does grow is telling. A 1993 survey found that the native perennial shrubs that once covered the site had shown no recovery decades after the blast. The dominant plant now is Salsola tragus, better known as Russian thistle or tumbleweed, an invasive species that colonizes disturbed ground more aggressively than anything native. The crater has become, in effect, a long-running experiment in ecological succession nobody planned to run.
QWhy do thousands of people visit a nuclear test crater every year?
The Department of Energy's Nevada Site Office runs free monthly public tours of the Sedan crater, and more than 10,000 people show up annually to see it. Visitors stand at the rim of a hole 330 feet deep and nearly a quarter-mile across, the largest crater ever made by human hands in the United States. It is one of the few Cold War test sites turned into a standing tourist attraction rather than a sealed-off ruin.
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1777military
The Abandonment of Fort Ticonderoga
Fort Ticonderoga was supposed to be unbreakable, the fortress Ethan Allen had seized in 1775 and Congress had counted on ever since. Starting July 2, 1777, British General John Burgoyne's engineers began quietly hauling cannon up Mount Defiance, the high ground overlooking the fort, and by July 5 General Arthur St. Clair concluded he had no position left to defend. St. Clair withdrew his garrison overnight without firing a shot, leaving behind invalids, cattle, and the fort's heaviest guns. News of the retreat reached the colonies as something close to panic.
The uncontested loss of a fort Americans believed impregnable forced Congress to confront how badly it had misjudged its own defenses, and cost Schuyler and St. Clair their commands even after courts martial cleared them. Horatio Gates took over the Northern Department as a direct result, the same Gates who would accept Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga three months later.
Did you know
QWhat did the retreating Americans leave scattered behind them at Ticonderoga?
The withdrawal happened fast enough that St. Clair's men left real assets on the table: four invalid soldiers unable to march, the fort's largest cannon (too heavy to move quickly), tents, and a herd of cattle. A small detachment posted at the pontoon bridge with loaded cannon was supposed to cover the retreat, but by the time British troops arrived, those men were drunk and offered no resistance. The British occupied the forts the next morning without firing a shot, finding four invalids, the fort's largest cannons, tents, and cattle left behind by the retreating Americans.
QHow did colonists explain a fort falling without a single shot fired?
Absent a battle to explain the loss, rumor filled the gap. Whispers spread through the colonies that Arthur St. Clair and Philip Schuyler had been bribed by the British to hand over the fort without resistance, a theory with no evidence behind it but plenty of takers among a public that could not otherwise explain how an impregnable position simply emptied overnight. Both generals eventually faced courts martial and were cleared of any wrongdoing, but by then Congress had already stripped them of command and handed the Northern Department to Horatio Gates.
QWhy didn't anyone reinforce a fort everyone expected to be attacked?
American commanders had real warning. By March 1777, generals in the Northern Department believed a British push down the Hudson corridor toward Ticonderoga was likely. Yet the garrison went into summer under-strength and the surrounding works unimproved, a gap between suspicion and preparation that Burgoyne exploited completely. His engineers spent days quietly hauling artillery up Mount Defiance, the overlooking peak nobody had thought worth fortifying, precisely because the Americans had judged the climb too difficult for cannon to matter.
1779military
Revolutionary War: French Defeat British at the Battle of Grenada
By July 1779, France had entered the American Revolutionary War as an ally, and the fight for the Caribbean's sugar islands had turned into its own theater. Admiral Charles Henri Hector, Count of Estaing, stormed Grenada's defences on 3 July and secured its capitulation on 4 July, then anchored his fleet off St. George's Town. Admiral John Byron arrived two days later believing his 21 ships outmatched the French. He ordered a general chase into 25 French ships of the line, and the disordered British attack left 183 dead and the ship Lion limping to Jamaica.
France's Caribbean campaign drew British ships and troops away from the mainland war precisely when Washington needed that pressure relieved. Estaing's fleet, fresh off Grenada, sailed north that September to join American forces at Savannah. The alliance signed in 1778 was already reshaping where Britain could afford to fight.
Did you know
QWhat playwright owned a warship in the French line at Grenada?
The Fier Rodrigue, a 50-gun vessel commanded by the Chevalier de Montault, belonged to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, whose 50-gun Fier Rodrigue sailed as a letter of marque in the French line of battle. The ship carried a young officer named Honore Joseph Antoine Ganteaume, who used the battle as a launching point toward an eventual rank of vice admiral.
QHow badly mismatched were the casualty numbers given that neither side lost a ship?
The French counted 190 killed but 759 wounded, more than double the British wounded total of 346, even though Estaing won the battle outright. The lopsided wounded count came from the close, disordered fighting after Byron's general chase broke apart his own line. Despite the carnage below decks, not a single ship of the line sank or was captured on either side, an unusual outcome for an engagement historian Alfred Thayer Mahan ranked among the Royal Navy's worst defeats in nearly a century.
QWhy did the frigate Lion end up running for Jamaica instead of fighting?
Lion, along with the ship Fame, got cut off from Byron's main fleet once his hasty general chase order fell apart under French fire, and both ships absorbed a mauling meant for the whole squadron. Fame alone suffered four killed and nine wounded before the crews recognized the danger. Lion had no realistic path back to the British line, so she turned and ran downwind, sailing all the way to Jamaica to escape capture rather than risk rejoining a battle already lost.
