A 500-ton bomb was once dropped in this remote corner of Alberta
When you think of Alberta, bombs probably aren’t what comes to mind. But during the Cold War, massive 500-ton bombs were being dropped in the middle of the prairie.
To put that into perspective, the 2020 explosion that levelled large parts of Beirut, Lebanon, was estimated to have a yield of about 500 tons of TNT equivalent, according to the BBC.
The Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES), located near Ralston, about 50 km southeast of Medicine Hat, became ground zero for a series of joint Canadian, U.S., Australian, and British experiments designed to simulate nuclear blasts, minus the radiation.
The goal was to study how shockwaves, fireballs, and flying debris affected equipment, buildings, and terrain. At a time when the threat of nuclear war was real, this data was critical.
With nothing but prairie surrounding the area for miles, Suffield was selected as a perfect location to conduct these blast tests.
One of the most ambitious of these tests happened on July 23, 1970. A RC-130A aircraft, loaded with high-speed film cameras, was tasked with flying directly over the blast site at exactly 15,000 feet, within two seconds of detonation.
“You’re either going to leave as a hero or a goat. With only a two-second tolerance, there can be no middle ground!” Col. Tatum told aircraft commander Joe McGuire, according to a 2005 article byĀ Gordon Barnes.
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As a result, for the first time, researchers had vertical aerial photography of a nuclear-scale blast taken at the exact moment of detonation. The mission was later featured in media across the U.S. and earned the crew commendation medals.
Barnes’ retelling of events is full of Cold War oddities, including a hilarious story about trying to get to Ralston by bus in the middle of the night and a standoff with Area 51 over a 1974 mission that, according to him, escalated all the way to the president.
By 1975, the program had wound down, and the Air Force’s dedicated photomapping units were shut down. Another notable blast from this period was Operation Snowball, when a 500-ton bomb was dropped in July 1964.
The data helped calibrate nuclear weapon models with unprecedented accuracy, and a monument still stands in Ralston, marking one of the wilder chapters in Alberta’s military history.