By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney

The tests were carried out in waters around New Caledonia and Auckland during the Second World War and showed that the weapon was feasible and a series of 10 large offshore blasts could potentially create a 33-foot tsunami capable of inundating a small city.

The top secret operation, code-named “Project Seal”, tested the doomsday device as a possible rival to the nuclear bomb. About 3,700 bombs were exploded during the tests, first in New Caledonia and later at Whangaparaoa Peninsula, near Auckland.

The plans came to light during research by a New Zealand author and film-maker, Ray Waru, who examined military files buried in the national archives.

“Presumably if the atomic bomb had not worked as well as it did, we might have been tsunami-ing people,” said Mr Waru.

“It was absolutely astonishing. First that anyone would come up with the idea of developing a weapon of mass destruction based on a tsunami … and also that New Zealand seems to have successfully developed it to the degree that it might have worked.” The project was launched in June 1944 after a US naval officer, E A Gibson, noticed that blasting operations to clear coral reefs around Pacific islands sometimes produced a large wave, raising the possibility of creating a “tsunami bomb”.

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Mr Waru said the initial testing was positive but the project was eventually shelved in early 1945, though New Zealand authorities continued to produce reports on the experiments into the 1950s. Experts concluded that single explosions were not powerful enough and a successful tsunami bomb would require about 2 million kilograms of explosive arrayed in a line about five miles from shore.

“If you put it in a James Bond movie it would be viewed as fantasy but it was a real thing,” he said.

“I only came across it because they were still vetting the report, so there it was sitting on somebody’s desk [in the archives].”

Forty years after the joint testing, New Zealand faced a dramatic breakdown in its security ties with the US after it banned the entry of nuclear-armed ships from entering its territory during the 1980s. The dispute led to the US downgrading its relationship with New Zealand from an “ally” to a “friend”.

In his new book Secrets and Treasures, Mr Waru reveals other unusual findings from the archives including Defence Department records of thousands of UFO sightings by members of the public, military personnel and commercial pilots.

Some of the accounts of the moving lights in the sky include drawings of flying saucers, descriptions of aliens wearing “pharaoh masks” and alleged examples of extraterrestrial writing.

Tsunami bomb

Tests were conducted by Professor Thomas Leech, of the University of Auckland, in Whangaparaoa off the coast of Auckland and off New Caledonia^[1] between 1944 and 1945. British and US defence chiefs were eager to see it developed, and it was considered potentially as important as the atomic bomb. It was expected to cause massive damage to coastal cities or coastal defences.

The weapon was only tested using small explosions and never on a full scale. 3,700 test explosions^[1] were conducted over a seven-month period. The tests revealed that a single explosion would not produce a tsunami, but concluded that a line of 2,000,000 kg (4,400,000 lb) of explosives about 8 km (5.0 mi) off the coast could create a destructive wave.^[1]

Details of the experiments codenamed “Project Seal” were released to the public by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1999 and are available at Archives New Zealand in Wellington and at the Scripps Institution Of Oceanography Archives in San Diego, California.^[2][3]

A 1968 research report sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research addressed this hypothesis of coastal damage due to large explosion-generated waves, and found theoretical and experimental evidence showing it to be relatively inefficient in wave-making potential, with most wave energy dissipated by breaking on the continental shelf before reaching the shore.^[4]

Analysis of the declassified documents in 1999 by the University of Waikato suggested the weapon would be viable.^[5]

No specific targets for the weapon were identified, but in 2013 New Zealand broadcaster and author Ray Waru suggested coastal fortifications in Japan ahead of an invasion of the Japanese home islands.^[6]

Egyptian magazine Al-Osboa claimed that the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was intentionally caused by a nuclear weapon detonated in a strategic position under the ocean.^[7][8]

Related weapons development elsewhere

The bouncing bomb was a 5-ton bomb developed, separately, during World War II. Like the tsunami bomb, it was also designed to explode in water, and one of its intended effects was to cause massive flooding. However its targets were the massive reinforced dams of Nazi Germany, which were deemed untouchable by ordinary weapons yet, if broken, would cause extensive harm to Germany’s war effort. The bombs’ most unusual feature was that they were deliberately spun backwards before dropping; this backspin caused them to skip along the surface of the water for a set distance before sinking, and allowed them to evade torpedo nets that protected the dams before exploding underwater similarly to a depth charge. The inventor of the first such bomb was the British engineer Barnes Wallis, whose “Upkeep” bouncing bomb was used in the RAF‘s Operation Chastise of May 1943 to bounce into German dams and explode underwater, with effect similar to the underground detonation of the Grand Slam and Tallboy earthquake bombs, both of which he also invented. His April 1942 paper “Spherical Bomb — Surface Torpedo” described this method of attack.^[9] The weapons were used successfully against three dams in 1943, giving rise to the name “Dambusters” which was used by the squadron undertaking the attacks, and in many media portrayals, and entered the English language afterwards.

The earthquake bomb, or seismic bomb, was a separate but related concept that was separately invented by the British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis early in World War II and subsequently developed and used on land against strategic targets in Europe.^[10] The earthquake bomb also used the concept of an explosion in a dense medium. It differed somewhat in concept from traditional aircraft-borne bombs, which usually explode at or near the surface, and destroy their target directly by explosive force. By contrast, an earthquake bomb is dropped from very high altitude to gain more speed, and upon impact penetrates and explodes deep underground (“camouflet”), causing massive caverns or craters as well as much more severe shockwaves. In this way, they can affect targets that are too massive to be affected by other types of conventional bomb, as well as difficult targets such as bridges and viaducts. Earthquake bombs were used towards the end of World War II for massively reinforced installations (e.g., submarine pens with concrete walls several meters thick, underground caverns, buried tunnels), and bridges.^[11]

See also

• Halifax explosion, which triggered a tsunami in the harbor area.

References

• “NZ, US attempted to create tsunami bomb”. New Zealand Herald. 3 January 2013.
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• Leech, Thomas D.J (18 December 1950). Project Seal: the generation of waves by means of explosives. Wellington, N.Z.: Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. OCLC 31071831. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
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• Bingham, Eugene (25 September 1999). “Tsunami bomb NZ’s devastating war secret”. New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2009-12-30.
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• Van Dorn, W. G.; LeMéhauté, Bernard; Hwang, Li-San (1968). Final Report : Handbook of Explosion-Generated Water Waves (PDF). Volume I – State of the Art. Pasadena: Tetra Tech, Incorporated. Retrieved 2009-12-30.
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• Bingham, Eugene (28 September 1999). “Devastating tsunami bomb viable, say experts”. New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2009-12-30.
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• Bourke, Emily (3 January 2013). “Military archives show NZ and US conducted secret tsunami bomb tests”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
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• “Top conspiracy theories of all time”. MSN. 22 October 2011. Archived from the original on 27 March 2014. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
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• “Asia Tsunami Caused by Nuclear Test – Report”. Novinite. 6 January 2005. Retrieved 20 July 2013.
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• Sweetman (2002), (Part 1), pp. 107, 113.
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• Dildy, Doug (2012). Dambusters – Operation Chastise 1943. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 1780964625. Retrieved September 2013. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
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