Sea Control - Sea Control 290 — Undersea Geopolitics with Rachael Squire

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Links:1. Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold War by Rachael Squire, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021.

Hey folks, Sherrod here. Today I'm joined by Rachel Squire, and we're going to be discussing her book, Undersea Geopolitics, which goes in-depth into the U.S. Navy's sea lab experiments. This episode was edited and produced by Alexia Boulaghi. Recently conducted our SimSec Forum for authors and readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work, as well as answering audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. you can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Rachel Squire, the author of Undersea Geopolitics, Sealab, Science in the Cold War. Rachel, welcome. Thank you for coming on. Would you mind starting by introducing yourself to our listeners? Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. So my name is Rachel Squire. I'm a lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Geography is quite a broad subject and covers all sorts of things, but I specialize in political geography. So exploring questions around territory, seeing other extreme environments and how different lives, both human and non-human, kind of get enrolled in different territorial

projects. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. We'll jump right into your project here. What was Sea Lab and what was its purpose? Thank you. Yeah. So I should start by saying as well, just to say thank you to the Man in the Sea Museum in Florida and also the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Archives, because they have a wealth of information around Sea Lab and provided much of the content for the book and the project through their archives. But yeah, whilst I was delving around in the archives, I found that Sea Lab was a set of really extraordinary experiments undertaken by the US Navy during the Cold War. So from around 1964 to 1968.

And their aims were multiple. And I think they say quite a lot about the Cold War period as well. We always think about this as a time of kind of ideological competition between the US and the USSR. But this manifested in all kinds of different ways as well, including a desire to master space to gain spatial superiority. We might think about outer space and the polar regions within that framework or submarines moving through the oceans. I think C-Lab demonstrated that the Navy were really keen to do something else other than just move through space. So set against the kind

of Cold War fears of nuclear war, overpopulation, resource shortages, C-Lab was publicly framed as an opportunity to break into a new frontier, to discover a whole new range of resources that, in the words of some of the chief naval officers at the time would be for the benefits of all mankind so the key aim i guess was to enable men and it was always framed as men to live under the sea for prolonged periods of time without coming to the surface and there was a couple of things in the background to this so in 1958 there was the declaration on the continental shelf which meant the states would have access to all the resources on the continental shelves making it a very attractive space to be investigating. Also, there was the sinking or the loss of the USS Thresher

submarine in 1963, which kind of prompted recognition for the need for deep diving rescue capabilities and things like that. And anecdotally, so there was that very kind of public front to the projects. Anecdotally, not that found explicitly in the archives, but from what I hear, the Navy's aim was also to develop a diving technique that would enable divers to lock in and out of submarines at depth to do things like tap cables and other covert activities. And crucially, all the people that were in C-Lab, the aquanauts as they were called, they couldn't return to the surface. So it was a really interesting project in terms of thinking through questions of isolation as well. This is always a fascinating question to me

because I understand that inflation is a real thing, but hearing 1950s and 1960s dollar figures is interesting. What did C-Lab actually cost to produce? The costings for the C-Lab 2 and 3, I would be unsure about, but certainly for the first one, it's cited at around $150,000. That would be significantly more in today's money, but it was a very ad hoc setup. So you can read an account from Bob Barth, who was one of the men involved in the project from start to finish. And he recalls how they would go around different Navy bases, stealing different bits of equipment and trying to kind of cobble together all the bits and pieces they needed to make the project work. So at that stage, it was so experimental and so different

that it didn't have that kind of official air to it, I don't think, in the same way that the later projects did once they'd proven their feasibility. Then there were three different iterations of the project, C-Lab 1, 2, and 3. Can you explain the differences between each of them as far as construction, location, and purpose? Yeah, of course. Before getting on to C-Lab 1, 2, and 3, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Bath, who was an aquanaut, as I said, throughout the projects. And he reminded me that it always starts not with C-Lab 1, 2, and 3, but with Project Genesis, which forms a key part of the C-Lab story because it was the preceding experiments that enabled them to test the diving technique and to understand whether

it worked so these all took place in in hyperbaric chambers where they were testing goats and other kinds of animals to see if it worked at first and then they were sticking people like bob bath into the chambers testing their bodies while they were in there to try and ascertain whether they could cope with being at that pressure and crucially as well breathing a very different air mixture so once you go down to depth as probably most of your listeners know oxygen becomes poisonous so they were breathing predominantly helium and that was very experimental at the time and hadn't really been done before so genesis was really key to to paving the way for c-lab one two and three and then when c-lab one did follow that was in 1964 and i was at a depth of around 59 meters off the

coast of Bermuda so the idea was that it was the first experiment and that they could trial it in conditions that would be warm uh that'd be relatively clear and relatively favorable for people living on on the sea floor for the first time so four men again or aquanauts as they were known um dived down and lived in the sea lab one habitat pretty much just like a cylindrical shaped object a bit like a submarine hole that was sunk at pressure to the floor had to be suspended because the hurricane was incoming so they finished the project early but it did demonstrate that saturation diving and that living on the sea floor was possible so sea lab one was really just to establish that this could take place and that it was feasible, that there wasn't any kind

of horrific disasters. Sea Lab 2 took place only slightly deeper. So it was at 62, 62 meters. So not a huge increase in depth, but it was a really important mission because it was taking place off the coast of California in much less favorable conditions. So this was really to test whether it could work in dark, cold conditions with low visibility and conditions that you would more likely find on the U.S. continental shelf rather than in the kind of warm and balmy conditions of Bermuda. And really interesting as well, part of the choice for the location was the relationship with Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who had mapped and charted the area. So the aquanauts in the Sea Lab 2 teams were both Navy personnel and scientists from Scripps. And there were other

additions too, such as Tuffy the dolphin, who was trained to deliver bottles of Coca-Cola to deliver letters his primary aim really was to find aquanauts that had been or who had potentially gotten lost so they would summon him with a acoustic signal and the idea was that he would go and swim to them and bring them back to the habitat so sea lab 2 is really a development of sea lab 1 in more trying conditions testing new scientific methods technologies testing the feasibility of enrolling marine mammals into the program and then sea lab 3 was again an extension of this so this was designed to be uh to a much much deeper depth so it was kind of sunk to around 190 meters again off the continental shelf of america but unfortunately that project ended

in tragedy with one of the acronauts barry cannon dying so effectively what happened as they sunk the habitat it was leaking profusely so bob bath and barry cannon were sent down to try and stem the flow from the inside they couldn't get the hatch open because the pressure differentials and it later transpired that the mixture that should get rid of carbon dioxide from their breathing equipment was missing in Barry Cannon's diving rig and so he tragically died trying to get the Sea Lab 3 habitat open and that kind of marked the end of the experiments but it had demonstrated as the Navy had hoped that the technique worked

that saturation diving was possible and Sea Lab 3 whilst it didn't take place they had developed all sorts of kind of undersea construction techniques that furthered the marine mammal program as well in preparation for SEALAB 3. So there were some kind of tangential things that the projects achieved, even though they came to a very tragic end. Sorry, that was a very long-winded answer to your question. No, that was tremendous.

I mean, there's a lot to cover between the three different experiments, and you brought Project Genesis into it as well. What role did the American idea of the frontier and the ongoing Cold War play in SEALAB's creation and evolution? So for me, I think the frontier was really, or the idea of the frontier and the practice of kind of frontiering was really crucial throughout the experiments. And I found through my research that the notion of the frontier in languages associated with this kind of ideological practice really shaped and framed how different actors and publics were understanding what C-Lab was and what it would do. So throughout the projects, we have people like George Bond, who was the kind of project lead and chief medical officer, invoking the likes of Columbus and Buffalo Bill and other kind of explorers who had broken into new territory, broken into new terrain. And he saw C-Lab as a kind of extension of that narrative and that it would take its place in this kind of grand history of exploration and frontiering.

And I think really interesting as well, thinking of the frontier in this case, not as this kind of flat thing to be moved across, but as something that is deep, something that has this kind of three-dimensional quality to it and all the complications that brings to environmental mastery. And you can see that coming through in lots of the newspaper reports as well. So reporters commenting on the Jules Verne-like quality of the undersea frontier, calling the aquanauts explorers of a dark world, aquanauts opening new frontiers, aquanauts as pioneers. All this language was really commonplace with, again, senior Navy personnel hoping that sea habitation would become as common as flight and other forms of exploration. And the language, I think, was really key to this in terms of, again, framing the frontier. So there's the project reports, the newspaper articles, George Bond's diaries, they're all listed with words like mastering, conquering, colonizing, imagining space as being this empty thing, awaiting the arrival of kind of the American man or the American pioneer to conquer it, even when it is far from empty. and this this had significant implications for how the project was perceived so people like Admiral Nelson and George Bond described the Aquanauts as men taking risks for all of mankind

they were seen as these kind of hardy warriors that were fearless just like those Americans that kind of expanded American territory into the west I think gender was really key to that as well so particularly in the minds of the government amidst the the politics of the Cold War they wanted not just through C-Lab but through other projects as well to really demonstrate that America was this kind of hardy masculine country and there's some really interesting work that explores some of those themes and how they came to permeate public discourse in the wake of things like Vietnam and other Cold War interventions where it was seen as a kind of failure of American of the American man C-Lab was one such avenue for kind of attacking the frontier and rehabilitating not rehabilitating

But I guess reasserting that the American mind could still undertake these exploratory, frontier-breaking endeavors. I apologize about the dog barking. No, no, not a problem at all. Like I said, it happens in more than you realize. Did any of your research include any of the sort of the popular culture stuff around C-Lab? Messing around with my phone here and realizing, oh, there was actually a television series in the 1970s that popularizing research that was going on. yeah so i think that's a really interesting question so i didn't pick up on i think it's called c-lab 2021 or something like that isn't it the cartoon series but i did explore a bit some

of the kind of ways that c-lab circulated within popular culture so paid quite a lot of attention to things like newspapers magazines but also i think interestingly exploring some of the links between people like george bond and other actors like jack who's the french diver who was friends with george bond and kind of friendly rivals i think and interestingly their kind of stories uh intersect and they became kind of what was known at the times like ocean boosters people who were calling for the age of the ocean calling for man to go down into the ocean i think jack christos has something like that you know the the age of the ocean is yet to come and it is vital that we go into the ocean to the future of the human race and all of this kind of language so i

think there were some really interesting ways that the popular, the scientific and the military kind of intersected and collided. And certainly in the public videos that you can watch online produced at the time about C-Lab 1 and 2, there were actors involved in narrating those. It was very much a kind of coming together of the popular, the military and the scientific to get the word out there about C-Lab. You mentioned George Bond a couple of times here. So Captain George Bond was the primary steward for C-Lab and today we call him a program manager but who is Bond and how would you describe his approach to C-Lab? So I found George Bond a really fascinating character and a lot of the information I got was from his diaries or his chronicles that at the

Man in the Sea Museum so he kept logs of C-Lab 1, 2 and 3 you know and each day of the experiments but they weren't really it might not have been a formal military log but I expect it to be much more kind of factual and this happened at this time but it's littered with very kind of very kind of grand language and it's written in a really kind of engaging way that that frames him as this kind of experimental dreamer who really believed in his mission as being this kind of divinely ordained kind of march to the ocean so george bond yeah he was the kind of one of the key protagonists of sea lab the chief medical officer and and he kind of managed the projects from Genesis to C-Lab 3.

He was originally, I think, a GP from North Carolina, but he came to be the senior medical officer in C-Lab, I think, through his Navy career. I don't know how much he believed his diaries would be read publicly. So one of the questions I've been asked before is, was he writing for an audience

and was he kind of playing up to the audience with some of the language that he used? I was going to ask that, but yes. That might change the reading of it, but certainly either way, it makes for a very interesting reading. And he certainly kind of, Brings a lot of colour to the Sea Lab project.

Writing about them, as I said, is this kind of extension of his Christian faith. And he would deliver church services to the aquanauts on the seafloor. He would describe the project as a kind of new and proper gospel that he believed should take place. And certainly he was responsible for the naming of Project Genesis, believing that this was a step towards man mastering the sea. And Bob Hellworth writes really nicely about that and the links between Genesis in the Bible and George Bond's kind of attitude towards the projects. I think he's an interesting character as well, because he, again, maybe surprisingly to me as someone that's not in the military, he was very affectionately seen by his aquanauts. He was known as Papa Topside quite quickly throughout the experiment. So they dropped Captain Bond in his official title.

And he's widely seen throughout the Navy diving community as the father of saturation diving. And he's still widely revered within that community. And certainly when I went to visit the Experimental Diving Unit and Aquarius Reef Base, which is an undersea habitat that still exists off the coast of Florida, George Bond's image looms large in those places as being a kind of founder of that diving technique of pushing Navy diving to new levels and new extremes. What difficulties did the aquanauts face domesticating the seafloor? I think that's another really interesting question, because I think for most people, or at least, again, I'm not sure if people who listen to this who have been in the Navy might think very differently. But for me, the idea of making a home on the seafloor seems ridiculous, and I don't know how anyone would begin to think about domesticating a space like that. But the idea of home was really key and central to the idea of the frontier and this whole mastery agenda and language that permeated through the projects.

And I think the reason for this is that it's one thing to go down to the seafloor and prove that you can develop the technique of saturation diving, but it's another to bring home comforts there. It's another to have hot water running in an undersea habitat on the continental shelf of the US. And the media reported on this a lot. So they would comment on the home comforts that the men experienced and really emphasize the fact that, you know, these aquanauts weren't just living there, they could thrive there. And that was seen as the kind of ultimate mastery of that space. And certainly images of people like Scott Carpenter, who was formerly an astronaut, but who became an aquanaut in his dressing gown in the habitat, kind of fed into that narrative. I think there was lots of challenges as well. And as much as the media kind of reported that it was like home, that, you know, the men would go on excursions to their backyard, which was obviously the sea and the underwater environment. There was lots of challenges as well. So in Sea Lab 2, for example, they couldn't really see very well because the sediment was kind of shrouding their vision, reducing their vision to kind of a hand in front of their face at times.

So there was all kinds of kind of material challenges. They saw in Sea Lab 3, there apparently, there's a photo of this, I think, in Life magazine, they were trying to develop a spray that they could spray along the seafloor that would form a kind of plastic rug on the sediment. which I think shows quite how much times have changed you would never have a scheme that was injecting plastic into the sea I don't think these days even just to yeah keep keep the sediment down but there were lots of other other challenges as well obviously it's a very cold environment if you're going out to work and live in the sea and they had all sorts of problems maintaining their body temperature both inside and outside the habitat there were lots of physical challenges as well so you can imagine that if you're living in a container that is exposed to the sea it

it's very humid so this led to all kinds of infections bacterial problems ear infections skin rashes so there's all kinds of things that kind of meant that they weren't really as at home as the media might like to report and certainly that the air they were breathing was a key challenge to this as well obviously if you're breathing an air mixture that's predominantly helium i'm sure we've all experienced or heard people talking with a helium voice it's very difficult to understand so i think whilst they adapted to understanding each other those on the surface had a lot of problems trying to decipher what they were saying the psychologists found it very difficult who was trying to study um what they were doing what they were saying to each

other uh very tricky and there was all the concerns about the technology as well so the psychological reports after sea lab reported that the men were very aware that their breathing equipment outside the habitat could malfunction at any time they were constantly listening to the sound of their breathing and the sound of their equipment whilst also being extremely careful not to suddenly descend ascend sorry to the surface which would be fatal uh to them at that depth so they were weighted down to the seafloor but not so much that they were just touching the seafloor because yeah there was all sorts of challenges with that as well including poisonous fish and other kind of stresses and i guess the only other challenge well there's many many others probably

In terms of domesticating, I think it was interesting. I'm sure they never felt completely at home, given the amount of testing that their bodies came under. So they were constantly observed by psychologists. They were giving samples of every bodily fluid and product you can imagine to people on the surface very regularly, because Navy doctors and Navy personnel were really trying to ascertain what the effects of this environment will be on the human body. So one of the more interesting challenges that I wanted to ask specifically about was, you know, you talked about trying to apply the layer of plastic over the silt because the silt was just a constant challenge for them from a visibility standpoint. One of the other more interesting ones I found out was the navigation challenges and navigating the seafloor because the seafloor changes in a way that you and I don't expect walking around on land. I expect if I'm going to walk from my home down my block, I'm going to see the same 11 landmarks in the same spot as I make that journey.

But that is not the case on the C4. And I think that's a really important point. Particularly in C-Lab 2, I think it was obviously something they were aware of in C-Lab 1 with Bermuda, but vision wasn't as much of an issue. But certainly they described being outside in C-Lab 2 as like being in a curtain of silt. Like it was just all encompassing around them. And so in order to orientate themselves, they really had to be aware of where the habitat was to follow distinct lines away from the habitat. Because, yeah, the environment was shifting all the time. And they knew this beforehand because of studies that had been done by Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

And George Bond, I think, commented at one time that they were never entirely sure of the exact precise location of sea lab because they'd think they'd be stationed above it. But then they'd find they weren't quite stationed above it. And yeah, all sorts of kind of interesting spatial and temporal dynamics that occur as the environment shifts and moves and creates all kinds of challenges for the people living there, but also for the people on the surface as well. But there were interesting dynamics that complicated that too. So George Bond, for example, said that one of his key concerns of the project was the idea of the breakaway phenomenon, which has its roots in aerospace and is the idea that when pilots are undertaking certain maneuvers in the sky, they might become disorientated and not know which way was up and which way was down. And he wrote that he was concerned that the aquanauts would experience something of this and start feeling a bit too at home on the seafloor in terms of seeing themselves as sea dwellers, seeing people on the surface as surface dwellers, the lines of communication and command breaking down at times, the aquanauts kind of disregarding borders because there was this sense that they were separate, that they were kind of different to what was going on on the surface. And obviously, no one could go down and tell them off or kind of assert their authority over what they were doing. So there's lots of interesting dynamics, I think, that come out when you delve deeper into the material.

What were the physiological effects of living in C-Lab? They were all kind of minutely measured and monitored by the people on the surface. There was some really kind of bizarre ones. So they found that for the first three days, at least, I think it was. And they believed it was a result of breathing helium, that the men moved much more slowly, that they undertook activities much more slowly and that the speed of their bodies had almost kind of slowed down. And there were lots of theories about why that would be, whether it's George Bond, I think, wrote that maybe it could be their bodies kind of subconsciously saving energy in response to an external threat, which would be just the environment as a whole. at least it could have been again the helium atmosphere but there were some more obvious ones as well like i said about the skin rashes the ear infections the the inability sometimes

to maintain body temperature so i think they called it paradoxical shivering where they would come in from the outside environment feel warmer in the sea lab habitat but still be violently shaking with the cold because of the again i think it's because of the helium atmosphere because it transfers heat so much quicker than normal air and i did find i think some levels of hearing lost but these weren't maintained uh after after when when they came back to the surface but certainly had quite profound effects on their internal physiologies as well so they found that their stress levels were raised throughout the duration of the projects whether they would publicly say that was an extremely stressful experience or not their bodies were responding

in a way that suggested that it definitely was as you can imagine i don't know the many people who wouldn't find that slightly stressful absolutely uh just time for one final question How did C-Lab support eventual space exploration? I think a really interesting and exciting dynamic of the project and I think an important legacy. So around the C-Lab projects converged lots of different spaces. So some of the C-Lab engineers and medical officers were looking to reports from Antarctica to see how people there had coped with wintering in an extreme environment and an isolated one. And also, NASA then became interested in C-Lab as a means to kind of understand how groups of people would behave around like a space station, how people would behave, how they would cope with being isolated. And crucially, with the depth that C-Lab was at, it's a context like outer space, I guess, slightly less extreme.

So they couldn't just return to surface and they couldn't just come to a hospital. Just as in a space station, you can't just suddenly nip to the doctor's if something goes wrong. So NASA became interested in the project during C-Lab 2 and started funding components of it. Scott Carpenter, as I mentioned, had previously been an astronaut and they did things like stage a conversation, a telephone conversation between C-Lab, the C-Lab 2 habitat and Gemini circulating above outer space. After the C-Lab projects finished, these interests kept going. So NASA and a couple of other agencies, along with the Navy, funded a series of projects called Tektite, which were another set of undersea habitat projects kind of less risky i guess because

they were less experimental at that stage because they had established that this could work but they were really pushing the duration of those experiments to i guess mimic those really testing uh the kind of physiology of the people involved trialing an all-female team also really banal things that we would take for granted so thinking about what the color of things inside the habitat would mean it put that you know people kept getting irritated by this piece of tape that had been put on the floor. So we're thinking about the placement of objects and how if you're going to send someone to outer space,

you need to make the environment one that doesn't irritate people and doesn't kind of cause little gripes that are going to constantly grind on people's sense of peace and well-being, I guess. And there's still some kind of links to outer space I think are really interesting. So I mentioned the Aquarius off the coast of Florida and the US Navy used that to train,

but so do astronauts who are going to go to the space station. So they spend, I think it's like three weeks, I think, in the Aquarius reef base, undertaking various kind of spacewalks, which are obviously in the water. They sometimes mimic the timing of a conversation from the habitat to kind of simulate the timings of the conversation and that they would mimic. If a control room, for example, was speaking to someone on the space station, they would keep those same timeframes from the habitat to the surface. So there's interesting dynamics there in terms of how these spaces continue to fuel the idea or fuel imaginaries of living beyond Earth as well as within its depths. I'd like to thank my guest, Rachel Squire. Rachel, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So, yeah, thank you very much for your time and for listening. So I'm on Twitter at Squire Rachel and by Squire Royal Holloway.

Hopefully my name should come up. So I'm currently working on a couple of things. So one project I'm looking into beginning is exploring the kind of geopolitical imaginary, I guess, of John Lilly, who was a Cold War scientist working with dolphins and had some wacky ideas about how if he could talk to dolphins, maybe we could talk to extraterrestrials when they were eventually discovered in outer space. So, again, those linkages being really interesting and compelling. And then also another project, thinking more forward in time, taking, I guess, some of the optimism and narratives around Sea Lab, but thinking about how people are imagining living well with water in the future. Obviously, our planet's becoming increasingly watery, having to engage with water and the sea in new ways. So I'm interested in exploring how kind of architects, writers, governments are imagining living with water in the future. Well, thank you for joining us, the listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Thank you. ¶¶