To Build a Bigger Ditch

On 18 December 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that the United States had decided to proceed with plans to build a sea-level canal in Central America or Colombia linking the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The new sea-level canal, proposed by the President to replace the Panama Canal, would eliminate the traffic jams in world commerce that have been building up on the present Canal. The one-time engineering marvel of the world has been growing old, and the limiting locks and channels will soon be inadequate for the needs of world commerce. The locks that lift and lower vessels for the 50-mile crossing cannot handle more than 50 to 60 ships a day, and some have to wait as long as 15 hours for their turn. An 8-million- dollar project begun in 1959 will widen Gaillard Cut from its present 300 feet to 500 feet and thus help to speed up ship traffic. But some 550 of the world’s newest freighters and tankers cannot traverse with a full load; another 50 such ships, plus 24 of our newer naval vessels are too big to get through at all. Notwithstanding a 150-million-dollar modernization program, it is estimated that the ship traffic will exceed the capacity of the present canal by 1980.

Traffic capacity with a sea-level canal would be virtually unlimited and transit time would be greatly reduced along with operation costs. The canal could be operated by a relatively small number of men—about 1,000 men, as contrasted with 14,000 men employed by the present Canal and few of these would need to be skilled. It would be far less vulnerable to sabotage and wartime attack. It has been estimated that a sea-level canal would be knocked out by a nuclear missile for only a week or two, while the Panama Canal with its locks would be out of operation for from four to seven years.

The United States and Panama announced jointly on 24 September 1965 that general areas of agreement had been reached on the following points:

• Abrogation of the 1903 treaty.

• Recognition of Panama’s sovereignty over the area of the present Canal Zone.

• Termination of the new treaty after a specified number of years; or on the date of the opening of the sea level canal, whichever occurs first.

• Provision for appropriate political, economic, and social integration of the area used in the canal operation with the rest of the Republic of Panama.

• Appropriate arrangements to ensure that other rights and the interests of all the employees serving in the operation of the canal are safeguarded.

Furthermore, President Johnson stated that the United States will make studies and site surveys of possible routes in Panama for the sea-level canal. Negotiations are continuing with respect to the methods and the conditions of financing, constructing, and operating such a canal which, like the present Canal, should be open at all times to vessels of all nations on a non-discriminatory basis. It is anticipated that U. S. forces and military facilities will be maintained under a base-rights and status-of-forces agreement.*

From the technical point of view, there are five possible sites for the new canal, three in Panama, one in Colombia, and one along the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border.

One of the three Panama locations is the site of the present canal. Only ten miles longer than the shortest of the routes, it would require less excavation than the others since much of the waterway already exists. There would also be a ready supply in Panama City of labor, machinery, necessary housing, and installations. If the present site is chosen, nuclear explosions for canal construction probably would be impossible because of the density of population in the area.

Panama is the one country that really wants the canal and is desperate to get it. Panama is hopeful that the new sea-level canal with its simplicity of operation will do away with the irritants of the past. If only 1,000 employees are needed to operate a sea-level canal, there will be no necessity for a zone such as now flanks the Panama Canal. The new canal will be subject to Panamanian law and taxes. And Panama hopes it will get a greater share of canal revenues if the waterway runs through its territories. The cost would be high because conventional excavation methods on the old canal would be necessary—cost estimates run between two billion and three billion dollars. The present canal, completed in 1914, cost 380 million dollars.

Panama now receives nearly 85 million dollars annually from the ten-mile wide Canal Zone—1.9 million dollars in direct U. S. payments, the rest from U. S. wages paid to Panamanians, U. S. purchases in Panama, and spending by Zone residents. If a new canal were cut through a remote area like Darien, the country would feel the pinch almost at once and the United States would have to make some arrangements to cushion this loss.

The canal is Panama’s largest industry and its largest employer, and the withdrawal of the United States would be a catastrophe for the Panamanians. Compensation payments by the United States seem almost inescapable as part of the price that would have to be paid for abandonment of the existing canal route. Panama considers the Isthmus to be their country’s sole natural resource and sees no need for it to be internationalized. Should the site of the old canal not be used, it could be made into an economic asset, also. It has fresh water power (enough is used for the locks and canals in one day to supply a city of a half-million people for a month) and untapped hydroelectric potentials.

It is imperative for Panama to move into an improved economic and social climate. Though two-thirds of the population live in rural areas, choice land is unused. Panama imports one-eighth of her food. Half the usable land is owned by one per cent of the landowners. Squatters who operate 90 per cent of the land units have no land tenure and raise only enough for their families. The fact is that political and economic power has long been controlled by one or 2 per cent of the population.

President Robles is well aware of this situation when he writes, “The Panama Canal helps our economy. It would be impossible to try to separate the Panama economy from the Panama Canal. But we are trying to create an economy which does not lean so heavily on the canal. We do not want to be independent of the Panama Canal because Panama will have to supply many things to the Panama Canal. What we do want is to so improve our economy that we could be self-supporting even without the canal. I want to stimulate agriculture, the cattle industry, and small business in the interior provinces, and to improve education, sanitation, and health facilities throughout the interior regions.” In addition to the ten million dollars in loans received from the United States during the first weeks of President Robles’ administration, the Alliance for Progress has advanced aid to the social and economic development of the interior of Panama.

Dr. Diogenes de la Rosa, economist and chief Panamanian negotiator in current discussions with the United States describes the plight of Panama with this explanation: “If the sea-level canal is constructed in Panama, there will be about ten years of great financial prosperity with a massive flow of foreign money, but after that period the income from foreign countries will diminish radically. We Panamanians must utilize this period of canal construction to create our own national economy entirely separate from dependence on the canal. We must reorganize our economy to a self-sustaining position.” Major reforms and unprecedented regulations by the Panamanian government would be necessary to bring about such a change.

The site at San Bias, Panama, is at the narrowest part of the middle American isthmus. It is only 40 miles long as against 50 for the existing canal. Using nuclear explosives it would cost 620 million dollars. Conventional means of excavation are estimated at 6.3 billion dollars. But the San Bias site is only 35 miles east of the present canal and experts are concerned as to whether fallout would prevent the use of nuclear force.

Another big question about the canal project is whether use of nuclear explosives would violate the test-ban treaty which bars underground explosions if any radioactive debris falls outside a national frontier. An initial difficulty to be solved—after first persuading the signatories of the nuclear test ban treaty to agree—would be to convince the people who live on the isthmus that the nuclear experts really know what they are talking about when they say it will be safe.

At the moment, the most favored site is the so-called Sasardi-Morti route (Caledonia Bay) 110 miles east of the present canal through the thinly populated Darien peninsula of Panama. This route, 58 miles long with a four-lane sea-level waterway, would require blasting with nuclear explosives through a divide 1,100 feet high and, at 329 million dollars, is the cheapest of the presently considered routes. It would cost about one-third that of conventional excavation.

The Atrato-Truando site in Colombia is believed to be another good possibility. Since it is remote from population centers, nuclear explosives could be used to excavate more than half of its approximately 100-mile route. The estimated cost using a combination of conventional and nuclear means varies from 1 to 1.5 billion dollars. Conventional digging would be about 4.6 billion dollars.

The 140-mile Nicaraguan-Costa Rican canal would be too expensive to build, for a combination of nuclear and conventional means would run from 1.8 to 2.2 billion dollars. But this route is considered mostly a reserve possibility in case Panama does not come through with a suitable political agreement.

Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec once was considered as a possible site for a canal, but the Mexicans have said if it were to be built they would do it themselves. A nuclear canal would cost 2.25 billion dollars for the 150- mile distance. A lock canal constructed by conventional means at that site would cost an estimated 13 billion dollars.

For a sea-level canal like the Sasardi-Morti, atomic energy experts propose to plant nuclear explosives of varying yields in a row stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific across Central America. Holes for the charges would be drilled 800 feet at sea level and 2,600 feet or more in the mountain areas. Starting from each coast, they would be set off in strings, about 15 at a time, to create a smooth, continuous trench 1,000 feet wide and 250 feet deep. Although debris would be hurled out at the side during the blasts, 90 per cent of the lethal radioactivity would remain trapped within resolidified rock beneath the channel. But there is still controversy among the scientists on these technical matters. Dr. Herbert York, physicist at the University of California, states that fallout could be minimized, but that it would take special nuclear explosives and special methods of emplacement which would be costly in time and money, and the amount of fallout would be difficult to verify. Moreover, he believes the A.E.C. greatly exaggerates how cheap this method would be.

While theory and small tests indicate nuclear blasts can be used, the technology still remains to be developed. Project Plowshare, the nation’s program to develop a nuclear- explosives technology for peaceful purposes, still has to face these problems: how to blast a crater whose sides will not collapse, how to get proper crater size in different materials, how to control the effects of simultaneous blasting of several craters in a row, and how to control radiation.

An interesting viewpoint is suggested by Democratic Representative Chet Holifield of California who states the case for international control of the new canal:

An international consortium of nuclear and non-nuclear nations could perfect an agreement with only slight modifications of the existing treaty ban against atmospheric testing. Such an agreement will be justified on the basis of self-interest for each participating nation and the benefits to their commercial shipping. All nations, including the site nation could be part of this international consortium. The nation furnishing the site for the canal could furnish the land as their part of the capital investment, and of course should share equitably in the financial benefits from the canal. Such participation would remove any basis for charges of imperialism by a small nation against any single large nation, such as is now occurring in our relations with the country of Panama.

A modernized sea-level canal will be of tremendous importance to the trade of the entire world and to the defense of the Western Hemisphere. By eliminating as much as 9,000 miles of ocean distances, the Panama Canal gives U. S. industries access to raw materials and markets that might be otherwise prohibitively expensive. Five per cent of all the world’s shipping goes through the canal and the total tonnage of this shipping is increasing annually. The United States, even with a dwindling merchant marine, is the largest user of the Canal. About 60 per cent of all commerce passing through the Canal originates in or is destined for the United States. Millions of tons of oil move from coast to coast, and such strategic raw materials as tin, lead, zinc, manganese, and copper—all essential to the economy of the United States in peace and war—-pass through the Canal. Manufactured goods, automobiles, paper and paper products, chemicals, and machinery flow from the East Coast to Australia, the Far East, and to our West Coast. Today, some 50 per cent of Japan’s exports to the West pass through the Canal; such South American nations as Ecuador, Peru, and Chile depend on it for between 75 per cent and 90 per cent of their total imports and exports. The average cargo ship between New York and San Francisco saves about 20 days of steaming and a cost of $50,000 by using the Canal. Over the last ten years, commercial traffic has doubled from 36,000,000 tons annually to about 72,200,000 tons annually, with more than 12,000 vessels a year making the 50-mile transit. An all-time performance record was made in fiscal year 1966 when commercial cargo of 81,500,000 tons passed through the Panama Canal.

The Canal is still of great importance to the security of the United States in spite of the fact that the size of the Canal’s locks (110 feet wide) preclude its use by the Navy’s largest ships, including many of the newest aircraft carriers. This importance is based on the fact that other Navy ships including the modern nuclear submarines, the new missile cruisers, modern frigates, amphibious ships, and the new antisubmarine warfare vessels, can be transitted through the Canal, thereby providing quick interchangeability from ocean to ocean. It should be remembered that fighting ships were shifted from ocean to ocean through the Canal in World War II, supplies for the Korean war were transported from Southern and East Coast ports via the Canal, and the war in South Vietnam is being supplied in large measure through the Canal. At the time of the Cuban crisis in 1962, thousands of Marines and an amphibious force traversed the Canal from California to the Caribbean area. The Panama Canal is still a transportation artery and short cut between the Atlantic and Pacific; it is of key importance in a Cold War crisis or any non-nuclear or limited conflict.

American engineers are now surveying the jungles of Panama and Colombia for a new sea-level canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The engineers have now finished the first phase of their surveys, and U. S. diplomats continue to work toward agreement on new treaties governing the operation of the present Canal and defining the conditions under which a new canal would be built.

But the diplomatic problems appear greater than the engineering ones at the present time. A certain amount of diplomatic intrigue is in evidence between Panama and Colombia. This is best illustrated by the recent announcement that Colombia has decided to proceed with construction of a hydroelectric seaway project that would provide a canal with limited capacity between the Gulf of Uraba on the Caribbean and the Bay of Malaga on the Pacific.

The Colombian proposal suggests that by spending 500 million dollars to build a 100- mile-long interim canal in Colombia, it would be possible to drain the present Panama Canal and thus reduce the cost of converting it into a sea-level canal from an estimated two billion dollars down to around one billion dollars. Thus, with a savings of 500 million dollars, Colombia could develop some useful hydroelectric projects, and in turn, Panama and the United States would get a sea-level canal. But at this point there is no sound engineering data on the feasibility, much less the cost of constructing a sea-level canal. Currently the United States is holding off on treaty discussions with Colombia until it sees the outcome of the negotiations with Panama.

Congress has authorized $17,500,000 for a commission to spend in a three-year study of how, when, and where to dig a sea-level canal. This five-man canal commission, headed by Robert B. Anderson, former Secretary of the Navy and of the Treasury, is scheduled to report to the President on 30 June 1968. Negotiations for construction rights could consume another two to five more years. In other words, it could well be ten years before actual construction on a sea- level canal is begun. The final selection of a route, however, is not likely to be made just on the basis of distance, cost, and engineering factors. Political considerations will be heavily involved. It is indeed a foregone conclusion that no Latin American country today would grant the United States exclusive control and sovereignty over the canal area as Panama did back in 1903.

It has been suggested that the canal be placed under international control with the United States handling operation and maintenance through a management contract. But, as some experts indicate, this idea of handing over to international control a new canal that would be important for the local economy and U. S. security could well encounter stiff resistance, both in Central America and here at home. A major aim would be to assure that the canal was run for the benefit of all seafaring powers and that rates for using it were reasonable. But how would a new, internationalized, two-ocean canal work under present circumstances? A United Nations canal would never work subject to a Soviet veto on any point, or even worse, to Assembly decisions taken by a majority of impotent anti-colonial nations. The United Nations has become too unwieldy and uncertain for the trusteeship of a canal in the Western Hemisphere. An OAS body in charge, with its present instability, would not function promptly or well, and there is the problem of the states being willing to provide a substantial part of the cost of the project. Responsible Panamanians have indicated that they do not want international control of the sea- level canal—neither by the United Nations nor the Organization of American States.

The future of Latin American relations with the United States may hinge in part on how President Johnson deals with the canal problem. Edgar Ansel Mowrer evaluates the various negotiations in this fashion: “The best arrangement for any new canal across the American Isthmus will be bilateral, generous to the host country but leaving decisions concerning defense exclusively in the hands of Washington.” Meanwhile negotiations continue for the sea-level canal.