My grandmother was born in (the now gone) Foy, Minnesota, which was right around [here]. She claims that as a child the airforce bombed the swamp next to her house, which is now the Red Lake Peatland Scientific and Natural Area. She claims that after a few years of bombing they dropped between one and three nuclear bombs in one bombing. For the longest time I didn't believe her but then I found this article published by the Minnesota Department of Resources magazine http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/mcvmagazine/issues/2016/jan-feb/big-bog-SRA.html.
My questions are:
How reliable is this magazine and where can I find corroborating primary sources. I don't have JSTOR, archival, and research librarian access any more which is where I would have started.
The magazine seems to suggest that more than one bomb was dropped but that they didn't have their nuclear cores. The magazine states that the detonation was visible from International Falls which I confirmed with another octogenarian from the Falls. It also states that the detention created a sizable, "lake." My suspicion is that in order to be visible from 70mi away that the bombs would have had to have their cores. Is this true and where can I find more precise specifications on the bombs.
The bombs were dropped on lands abutting the Red Lake Indian Reservation. How common was it to test nuclear devices near tribal land?
What is the risk to lake and the people who lived in that area? Is there a national registry of cancer rates or something like that?
There were no nuclear tests in Minnesota.
The high-explosives components of a Mark IV nuclear weapon weighted in at about 2 tons of TNT. That's pretty big. It's 10,000X less powerful than if the nuclear cores were inside (20,000 tons of TNT). So if they did test those there (I have never heard of such a thing), they would still be pretty big bangs by the standards that most people are used to dealing with. They did non-nuclear testing of such weapons at a variety of places during the Cold War.
I'm extremely dubious of the numbers quoted in the article. To have a blast wave capable of breaking windows 25 miles away (which is around 1-2 psi of overpressure), you would need a bomb with about 7 megatons of explosive power. You would know if something like that went off domestically — it could not be hidden or minimized. I am dubious as well about 70 miles away — generally line-of-sight is a lot shorter than that. (My estimate is that on a clear day, from the top of the Freedom Tower — the tallest building in the Western hemisphere — you can see maybe 30 miles.) All of these numbers seem rather arbitrary and inflated.
Now it is possible that there may be some freak occurrences where lesser yields could produce long-range blast effects (e.g. reflecting off an inversion layer in the atmosphere, as happened with the first Soviet megaton-range nuclear detonation), but even then you are talking about ranges in the millions of tons of TNT.
It strikes me as entirely plausible that ballistic and conventional testing relating to nuclear weapons could have happened there for the climactic reasons mentioned in the article. But they were not nuclear tests and I doubt the effects were as stated.