Four months ago, eight environmental groups filed suit in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia in an attempt to block the underground detonation by the Atomic Energy Commission of a five-megaton nuclear warhead on Amchitka, an island in the Aleutian chain off Alaska. On Saturday, November 6, after numerous rulings from the district and appellate courts below, the groups came very close to convincing the Supreme Court that it should issue an 11th-hour order restraining the Commission from proceeding with the test, which was code-named "Project Cannikin." The groups relied primarily on the assertion that the Commission had failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, although they had also alleged violations of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, various statutes designed to protect wildlife, and the rights under the Fifth and Ninth Amendments of citizens endangered by the blast. Consequently, the seven court decisions in the Cannikin litigation focus upon the sufficiency of the environmental impact statement that the Commission prepared under §102(2)(C) of NEPA and upon the discovery proceedings through which plaintiffs attempted to show that existing scientific analyses, which had been requested by the government and classified secret by it, cast considerable doubt on the accuracy of Commission's statement of the risks that Project Cannikin presented.

The eventual loss before the Supreme Court, the subsequent uneventful detonation of the device, and the more-focused and case-oriented analysis of the ELR Comment that follows should not be allowed to overshadow the importance for NEPA of the Cannikin litigation. It is significant that the plaintiff groups were allowed to appear at all before a special Saturday session of the court (requested by the Chief Justice just hours before the blast) to challenge a major nuclear test of allegedly vital importance to national security, which Congress had debated and the president had personally ordered to go ahead, on the ground that the act required the Commission to use the §102 process for informing Congress, executive decisionmakers, and the public of the full range of environmental risks that the project posed. The litigation, it must be stressed, was not a loss for NEPA. Rather, even though they narrowly failed to obtain the relief requested, the environmental groups conducted a litigation the net result of which, whatever the merit of specific holdings, is a warning to federal agencies that NEPA may not be cast aside, even in the circumstances of Project Cannikin, nor may agencies alone determine what their impact statements must contain.