The Firecracker Boys

[He] told how the navy had searched the world for a test site and had determined that Bikini was the best.

—Robert C. Kistte, on how the Marshall Islands’ Military Governor convinced Bikinians of the need for weapons tests there

On July 14, 1958, Edward Teller, now director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and his entourage from Livermore landed unannounced in Juneau, the seat of the Alaska territorial government and, according to guidebooks, perhaps the most beautiful of American capital cities. Coming from the flat pastureland and dry rolling hills of the Livermore valley, they must have been impressed with this place where a rain forest of mammoth conifers straddles saltwater channels. The waterfront may have reminded them of San Francisco, with its racket of swooping gulls and smells of fish and creosote and diesel; with its wet streets, lined with curio shops and bars, rising to Victorian-era wood-frame houses stuck into the hillside. Most people visiting Juneau for the first time would pick up on the West Coast flavor of the place, but would be unprepared for the scale of things. The hillside rose to a mountainside so steep that in places long flights of stairs serve as streets. And the gusts here were not the mild breezes off San Francisco Bay, but instead carried down through the dank cedar and spruce the cold bite of the Taku Glacier thousands of feet above.

If Teller and his physicists from Livermore were not prepared for Alaska, neither were territorial officials prepared for them. For a start, no one knew they were coming. The legislature, not then in session, had dispersed throughout the territory, and Gov. Mike Stepovich was in the Lower Forty-eight at the time. Half of Teller’s group scrambled to set up a news conference, imposing on the Department of Health to round up business leaders and people from government agencies. They also set up a presentation to the Rotary Club for the next day. The other half of the party flew on to Anchorage to address the chamber of commerce there.

At his Juneau press conference, Teller said he had come to unveil a proposal known inside the AEC as “Project Chariot.” The idea was to create an instant deepwater harbor at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska by simultaneously detonating several thermonuclear bombs. Seventy million cubic yards of earth-moving would be accomplished instantly, as the sea rushed in to fill a keyhole-shaped crater. “We looked at the whole world—almost the whole world,” he said, not mentioning his own criterion that the site must be in U.S. territory, “and tried to pick a spot where we could most effectively demonstrate the peaceful uses of [nuclear] energy.” On the basis of a preliminary study, Teller said, “the excavation of a harbor in Alaska, to open an area to possible great development, would do the job.”

The audiences Teller addressed in Juneau, and later in Anchorage and Fairbanks, liked the economic development angle of the peculiar project. Alaskans were troubled by a postwar economic decline and hopeful that statehood, which had just passed Congress and was to take effect the following January, might bring an increased flow of federal dollars to the new state. Federal spending—most of it military spending—had accounted for 60 percent of all jobs in Alaska prior to 1957. After that date, however, spending for military purposes declined dramatically. Mindful of Alaskans’ concerns, Teller described a range of economic advantages that would attend the project. He said that the AEC would be spending $5 million on the harbor, “two-thirds in labor and things we will buy here.” Moreover, the employment of many Alaskans in construction activities was only the short-term benefit. The real payoff would come when the harbor began to export “the largest deposits of highest quality proven coal deposits in Alaska,” which he said were adjacent to Cape Thompson. Alaska’s “black diamonds can pay off better than its gold ever did or will,” said Teller. The fishing industry would also profit. According to AEC press handouts, commercial fishing in the Chukchi Sea had “been impeded by the lack of a safe haven.”

But the Alaska businessmen and government officials, confirmed developers though they were, could not see the utility of a harbor at Cape Thompson some 300 miles north of Nome. They pointed out that the harbor would be ice-locked by the frozen Chukchi Sea for nine months of the year. Still, as men who had spent long years beating back the wilderness, they weren’t about to turn down a free offer to move dirt. They suggested alternatives: a canal excavated through the Alaska Peninsula near Port Moller would shorten by 400 miles the shipping lanes to Bristol Bay, the world’s richest fishing grounds. If the AEC and Livermore had to have a harbor, there was a bona fide need for one in Norton Sound to serve Nome. And even with the short shipping season on the Arctic coast, a harbor that could serve Umiat, where oil was known to exist, would be more useful than one at Cape Thompson.

If Teller was caught off guard by the Alaskans’ strong opinions, he adjusted immediately. “I’m delighted. This is just the type of suggestion and objection we are looking for,” he said. “We came here to be partners with you, and because we want suggestions.” Teller downplayed his interest in performing an experiment and emphasized his interest in doing useful public works: “We want not just a hole in the ground, but something that will be used. If this project isn’t feasible, what else can we undertake?” Everywhere they spoke, Teller and his colleagues stressed that whatever project the AEC selected, it “must stand on its own economic feet over a long range period.” He reassured his audiences that “the blast will not be performed unless it can be economically justified.”

Before leaving Juneau, however, Teller tried once more to salvage the economic argument for a harbor at Cape Thompson. On the morning of July 15, 1958, he tried to recruit Dr. George Rogers, a longtime Alaskan and Harvard-trained economist, as an adviser for the project.

[Teller] invited me to breakfast . . . he gave me the pitch again. . . . Then I said well, the Native people, they depend on the sea mammals and the caribou. He said well, they’re going to have to change their way of life. I said what are they going to do? Well, he said, when we have the harbor we can create coal mines in the Arctic, and they can become coal miners.

Rogers was not eager to advise Eskimos to abandon an economy and culture rooted in gathering food from the land and sea for low-wage work and the expectation of black lung disease. Nor was he likely to be comforted by assurances that the AEC had a great deal of experience in relocating people. The tragic experience of the Marshall Islanders, whom the AEC had uprooted for atomic testing in the Pacific, had been widely reported in the popular press. Rogers shifted the focus of the discussion to economics, mentioning the short shipping season, and remembers Teller’s reaction: “He said we’ll just have to create warehouses and tank farms to retain these things until the season opens.” When Rogers noted that the coal deposits the physicists seemed to be referring to were on the back side of the Brooks Range, hundreds of miles from the proposed harbor site, Teller said it was not a problem, a railroad would be built. Agape, Rogers asked if Teller had any idea what these things would cost to construct in the Arctic. “By this point he realized I was not the economist he wanted, so he changed the subject totally and said time is running out, where would you advise me to buy my souvenirs?”

Though Teller managed to convey his ignorance of such things as the length of the shipping season, the location of mineral deposits, and construction problems in the Arctic, these issues had been covered in an economic study Livermore had commissioned from the E. J. Longyear Company some months earlier. Longyear, a mining concern that held Livermore contracts for drilling at the Nevada Test Site, was hired to analyze the “economical mineral potential of Alaska between Point Barrow and Nome.” Its report, prepared in just nine weeks’ time and without the benefit of travel to Alaska, concluded:

Most of the valuable mineral resources will be in the form of bulky material, namely oil and coal. These, in order to be economic, must be produced in large tonnages, put aboard relatively large ships, which in turn require a large harbor and facilities.

The Longyear report suggested a harbor with a “minimum basin area of 6,000 by 3,000 feet.” It also cautioned that “the effect of ice on navigation to the north of Icy Cape is considerably greater than the effect to the south.” In the course of their study, therefore, Longyear researchers had decided that the harbor should be far enough north to be near known North Slope oil deposits (though the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field, nearly 500 miles northeast of Cape Thompson, had not yet been discovered), and near some North Slope coal deposits, but that it should be south of Icy Cape. Increasingly, they had begun to zero in on the area around Cape Thompson, and LRL had advised Dave Hopkins and his group at USGS to restrict their study to the stretch of coast between Cape Thompson and Cape Seppings.

• • •

While Teller was still in Juneau, two of his associates spoke to a chamber of commerce-sponsored meeting in Anchorage and told the audience there that the harbor would export millions of dollars in coal and oil—the Longyear report estimated $176 million annually in twenty-five years. But, they cautioned, the AEC would only pay for the excavation. Private industry or some other government agency would have to put up money for port facilities. And these costs, said Teller’s associates, might be between $50 million and $100 million: “We have to be reasonably certain that someone will have money for this development before we dig the hole.” The Anchorage businessmen, though generally interested in applications of the new technology, were taken aback by this sum. One man pointedly reminded the physicists that “economic feasibility and scientific feasibility don’t go hand in hand.”

Teller had to do some nimble damage control when he arrived in Anchorage the next day. While the costs his subordinates had quoted came right out of the Livermore-commissioned study, Teller categorically disavowed them, saying: “figures of 50 to 100 million dollars are greatly exaggerated.” An Anchorage Daily Times writer said Teller dismissed the usefulness of such estimates, believing that it was “foolish to give figures now.” He himself had considered the cost of port and warehouse facilities to be more like $5 million. It was not an inconsequential issue. In fact, though he didn’t say so, Teller knew that a directive by the AEC commissioners had made their approval of the harbor plan “contingent upon receiving outside sponsorship for the development of harbor facilities.”

Juneau and Anchorage businessmen had given the Cape Thompson harbor idea a cool reception, and Teller had responded by conveying the impression that he was flexible. By the time his group reached Fairbanks, the excavation project appeared wide open—the AEC might construct dams, canals, or harbors, whatever Alaskans favored. About forty civic leaders and members of the science faculty showed up at the faculty lounge on the University of Alaska campus to hear Teller say that all sorts of projects might be considered and that suggestions were welcome.

Albert Johnson, a faculty member who heard Teller’s presentation, remembers Teller as charming and persuasive, as speaking matter-of-factly and thoughtfully. According to Johnson, there was little reaction from the audience, though the boomtown businessmen gladly contributed a few suggestions of their own for a Plowshare project to boost the Alaskan—and maybe the local—economy. “Many of these were of the wild variety,” wrote Al Johnson in a 1961 letter to a colleague, “I can’t recall anything very sensible being said.” The businessmen thought the AEC might consider damming the Yukon River with a strategic detonation at Rampart, which could create an impoundment the size of Lake Erie; or damming the half-mile-wide Copper River, which carried its load of glacial silt like a great gray conveyor belt out of the Wrangell Mountains; or the mighty Susitna, which drained practically the whole south side of the Alaska Range. Besides a harbor at Cape Thompson and another near Nome, one might be built at Katalla on the Gulf of Alaska near promising coal deposits. And a canal across the Alaska Peninsula still looked promising.

By contrast, the science faculty, particularly the biologists, were generally skeptical, even mildly alarmed. Teller insisted that radiation hazard was a nonissue. “We have learned to use these powers with safety,” he said, claiming the detonation would add even less radiation than the background amount to which all persons are constantly exposed due to cosmic rays. That statistic made Chariot’s radiation hazard sound insignificant, but the science faculty could see that the statement was just a tricky way of saying that the harbor project might nearly double the amount of radiation to which people were already exposed. Chariot might only add an amount that was just under the background level, but because it would be added to the already existing background level, it could account for a near doubling. And no one really knew for certain if that amount might do significant harm. Those scientists who were in the best position to know—the world’s geneticists—were unanimously convinced that any increase in radiation exposure would result in increased genetic damage. Privately, the University of Alaska biologists discounted Teller’s salesmanship, though publicly they said very little. They took heart at his insistence that the project would have to be justifiable from an economic standpoint. In another letter, Al Johnson recalled the faculty mood after Teller’s presentation:

The statement was made by someone . . . that the shot would not be made unless it could be shown to be economically useful. I remember breathing a sigh of relief at that news and several of us discussed the project in light of that news, being sure that nothing could come of it.

Teller was an effective speaker, by turns flattering and swaggering, soft-soaping the crowd, saying that Alaska had been chosen to host the visionary technology because “you have the fewest people and the most reasonable people,” and that Alaska was “a big state with big people.” A bold project like Chariot was to be seen as of a piece with Alaskans’ pioneering spirit and intrepidity. Permitting himself a bit of frontier bravado, Teller boasted that the AEC could control a nuclear excavation so precisely as to “dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear if desired.”

C. W. Snedden’s Fairbanks Daily News-Miner covered the speech, framing the story as a lucky break for a flagging economy. Under a headline that said ALASKA CAN HAVE MASSIVE NUCLEAR ENGINEERING JOB, the story’s lead read: “An opportunity for Alaska to have a $5 million earth-moving job done at no cost to the new state was outlined here yesterday.” The question of whether or not Alaskans wanted the project was not raised by the News-Miner. Publisher Snedden was a tough campaigner for every brand of resource development and economic growth. In the week following Teller’s visit, the Daily News-Miner’s editorial page gave Project Chariot an unqualified endorsement, the onetime mining-camp newspaper fairly groveling with gratitude: “Alaska has been invited by the high echelon of nuclear scientists of our nation to furnish the site. . . . Dr. Teller flattered Alaskans. . . . We say to Dr. Teller and his associates: Come ahead, Alaska will be proud to be the scene. . . . Alaska welcomes you, tell us how we can help.”

The piece was written by Snedden’s right-hand man, editorial page editor George Sundborg, who apparently construed the massive nuclear explosion as some sort of pyrotechnic fanfare—the sort of fireworks that might befit Alaska’s entry into the union and herald the new state’s brilliant destiny: “We think the holding of a huge nuclear blast in Alaska would be a fitting overture to the new era which is opening for our state,” he enthused. Sundborg predicted the blast “would center world scientific and economic attention on Alaska just at the time when we are moving into statehood and inviting development.” Any worry over the hazards posed by radiation was “nonsense.” “The fallout,” Sundborg insisted, “would occur where the scientists foresee and prepare for it.”

The editorial concluded that those who had heard “the famous physicist” speak “appeared to emerge of one mind that having a nuclear experiment of the kind outlined would be a good thing.” With respect to the Fairbanks businessmen and civic leaders in attendance, the News-Miner was probably right.

• • •

While Teller tried to promote the Cape Thompson excavation, he had stressed throughout Alaska that the AEC was open to alternatives. “If this project is not feasible, what else can we undertake?” he had said. And Livermore did seem prepared to shift from its preferred site, as evidenced by its quiet studies of Katalla and Port Moller, areas that had been suggested by Alaskans. But what Teller had not said was that some two months earlier his laboratory had asked the AEC to initiate a classified application with the Department of the Interior to withdraw from the public domain a chunk of the Cape Thompson hinterlands nearly the size of Delaware. Even as Teller spoke in Fairbanks, encouraging his audiences to suggest alternative projects, his associates landed at Ogotoruk Creek and began determining where the bombs might be placed.

From July 17 to 19, Gerald W. Johnson, test division leader at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and a small team of consultants held a field conference at Ogotoruk Creek. The group joined a USGS field party already camped there. The USGS group had spent ten days studying three alternative harbor sites between Cape Thompson and Cape Seppings. It was at this meeting, after listening to the geologists review each site, that Gerry Johnson selected the mouth of Ogotoruk Creek as ground zero for the detonation. He showed the geologists where the holes for the bombs would likely be drilled. The USGS team then spent the remainder of the season, until August 25, in the area evaluating geologic and oceanographic factors that might bear on harbor construction.

The matter of site selection wasn’t the only card Teller was playing close to the vest. He had decided not to release the 1958 Longyear report to the public during the promotional swing through Alaska, preferring instead to summarize its contents. It was eventually released more than a year later. George Rogers, the Alaskan economist whom Teller had tried unsuccessfully to recruit for the project, had an opportunity to review it:

There is no analysis nor comment as to actual economic feasibility. . . . There is no attempt to analyze probable demand. . . . There is rather strong circumstantial evidence that the volume [of exported minerals] may have been arrived at by working backward from the contemplated size of the harbor, through an estimate of the number of ships which could be moved in and out within the shipping season, thence to a volume figure.

What Livermore really wanted, of course, was to get information about cratering phenomena and radiation hazard in order to proceed with the Panama Canal project. The claims of wanting “not just a hole in the ground,” but something to boost the Alaskan economy, had little basis in reality and seemed in the end to be rhetoric aimed at securing public acceptance of the proposal. In an interview conducted in 1989, Gerald Johnson was presented with George Rogers’s criticisms of the economic justification for Project Chariot: “He could very well be correct. I mean, it didn’t matter to me because we just wanted to do an experiment. We didn’t care if there was a harbor there or not.”

Teller’s claim that the economic viability of the harbor was a sine qua non proved to be specious. Likewise, the assertion that Plowshare projects were strictly peaceful in nature and had no military connection has been undermined by documents from Livermore declassified as a result of this research. Writing to Gen. Alfred Starbird, the director of the AEC’s Division of Military Applications, Teller revealed that the military value of Project Chariot was, in fact, a subject of interest. He wrote Starbird that he had discussed the harbor idea with groups in Alaska, but had found no one who could justify, on a “military basis,” the need for the harbor. The August 1958 letter also reveals that Teller discussed the possible strategic value of other nuclear excavations with Alaska-based Gen. Frank Armstrong.

The AEC confirmed the military value of Plowshare projects in statements contained in the previously classified minutes of the Atomic Energy Commission meeting of May 22, 1959. Until then, Plowshare had resided, administratively, within the AEC’s Division of Military Applications. Some of the commissioners worried about the “unfavorable implications” of having an ostensibly peaceful program supervised by “an organization which bore a military connotation.” These members proposed the creation of a new Office of Civilian Applications. Interestingly, those at the meeting who opposed the suggested restructuring took the position that Plowshare was so alloyed with weapons development that segregating the programs would be inefficient. According to the minutes, the AEC’s general manager, Gen. A. R. Luedecke, reasoned that “the circumstances created by an integration of work performed to produce explosive nuclear devices, whether for peaceful application or for weapons, makes it very impractical to separate these functions.” And Chairman John McCone “expressed his belief that the basic development of the devices, irrespective of their ultimate use, is [so] interwoven in the weapons program, that organizational separation would seriously impair the program.” In addition, he continued, “it is clear that Dr. Teller believes the detonations carried out in the near future under the Plowshare program will be related to our weapons program; therefore, the Commission must exercise care in any arrangements made for conducting nuclear shots under this program.”

• • •

Among Edward Teller’s many gifts was the ability to concoct aphorisms extemporaneously. He invariably supplied the strategic sound bite, the quotable quote. When he said that the AEC had refined the science of crater production to such a degree that they could “dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear if desired,” the reporters were happy to perk up their stories with the colorful image and, in the process, to reassure the public with Teller’s cocksure style. But three months later, in a more sober tone, Teller wrote in a document classified “Secret” that the cratering dynamics of buried shots in media other than Nevada soil and Pacific coral were simply not known. He said the Alaska blast would produce helpful data “without endangering the project even if the actual crater was off by 30 per cent or more from the calculated size” (emphasis added). In a second classified letter a few months later, Teller again referred to “considerable uncertainty” about cratering laws and said there was “even more uncertainty” with respect to how deeply to bury a bomb so as to contain radiation.

Had Alaskans, as the nation’s “most reasonable people,” been given this information, they might have concluded that a 30 percent margin of error amounted to something less than sculptural precision, and that a hypothetical polar bear harbor might stand a fair chance of resembling a big ragged hole in the ground.

A related issue also left unaddressed by Teller or the newspapers concerned the operational details of the shot and the effects of the blast. What sort of explosive yield was being considered for the Cape Thompson shot? How many bombs would be used? How deeply would they be buried? How much of what kind of radiation would be released? What area would be contaminated, and for how long? Was the AEC proposing to evacuate the people of Point Hope? And if so, where would they go and when could they return?

The News-Miner had reported Teller’s figures for the dimensions of the proposed harbor: the entrance channel would be more than a mile long by nearly a quarter mile wide (6,000 feet by 1,200 feet), leading to an oval “turning basin” more than a mile by a half mile (6,000 feet by 3,000 feet). The basin’s dimensions were exactly as recommended in the Longyear report. Later, the harbor’s size varied slightly almost every time it was mentioned in internal documents and press accounts, but the important fact was that an excavation this enormous would require a huge explosion—in the megaton range—and therefore a thermonuclear, rather than a fission, one. Writing in a classified letter to the AEC a few months later, Teller revealed the configuration he originally had in mind: a 2.4-megaton detonation consisting of four 100-kiloton and two 1-megaton devices to excavate the entrance channel and turning basin, respectively.

Nuclear weapons designers commonly refer to a bomb test as a “shot.” But the word seems inadequate when applied to a detonation on the scale of Project Chariot: the equivalent of 2.4 million tons of TNT. If that amount of TNT were transported by one-ton flatbed trucks loaded to their legal limit and driving literally bumper-to-bumper, the convoy would stretch from Fairbanks, Alaska, to somewhere in southern Argentina.

The enormity of the Hiroshima explosion seemed to mark permanently all who saw it. The blast Teller envisioned for Alaska would be 160 times larger than Hiroshima. In one instant, the salvo at Ogotoruk Creek would discharge firepower equal to 40 percent of all the explosive energy expended in the whole of World War II.

As to the danger from radiation—both the immediate effects and the long-term contamination from fallout—any assessment of the hazard relied on knowing the depth of the bomb’s burial and the percent of the bomb’s yield attributable to fission. The fission trigger of the thermonuclear device contributed the most dangerous radionuclides, so the larger the fission component, the “dirtier” the bomb. But the AEC never revealed what percent of the yield would be attributable to fission. In fact, it is likely, as the following evidence suggests, that the original Project Chariot concept was sold to Alaskans before any engineering design—drawings and calculations showing number of devices, yield, depth of burial, percent of vented radiation, crater size, etc.—was begun.

The report of the USGS field party who visited Ogotoruk Creek obliquely suggests that the nuclear devices were to be buried at a depth of some hundreds of feet. This squares with the recollection of Gerald Johnson, who was technical director of the Alaska project. But other evidence suggests that Livermore intended that the explosion would have been a surface or near-surface burst, which could still accomplish excavation. In 1958, Livermore asked the U.S. Weather Bureau to analyze wind records and to speculate as to possible fallout patterns of the Chariot shot. The bureau based its calculations on the assumption that the blast would be in the megaton range and that 100 percent of the radioactivity would vent. In other words, the bureau understood that Chariot designers at Livermore contemplated a surface or near-surface thermonuclear burst.

Also in 1958, the same year that Teller and his subordinates toured Alaska, the laboratory produced a film entitled Industrial Applications of Nuclear Explosives. It shows an image of the Ogotoruk Creek valley apparently adapted from the aerial snapshots taken by LRL visitors to the site. Like the photos, the film shows the green, treeless hills and the broad valley that meets the sea between high limestone cliffs. Graphics superimposed on this view indicate the placement of the explosives. Four 100-kiloton explosives are positioned to excavate a channel that leads to a basin to be dug by a single one-megaton device. Though the depiction is far short of the sort of technical drawings that would accompany an engineering design, the schematic is certainly a simplified representation of the Chariot experiment envisioned by the Livermore physicists. (Speaking at Point Hope in 1960, the AEC’s Russell Ball confirmed that the film represents Project Chariot, although, as he said, “it is not mentioned by that name.”) The only difference between the film’s portrayal and the original Chariot configuration is the elimination in the film of one of the one-megaton bombs. The burial depth is shown as 30 meters for the smaller bombs and 50 meters for the larger one, or 98 and 164 feet respectively. Such near-surface bursts allow nearly 100 percent of the radiation to vent into the atmosphere, and the potential destruction from the air blast (the powerful shock wave traveling through the air) is nearly the same as for a surface burst. With respect to the radiation hazard, the shallow burial actually produces a dirtier explosion than a surface burst because a larger crater is formed, hence more dirt is mixed with the fireball and rendered radioactive. In the case of Chariot, hundreds of billions of pounds of earth would be pulverized, irradiated, and blasted as high as the stratosphere.

The documentary film was shown at the Second International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in September of 1958. Because the physicists showcased the film to an international audience of their peers and the press, it can be taken as illustrating Livermore’s state-of-the-art techniques in nuclear cratering. The film proves that in 1958 Livermore physicists did in fact believe that a harbor could be safely excavated in a remote coastal area with a megaton-range blast where the bombs were buried at relatively shallow depths.

“I don’t see how those numbers got in the game or where they came from,” said Gerald Johnson in an interview. Considering the shallow depth of burial, he said, “That would have been pretty damn dirty. . . . That design could not have lasted long within the laboratory.” The design did not last long. By January 1959, LRL had downscaled the blast to a mere 19 percent of the size originally proposed. Johnson also noted that a 2.4-megaton blast “could not have been safely carried out in Nevada for two reasons. I would have worried about the seismic [implications] as well as the radioactivity . . . we would have been ruled out on both counts in Nevada.” Las Vegas is the nearest community of significant size that would have been affected by such a blast in Nevada. Yet Point Hope is closer to Ogotoruk Creek than is Las Vegas to the Nevada Test Site.

Gary Higgins, who succeeded Johnson as the head of Plowshare projects at Livermore in 1960, corroborates the notion that the Chariot scheme, as initially proposed, would have been shallow and, therefore, dirty. “I think the original concept would have been for a surface or near-surface detonation,” says Higgins. In an interview the same year, the radiochemist allowed that the Project Chariot concept was promoted in 1958, before any realistic consideration was given as to the possible consequences of the blast to the residents of Point Hope:

I know there was no real serious thought of air blast. That’s another phenomenon that’s very important and precludes essentially using megaton-level explosions around any kind of human activity within hundreds of miles. You break things and knock them down and do all kinds of damage.

That’s what the experts say today—that hundreds of miles ought to separate human activity from such shots. But in the 1958 film, the Livermore scientists, perhaps allowing their optimism for the new technology to get the better of their scientific training, claimed that “overpressures and seismic effects would be acceptably small beyond a radius of 30 kilometers,” or about nineteen miles.

Higgins considered the original sketches of the nuclear excavated harbor as “sales charts that they used to take to the Congress and to the AEC to say this is what we have in mind.” He called the animated film and the mock-up charts “cartoons”:

I don’t think that, in the original cartoons of Chariot (I think that’s what they really were), anyone thought about the offsite effects and the environmental impact. You know, I really mean they really hadn’t even thought about them, let alone dismissed them.

When asked, “What could have been the effect from air blast at Point Hope thirty-five miles away or so, from that kind of shot as a near-surface burst?” Higgins said:

Well, it would have wiped out everything. It would only take someone to sit down and start to do the details of an engineering design to realize you couldn’t do that experiment. You just couldn’t do it. . . . For a one megaton burst under those circumstances, you probably want seventy or eighty miles separation, at a kind of minimum.

Seventy or eighty miles’ minimum exclusion for a one-megaton burst. Point Hope was less than half that distance from ground zero, and the shot was to be more than twice that size. Like Gerald Johnson, Gary Higgins believes that any plan for a megaton-range blast thirty-odd miles from Point Hope would never have survived a proper engineering analysis. Nevertheless, it was precisely that plan that was promoted in Alaska by the “highest echelon” of American scientists as the safe use of a proven technology. And those Alaskans who, as the News-Miner put it, feared exposure “to the effects of a powerful blast and to radiation” were said to be talking “nonsense.”

• • •

Teller made many claims in Alaska in July of 1958. He said that the AEC had looked at nearly the whole world for a demonstration site; that a harbor at Cape Thompson was economically justified, and that economic feasibility was important to Livermore; that high-grade coal existed in abundance in the area; that commercial fishing had been impeded for lack of a harbor there; that the cost of developing harbor facilities would be much less than quoted by his colleagues; that LRL was not particularly set on Cape Thompson as the site for the excavation project; that the physicists could control the crater dimensions of the explosion to a highly refined degree; and that the proposed blast presented no danger to local people from radiation or from air blast. Though these remarks played well with the newspaper editors and with many civic boosters, nearly every single material claim Edward Teller made in Alaska seems to have been untrue. As Teller and his retinue headed back to Livermore, work was quietly begun at the mouth of Ogotoruk Creek to ready the site for a detonation.

• • •

Holmes & Narver (H & N), Livermore’s engineering and construction contractor, moved quickly to establish a camp at Ogotoruk to support topographic and offshore survey crews. The USGS field party had built a 700-foot airstrip, and by August 7, 1958, Wien airlines was flying in H & N personnel in a Cessna 185, and B & R Tug and Barge Company steamed up from Kotzebue to land supplies from barges. Of course, planning for construction of a camp during the short Arctic summer had, by necessity, begun much earlier. The AEC had authorized field studies in April 1958, and H & N had received in mid-May, two months before Teller’s visit to Alaska, its “scope of work” order outlining the company’s contractual responsibilities.

The USGS party had set up their camp, a half-dozen white canvas wall tents clustered on the benchland above the beach. H & N personnel, experienced in running AEC projects in the Pacific and at Nevada, had been flown up from Los Angeles and were ready to get the work under way. They quickly selected a site on a sandbar in the lee of high ground near the mouth of the clear-running Ogotoruk Creek. Tents, sleeping bags, camp chairs, and messing facilities sufficient to handle twenty-five fieldworkers were all in place by August 12. Fourteen surveyors from Philleo Engineering Company of Fairbanks arrived that day just as the weather changed. It was an ordinary Arctic summer storm: It raged. Tent flies billowed and flapped wildly, straining at their snub lines. The rain pelted down and gushed in rivulets along the tundra-covered hillsides. Shortly, the tents, the sleeping bags, the camp chairs, and tables of H & N’s camp were leaving wakes in the numbingly cold waters of a rising Ogotoruk Creek.

There was nothing for H & N supervisors to do but to order, in the midst of the storm, the relocation of the camp to higher ground. That’s when the wind kicked up in earnest. The higher ground was more exposed, and tents caught gusts up to sixty-five miles per hour. Canvas parted and tents collapsed as soaked and shivering men struggled in the chaos of a country very different from Las Vegas or Eniwetok, learning much about it even before their formal investigations began.

The blow lasted four days. Then it was calm. Calm enough for Dan Lisbourne, his nephew, and Peniluke Omnik to launch their skin boat from Point Hope and hunt for caribou around Cape Thompson. As Lisbourne would later recount to his wife, when the hunters motored around Crowbill Point they saw tents at Ogotoruk and turned the umiaq toward shore. Jimmy Hawley, an Eskimo from Kivalina working at the camp, recognized Lisbourne in the boat. He waved, and walked down to the beach to say hello.