More than likely, the moral and intellectual leadership of science will pass to biologists, and it is among them that we shall find the Rutherfords, Bohrs and Francks of the next generation.
—Sir Charles P. Snow, 1961
After World War II ended with the dramatic dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, Barry Commoner, a plant physiologist then at Washington University in St. Louis, began to think deeply about what is generally called the social responsibility of the scientist. Obviously, the possibility of nuclear war was a preeminent concern, as was the danger inherent in testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Just as obvious was the fact that reasoned public discourse on these political issues involved some understanding of scientific information. Unless citizens intended to abdicate their democratic prerogatives to government experts, some public education was essential. And Commoner believed that scientists had a responsibility to explain this technical information and thereby assist the public in making these science-related—but political—decisions.
None of the several associations of scientists that had sprung up after the war seemed to Commoner to fill the bill. Groups such as the Federation of American Scientists, the Pugwash movement, whose organ was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Society for Social Responsibility in Science certainly were all cognizant of the scientist’s new role in public affairs. But they all seemed to project a view of the scientist as an expert either in the analysis of political matters or in the analysis of social ethics. And scientists had no more claim to be arbiters of the public good or mediators of moral philosophy than had any other human being.
The case of nuclear excavation illustrates how a technical proposal presents more than simply a scientific dilemma. Harbors and canals blasted by H-bombs could facilitate economic development to improve materially the lives of many people. But along with that potential, the projects inevitably carry some risk to human health, such as the risk of increased incidence of cancers and birth defects from fallout. Suppose, for example, that expert analysis concluded that Project Chariot would result in a quarter million dollars annually in increased economic activity in northwest Alaska. But suppose the analysis also projected that, with equal likelihood, a dozen Eskimos at Point Hope could be expected to have their lives shortened by a decade due to late-developing cancers. Experts—statisticians and epidemiologists, radiobiologists and ecologists, economists and politicians—might be able to assign a probability to these eventualities, but who could assign the value to be placed on economic advantage, or on human suffering? An Edward Teller might see the balance tipped one way, an Albert Schweitzer, the other.
Barry Commoner’s notion was that in these matters it was not the scientist who was the authority, but—through the political process—the ordinary citizen. And the scientist’s contribution, he said, ought to be more along the lines of a technical consultant’s who could sift through the facts, outline scientific principles, discuss the limits of accuracy and alternate interpretations, then step aside and let the public determine its will.
Accordingly, in 1958 Commoner formed the Greater St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI), a pioneer group of scientists and laypeople whose mission was to provide information, not advocacy. “CNI does not stand for or against particular policies,” the group’s literature stated. “It presents the known facts for people to use in deciding where they stand on the moral and political questions of the nuclear age.”
By 1960, Commoner chaired a Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). With his fellow committee members, one of whom was Margaret Mead, Commoner analyzed the role of science in the political affairs of the modern world:
Having become a major instrument in political affairs, science is inseparably bound up with many troublesome questions of public policy. That science is valued more for these uses than for its fundamental purpose—the free inquiry into nature—leads to pressures which have begun to threaten the integrity of science itself.
Without mentioning the Atomic Energy Commission by name, the AAAS committee singled out ardent nuclear partisanship as a cause of the erosion of such scientific values as “objective, open communication of results; rigorous distinction between fact and hypothesis; candid recognition of assumptions and sources of error.” And the result, said the committee, was that “the identity between science and an objective regard for the facts” had become clouded.
In connection both with his chairmanship of the AAAS committee and his leadership in the Committee for Nuclear Information, Commoner began to track Project Chariot. In the spring of 1960, his group wrote to John Wolfe asking to see any environmental data that might have been developed from the investigations at Cape Thompson. Wolfe felt that it would be improper for him to release any preliminary data, but that CNI could contact the investigators individually. [This CNI did, and as a result the group published in the summer of 1960 two issues of their newsletter, Nuclear Information, dealing with Project Chariot and Plowshare.]
The two issues “stimulated such an unprecedented volume of response from scientists and non-scientists here and abroad, and from government agencies,” wrote the CNI editor to Alaskan investigators, “that we feel impelled to publish additional material.” The CNI editor requested articles from the Alaskan scientists for an expanded issue on Chariot, noting many complaints that information about Chariot was not publicly available, and further noting that John Wolfe’s letter appeared to say that the scientists were free to release their data.
Bill Pruitt considered that CNI’s interest represented a tactical opportunity too good to pass up. “I have been very favorably impressed with their dispassionate approach to atomic energy,” he wrote Don Foote, “. . . I suggest we use this outfit as a vehicle for introducing our attack, just the light artillery, especially the biological and scientific objections (the real heavy artillery will be the emotional, ethical and political push).” The vehicle for the “heavy artillery,” Pruitt, Foote, and Viereck agreed, should be a mainstream national magazine.
Despite their interest, it was months before the busy Alaskan researchers—who were also working on their articles for the Alaska Conservation Society News Bulletin—were able to send their contributions to the proposed Chariot issue down to Commoner’s group. Meanwhile, “the flow of inquiries and comments” on the first Chariot article continued to pour in, according to CNI. When the material from Alaska finally arrived in Saint Louis in February 1961, it sent Barry Commoner hurrying off to the library.
• • •
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, biologists were examining a puzzling phenomenon. Air currents in the stratosphere deposited fallout mostly in the Northern Hemiphere’s Temperate Zone (where, incidentally, most of the world’s population lived). Consequently, some measurements had shown that fallout levels in the North Temperate Zone were ten times higher than levels measured on the ground in Arctic regions. But for some unknown reason, the level of strontium 90 showing up in Alaska caribou was many times higher than that in domestic animals in the lower states. For example, the bones of grazing animals in the lower states averaged about twenty-five micromicrocuries of Sr90 per gram of calcium (or twenty-five strontium units), while the bone and antlers of caribou in the north contained 100–200 strontium units. Caribou meat was seven times more contaminated with strontium 90 than the meat of U.S. domestic animals. And the stomach contents of cattle raised on the fallout-rich Nevada Test Site was about 200 strontium units, while caribou stomachs were showing 1,264 strontium units. Furthermore, the caribou, and the Eskimos who ate the caribou, appeared to be higher in Sr90 content than any other group in the world.
Why were these two species, caribou and man, who lived in a region of low fallout, showing such high concentrations of radioactive contamination? Biologists believed that the differences in the efficiency of uptake must be attributable to differing biological processes in the two regions. And they focused on the unique biology of the caribou’s major food, lichens.
Lichens are amazing testimonials to floristic cooperation. They are not like ordinary vascular plants, but are, rather, two distinct organisms aligned for mutual benefit. Algal cells intertwine with fungal filaments to produce a plant body that can take a scaly, leafy, or stalked and shrublike form. They can grow on rocks or soil or on tree trunks. Unlike ordinary plants, which draw water and nutrients out of the soil, sending this food up from their roots and transporting it to the plant’s parts through vessels, lichens are rootless and derive their water and their mineral nutrition from the air. Rain, and the minerals dissolved in it—or even dust particles blown by the wind—land on the lichen body and are gradually dissolved and absorbed into it.
This arrangement was satisfactory for the lichen throughout all the millennia of its existence—until 1945. Then the rains began to bring down radioactive dust. Lichens are the ideal organisms to capture fallout. They cover wide areas and retain virtually 100 percent of the radioisotopes that land on them. Also, because they grow so slowly and are long-lived, they contain the accumulated burden of many years’ fallout. If this contamination was bad for the lichens, it was worse for the caribou, and worse still for the Eskimos. When the caribou grazed on the lichens, their principal winter food, they gleaned the fallout from many acres and stored it in their tissues and bones. As Eskimos ate the caribou, they further concentrated into their bodies the radioactive strontium and cesium that were once dispersed over miles of tundra. So, because of the unusual biology of the lichens, because caribou have a predilection for lichens, and because Eskimo villages such as Point Hope might consume 100,000 pounds of caribou meat annually, the radioactive contamination was amplified at each successive level of the food chain.
As Barry Commoner sat in the library learning about lichen and caribou and Eskimos, an idea was driven home to him with great force and clarity. “It was my introduction to ecology,” said the man who would become a leader of the environmental movement before the decade was out. “It was when I realized that the different ecosystem in Alaska deeply conditioned the outcome of this technological impact, that I realized that what we were doing in our work on radiation was really an aspect of what is now called environmentalism.” This realization, and Commoner’s ability to articulate the principle and to organize and lead concerned citizens, would help to broaden antinuclear activism into the environmental movement. But that would come later. For the moment, he had a magazine to get out.
• • •
Bill Pruitt had noticed the uniquely efficient lichen-caribou-man pathway for fallout more than a year earlier than Commoner. He’d seen references to a couple of scientific papers on lichens and, he says, whenever a caribou biologist hears about a paper on lichens his “eyes start to light up.” Naturally, he sent away for reprints. One paper was by a Norwegian named Hvinden, and the other by a Canadian named Gorham. The Canadian research had shown that lichens sampled in that country were high in fallout radioactivity compared with other plants, while the Norwegian study showed that strontium 90 from fallout was utilized biologically by animals that grazed on lichens. Domestic reindeer in Norway showed twice the Sr90 concentrations in their bones as did sheep grazing in the same region.
Pruitt knew that the Cape Thompson region was not overrich in lichens, and even in places where lichens comprised more than 50 percent of the vegetative cover, the cover might have extended over only half the ground, the rest being bare soil. Still, when the winter-feeding caribou were not eating lichens, they were generally eating sedges, which, next to lichens, were showing the highest readings of radioactive contamination. And the Chariot fallout could certainly spread over wide areas of the North Slope of Alaska, where the lichens did grow abundantly. Reading these papers, Pruitt saw what he called the “ecologically obvious” and its implications for Project Chariot. He submitted a proposal to John Wolfe in February 1961 to study the “vegetation-caribou-radioactivity relationships,” but funds “were specifically deleted,” he claimed. In his progress report submitted in advance of the “First Summary Report,” which was released in the summer of 1961, Pruitt noted that radiation might concentrate in lichens and caribou, but this observation did not survive John Wolfe’s editing of the document. Finally, in a draft of his final report submitted in late 1961, Pruitt listed in a table the few published data noting the relatively high levels of radiation found in lichens and caribou. But Wolfe considered the data’s inclusion “somewhat out of order.” He said, “We are aware of these and other published analyses, and when they are useful in various kinds of comparisons, we fully intend to use them.”
By then Wolfe was, as he said, aware of the lichen research. But it was Pruitt who seems to have been responsible for this enlightenment, and it apparently came as more of a surprise to Wolfe than his casual tone might suggest. Al Johnson, who was then in Norway on sabbatical, recalls the circumstances:
Once Wolfe found out about that, he got very excited about it. And worried about it. In fact, I have a telegram in my file from him asking me for information about lichen growth rates and that sort of thing. . . . The Scandinavians first showed that impact on concentration in caribou, reindeer. And Pruitt was in touch with that. Wolfe and his group did not know about that at that time. So I really believe that neither John Wolfe nor anybody else would have been so foolish as to try to hide from that particular thing.
Strong evidence that this bioaccumulation hazard was not common knowledge at the AEC before Pruitt started bringing the international research to light can be found in a previously restricted AEC document that summarized the findings of the environmental studies:
Special mention is perhaps warranted of the fallout/lichen/caribou/man food chain. This is an example of an environmental problem identified in the course of the studies which must be taken into account if the Chariot detonation were to be conducted. This food chain appears to be the mechanism which has resulted in markedly high body burdens of fallout-borne Cs-137 that has been found in the Arctic peoples whose diet is heavily dependent on caribou or reindeer. [Emphasis added.]
Though Pruitt had not been able to sound the alarm about lichen-radiation interactions in the AEC’s published report, he did cover the topic in the ACS News Bulletin and he alerted the Committee for Nuclear Information’s Barry Commoner, who could address the issue as a plant physiologist. “There is almost no basis,” Commoner wrote in the June 1961 issue of Nuclear Information, “for using experimental studies of Sr90 in pastures, cows and milk to predict what will happen in Alaska.” The grassland ecology was entirely different. For one thing, blades of grass have waxy coatings on their upper side that resist the absorption of dust particles. For another, grass dies back to its roots after a short, seasonal life. Fallout, which sifts down to the ground and enters the soil in pastureland, is “diluted” by the presence of minerals already there. Strontium 90, for example, is chemically similar to calcium. So in soil where calcium is abundant, Sr90 will have a necessarily lower statistical chance of ending up in a plant. Finally, there is considerable discrimination at the root wall against Sr90.
Commoner also questioned the AEC’s willingness to extrapolate the Temperate Zone data to the Alaskan situation where man’s diet was concerned. A great deal of scientific work had been done to show how fallout Sr90 moved through pasture soil, entered the fodder, then cattle, milk, and humans. Not only was the Alaskan pathway completely different, but the dietary habits and hence certain metabolic processes of the Eskimos were dissimilar as well. The Eskimos ate a very limited amount of starch but a great deal of fat and meat. Presumably, Commoner reasoned, the diet was low in calcium but very rich in vitamin D, which promotes calcium absorption. It was possible that a low level of calcium in the diet was offset by unusually efficient calcium absorption facilitated by high dietary levels of vitamin D. And, because strontium is chemically similar to calcium, this knowledge suggested to Commoner that “the relative efficiency of Sr90 absorption from the characteristic Eskimo diet may be very different from persons living on a diet typical of temperate zones.” Though the AEC frequently attempted to relate their “experience in Nevada” to the Arctic condition, Commoner bolstered the Alaskan biologists’ argument that such extrapolations were scientifically improper.
• • •
Another article in CNI’s Chariot issue questioned the reliability of the AEC’s published estimates on the extent of Chariot fallout. Washington University physicist Michael Friedlander’s analysis began with the observation that the AEC had conducted only four previous atomic detonations in Nevada where the depth of burial and the explosive yield resulted in a crater formed by ejected earth. And in none of these four was the depth of burial or explosive yield similar to those designed for Chariot.
Two of the shots, Jangle-U and Teapot-S, which both had only about a one-kiloton yield, were buried at seventeen and sixty-seven feet respectively. In both cases, the shallow burial resulted in the venting of nearly all of the radiation into the atmosphere (more than 80 percent in the case of Jangle-U, and 90 percent for Teapot-S). The third and fourth tests, Neptune and Blanca, were buried more deeply relative to their explosive yields (Neptune, about 1 kiloton buried at 99 feet; Blanca, 19 kilotons at 835 feet). Consequently, much less radiation was observed at the surface (estimated to be 1–2 percent for Neptune and less than 0.5 percent for Blanca). But the largest bomb in the proposed Chariot detonation (200 kilotons) was ten times larger than the largest previous cratering shot (19 kilotons). The other four Chariot bombs at 20 kilotons resembled the Blanca test, but they were not planned to be buried even half as deep as Blanca.
In other words, of the four previous shots from which the AEC might predict the venting of a Chariot detonation, two were shallowly buried and vented nearly all their radiation, and two were deeply buried and vented little radiation. Chariot was to be buried at an intermediate depth, so its vented radiation would fall somewhere between a lot and a little. But where? It all came down to what shape curve one thought might be drawn between the two data points at the upper left corner of the graph and the two data points at the lower right corner. The AEC drew a curve for Chariot that indicated that only 5 percent of the radiation would vent. But Friedlander pointed out that “there was no reliable way of knowing the steepness with which the curve descends from Teapot-S to Neptune—and this is the crux of the matter.” He concluded that “the predicted value of 5% for the vented radioactivity of the proposed Chariot explosions must be regarded as so uncertain as to suggest, with equal probability any value ranging from 1% to about 25%.”
• • •
Within days of the release of CNI’s Nuclear Information, the Atomic Energy Commission released its “First Summary Report” on Project Chariot that, as detailed in Chapter Thirteen, avoided a discussion of the characteristics of the Chariot nuclear explosion; provided nothing to indicate the basis of its conclusion that the radiation effects would be “negligible, undetectable, or possibly nonexistent” beyond the throwout area; and failed even to mention the unique aspects of the Arctic food chain, in which lichen and caribou concentrated radiation. With both publications circulating in June of 1961, Science magazine offered its readers a review of the two conflicting reports. In an article entitled “Project Chariot: Two Groups of Scientists Issue ‘Objective’ But Conflicting Reports,” Science writer Howard Margolis faulted the AEC document for the three omissions noted above. But having said that, he focused the bulk of his critical comments on the tone and “technical soundness” of the report from Barry Commoner’s group. In particular, he questioned CNI’s calculation of the quantity of Sr90 that might be vented from the Chariot explosion.
Some evidence suggests that Margolis relied heavily on the AEC’s viewpoint in the preparation of his article. Margolis had been briefed on CNI’s “errors” before he had even seen the report, according to Commoner. Several of Margolis’s criticisms form the core of AEC comments prepared for use within that agency. John Wolfe conferred with Margolis about the extent to which Margolis’s piece had quelled public concern roused by CNI, and reported (with obvious satisfaction) to the University of Alaska’s President Wood that Margolis thought the controversy had “died down quickly” after the appearance of his review. (Wood thought the Margolis piece “very cleverly managed.”)
But the issue did not die down, because the next month Commoner wrote a rebuttal letter to Science that dealt point by point with the Margolis/AEC criticisms and suggested that the author’s technique did not seem to meet the professional standards of either science or journalism:
A few days after the CNI report had been made public, one of us received a long distance telephone call from Margolis. In this call he made several criticisms of the CNI report, and asked for comment on them. During this conversation Margolis acknowledged that he had not seen a copy of the CNI report. Accordingly, a copy of the report was sent to him immediately. After several days he called again. In this second conversation nearly all of the points which we have enumerated above (including an explanation of the so-called “technical error”) were explained to Margolis at some length. We regret that they do not appear in his article. In particular, we believe that ordinary journalistic practice would recommend that the specific reply given to his query about the supposed technical error in the CNI report should appear in his article alongside his discussion of the AEC “complaint” about it.
• • •
Fallout from the publication of the Alaska Conservation Society’s News Bulletin, CNI’s Nuclear Information, and from the AEC’s “First Summary Report” spread across the country. Science News Letter carried an article announcing the conclusions of the AEC’s “First Summary” under the headline: AEC FINDS NO BIOLOGICAL REASON TO STOP ‘CHARIOT.’ The preferred reading of the article, which devoted one sentence to the CNI point of view, was that despite some rather sweeping claims of danger, the thirty-plus scientific surveys “have not revealed any biological reason” for stopping Project Chariot.
In conservationist circles, however, opposition to Project Chariot was building. The Sierra Club reprinted the entire issue of the Alaska Conservation Society News Bulletin (it had all been devoted to Chariot) in the May 1961 Sierra Club Bulletin. Far from their humble mimeographed origins, the ACS articles now ran alongside photographs of Alaska wildlife and comprised nearly the whole issue of the nationally distributed glossy. Introducing the article, the editor noted that the Sierra Club’s board of directors “commends and supports the Governor of Alaska for his stand in opposition to Project Chariot . . . pending a more complete study of the total effects including damage to native people, wilderness and wildlife.” The Sierra Club had not so much announced its opposition to Chariot as commended the governor for his opposition. And Gov. Bill Egan had not precisely come out against Chariot, either. He had merely stated that he intended that his government would be satisfied of the safety issues before any blast would take place. Writing to the Sierra Club, Egan asked, “I should appreciate your advising me on what that statement of my purported position is based.” And when Alaska senator Bob Bartlett read a copy of the governor’s tart reply, he commiserated with Egan, observing that the Sierra Club bulletin was a rehash of the earlier ACS newsletter and the CNI bulletin:
I found myself gagging on making a third try and had to desist. The Alaska Conservation Society heroes and heroines may be 100 per cent right about Project Chariot for all I know (although I do not believe it), but I am pretty much inclined to the opinion that however dedicated they are (and they are plenty dedicated), they are essentially third-rate people with no more knowledge of all of this than you and I, and maybe not as much. Admittedly, my opinion is colored by the fact that these are the same people who so ardently support the Arctic Wildlife Range.
The Sierra Club’s plucky junior colleague, the twenty-five-year-old Wilderness Society, had passed a blunt resolution the previous year urging the abandonment of Project Chariot, which it said “would unalterably destroy the wilderness area of the westerly end of the Brooks Range, our last great wilderness in the world not in a tropical region.” The text was written by Lois Crisler, author of Arctic Wild, who distrusted Teller’s judgment, particularly after reading that he thought Plowshare projects “would be a decisive victory in man’s historic battle to shape the world to his needs.” That point of view might have been acceptable a century ago, Crisler argued, but “the main fight now turns to saving enough nature to shape human beings.”
The Wilderness Society’s director, biologist, naturalist, and wildlife illustrator Dr. Olaus Murie had first tramped and run dog teams through the Alaska wilderness more than forty years earlier. For him, Chariot was “part of our national carelessness with what we do with our land.” He objected to the popular view of wilderness places as suitable testing ground for potentially hazardous experiments:
Why, then, are such areas chosen for this atomic plaything—the ocean, Nevada, and Alaska? Because they are considered waste places; places where it doesn’t matter what damage is done to wildlife or the few people there.
Smaller journals with limited circulation such as the Defenders of Wildlife News and National Wildland News ran tough editorials opposing the Alaska project. The latter called for “thinking people everywhere to demand an end to nuclear detonations.” The former published a critical account of Chariot, and the group’s president wrote to President Kennedy, saying that the Defenders of Wildlife doubted that the AEC, “steeped in its own lore,” could impartially evaluate the scientific findings:
One of the purposes of the experiment is to define the effect of the blasts on the biota. At the same time we are assured that the Atomic Energy Commission will not proceed unless it has assurance that the experiment can be conducted without jeopardy to living things. This is double talk.
The National Parks Association, a private, nonprofit educational and scientific group founded to protect the national park system, said its 16,000 members thought that “the risks can in no way be justified.” Writing to then AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg, the group’s executive secretary said: “We can assure you that sentiment in this matter will in all probability be quite nearly unanimous and that Project Chariot will have the condemnation and opposition of most conservationists.”
Despite these protests, for the critics of Project Chariot the support of conservation groups did not come as easily as they might have expected. But “Chariot was an atypical cause,” as one environmental historian has written, because the soggy tundra of the Cape Thompson region was not the sort of magnificent landscape likely to draw crowds, and caribou and grizzly bears, while scarce elsewhere, were abundant in Alaska. The Massachusetts Audubon Society, for example, declined to pass a resolution condemning Chariot after board member Bradford Washburn, who had many years of experience in Alaska, shrugged off the threat of contamination. One director recalled, “there were so many thousands of square miles of tundra, [Washburn] said, it wouldn’t make much difference to pollute a few.” Chariot’s threats hinged on ecological relationships that were not only unspectacular, but invisible.
Also, many conservationists in the early 1960s had hopes that nuclear power generation might forestall the damming of wild rivers and flooding of wilderness areas. Finally, conservationists were somewhat cowed before the technical complexities of nuclear science. One of its correspondents thought that “the Wilderness Society should be concerned to the extent of their knowledge of the subject.” And the Sierra Club’s secretary warned executive director, David Brower: “We must be careful not to get into genetic and other fields we are not expert in.” But the Wilderness Society’s Lois Crisler disputed this logic, calling it the “mystery-cloaking” by which scientists were sometimes able to avoid public scrutiny; “it is to be condemned,” she declared.
Notwithstanding that the issue was an atypical one for conservationists, a broad assortment of large and small conservation groups declared their opposition to, or wariness of, Project Chariot. And sportsmen’s groups—which sometimes allied themselves with conservationist causes—also expressed concern over the massive detonation in Alaska. In January of 1961, Outdoor Life printed a cautionary account of Chariot prompted by a letter from the Alaska Sportsmen’s Council executive director, A. W. “Bud” Boddy, who was also the mayor of Juneau. Boddy had written that Alaska sportsmen were worried about Chariot’s effect on the state’s tremendously bountiful fish and game:
Not only sportsmen, but every citizen of the U.S. should be seriously concerned with what effects this planned nuclear explosion might have on game and fish, two of Alaska’s most valuable natural resources—to say nothing of their possible effects on our human resources.
Outdoor Life took a wait-and-see approach, but noted that the environmental studies had not been made available to the public as they should be, and that the stakes to sportsmen were high:
A hundred miles or so to the east of the Chariot site, in the western end of the Brooks Range, there is some of the finest big game country left in North America—Dall sheep, moose, grizzly bears, and caribou are plentiful.
A national conference of peace workers held in Chicago discussed the Chariot scheme in the context of it being an AEC ploy to resume atomic testing during the moratorium. They considered Chariot as a possible focus of a national protest action by peace activists, as one of the organizers wrote to Les Viereck:
It was agreed that should negotiations for a test ban break down in Geneva . . . we would mobilize all forces for a major action directed at preventing resumption of testing.
• • •
Meanwhile, Keith Lawton, the Episcopal priest at Point Hope, was doing all he could to hold the AEC’s feet to the fire and protect his congregation from what seemed to him a dubious project. Needless to say, these efforts rankled the AEC. In a 1964 review of the Chariot “public information” effort, the AEC attributed much of its public relations trouble to Lawton. They accurately noted that although Point Hope and Kivalina were about the same distance from the site, Point Hope was “vigorous in opposition,” while Kivalina “voiced no objection.” The AEC said Point Hope’s “unrelenting” opposition was “led by a local minister [Lawton] and an investigator for the Environmental Study Group [Don Foote].” The AEC concluded that the Eskimo people “had been furnished by outsiders with articles on the effects of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from these some said they feared a similar fate.”
Reviewing the disastrous March 14, 1960, meeting at Point Hope, the AEC public relations specialists criticized Lawton for hosting the program and for asking questions on behalf of his congregation. They leave no doubt as to whom they perceived as the Eskimos’ chief ringleader:
Questioning began within a critical atmosphere. The questioning was led by Keith Lawton, local Episcopal missionary, who has been reported agitating against the project. He tape-recorded the session and conducted the questioning as though it were a news conference. . . .
Lawton led the discussion into danger of fallout; reports of sterilization of Japanese A-bomb victims; lingering and dangerous effects of radiation to humans, animals, seals, whales, and all forms of life. . . .
The villagers also expressed fear of the blast effects on their homes and on the water and land in nearby areas. The emotional pitch exhibited indicates that opposition has been stirred up purposefully and that arrangements had been made for an almost staged performance of the opposition.
Of course, another interpretation of why opposition had coalesced at Point Hope might be that this village had made an effort to acquire information from sources other than the AEC. And if the Reverend Mr. Lawton had taken the lead in organizing the gathering and dissemination of information—which he had—he saw that involvement as part and parcel of his ministry. He responded hotly in a 1988 interview when read the above excerpts from the AEC report:
If anybody at the Atomic Energy Commission wants to consider me—I was living in the village as priest in charge of a congregation that involved almost all the people of Point Hope—and if they want to consider me at that point an outsider, I violently object to that. I mean I violently object to that. I take exception to that. I was in the village as a resident in the village. I belonged to the village. I was where I was supposed to be and I was doing my job in the village. I was not an outsider.
Lawton said, “I’m glad they found us ready for them because we intended to be,” but he says the idea that the opposition was staged was “ridiculous.” He said that while he helped the people to understand technical issues related to nuclear explosions, the people had their own sources of information too:
Well the Eskimo people weren’t illiterate. They could read, and they could speak for themselves. . . .
The Atomic Energy Commission was dealing with people who had been in the Pacific theaters of war in World War II. People who had traveled down to California, Hawaii. Many of the people who were in the National Guard were familiar with nuclear effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had been informed of this kind of stuff in their military experience. . . .
It was spontaneous. I was very proud and pleased with some of the questions the Eskimo people asked. And it showed me they had plenty of sense about what was going on.
The priest’s active interest—advocacy, even—on the subject of Project Chariot raised eyebrows within his own church, and among church administrators of various faiths. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the question of Church involvement in social and political issues was a prominent one in the national consciousness. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. led boycotts and mass nonviolent demonstrations against racial inequality, proclaiming: “Too often, the churches had a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.”
As Lawton remembers it, his then superior, Bishop William Gordon, the famous “Flying Bishop” (who piloted his own plane to remote villages) and powerful leader of the Episcopal Church in Alaska, gave him absolute freedom to approach Project Chariot according to his conscience. But Gordon endorsed Chariot and employed the AEC’s stock justifications for the blast in a letter to concerned church members:
I must point out to you that similar explosions have been carried out in Nevada in proximity to people more cultured and civilized in the modern sense of the word than the people of the Arctic coast. This is not a new thing.
I also believe that we should explore the potentials for the good of atomic energy, that there are tremendous possibilities for mankind in the future from peacetime uses of atomic energy. . . . Certainly we must have some experiments in order to bring this about.
Gordon went on to say that he felt “very strongly” that “certain people” connected with the project “who knew little or nothing about atomic explosions” but “who have pretended to be experts” had harmed the project.
Gordon apparently squelched even the mention of concern over Chariot by fellow delegates at the Alaska Council of Churches’ annual conference. Early in 1961, Rev. Richard Heacock, then a young Methodist minister in Juneau, drafted a resolution opposing Project Chariot, which he submitted to the Alaska Council of Churches’ Committee on Christian Social Relations. But action on the measure was blocked, as Heacock wrote in a 1961 letter:
The truth is that my carefully written resolution didn’t get out of the Christian Social Relations Committee. It seems that Bishop Gordon and Mr. Dutch Derr strongly vetoed it and no mention was made of the project in the committee report.
When I saw it was not included in the report I asked the chairman why and he told me. I went to Bishop Gordon to see what he knew. He would only say, “It’s in good hands. We don’t need to worry about it.” When I asked what hands he said, “The AEC’s hands.”
Heacock felt the issue too important to allow it to be buried by so few men in committee. And though it was “pretty scary” because he was a young newcomer to Alaska, and because “everybody knew Bishop Gordon,” he “screwed up enough courage” to address the full council meeting in open session. Heacock asked the privilege of the floor just before adjournment, stated his concern, and read the statement he had written. He moved that the statement be referred to the committee for study. “The motion carried,” said Heacock, “but a subsequent motion by Bishop Gordon specified that the statement not be included in the minutes of the assembly.” (Emphasis in original.)
Eventually, Bishop Gordon’s confidence in the AEC diminished as he came to believe that the government scientists were “not much concerned about the people in the area.” In an interview shortly before his death in 1994, Gordon credited Keith Lawton and Richard Heacock for broadening his view: “They helped me see [Chariot] in a larger light.”
Stymied at the interdenominational level, Heacock nonetheless saw the passage of an anti-Chariot resolution within the Methodist Church in Alaska. As early as May 1960, his church’s Woman’s Division of Christian Service had drafted a resolution that said: “We continue to object to the AEC Project Chariot.” and requested that the AEC “cease its plans.” Statements of deep concern over American nuclear weapons development, testing, and Project Chariot in particular were also part of the Alaska Methodist Church’s annual reports throughout the early 1960s.
Heacock and the Alaska Methodist women’s society also spread the word about Chariot beyond Alaska by taking advantage of the Methodist Church’s network of civic education programs, traditionally run by the women of the church. “It has been described as one of the largest and most significant adult education programs in the world,” says Heacock, “because in almost every city and town in the United States and even in rural places you’ll find United Methodist churches, and most of these have a United Methodist women’s organization.” By the spring of 1961, the national group, the Woman’s Division of Christian Service, had taken specific action on the Alaska harbor “in response to expressed concerns of Women’s Societies in Alaska related to the dangerous effects of Project Chariot.” The group called on President Kennedy to delay the blast until its usefulness might be proved and the people’s safety assured.
Heacock also had another idea. He asked a legislator from Kotzebue, Jacob Stalker, to have the mayor of Point Hope produce a tape recording, in English, of residents expressing their attitudes toward Chariot. When the tape arrived, Heacock thought it expressed the central problems with simple, powerful eloquence, as an excerpt illustrates:
DAVID FRANKSON (MAYOR): What do you think about this plan at Cape Thompson?
JOSEPH FRANKSON: Well, one thing, I don’t want it to go off. I don’t know much about the atomic bombs, but what I heard and what I know little bit about them, well, it’s to me, just like taking a chance on our lives here at Point Hope. Well, on what I hear from people, and from people that know a little bit about atomic bombs, I know it can do a lot of serious damage to people’s body. And I hate, I don’t want to take a chance on my life. You know, anybody that’s born anyplace always likes his home. I don’t care where people are from. I know I like this place, Point Hope. So I like to keep living here.
DAVID FRANKSON: Without any disturbances like that?
JOSEPH FRANKSON: No. Well, we know they’re taking a chance because I know they are doing a lot of studying. They must be taking a chance if they are doing a lot of studying here.
Heacock sent the tape off to the Woman’s Division of Christian Service in New York and it was circulated around the country to women’s groups within the Methodist Church. “And I’m sure it was related to opposition that grew to Project Chariot,” says Heacock.
• • •
Aside from group or institutional activism, individual opposition to Project Chariot was sprouting from the grass roots. In Norwich, Vermont, Alan Cooke, who had worked briefly with Don Foote on the Chariot studies, began “anti-AEC-ing.” With the help of his wife and mother-in-law, who was a professional writer and editor, Cooke sent letters to some thirty members of Congress complaining that the AEC was preparing to go ahead with the explosion “in the face of reasoned and trustworthy warnings against it.”
By far, the most energetic and dedicated grass-roots protest was the inspiration of a man named Jim Haddock, of Manchester, New Hampshire. “I imagine myself to be an average man,” he wrote Les Viereck in early 1961, “Amherst graduate, employed by the local electric utility in scheduling production of power, load forecasts, etc. I have a better than average knowledge of mathematics and nuclear physics through special courses at M.I.T. I have never been associated with any ‘causes’ before and would not be now if I had been able to find some one else to carry the ball.”
Haddock had learned of Chariot through a purely chance encounter with Keith Lawton, when Lawton had exchanged pulpits with the rector of Grace Church in Manchester for the summer of 1960. Lawton spoke about Chariot before various groups and even appeared in interviews on radio and television. Dramatizing Lawton’s message was the presence of Antonio Weber, a highly respected Inupiaq hunter from Point Hope, and his wife, Hilda, who traveled and hunted with him. The couple had come along with the Lawtons for the summer, and for Jim and Doris Haddock, they put a human face on the impending tragedy.* The Haddocks, together with another couple, Max and Elizabeth Foster of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and the Fosters’ son Peter, comprised the ranks of what they facetiously called “the Campaign.”
Like the Alaskan conservationists, the Campaign had a mimeograph machine and a typewriter. But they also had “connections,” as they say in New England. Max Foster had been a partner in a Boston law firm and three of his classmates at Yale were in the U.S. Senate; Elizabeth Foster was a board member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, while the Haddocks’ son was engaged to the niece of a distinguished New England doyenne, Mrs. Joseph Lyndon Smith, “Aunt Corinna.” One of the Campaign’s more interesting attempts to thwart the onrush of Chariot involved presenting the case to Aunt Corinna who, as it was generally accepted, could “call up the President any time.” Elizabeth Foster wrote an account of the Campaign, including this recollection of the tea given by Aunt Corinna for Doris Haddock, Jackie Lawton, and Hilda Weber of Point Hope:
The party was awesome and not wholly satisfactory. Blistering weather, the unaccustomed grandeur of the surroundings, Aunt Corinna’s gracious but daunting formality, were all too much for Hilda, who could not utter a word. Mrs. Lawton lost her poise when her small son upset his milk on the oriental rug, which left Doris [Haddock] to present the Chariot problem without help from her chief witnesses [Hilda Weber and Jackie Lawton]. . . . The party returned home to Manchester without hope that anything had been accomplished. Clearly Aunt Corinna did not intend to call up the President.
Not the president, perhaps, but Mrs. Smith also happened to serve on the board of directors of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and this connection would prove valuable both to the Campaign and to the Inupiat people of Alaska. Meanwhile, Jim Haddock prepared and mimeographed a six-page paper outlining the case against Chariot. The project could never be carried out, Haddock wrote, if it were proposed to be conducted on a cattle range in Texas, or on the fishing grounds of the Atlantic Seaboard:
It would be instantly rejected because of the immediate and convincing protest with which the people . . . would, through their representatives, through their newspapers, over radio and television networks, blanket the country. These 300 Eskimo men, women and children have no voice with which to make any protest.
Haddock also questioned the morality of exposing human beings to risk when they “have been given no opportunity to express their acceptance or rejection of that risk.”
To this memorandum, Haddock added Les Viereck’s letter of resignation from the University of Alaska, the ACS statements opposing Chariot, and the Wilderness Society resolution. He would make, he wrote Les Viereck, “a serious and strenuous effort” to get the packet of information “to every point of power possible.” Routes of access were explored up through the labyrinthine channels of eastern society. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall received the information “from a close personal friend who is granddaughter of Groton’s headmaster.” Dean Acheson, Kennedy’s foreign policy adviser and former secretary of state, was a friend of Elizabeth Foster’s brother and of Max’s, and a full account was sent to him “with a request to get it to Kennedy.” Acheson replied that he had been advised “by one who knows” that he could say “categorically that nothing is imminent.” Haddock interpreted this to mean that Acheson had spoken to Kennedy, that the president was not wedded to the experiment, and that it was likely that considerations dealing with test-ban treaty negotiations probably would control the future of Project Chariot. McGeorge Bundy, another of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained advisers, had worked on nuclear disarmament policy and was also a distant relation of Max Foster’s. Bundy, too, received the materials and passed them on to others on the White House staff whom he knew to share misgivings about Chariot. Ted Sherburne, a friend of Jim Haddock’s and the new director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, received a packet along with another one for him to give Glenn Seaborg, the new chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Max Foster also knew Henry Luce of Time and Life, who was encouraging but thought the time not yet ripe for a story. Jim Haddock wrote the Lawtons that he never dreamed Max Foster would use his connections, but that he was doing so “shamelessly.” “He is unutterably tenacious once he is roused,” Haddock wrote.
By the time the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information was getting to work on its Project Chariot issue, the Campaign had already made the AEC take notice. When Plowshare chief John Kelly met with CNI in the spring of 1961, “he told a tale concerning [the Campaign’s] original mailing,” according to CNI staffer Judith Miller. “It appears that 36 Congressmen, Governors and other official gentlemen who received that mailing all forwarded the copies to the AEC . . . where they were all piled on Dr. Kelly’s desk for reply.” By May, the AEC’s then director of military applications, A. W. Betts, wrote to the commissioners that “the volume of incoming letters objecting to Project Chariot has increased greatly,” and these, he said, came “directly or indirectly from a small group.” Betts identified the small group: Don Foote and Keith Lawton led the list followed by the Haddocks and Fosters, Viereck and Pruitt, the Alaska Conservation Society and the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. Betts said the Haddock-Foster pamphlet had been forwarded to the AEC by the White House, by about twenty congressmen, and by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Betts advised AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg and the commissioners that the “attack on Chariot will continue and may even expand.”
The Campaign was a small group, but a dedicated one. On July 3, 1961, its efforts began to look as if they might yield some success. That day, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the Haddocks got a telephone call from Aunt Corinna. Now, a year after she had hosted the “not wholly satisfactory” tea party, Aunt Corinna was calling to say that the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) was going to send its executive director, La Verne Madigan, to Alaska. The group, at Mrs. Smith’s urging, had appropriated money to “make available to Eskimos the legal and investigatory services long available to Indian tribes.” She wanted to know if the Haddocks could introduce Miss Madigan to the Lawtons. A half hour later, Madigan called. She would be leaving at once for Alaska and would be accompanied by Dr. Henry S. Forbes, chairman of the association’s Committee on Alaskan Policy. Their mission was to “assess the facts and protect [the Eskimo’s] interests.” When the Haddocks went to bed that night they had reason to hope that they had put out the light on Project Chariot.
* In 1999, at the age of eighty-nine, Doris Haddock (better known as Granny D.) began a 3,200-mile walk across the country to demonstrate support for campaign finance reform.