The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
William Pruitt and Leslie Viereck
In 1969, Pruitt left Memorial University in Newfoundland for a job at another Canadian school, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where he became recognized among students and colleagues as “the father of North American boreal ecology.” For twenty-eight years, Pruitt exiled himself from the United States, eventually becoming a Canadian citizen. He took sabbaticals and attended conferences at centers of northern study throughout the circumpolar world, but not in Alaska or elsewhere in the United States. Nor would he publish in U.S. scientific journals. In 1989, Dr. Pruitt received the Canadian government’s Northern Science Award and Centenary Medal for significant contribution to understanding of the North. He retired in 1996 at the age of seventy-four, whereupon the title Senior Scholar was conferred upon him.
Les Viereck continued to work at the Institute of Northern Forestry in Fairbanks from 1964 until the U.S. Forest Service closed the institute in 1996, and he retired. Following the closure, a co-operative unit emerged at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Viereck remains affiliated there as a Forest Service Emeritus Scientist. He is also Affiliate Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and periodically works on projects for several of the university’s research institutes. His classification of vegetation in Alaska is considered the “bible” for researchers and scientists, and his books on Alaska’s woody vegetation (particularly Alaska Trees and Shrubs) are regarded as indispensable guides. Viereck is internationally known as Alaska’s leading forest ecologist.
Over the years, both Edward Teller and former President Wood had been awarded honorary doctorate degrees at the University of Alaska, as have several other erstwhile Chariot enthusiasts. In 1992, thirty years after Project Chariot’s cancellation, dozens of Pruitt and Viereck’s friends and colleagues in Fairbanks campaigned to persuade the university administration to recognize the two biologists similarly. Distinguished citizens and scholars from several countries sent in strong letters of support for Viereck and Pruitt, nearly all of them mentioning the scientists’ courageous defense of scientific integrity as an accomplishment on a par with their outstanding scientific attainments. The faculty nominating committee voted its unanimous endorsement, and the university administration, initially reluctant to do anything that might embarrass the still-living former president, approved the popular initiative. When the citation was written, however, university officials sensitive to public relations edited out any mention that the two men, at great professional risk to themselves, had stood up for the truth of their findings and for principles of academic freedom. As a practical matter, it was more politic simply to recognize the men’s scientific contributions and finesse the touchier academic freedom issue. But the faculty committee reconvened and, led by two senior professors who had been on the faculty during Chariot days (Rudy Krejci and Jack Distad) insisted that language similar to the original, committee-passed version be restored. And it was.
On May 6, 1993, a short, round, gray-bearded man stooping under a big pack stepped off a Canadian airplane on to the tarmac at Fairbanks and walked through Customs. A shout went up from a small mob of equally gray old friends—pals who had been young in Alaska together, many of them now in their seventies. Les and Teri Viereck, Celia Hunter, Ginny Wood, and others rushed to embrace Bill Pruitt and his wife Erna. Red-faced and absolutely speechless, his eyes filling with tears, Pruitt recognized some of the people by voice alone. Three days later, the University of Alaska awarded honorary doctorate degrees to William Pruitt and Leslie Viereck. In part, the university had conferred its highest honor in recognition of the very actions for which the men had lost their jobs thirty years earlier.
Former President Wood did not attend the commencement exercises for the first time in thirty-two years.
As an additional honor, the Alaska state legislature passed a resolution honoring Viereck and Pruitt that plainly acknowledged how the scientists came to lose their positions at the state’s university. Concluding, the citation reads: “Gentlemen, you were right, and we, the people of Alaska, owe you a debt of gratitude for holding strong to your principles. The members of the Eighteenth Alaska State Legislature humbly thank you.”
Don Foote
Though he had only a short professional life, superlatives with respect to Foote’s scholarship come from every quarter. Sometimes called “the new Stefansson,” he remains a major figure in Arctic human geography. As one colleague said: “Many ideas, theories, and techniques in these fields that were unknown or were at odds with conventional wisdom forty years ago, and which Don did much to pioneer, have become conventional and routine today.”
William R. Wood
Wood presided over the University of Alaska (now called University of Alaska Fairbanks) from 1960 until 1973, a period of unprecedented growth. As one backer enthused, ever since his first day on the job, “Dr. Wood has had back hoes and bulldozers running over that campus.” One of these projects was to construct a new power plant and, for a time, he was hopeful of replacing the aging boilers with a nuclear reactor. During his thirteen-year presidency, Wood aided in the establishment of several research institutes, tripled student enrollment, saw the value of the campus plant increase nearly tenfold, the budget rise by a factor of seven, and the university system expand statewide. But during Wood’s reign, the campus was rocked by “four separate incidents of arbitrary firings,” according to one former professor who has written on the subject. Some of these, including the Pruitt and Viereck case, were multiple firings. As one philosophy professor at the University of Alaska said: “Philosophical differences cannot be handled here because we do not have . . . what I call culture—culture in the exchange of ideas. . . . The atmosphere here is not conducive to academic freedom as it is generally understood.”
For more than thirty years, Wood supported every large development project proposed for Alaska. As Project Chariot ground to a halt, Wood climbed aboard the bandwagon to dam the Yukon River near the village of Rampart. He served on the Rampart Economic Advisory Board and later as vice president of Yukon Power for America, a booster group formed to promote the dam. In the late 1960s, when controversy erupted over whether to build the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and conservation groups rallied in opposition, Wood charged that the criticism was “anti-God, anti-man and anti-mind.” It was anti-God because the Bible directed man to “fill the earth and subdue it.” It was anti-man because the critics’ worldview seemed to doubt the doctrine of mankind’s supremacy over the earth and other living things. And it was anti-mind in that pipeline opponents seemed to lack sufficient commitment to material progress through human ingenuity.
After retiring, Wood stayed on in the community (unlike his successors, who all hastened south). Into his nineties he remained a revered civic leader and prominent Alaskan. He served a term as mayor of Fairbanks, was named “Distinguished Citizen” by the local Boy Scouts and “Alaskan of the Year” by the statewide chamber of commerce. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner gave Wood a regular column, in which for more than a decade his views were featured as the apparent voice of reason in a world overrun by environmental extremism. He died in 2001.
Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood
After 1962, Hunter continued to serve as executive secretary and principal spokesperson of the Alaska Conservation Society. The remarkable success of this tiny, grass-roots organization—and the feisty intelligence of Celia Hunter—drew the attention of national conservation groups. After serving on its governing council and then as council president, Hunter left Fairbanks in 1976 for Washington, D.C. to become the national executive director of the 50,000-member Wilderness Society. For many years, she and Ginny Wood shared a log cabin outside Fairbanks. The handcrank mimeograph machine was sent to the shed, and the manual typewriter gave way to a computer, but both women wrote regular columns and remained among Alaska’s most articulate commentators on environmental issues. Celia died suddenly in 2001.
Conservation
The defeat of Project Chariot represented the first successful opposition to the American nuclear establishment and one of the first battles of the new era of “environmentalism.” Here the rationale for caution was not the old logic of conserving a magnificent landscape or endangered species. Rather it was based on a more holistic concept of environmental protection, one premised on the realization that insidious degradation was possible because of the invisible connectedness of things. “Looking back on my career in environmentalism,” said Barry Commoner in a 1988 interview, “it is absolutely certain that it began when I went to the library to look up lichen in connection with the Chariot program. That’s a very vivid picture in my mind.” Chariot led Commoner into environmentalism, and Commoner led others into what became known as the environmental movement. By 1970, Commoner was on the cover of Time magazine as the apparent leader of the new movement—the “Paul Revere of Ecology,” as the Time headline put it, noted for his “political savvy, scientific soundness and the ability to excite people with his ideas.” Elsewhere he has been called “the dean of the environmental movement,” and “the father of grass-roots environmentalism.” “I think,” said Commoner in 1988, “in so far as I had an effect on the development of the whole movement—which I did, I have to admit—Project Chariot can be regarded as the ancestral birthplace of at least a large segment of the environmental movement.”
• • •
The environmental study that the Alaskan biologists had demanded, and which John Wolfe had shepherded through the AEC, was published by the AEC as Environment of the Cape Thompson Region, Alaska in 1966. It was said to be the most comprehensive bioenvironmental program ever done at that time. “Nowhere in the free world at least,” wrote John Wolfe in 1961, “and probably nowhere else, has such an assemblage of bioenvironmental researches been carried on simultaneously in the same location encompassing both land and sea environments.” Because the Chariot environmental study was, at least ostensibly, intended as a planning tool, it can be regarded as the first de facto environmental impact statement (EIS). Begun ten years before the EIS formally existed, the Chariot study served as a model for some of the early EISs produced under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
Alaska Natives and the Tundra Times
The Native land claims issue would become a central focus of the Tundra Times for the rest of the 1960s, as the paper served to politically sensitize and unify all Alaska Natives. In the summer of 1962, the Athabascan Indians of Alaska’s Interior met for the first time since 1913 and followed the Barrow conference model to organize in defense of aboriginal rights and land issues. It was the beginning of a new era of political accomplishment for Alaska Natives, which would reach its apex in 1971 with the passage of the historic Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The 40 million acres of land that would be conveyed by that act would exceed all the land held in trust for all other American Indians. And the nearly $1 billion in compensation for lands already given up would nearly quadruple the total amount won by all other Indian tribes from the Indian Claims Commission over its twenty-five-year history.
Project Plowshare
After the Sedan “success,” the Atomic Energy Commission’s Plowshare program continued to expand in anticipation of excavating a new Panama Canal with nuclear explosives. By 1968, the program drew $18 million in annual federal funding. But by then, President Johnson was being pressed to reduce spending in light of rising inflation and an escalating Vietnam War. When the AEC requested a boost in Plowshare funding to $24 million for 1969, Johnson administration budget cutters approved only $14 million, a cut of $4 million. Richard Nixon, during his first run for the presidency in 1960, had promoted Plowshare in campaign speeches as “new and imaginative,” as “having great potential,” and as offering “tantalizing glimpses of great new vistas of future achievement.” But according to Plowshare historian Trevor Findlay, when Nixon ascended to the presidency in 1969, he seemed to have no particular affinity for Plowshare. By then the program was largely identified with the Johnson administration, which had funded it amply for six years. To the AEC’s request for nearly $30 million in annual funding, Nixon responded with less than $15 million. Congressman Craig Hosmer, a Plowshare supporter on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy fumed: “In addition to the assorted professors, scientists, lawyers and literati who whine over Plowshare for philosophical reasons, a hard core of Plowshare opponents seem to have developed within the Executive Branch of the government itself.”
The truth that boosters like Hosmer ignored was that besides being expensive, there just seemed to be little need to trade the enormous risks involved in multiple, high-yield nuclear detonations for the opportunity to correct “a slightly flawed planet.” When the Atlantic Pacific Inter-oceanic Canal Commission delivered its recommendations to Nixon on the idea of a new sea-level Panama Canal, it rejected the use of nuclear excavation. The commission said the plan’s “technical feasibility”—a term that surely included radiation safety and other environmental concerns—had not been proven. Besides the scientific issues, there was a political consideration as well. The canal project would have required signatory states to agree to an amendment of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT). As Findlay writes: “The most incredible aspect of the entire nuclear excavation saga had been the air of unreality about the chances of the PTBT being amended. . . . To start with, no one seemed to have any idea whether the Soviet Union would agree or not.”
After the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), environmental impact statements were required to be prepared for all Plowshare projects. NEPA could not require the disclosure of the bomb’s characteristics, but it did force the release of more information as to the risks associated with the detonations. After NEPA, says political scientist Richard Sylves, “Plowshare could no longer proceed as elite or concealed policy-making.” As the public’s knowledge of civil works detonations grew, so did people’s uneasiness with the idea. Plowshare’s nuclear excavation program ended in 1970, while other Plowshare applications of nuclear explosions continued to be funded for a few more years. “The story of Project Plowshare,” writes Sylves, “is one of sustained and futile scientific and engineering optimism in the face of a world public becoming increasingly intolerant of such nuclear ventures. . . . The termination of Plowshare was the reluctant admission that a nuclear utopia was not imminent.”
In the Soviet Union, however, a similar program continued, and nuclear blasts were used for oil stimulation, creating underground storage cavities, extinguishing gas fires, conducting deep seismic sounding, and excavating. On February 10, 1992, Alaska’s U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, cited published and U.S. intelligence reports that indicated the possibility of “widespread nuclear contamination” in the former Soviet Union as a result of peaceful nuclear explosions. According to his information, Murkowski said, the Soviets had used nonmilitary devices for civil works projects during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Murkowski called for an intelligence investigation. Four days later, he received a report classified “Secret” from the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to his press release, the report gave “credence to his initial fears.” Murkowski referred to accounts of Russian scientists who estimated that the Soviet Union may have released into the atmosphere a billion curies of radioactivity from 126 so-called “peaceful nuclear explosions.”
In August, speaking at a special meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence convened in Fairbanks, then Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates echoed Murkowski’s distress over the Soviet PNE program, saying, “These [Soviet] crater-producing explosions produced widespread contamination.” None of the more than two dozen experts testifying at the day-long hearing mentioned that radioactive contamination of the Arctic would have been a U.S. legacy as well if the AEC had been allowed to conduct Project Chariot. No one mentioned that just five years earlier in Anchorage, Edward Teller had spoken to a prodevelopment association and lamented that Project Chariot “should have been done. With no good reason, the environmentalists stopped us. . . . The Soviets are doing it; we are not.”
Nothing if not persistent, Teller continued to advocate the peaceful use of nuclear explosions into the 1990s, revelations of the USSR’s disastrous experience with PNEs notwithstanding. In late 1992, in response to the Senate hearings, Teller insisted that the bomb would yet be redeemed as a peaceful tool: “In the future it certainly will be used, and it can be used safely. The Soviets have been much too careless. We must find safe ways. When we find them, programs of that kind, including the kinds of things we tried to do in Alaska, will be practical and safe.”
As the Soviet economy deteriorated, a business called International Chetek Corporation was founded in Moscow to offer nuclear explosions to anyone in the world with enough cash. “We are willing to entertain all ideas,” said a Chetek marketing representative in Montreal, Quebec, bringing to mind Edward Teller’s epigram of thirty years earlier: “If your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card.” “It doesn’t matter who, where or when,” said the Chetek salesman, “we have all the technologies and they’re going to be used.” The first offering at this “yard sale at the end of history,” as one strategic analyst calls it, was Chetek’s proposal to incinerate chemical and radioactive wastes, chemical weapons, retired warheads, and the like in an underground nuclear explosion. Chetek appears to have gone out of business within a year or so of its formation, so perhaps it will not be necessary to deal with the strategic and environmental repercussions of cash-starved Soviet scientists launching have-bomb-will-travel enterprises.
Edward Teller
Teller continued to be at or near the center of American defense and nuclear policy for decades, with an apparently life-time appointment as de facto science adviser to the president during Republican administrations. He was unwavering in his support for weapons development and testing, and equally steadfast in opposition to any attempts at controlling the arms race. Repeatedly, when his cold war agenda was threatened, Teller undertook intensive lobbying campaigns, promoting some not-yet-existing technology with an optimism that was later shown to be scientifically insupportable. At the end of World War II, when scientists began to head back to their universities and the Los Alamos laboratory began to shrink, Teller demanded that a crash program be launched to build a model of the H-bomb in which he proclaimed great confidence. In support of his model, he presented calculations that later proved to be wrong. The H-bomb only emerged when an unrelated model was suggested by a colleague. Nevertheless, Teller succeeded in keeping a vigorous nuclear weapons program alive. And he did so even though it meant “leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to be very incomplete,” as Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize winner and Teller’s boss on the Manhattan Project, has said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Teller helped to kill the chances for a comprehensive test ban by insisting that the “clean bomb” was “well on its way to success.” The clean bomb—a key to Plowshare miracles—was not at hand at that time, nor is it today after more than thirty years of experimenting. “During the moratorium,” says Teller, speaking candidly about his greatest challenge as Director of LRL, “the problem was to keep the [Livermore] lab together and to keep people working on nuclear designs even though we could not test.” The promise of a clean bomb assisted with that objective; the laboratory stayed in business, and treaty negotiations with the Soviets—which Teller feared would cause Americans “to turn away from nuclear weapons”—fell short of a comprehensive test ban. Instead, a “limited” or “partial” test ban treaty was signed, which, while banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, oceans, and space, permitted them underground.
In the 1980s, a new and powerful threat to the arms race emerged in the form of a “nuclear freeze movement.” The initiative garnered widespread support as people questioned the need to continue stockpiling weapons capable of annihilating adversaries 1,000 times over. But again Edward Teller outflanked the arms-control advocates and repackaged the business of weapons production. He saw that nuclear weapons R & D—not to mention a broad wish list of other military projects—could be sold to the American people (and funded by Congress) under the rubric “defensive shield.” Teller had convinced politicians of the feasibility of a fantastic technology, namely that not-yet-developed X-ray lasers, based in space, could knock out incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In March of 1983, President Ronald Reagan unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), later dubbed “Star Wars,” which, he said, could make nuclear weapons “obsolete.” With Reagan embracing Teller’s vision, Star Wars became, by far, the most expensive military project in the history of the world. But the laser hardware never materialized. Thirty billion dollars were poured into the benign-sounding research that many scientists described as “a fraud” and “impossible to accomplish.” The nuclear freeze initiative essentially disappeared. The weapons labs stayed in business, flush with money. Again, Teller had led the country into a fantastically ambitious and expensive military project on the basis of a technical optimism that was neither scientifically supportable at the time nor validated later.
In each case—with his first model of the H-bomb, with the clean bomb, with Plowshare, and with Star Wars lasers—Teller passionately insisted that he had the key to brilliant new technologies if only nuclear weapons R & D were allowed to continue. In each case, the promised breakthrough failed to come about as advertised, while progress on arms control was thwarted and the agenda of the weaponeer advanced. “Time will reveal,” wrote I. F. Stone in his 1963 book The Haunted Fifties, “that those who campaigned for a nuclear test ban were acting in the best interests of United States security while those who opposed it, as Edward Teller and the AEC-Pentagon crowd did, were acting against our country’s best interests.”
• • •
In June 1987, Edward Teller returned to Alaska. Once again he came to promote a defense-related, high-technology project to be based in the Alaskan Arctic. He proposed installing SDI laser weapons on the North Slope. Speaking before Commonwealth North, a prodevelopment business group, Teller evoked the rhetoric of the Chariot debate of thirty years earlier. He offered Alaskans, whom he again called the most “reasonable” of U.S. citizens, an opportunity to “make a great contribution to the nation’s defense.” He applauded the fact that the barren Arctic wasteland had been validated now with oil development. Before Prudhoe Bay, he said to the laughter of his audience, “the North Slope was not yet there.” Once again negating several thousand years of Inupiat Eskimo culture, he continued, “Or to be more accurate, nobody was there except the North Slope.”
The Alaskan businessmen attending the breakfast meeting pressed Teller to use his political clout to bring the big federal project to the state: “May we presume,” one questioner asked, “that you will advise the President and those instrumental in SDI development that Alaska and the North Slope presents the ideal locale for placement of laser and particle beam defense staging?” Himself beaming, Teller replied: “You may certainly presume that I will . . . advise the President’s advisors. I have the experience that our president [Reagan] is a very good listener. . . . I am very hopeful that you will see action.”
Star Wars lasers were never installed on the North Slope or in space. But, with Teller’s involvement, the idea has been reconfigured and repackaged into a succession of anti-ballistic missile schemes, the latest of which has been built in Alaska. What has not changed in forty years is that billions of dollars continues to be transferred from public coffers to the arms manufacturers, that no meaningful security from intercontinental ballistic missiles has resulted, and that the United States continues to move closer to the weaponization of space. In 2001, when President George W. Bush abrogated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia as part of a continuing effort to deploy anti-missile systems, Teller offered a two-word reaction: “High time!” Bush awarded Teller the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, praising his “long life of brilliant achievement and patriotic service.” He died the same year at the age of ninety-five, one of the most politically influential scientists of the twentieth century.
Missile Defense
The history of missile defense has followed a roller coaster trajectory, led by gung ho champions during Republican administrations and at least acquiescent apostates during Democratic ones. In the 1960s, the military was able to send a missile launched from Kwajalein atoll in the central Pacific to within a mile and a quarter or so of a missile fired from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. In theory, that proximity was close enough to destroy an incoming missile, if the interceptor detonated a nuclear warhead. But such a crude antiballistic missile system (ABM) was known to have major flaws. Each incoming missile could contain multiple warheads and multiple decoys, and U.S. detection equipment might not distinguish between them. If only one warhead got through, an entire city could be destroyed. With any missile defense system, therefore, there is no margin for error. A ninety-nine percent success rate in defending San Francisco, say, could amount to total failure.
The task of discriminating between decoys and actual warheads might be made easier by withholding the intercept until after reentry, by which time any decoys (lacking heavy shielding) would have burned up. But this “terminal” phase lasts only a very short time—perhaps one or two minutes—and the available technology could not process the data fast enough. Besides, such a relatively low altitude intercept would mean detonating one nuclear bomb—and blowing apart another one—in the atmosphere above American cities, plastering our own population with radioactive fallout. These problems notwithstanding, Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon pressed ahead with ABM. In 1975, at a cost of $6 billion, an ABM installation called Safeguard became operational in North Dakota, defending a single battery of American nuclear-tipped ICBMs. The facility was shut down just months later, Congress having decided its maintenance was a waste of money.
Funding of research for ABM systems continued at the Pentagon into the late 1970s, however, to the tune of about a billion dollars a year. When Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency in 1980, a plank in the Republican Party platform called for “vigorous research and development of an effective anti-ballistic missile system.” Following Reagan’s election, and with Teller promoting as a virtual certainty a new X-ray laser weapon, “Star Wars” emerged. Tens of billions of dollars later, no such weapons existed. And as the USSR imploded, even the Soviet threat went away.
With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the public was more concerned with a sputtering economy than with fantastical weapons systems. The enormously expensive Star Wars program appeared to be dead. But the arms manufacturers (who would make billions whether a missile defense system worked or not) were solidly allied with political conservatives (who seemed less concerned about an efficacious missile defense than about beginning the effort to put weapons into space). A new rational emerged whereby a missile defense system need not be expected to protect the country from the sort of full-on missile attack the former Soviet Union might have launched. Rather, it would defend against the odd missile that might be lobbed at the United States by a technically advanced (and apparently suicidal) “rogue state.” Missile defense became part of the “Contract with America,” a campaign stratagem that helped the Republican Party gain control of the Congress in 1994, and missile defense was once again back on track.
If President Clinton did not favor the scheme, now called National Missile Defense (NMD), he still signed off on continued funding. In 1999, with a presidential election looming and political considerations uppermost, Congress passed and Clinton signed the National Missile Defense Act. It simply stated: “It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as technologically possible an effective national missile defense.” After three years of testing, and just before the 2000 election, Clinton said he did not have confidence in the NMD system. Rather than cancel it, however, he said he would let the next president decide whether or not to deploy NMD. In this matter, George W. Bush was pleased to be “the decider.” The new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had been an early and ardent advocate not only of missile defense, but of putting American weapons in space.
What military analysts had been calling a “rush to failure,” now rushed even faster. Testing resumed, but when independent scientists such as the Union of Concerned Scientists looked at the experimental designs, they found that the Pentagon had created an array of artificialities that simplified the inceptor’s task. For one thing, many of the tests were repeats of earlier tests, which placed the target array in a tight cluster, in the same place in the sky, at the same time of day (hence always illuminated by the sun in the same way). For another, the interceptor boosters used in the tests were slower, two-stage rockets that did not replicate the greater heat, vibration, and shock forces of the three-stage rockets that were intended for the system but that were not yet built. Slower rockets meant artificially slower closing speeds, so that the kill vehicle had more time to adjust to its target.
Test planners also made it artificially easy for the kill vehicle to discriminate between the mock warhead and any decoy that might be flying alongside. The decoy always had a very different electronic appearance to the kill vehicle’s sensors. The geometry of the trajectories was so arranged that the target cluster (warhead, decoy, final stage of the rocket) was kept within a narrow field of view with respect to the kill vehicle. That meant that the kill vehicle’s sensors “saw” all the objects at once. In a more realistic situation, the kill vehicle would have to rotate itself so that its sensors could gather data on several more widely separated objects. Artificially eliminating that problem gave the kill vehicle more time to rule out the decoy and steer toward the warhead.
Much of the critical detection apparatus, as well as the central computer system that would coordinate detection data with guidance instructions to the interceptor, were not yet built and so were simply not part of the tests. Instead, the defense was given in advance the incoming missile’s flight plan, and was able to point the interceptor at the precise place in the sky where the rendezvous was planned. To make things even easier, a beacon was installed on the mock warhead for the interceptor to home in on.
Even with all these advantages, most tests were acknowledged failures. When the Pentagon claimed successes, independent scientists, engineers and other analysts often demonstrated the claims to be overstated or inaccurate. The Bush administration responded by impounding data from future tests. Henceforth, test data would be classified and peer review impossible.
To President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, the fact that the technology failed to prove out in testing was not a reason to delay its deployment. In 2002, Bush announced a crash program to field a rudimentary missile defense system by 2004. Fort Greely, Alaska, was selected to host a battery of interceptors, with two additional silos to be constructed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Initially, the Pentagon said forty interceptors would be installed at Fort Greely, but later it said it would keep secret the number of missiles deployed. The first missile was loaded into a silo at Fort Greely in the summer of 2004, and the site was declared operational on June 20, 2006. The very next month, however, heavy rains flooded seven silos, causing $38 million worth of damage (silos were filled to up with water sixty-three feet deep). When Secretary Rumsfeld visited Fort Greely in August of 2006, he acknowledged that the system upon which he was spending approximately $10 billion per year, had a limited capability, that it had never been tested end-to-end, and that he would need to see a full test done successfully before he had confidence that a defensive capability actually existed. Between Rumsfeld’s admission and Ronald Reagan’s unveiling of his Star Wars vision in 1983, American taxpayers had paid approximately $100 billion for a missile defense system. Still, the administration did not gainsay their decision to build a flawed system first, then test and refine it later. Baffled observers call this strategy “Fire, aim, ready.” The catchphrase preferred by the Pentagon is “Something is better than nothing,” as if it would make more sense to buy, rather than not to buy, an umbrella made of fish net.
The People of Point Hope
In the fall of 1992, the people of Point Hope painfully revisited the Project Chariot controversy. In August of that year, I passed on to an official of the Point Hope village corporation, and to the Alaska Military Toxics Network, documents uncovered while researching this book. The letters and memoranda showed that before abandoning the Chariot camp, government scientists had buried nuclear waste near the site. Shortly, banner headlines in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska’s largest newspaper, proclaimed, NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP DISCOVERED: ARCHIVES REVEAL ’60s CHUKCHI TEST SITE; OFFICIALS HUSTLE TO DETERMINE HAZARD. The thirty-year-old documents described how the Atomic Energy Commission had contracted with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to conduct experiments with radioactive tracers at the Chariot site. And they show that when the experiment was finished, the scientists illegally buried quantities of certain radioisotopes 1,000 times in excess of federal regulations. According to the documents, the AEC had asked the USGS to submit a funding proposal for the experiment, which was not specifically related to Project Chariot.
Just before the Sedan detonation at the Nevada Test Site in July 1962, scientists from the USGS placed collection pans on the ground a mile from ground zero. Sedan threw 24 billion pounds of irradiated soil out of its crater. Seventeen and a half of those pounds were collected in the pans and the next day transferred to a cloth sack. This fallout contained the complete array of fission products, dozens of radionuclides, including the radiological poisons cesium 137, strontium 90, and traces of plutonium 239. Six weeks later, the USGS scientists flew with the sacks to Ogotoruk Creek. They also brought north from their Denver laboratory three other bags of sand mixed with three pure radioactive isotopes: cesium 137, strontium 85, and iodine 131. These three sand mixtures totaled twenty-six pounds, and together with the Sedan fallout, the total weight of all the contaminated soil flown to Alaska was 43.5 pounds. The total amount of radioactivity, as reported in the documents, was twenty-six millicuries (twenty-six thousandths of one curie). However, as much as five curies of radiation might have been transported to Ogotoruk Creek, since the USGS had asked the AEC for permission to transport that amount, and permission had been granted. Five curies would represent a third of the radiation that was said to have vented in the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the Three Mile Island mishap.
On August 21, 1962, the scientists loaded their radioactive dirt and other tools and equipment into a “weasel” track vehicle and headed up the Ogotoruk Creek valley to a tiny tributary on the west bank called Snowbank Creek. An armed guard accompanied the team to ensure that Russian agents did not steal the fallout and, through radiochemical analysis, determine various characteristics of the Sedan bomb. Three-quarters of a mile from the Chariot camp, the men staked out twelve small sites on the treeless tundra: Eleven were terrestrial plots, one was a reach of Snowbank Creek. They wrapped one-by-six boards with polyethylene sheeting and imbedded them around the perimeter of the eleven plots, which averaged about three feet on a side. A notch was cut into the lowest board so that when the area was saturated, runoff would flow from the notch so that samples might be collected in plastic bottles. Into the turf at the head of each plot, the men hammered wooden plaques identifying the isotope in use. Pictures taken at the time show the plaques and their bordered plots looking uncannily like diminutive tombstones marking tiny graves.
Next, the scientists sprinkled the radioactive soil, the “tracer,” onto the ground and the vegetation within the plots. With a gasoline-powered pump set up at the creek, and a garden hose, they simulated rain by spraying the plants and soil within the plots until they were drenched and water ran out the notch and into the plastic bottle. These samples were labeled and taken back to the laboratory in Denver for analysis.
The purpose of the experiment was to determine the extent to which water passing through irradiated soil would dissolve the fallout radionuclides and transport them to aquifers, streams, and ponds. That would indicate whether a detonation like Chariot might tend to concentrate radioactive contaminants in water supplies used by people and animals. The mixed fission products from Sedan were especially suitable stand-ins for the expected Chariot fallout because the Sedan bomb was a similar device to those planned for Chariot. It is noteworthy, however, that the experiment that could give the most definitive answers about Chariot’s potential to deliver radiation to man via water was not part of the Project Chariot program of environmental studies organized by John Wolfe. It was apparently not funded through Project Chariot or Plowshare accounts, and was not commenced until late 1962, at a time when the AEC had already decided to cancel Project Chariot. Apparently the study was of interest to the AEC’s Albuquerque Operations Office, which was concerned with the safety considerations of nuclear testing operations, generally.
At the twelfth site, the men put five and a half pounds of contaminated soil, 3.2 millicuries of radioactivity, directly into the creek. Then they collected samples of the water at twenty, forty, and sixty feet downstream to show the dispersal of the suspended particles and to measure the “resulting wave of radioactivity that passed downstream.”
To decontaminate the plots after the experiment, the men excavated the soggy soil and vegetation down to a depth where only background levels of radiation were detectable. This amount of contaminated earth, which now totaled about 15,000 pounds, they loaded into fifty-five-gallon drums and hauled to a spot midway between two of the plots. They dumped the dirt out of the drums and threw the contaminated boards into the pile. This heap measured about 4 feet high and covered about 400 square feet. The material could not be buried in a pit because, even by August, the soil had only thawed to a depth of about two feet. Instead, one of the equipment operators brought up a bulldozer from the camp and pushed about four feet of clean dirt over the top of the waste pile. Then the scientists left.
Of course, the 3.2 millicuries put into the stream was not recovered. Presumably the “wave of radioactivity” flowed down Snowbank Creek, into Ogotoruk Creek, and on down to the sea. Other scientists working at the Chariot camp were unaware of this fact, even though the camp’s water supply—for drinking, cooking, and washing—came not from a well, but from Ogotoruk Creek.
The radioactive material lay buried and forgotten for thirty years, almost exactly to the day. The site was not fenced or labeled or marked as off limits. No one monitored it over the years even though the porous nature of the uncompacted mound “could have allowed the radionuclides to leach out with rainfall,” according to a 1993 scientific review. No one had bothered to consult with the people of Point Hope about dumping nuclear waste on land they claimed. And no one told them of the dump’s existence after the fact.
The disposal contravened the Code of Federal Regulations, which limited the quantities of specific isotopes that may be buried in soil. Specifically, the cesium 137 and strontium 85 “exceeded one thousand times the amounts specified” in the law, according to federal regulators. Also contrary to the federal code, said regulators, was the fact that “no records were maintained of the byproduct materials disposed of by burial.” Finally, the disposal was in direct violation of the Department of the Interior permit that allowed the AEC to occupy the Cape Thompson region. That permit stated unequivocally that “nothing in this permit shall be construed to authorize the contamination of any portion of the lands.”
• • •
The shock waves that rippled through the Eskimo communities of northwest Alaska in 1992 upon the disclosure of the radioactive dump site reverberated around the world. NORTH SLOPE DECRIES NUCLEAR LIES, read a headline in the Anchorage Daily News soon after the story broke. Reviving after briefly folding for financial reasons, the Tundra Times revisited the story that had launched the paper exactly thirty years earlier. Atop its page one, the headline read: ATOMIC ARROGANCE: FEAR, ANGER RUN DEEP IN POINT HOPE.
Picked up by the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, and McClatchy), articles appeared in papers all over the United States, as well as in Canada, Britain, and Japan, at least: ESKIMOS FURIOUS ABOUT NUCLEAR DUMP; ESKIMOS UNCOVER 30-YEAR SECRET: NUCLEAR WASTE DUMPED NEARBY; ESKIMOS FEEL BETRAYED BY NUCLEAR EXPERIMENTS. The Washington Post gave the story prominent play, the Los Angeles Times ran it on page one, and The New York Times ran a major story in its Sunday edition with several photos.
Representatives of the Alaska state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Army Corps of Engineers flew to the site on Thursday September 10, 1992, four days after the initial news story appeared. The first snowfall of the season preceded them. A mile from the site they saw a herd of musk oxen grazing. From the air, following maps I had found in the archival documents, the officials located the waste mound not very far inland from a spot on the beach where a whale carcass was being devoured by six grizzly bears. The mound proved to be easy to find from the air because swaths of disturbed tundra radiated from it like a starburst. A bulldozer had created the mound by scraping up dirt from every direction toward the center. Though thirty years had passed, the disturbance was still plainly evident.
The first operation, a test to see if there might be a high level of radiation at the site, involved getting the pilot to fly as low as he dared, while one of the men held a Geiger counter out the window. Nothing registered. Later, the men landed and hiked to the mound. They brought along a gas-powered ice auger borrowed from a Point Hoper, but the ground was frozen below a shallow depth. They resorted to using sledge hammers to pound an eight-foot steel rod into the frozen mound. After reaching a depth of about two and a half feet, they pulled the rod out and held the Geiger counter up to its tip. When the meter registered a slight increase in activity, the Corps of Engineers man declared that he’d seen enough. The investigators filled in the hole, marked the mound as off limits, and left.
“I’m scared now more than ever,” said the mayor of Point Hope. “I’m just glad three of my people were out there and saw that meter. I trust them.” As a news story explained, Point Hopers were “desperately seeking an explanation for the high number of cancer deaths in their village.” Even though the Geiger counters had confirmed what they considered an inexcusable betrayal, Point Hopers felt a sense of vindication and relief. As they saw it, they were finally able to point to the cause of their medical troubles, and the discovery of the radioactive waste mound at Ogotoruk Creek seemed to confirm long-standing Eskimo tales of suspected buried poisons. But three paper studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control over the previous decade all concluded that cancer rates on the North Slope were not out of line with the rest of the country, and that dietary factors and smoking were more likely causes of the Eskimos’ cancers than environmental pollutants. Even though the cancer rate at Point Hope was once reported to be 38 percent higher than the national average, epidemiologists could not conclude the difference was statistically significant in a sample size as small as the population of Point Hope (600). But, as news reporters discovered, the Point Hopers “have never believed that.” North Slope Borough mayor Jeslie Kaleak told an audience in Point Hope, “I have a personal interest in this. I have lost [members of my family] to cancer that must have been caused by Project Chariot.” Even a veteran public-health worker in Arctic Alaska ascribed cancer deaths to the waste mound at Chariot camp:
My government has made me an unknowing partner in its duplicity. . . . They used me to promulgate a lie that was killing people. They assured me over and over again that the people of Point Hope were imagining their problems. They had dreamed up their tales of waste being buried near their village.
Actually, the Native Alaskans’ suspicion that they were sometimes used as unwitting participants in a radiation experiment was not without some basis in fact. Project Chariot was intended, as Livermore officials said, to be a “meaningful radioactivity experiment.” A billion and a half curies of radiation would have been vented, much of it dumped on the Eskimo people’s hunting ground, and scientists would return afterward to monitor its effect on the biota, including people. Whether Chariot was planned in the vicinity of an Eskimo community because the people there were few in number, nonwhite, not uniformly proficient in the English language nor highly educated in Western subjects—in short, because they lacked any sort of political clout—is not known. But it is known that Alaska Natives, including people from Point Hope, had been subjects in radiation experiments carried out by the U.S. military in the same time period, the mid–1950s. More than 100 Eskimos and Indians from six villages in northern Alaska were given radioactive iodine as part of an experiment conducted by the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. Subjects were given single doses of up to sixty-five microcuries (sixty-five millionths of one curie) of iodine 131 in an attempt to evaluate the role of the thyroid in human acclimatization to cold. Many subjects were dosed more than once. These doses were many times more than is considered appropriate under present medical standards, where only about six to ten microcuries are administered for diagnosis of thyroid anomalies. And that is only done when an illness is present or suspected, Healthy people, of course, are not dosed at all.
The obvious question is to what degree these Native people could have given informed consent to their participation in the study. At that time, many of the subjects in remote villages would not have spoken any English at all. Their own language would not have included a word for radiation. For many, the concept would not have been in their experience or education. The medical doctor who conducted the study remembers employing a bit of technological magic to secure one village chief’s cooperation:
We had with us a portable x-ray machine which generated enough x-rays so that we could take an x-ray picture of the chief’s head with his brain and everything showing. And he was so impressed, of course, that . . . he joined immediately. And we were then permitted to live with them, share everything with them and make a very thorough study of their metabolism, their nutrition, behavior, hunting and all that sort of thing.
Surviving participants say they had not been informed that they were involved in an experiment that had the potential to affect their health.
• • •
As soon as the existence of the Ogotoruk Creek dump site was confirmed, Alaska’s Senator Murkowski flew back to Alaska from Washington. It was September in an election year, and Murkowski had been spending a great deal of his campaign energy detailing the legacy of Soviet nuclear contamination in the Arctic. Here, all of a sudden, was an instance of American nuclear pollution, and though the amount was insignificant by comparison to Soviet dumping, it had turned up in the senator’s own backyard. Joining Governor Walter Hickel, Murkowski flew out to inspect the Chariot site and to attempt to reassure the people of Point Hope. The New York Times reported that an elderly woman spotted the senator in the village and threw herself at him shouting: “You have poisoned our land!”
Both Hickel and Murkowski demanded that the federal government clean up the site. Murkowski met with Secretary of Defense Cheney and Energy Secretary Watkins, and Governor Hickel asked President George H. W. Bush to give cleanup of the site the highest priority. Next, Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens secured $1 million for site cleanup through the Defense Appropriations Committee. By February 1993, the Department of Energy put the cleanup figure at $3 million, and the agency said it would spend the money even though they were sure the mound posed no risk.
In March 1993, Stevens convinced the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to launch a Government Accounting Office (GAO) investigation to identify other radioactive waste sites in Alaska. The GAO study initially was restricted to “abandoned” military sites, but it was pointed out (by the author) that such a limitation would likely miss the most contaminated sites in the state, excepting Amchitka, namely those at active military bases such as Fort Greely. Also, an investigation limited to federal land would miss federally licensed disposals on state land, such as the burial of low-level radioactive wastes by the University of Alaska Fairbanks on its campus and at the “Musk Ox Farm,” a popular tourist attraction in Fairbanks. In apparent response, the study was broadened to include non-federal sites, active military bases, and some other sites about which it received information.
Issued in July 1994, the slim report is far from an aggressive investigation. Essentially, the GAO asked the principal polluters—the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy—to identify and characterize their dump sites, then it incorporated into its report whatever information the agencies had cared to present. There were no terrestrial surprises, though at the time of the report’s publication, the army had yet to check 138 defense facilities for radioactive waste. But offshore, the report acknowledged that between 1958 and 1969, at a point in the ocean 350 miles southwest of Ketchikan, Alaska, the Boeing Company of Seattle (with the AEC’s permission) dumped 294 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste (including strontium 90 and radium 226).
As the Chariot site nuclear-waste dump controversy escalated, lawyers, environmental consultants, bureaucrats, and reporters flew, phoned, or faxed north like prospectors in a high-tech gold rush. The North Slope Borough expected to spend $150,000 on their consultants, and they wanted federal reimbursement. The Department of Energy preferred to leave the material buried to decay to harmless levels over the next century, but said it would spend the $3 million in cleanup costs in order to calm the Eskimo people. By May 1993, the estimate had jumped to $5 million, by June, $6 million, but the agency was still inclined to spend the money. Plans were drawn up for the establishment of a fifty-one-man camp at Ogotoruk Creek to accommodate cleanup workers. If the government spent more than $1 million removing the contaminated soil from Ogotoruk Creek, said one DOE contractor, “it could easily go down in history as the most expensive and least cost-effective radiation protection measure ever undertaken in the history of mankind.”
While the disposal of radioactive waste near Point Hope was carried out in an insensitive, secretive, and illegal way—and while it illuminates the AEC’s motivations at that time, and its management of nuclear wastes since then—it is hard to reconcile the frantic public reaction when one considers Nevada. Not quite half of the radioactivity buried at Ogotoruk Creek consists of 17.5 pounds of irradiated dirt collected from the Sedan test at the Nevada Test Site. This material (perhaps a shovel’s worth) lay buried under four feet of fill, thirty miles from the nearest dwelling (at Point Hope). That leaves twenty-four billion pounds of the same Sedan ejecta sitting on top of the desert floor in Nevada, blown about by the winds for forty-five years. If it was reasonable to demand that the government spend $6 million hauling out the comparatively microscopic Chariot contamination, what ought the people of Nevada to demand?
Or, nearer to home than Nevada, Alaskans might take a minute to consider how the Ogotoruk Creek disposal ought to rank alongside the serious radioactive contamination at Fort Greely, just outside the town of Delta Junction, Alaska (population 840). At the reactor site there, the military left behind—by the army’s own reckoning—70,000 curies of radioactivity. That figure is roughly 2.5 million times greater than what was buried near Point Hope, and it does not include additional low-level radioactive waste that the army deliberately pumped into a well on the base, or that which they dumped into Jarvis Creek, both on the outskirts of Delta Junction.
“Remediation” programs such as the one performed at Ogotoruk Creek may become the pork-barrel projects of future decades. If so, it seems reasonable to ask where the megadollars will end up. Probably not with the people whose lands were violated, but rather with the weapons laboratories and their contractors, newly reconstituted as decontamination specialists—back to the geniuses who put the stuff there to begin with.
Perhaps even more worrisome is the fact that a near-hysterical public reaction to such disclosures will tend to validate government policies of deception and secrecy. If the public appears incapable of a rational evaluation of risk, then the agencies can be expected to extend a program of propaganda and disinformation that, while it may dampen excess anxiety, evades public accountability and corrodes democracy.
Alaska
It was not surprising that the Atomic Energy Commission chose Alaska as a venue for Project Chariot. Like the moon (which Edward Teller had also suggested as a target of experimental nuclear explosions), Alaska was often regarded as a barren wasteland, suitable for extracting mineral resources or as a laboratory for testing potentially hazardous technologies. At various times, the AEC considered other Alaska projects, such as blasting an instant harbor at Point Barrow with a five-megaton shot, or dredging Bering Strait with nuclear explosions.
In 1962, the first “portable” nuclear power plant to be built in the field attained criticality at Fort Greely, Alaska. Under emergency conditions, the army said, it would be possible to fly the components of such a plant to a remote site. The reactor operated for ten years as low-level radioactive waste was pumped into nearby Jarvis Creek and into a well that was drilled for that purpose.
As the Chariot scheme was being scrapped, intense debate in Alaska focused on another megaproject, Rampart Dam. Here the plan was to erect the largest dam in the world on the Yukon River near the village of Rampart. A vast marshy lowland known as the Yukon Flats would be submerged, and the 10,000-square-mile lake created would cover an area larger than Lake Erie. Again business and labor leaders, politicians, and the university president rallied behind Rampart. And again opposition arose from the usual quarters: principally, the Alaska Conservation Society allied with Alaska Native villagers. Boosters touted 5 million kilowatts generated annually, twice as much as produced by any other dam in the world. No one was more outspoken in support of Rampart than Alaska’s U.S. senator and former governor, Ernest Gruening. Of the Yukon Flats, he said: “Scenically it is zero. In fact it is one of the few really ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty.” Joining the ranks of developers who saw northern lands as desolate and even repulsive, Gruening told audiences that the region to be inundated was “nothing but a vast wasteland . . . notable chiefly for swarming clouds of mosquitoes.”
Perhaps there was one man more outspoken than Gruening—his administrative assistant, former editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, George Sundborg. “Search the whole world over,” said Sundborg, “and it would be difficult to find an equivalent area with so little to be lost through flooding. . . . In fact, those who know it best say the kindest and best thing one could do for the place is put it under 400 feet of water.” Apparently, those who knew the area best were not the Native people who had occupied the territory for perhaps 10,000 years, but men more of Sundborg’s stripe. Critics pointed out that seven Athabascan villages would be drowned by the project, but that didn’t amount to much of a loss, according to Sundborg. After all, he said, the whole area contained “not more than ten flush toilets.” It was a novel way to quantify the value of a culture, but not out of character for the comparatively uncivilized boosters. When Rampart Dam proponents paid any attention at all to the 1,200 people whose homeland and livelihood would disappear, they sometimes did so with a degree of ethnocentrism not readily distinguishable from insult. Gruening didn’t mind saying, for instance, that these people lived in “an area as worthless from the standpoint of human habitation as any that can be found on earth.”
Besides the impact to human beings, there were other serious ecological consequences of the proposed dam. The potential cost was summed up in plain language by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” As usual, Sundborg was ready with a comeback: “Did you ever see a duck drown?” If the battle over Rampart had hinged on force of rhetoric alone, the dam probably would have been built. But conservationists drew on the lessons gleaned from the Chariot controversy and brought a new awareness of ecological relationships to the debate. Besides that, the fact that no market existed for the huge quantity of electricity did little to inspire federal support for the $1.3 billion construction-cost. Rampart was a dead issue by 1968, though an occasional letter to the editor in the Fairbanks paper will still call for its construction.
• • •
Another development scheme involving Alaska in the early sixties was promoted by the R. M. Parsons Company, a large southern California-based engineering firm. This scheme would reverse the flow of the Yukon and Tanana rivers. A system of dams, canals, and pumping stations—the canals excavated by AEC teams using nuclear explosives, the pumps powered by nuclear reactors—would send the Far North’s glacier-fed water down the Rocky Mountain trench in western Canada, all the way to the arid American Southwest. Dubbed the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), the dream was revived in the early 1980s and again in 1992 by right-wing political activist Lyndon LaRouche. In his 1992 presidential campaign literature, LaRouche noted with pleasure that Alaska governor Walter Hickel had proposed the construction of a plastic offshore pipeline to send Alaska water to California. “These initiatives,” according to the LaRouche pamphlet, “show that once again, there is emerging a mood to solve problems, rather than to succumb to anti-growth propaganda and national economic devastation.”
So far, escalating costs, if not environmental sensibilities, have kept NAWAPA merely on paper. Of course, the environmental consequences of radically altering these natural systems down the length of the continent would be staggering; but those who track water politics in America believe that NAWAPA’s construction—albeit probably without the benefit of nuclear excavation—is a matter of “when,” not “if.”
Another megaproject touted at various times over the past 100 years by both American and Soviet technologists represents perhaps the ultimate contempt for the Arctic world: a plan to thaw it. Bering Strait would be dammed and huge pumps would force Arctic Ocean water into the north Pacific. In theory, the displaced cold water would allow the warmer Atlantic Gulf Stream to be drawn north, thawing the polar ice pack. If the scheme worked mechanically—which is doubtful—it could have the potential to alter climate on a global scale. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg thought such nuclear-aided proposals to alter weather and climate “intriguing,” but risky.
• • •
Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, recalled hearing through back channels between 1961 and 1963 that “a plan was proceeding in the Defense Department to construct some nuclear testing sites for the United States in Alaska.” Salinger thought testing nuclear bombs in close proximity to the Soviet Union might have repercussions that Kennedy would not favor. He told the president, who had not heard about it, and “a call from the President to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who had also not heard of the plan) brought the whole idea to a shuddering stop.”
For the moment.
At one point during the Project Chariot controversy, Alaska’s senator Ernest Gruening opined: “If they wanted to blow a hole in the ground they should have picked an uninhabited island where there would be no possibility of danger to anyone.” The AEC seemed to take note because in 1964 the agency, along with the Department of Defense, set up operations on Amchitka Island in Alaska’s Aleutian Chain, and declared it a temporary nuclear test site. The island was said to be uninhabited, the nearest village being more than 200 miles away. As Melvin L. Merritt, whom the AEC hired to write an environmental study, liked to say: “There’s no people for several hundred miles for the simple reason that nobody would ever want to live on Amchitka.” Of course, Merritt didn’t mention that the U.S. military had thoroughly trashed a good bit of the island a few decades earlier during the World War II Aleutian campaign. From the air, an extensive network of ruts from military vehicles was still visible in the tundra twenty-five years later; a couple of thousand tumbled-in Quonset huts had been left behind to rot; an estimated 1 million telegraph poles jutted at odd angles or dangled, broken, from the wires; and under the constant rain and fog, numberless oil drums rusted and leached their toxic contents into the soil. As one writer observed when he toured the “subarctic junkyard” during the AEC’s drilling operations, “an ecologist or naturalist . . . feels a revulsion, as an artist would standing before an ancient masterpiece defiled by vandals.”
In spite of the military and the AEC’s degradation of the landscape, wildlife abounded on Amchitka. The island’s waters were home to pink, coho, and sockeye salmon; cod, halibut, and sole; and Stellar’s sea lion, seals, and one of the world’s largest single populations of sea otter. On shore, perhaps 100 pairs of American bald eagles nested on the rocky cliffs, as did twenty pairs of peregrine falcon. The cliffs were also home to dense colonies of seabirds: puffins, cormorants, murres, and guillemots. Emperor geese stopped at the island on their migration. Amchitka had been part of a national wildlife refuge for more than fifty years before the AEC and Department of Defense arrived. But the 1913 executive order that established the refuge permitted use of the land for “lighthouse, military or naval purposes.” The document had been written decades before nuclear fission had even been imagined, but the AEC and the secretary of the interior found that testing atomic weapons at the wildlife refuge was “consistent with the spirit of the Executive Order.”
While Gruening’s comment may have revived the AEC’s interest in Amchitka, the agency had had its eye on the island since early 1950. According to the AEC’s official history, when bomb testers began a search for a continental test site, Amchitka was the first such location recommended by the AEC and the DOD for a nuclear test. An atmospheric and an underground test were scheduled for the fall of 1951. In late 1950, President Truman even approved the plans, called Operation Windstorm. But a search for a more convenient site continued, and toward the end of 1950 planners zeroed in on the Las Vegas bombing and gunnery range in Nevada. The Nevada Test Site accommodated all the AEC’s testing until the 1960s, when the military wanted to test a warhead too large for safe detonation in Nevada. After what the AEC claimed was a “considerable search,” the bomb testers went to Amchitka.
Three underground nuclear detonations occurred on Amchitka: Long Shot in 1965, Milrow in 1969, and the largest underground test in U.S. history, the five-megaton Cannikin shot in 1971. Long Shot helped military analysts discriminate between seismic signals generated by underground nuclear tests and earthquakes. These data were of use in verifying Soviet compliance with any test-ban treaties negotiated. With Milrow the AEC set off a one-megaton detonation as a “calibration” test to see what sort of geologic effects might be expected from Cannikin’s five-megaton yield. In the protest against Cannikin, a new group of political activists joined the antiwar and disarmament protesters: environmentalists. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth focused on the possibility that Cannikin might trigger a massive earthquake and tidal wave. A dozen protesters from Vancouver, British Columbia, set off for Amchitka in an old wooden halibut packer. To celebrate the fusion of environmental and political activism, they called their voyage the Greenpeace, and launched a new international environmental activist group.
When fired, the Cannikin blast lifted the earth over ground zero with such violence that shorebirds standing on the beach above had their legs driven up into their bodies. Overpressures in the ocean caused the eyeballs of sea otters and seals to burst through their skulls. On the island, rocky bluffs and sea stacks crashed into the water, lakes drained, and at surface zero the land collapsed into a subsidence crater. What long-term radiological hazard will result from the Amchitka detonations is not known. Radioactive tritium, however, was detected in mud above the Long Shot ground zero within a few years of the detonation. AEC geologists had calculated that no such migration of radionuclides would occur for 400 years.
In 2000, Amchitka construction workers were added to the list of nuclear weapons workers declared by the Congress to be eligible for compensation for “the health effects of their labors,” as one senator said. Workers with most forms of post-exposure leukemia, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and any of a specified list of diseases associated with radiation exposure—or their heirs should they have died from these illnesses—became eligible for $150,000 payments. Of the 1,400 former Amchitka workers who registered with the program, a higher number reported cancers than would be expected from a group of the same size and age from the general population. Thirty-five leukemia cases, for example, were reported, when only 1.9 would have been expected. Ten times the expected number of pancreatic cancers were reported.
• • •
Walter Hickel became governor of Alaska in 1966 and tried to hitch his dream of “opening up” the Arctic for resource extraction to a rising nuclear star. He wrote AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg that one of his dreams was to “see economic development in Interior Alaska” by “extending the Alaska railroad into the heavily mineralized area of the North country.” Hoping that the AEC might assist with that effort, Hickel offered Alaska’s North Slope as a new testing ground for nuclear bombs: “I would appreciate your opinion of the potential and possible use of Arctic Alaska as an atomic testing site.” And the AEC did conduct a “geological exploration” of an area north of the Brooks Range near Point Lay as an alternate site in case of unforeseen difficulties at Amchitka Island, which was the agency’s preferred location. Hickel sent the AEC repeated inquiries about the Point Lay option, until the agency finally told him that “work near Point Lay would clearly be more difficult and costly than on Amchitka. We . . . do not plan to return to that area.”
• • •
In the 1960s, when the U.S. military considered where in the world to test deadly nerve gas and germ-warfare agents, they chose Alaska. At the secret Gerstle River Test Site, part of the 1,200-square-mile Fort Greely Military Reserve in Interior Alaska, the army experimented with some of the most deadly chemical agents known to man. Mustard gas and the lethal nerve gases known as VX and GB were packed into rockets and artillery shells and either launched or fired from howitzers into the spruce forests and marshes of the Gerstle River area. Of course, not every piece of ordnance detonates as it is supposed to do, and “the test area remains a no-man’s-land” of unexploded ordnance, according to a military historian.
Sixty miles east of the Gerstle River testing grounds, the army selected a site near Delta Creek as a place to test bacterial disease agents in the open air. It was one of only two locations in the United States where germ-warfare organisms are acknowledged to have been released into the environment. In 1966 and 1967, the army’s tests at Delta Creek sought to determine the effectiveness of the tularemia bacteria in subarctic conditions. Tularemia (after Tulare County, California, where it was first found) is sometimes called “rabbit fever,” though it can occur in 100 mammals, in insects, birds, fish, and water. It is an acute infectious disease related to bubonic plague. Onset symptoms occur suddenly and include extreme weakness, headache, recurring chills, and drenching sweats from high fever. Untreated, death occurs in about 6 percent of cases.
In one incident uncovered by the Alaskan investigative reporter Richard Fineberg, the army lost hundreds of rockets laden with an aggregate ton of lethal nerve gas. The rockets, which were slated to be destroyed, were stacked on a frozen lake in the winter of 1965. But, for some reason, the soldiers failed to retrieve the rockets before the spring thaw, and they sank to the bottom of the lake, apparently forgotten. In a few years, with personnel turnover, the story of lethal nerve gas rockets lying at the bottom of one of the lakes in the military reserve slipped into local folklore. In 1969, however, a new commander at the test center followed up on the rumors, tracked the evidence to a lake about a mile from the Gerstle River facility, and ordered it pumped dry. On the muddy bottom, the crew found more than 200 nerve-gas rockets—one leaking. A small drop of the stuff on the skin can kill a person in minutes.
The military undertook a general “cleanup” of the Gerstle River Test Site in 1970, though perhaps it is more accurate to say the contaminants were consolidated. The army simply heaped up 4 million pounds of chemical munitions, gas masks, contaminated clothing, and equipment into two mounds and covered them with dirt. An attempt to transfer the “restored” land to the Bureau of Land Management resulted in BLM declining the offer. The army cannot certify that the land is decontaminated because, as one historian has written, “when the program terminated in the late 1960s, records of the testing inexplicably disappeared and remain missing, apparently destroyed. What files remain confirm sloppy record-keeping which failed to identify the type of weapons being tested or how and when they were disposed of.”
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If the logistical difficulties and cost of transporting radioactive wastes from the Lower Forty-eight to Alaska were not so great, the Department of Energy would no doubt be eyeing the state as a terrestrial dump site (it did license Alaska offshore dumping, as mentioned elsewhere in this section). The Soviets, however, found it quite convenient to call on their northern regions to absorb the environmental burden of cold war militarization. In the Kara Sea off the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, they have scuttled ships with damaged nuclear reactors onboard, including no fewer than five nuclear submarines containing ten reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. At the western edge of the Asiatic steppes, a person who merely stands for one hour along the bank of Lake Karachay near the plutonium plant at Chelyabinsk will receive a lethal dose of radiation.
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“CHASE” was the name of a U.S. Navy program to scuttle aging Liberty Ships loaded with surplus explosives. The acronym stood for “cut holes and sink ’em.” In 1967, the navy loaded the Liberty Ship Robert Louis Stevenson with more than 6 million pounds of unexpended munitions: TNT, rocket fuel, bombs, torpedoes, mines, etc., then towed her to a spot thirty-five miles off Amchitka. The ship had been fitted out with pressure-activated detonators designed to blow at a depth of 4,000 feet. After the scuttling valves were opened, however, the Stevenson didn’t sink as quickly as expected. Wind and current had begun to carry her back toward Amchitka when she disappeared into a fog bank. Eventually, the navy found the vessel through the use of sonar devices. It had come to rest in 2,800 feet of water, seventeen miles from Amchitka. The ship sat—and still sits—half the intended distance from Amchitka, a 6-million-pound bomb in Alaskan fishing waters. Environmentalists fear that an earthquake might send the ship sliding down the steep slope upon which it rests, triggering a detonation equivalent to a two-kiloton nuclear explosion. In any event, they say, mercury, lead, and other toxins will find their way into marine organisms as the weapons casings corrode.
Alaska’s Aleutian Islands also attracted the U.S. military when it needed to establish a dump site for chemical warfare agents. Between 1947 and 1949, the military dumped nearly 2 million pounds of poison gas canisters (mustard and arsenic blister agents) into the sea just twelve miles off Chichagof Harbor on the Aleutian Island of Attu.
There has been no change in a U.S. policy that apparently considers Alaska a wasteland suitable as a dumping ground, as a test site for dangerous technologies, and as a practice bombing range. The military has expanded its training activities in Alaska, including the use of vast new areas of the country for its “live fire” exercises.
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Early on the morning of Good Friday, March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling 11 million gallons of Alaskan crude oil into Prince William Sound in Southcentral Alaska. It was the largest and most disastrous oil spill in U.S. history. Despite repeated and categorical assurances from the oil companies that contingency plans were in place to handle any eventuality, the spill response was demonstrably inadequate. Also clear to heartsick observers around the world was the fact that Alaska remains vulnerable to the so-far empty promise that technology can manage development in wilderness.
In addition to the national missile defense silos installed at Fort Greely, another launch facility was built in Alaska on Kodiak Island. Vowing that all operations would be entirely commercial and non-military, Alaska’s state legislature had begun the spaceport project as a state-owned corporation intended to stimulate economic development. But when private investors declined the opportunity to invest, millions in federal funding arrived through the Air Force, courtesy of Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens, then chairman of the Appropriations Committee. The complex soon became a military facility, or, as the mayor of Kodiak equivocated, “a privately-owned launch pad doing military launches.” Missions at the Kodiak Launch Complex include missile defense testing operations.
The AEC
From 1954 to 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission operated as a unique agency mandated to both develop and regulate nuclear technologies. In effect, the agency policed itself. Finally in 1974, Congress split off the regulatory function, establishing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to oversee the private nuclear power industry and renaming the research divisions the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). ERDA included some nondefense energy research, but was dominated by military applications. In 1977, Congress, acting at the behest of President Jimmy Carter, created a new cabinet department, the Department of Energy (DOE), to consolidate various energy-related agencies. The principal business at DOE is still related to nuclear weapons, and that effort is still under military control. The DOE continues to employ sophisticated public relations techniques in pursuit of a favorable public image. In fact, the U.S. General Accounting Office has reported that the DOE was spending “only 22 percent of its money on its mission, with the balance going to such things as public relations.” The agency still proclaims that a vigorous nuclear testing program is necessary for national security. As one local DOE official said, “It’s still the same; the only difference is the name over the door.”