The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement

Dan O'Neill, then a Research Associate with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, documents the history of Project Chariot. It is a tale replete with tragicomic errors and deceptions on the part of the AEC and the staff of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then called Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, or LRL) including Dr. Edward Teller, known as the father of the H-bomb.The basic idea was to carve out a deep-water harbor in Alaska using nuclear bombs. Project Chariot would have been the first "shot" in this effort: a data-gathering blast sometime in 1961. One small detail stood in the way: an Inupiat village called Point Hope. Luckily, the citizens of Point Hope, with O'Neill's help, stood up to the AEC. The plan was shelved in 1962. PR materials on it had predicted negligible fallout, but an internal memo, released later, estimated leakage of 1.5 billion curies of radiation. For comparison, Chernobyl spilled "only" 40 to 86 million Curies.O'Neill's entire gripping account deserves to be read; but if you're short of time, the heart of the story lies in Chapters 9 and 10. Highly recommended.

Years after I worked at the University of Washington Department of Oceanography I found out that my boss (now deceased) was the U of A Fairbanks Professor that dubbed Edward Teller (so-called Father of the Hydrogen Bomb) and his colleagues the "Firecracker Boys". After finding this out, I read the book and it provides excellent insight into the idea that nuclear weapons could be used for "peaceful" purposes. The good news is that the idea of using nuclear weapons for excavation was eventually dropped.

Dan O’Neill’s excellent book, The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement, tells the story of Project Chariot.It’s hard to comprehend the lunacy of it today, but Project Chariot was a serious proposal by the Atomic Energy Commission to “geographically engineer” a deep-water harbor on the northwest coast of Alaska by detonating a series of thermonuclear explosions. That’s right: hydrogen bombs.Three major themes jumped out at me from the book.First: There is an inexorable structural bias that causes local interests to be seduced by the promise of short-term financial benefits such as employment or tax revenues. That is why many local politicians, businesses and communities initially embraced Project Chariot, just as they do more contemporary examples like the Keystone XL Pipeline or oil and gas exploration in Alaska’s arctic.Second: Development interests, often in the form of government, almost always provide reassurance that there is little or nothing to fear, whether in the form of nuclear radiation from Project Chariot blasts, human impacts on climate change, oil exploration in the arctic ocean, or mining activities in the headwaters of salmon streams.Third: The most effective organizers operate at a grass-roots level. Project Chariot garnered the attention of local activists like Ginny Wood and Celia Hunter. Before long, they had helped organize the Alaska Conservation Society, which launched successful campaigns to establish what is now known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to defeat Project Chariot from proceeding.These themes still resonate today across a broad spectrum of threats to the environment, ranging from climate change to fracking to offshore oil exploration.

I have an Alaska background, am an environmental biologist, and was in the same university department with Bill Pruitt (one of the stars of this book) for several years - and yet I stumbled across this book by accident. Please don't just read it - also recommend it and loan it around to friends. Whether you care about Alaska, care about the environment, worry about things nuclear, worry about academic freedom's vulnerability to politics, or you like Dan O'Neill as an author (his "A Land Gone Lonesome" for example), you have to read and spread the word about this book. It's one you will not just read, but will re-read.

If you want to know the true nature of American government, this is a must read book! Project Chariot is when the US government wanted to explode a nuclear bomb in Alaska, and the fight it took to prevent it. Today is a good day to read this because history is repeating itself........

Edward Teller wanted to use atomic bombs to build a harbor in northern Alaska. In doing so, native Americans would have lost a lifestyle. Luckily, it never happened.

My neighbors north

Boy, is this a slow-moving sucker!I have a friend who was involved in the Firecracker Boys project. This is one of the most revealing books of the Cold War, but it is told so laboriously that you find yourself doing a lot of speed reading, turning pages every few seconds . . . and not because you can't wait to get to the next part. In truth, this book could have been told very well in half the pages. One of the most provocative concepts was the wrongheaded ideology of Edward Teller, and he was head of Livermore Laboratories at the time. I'm sure there were people behind the scenes in government, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do with this man with nuclear on the brain. Poor Eisenhower! He had no concept of the magnitude of all this, but he was worried about the military-industrial complex.