Norton, David W.

English

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178 •  REVIEWSTHE FIRECRACKER BOYS. By DAN O’NEILL. New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 388 p., maps, b&w illus., bib.,index. Distributed in Canada by McClelland & StewartInc. Softbound. US$14.95; Cdn$21.00.Arctic Alaska narrowly escaped becoming the nuclear testingground that Edward Teller of the U.S. Atomic Energy Com-mission (AEC) passionately hoped it would become. Thisbook details how close the “Father of the H-Bomb” (and yearslater, the White House’s promoter of Star Wars) came tohaving his way, the nature of his arctic scheme, called“Project Chariot,” and the people and intrigues swirlingaround this other-worldly interval of arctic Cold War history.Before introducing Dan’s epic tale to students in the first ofseveral university seminars in Alaska, I had read it threetimes, cover to cover. Two of those readings even includeddelving into 61 pages of endnotes (“Notes,” p. 308– 369).But the first reading was for the book’s whodunit and per-sonal intrigue qualities: who were history’s good guys andbad guys in Dan’s assessment? A first reading of The Fire-cracker Boys as a riveting page-turner worked. My onlypauses were to add names to a penciled list of people outsideof Alaska to be sent copies as Christmas gifts in 1994.Not many pages into the first reading, it was clear that Ishould treat myself to a more leisurely second reading.Project Chariot involved many more people and far biggerissues than I had realized. Some people, led by Leslie A.Viereck (p. 181), William O. Pruitt, Jr., (p. 195), and DonFoote (p. 205) had to make career-altering choices of con-science. These choices were thrust on them when they per-ceived that either the AEC or its research contractor, theUniversity of Alaska, was distorting its own environmentalresearch findings from the vicinity of the proposed test site.Such distortions were to buttress the AEC’s public posturethat detonating a series of buried nuclear bombs to create ademonstration crater and harbour in northwestern coastalAlaska posed no significant environmental or health risks.The site chosen for the nuclear “shots” was by Cape Thompson,at Ogotoruk Creek, halfway along the 100 km of coastlineseparating the Iñupiaq Eskimo communities of Point Hopeand Kivalina. In today’s hindsight—tinged with disbelief thatsuch nuclear recklessness could ever have been proposed—it is not surprising that Viereck, Pruitt, and Foote emerge asthe story’s troika of exemplary heroes for inspiring Chariot’sdoubters and dissenters. What is surprising is to learn themagnitude of their heroism, and how their courage had toripple upstream against currents of Cold War apathy, to rallyothers. Others included Howard Rock of Point Hope, whofound both salvation and heroism in rising to oppose Chari-ot’s nuclear scheme. With Tom Snapp of Fairbanks, Rockfounded and published Alaska’s first Native newspaper, theTundra Times (p. 237). Far from the Arctic and Alaska, livesand historic events were also rallied by the Project Chariotscheme, in ways that Dan O’Neill’s research brings to light.Barry Commoner in St. Louis, now standing beside RachelCarson (Silent Spring, 1962) in the pantheon of environmen-talism’s founders, traces his induction to the time when helearned of the lichen-caribou-human food chain (p. 210)through Bill Pruitt’s work and from correspondents inFairbanks (p. 347).Intrigue and influence swept clear through the WhiteHouse and beyond. The Geneva meetings on peaceful uses ofnuclear energy in September 1958, for example, featuredmany showings of an AEC film depicting Project Chariot’splanned use of thermonuclear (H-bomb, as opposed toA-bomb) blasts, to create an arctic harbour in the first ofthree successive versions of the scheme. Soviet partici-pants in Geneva watched the AEC’s animated cartoonrepeatedly, but denounced Chariot at this meeting as thinlydisguised military research. Edward Teller and hisLivermore team subsequently downscaled their design forProject Chariot, switching from thermonuclear to nuclear“shots” and reducing the yield from 2.5 megatons to 0.46megatons (460 kilotons). The first downscaling was theresult of a design miscue with “Neptune,” a tiny undergroundtest shot, in October of 1958 (p. 56). That small incidenthardly instills confidence that secrecy-shrouded nuclear an-tics by “firecracker boys” were either well designed or in thepublic interest. Before it was over, Chariot had to be down-scaled again, to 280 kilotons, or to 11 percent of its originaldesign yield. Yet Chariot remained nearly three times the sizeof the “Sedan” shot of July 1962, which exceeded by fivetimes the AEC’s predictions of its fallout (p. 252).In this tale, there are plenty of intrigues and epic confron-tations to entertain fans of novels by Tom Clancy (The Huntfor Red October). There is George Rogers, economist inJuneau, bemused in 1958 at Edward Teller’s warped sense ofeconomic geography, by which Teller fantasized using anuclear-excavated harbour near Cape Thompson to exportcoal mined from the other side of Alaska’s Brooks Range.There are Al Johnson and Tom English in January 1959,ambushing AEC representatives with remarks about theAEC’s “mendacity,” and the circulation, in the same vein, ofan anonymous verse at the University of Alaska (p. 184).There are diminutive Kitty Kinneeveauk and burly DanLisbourne in Point Hope, speaking their minds at the long-overdue 1960 public meeting disclosing the Chariot schemeto that Iñupiaq Eskimo community. There are the tirelessdoubters with the Alaska Conservation Society, who crankedout and mailed 1000 mimeographed copies of its Bulletin inthe spring of 1961, thereby publicly laying siege to ProjectChariot’s propagandists.So, who were the opponents to these greater and lesserheroes? On this question, O’Neill is a virtuoso artist whorefrains from using unmixed black pigment from his palette.Even Edward Teller is portrayed in more than a unidimensionalvillain’s role, despite the childish, intemperate way he treatedthe author, terminating their only chance for a face-to-faceinterview during Dan O’Neill’s 7-year odyssey of researchfor the book (p. 300–301). Teller emerges as rhetoricallyskillful, and if not passionately devoted to particular truths, atleast capable of using compassion artfully, as in his Com-mencement address at the University of Alaska in 1959(p. 89) to support grand visions. Ideological unity about ColdREVIEWS • 179War risk-taking developed, top-down, between the AEC andthe University of Alaska. The tragic side of William R. Woodwas that he believed passionately in the well-being of theUniversity of Alaska, but never—as its President—sensedessential distinctions between a university and an executivebranch of government. Yet O’Neill grants Dr. Wood a gener-ous measure of skill and vision, by which he could holdspellbinding and revealing discussions with faculty membersand associates, untainted by philosophical antagonisms (e.g.,p. 182). No figure in the entire story is more mysterious, orportrayed in a more poignant, shadow-casting role, than JohnWolfe, whom the AEC selected in 1958 to form and lead itsBioenvironmental (Studies) Committee (p. 150). How, forexample, could this one person—an insightful ecologist in hisday—grant blanket freedom for all scientists contractedthrough the University of Alaska to publish their findingswithout constraint or review by the Bioenvironmental Com-mittee (p. 343), then later withhold their entire second fieldseason’s environmental research results while publishing hisCommittee’s opinions in early 1961 (p. 188)? Was he se-duced into this contradictory behaviour by passionate devo-tion to historic consciousness, hence by a prophetic vision ofthe co-dependencies of megaprojects and environmental stud-ies in the future? We may never know, but O’Neill the writerilluminates the question brilliantly for others to ponder. Atthe end of the first speed-reading of The Firecracker Boys inlate 1994, I had to wonder why Hollywood had not alreadymoved to capitalize on the box-office appeal of O’Neill’sChariot story. Oh, well—perhaps Hollywood’s inattentionmerely illustrates Carl Benson’s maxim that “Ignorance ofthe Arctic is an infinite resource.”The second and more leisurely reading was profoundlyrewarding. Abandoning entertainment, I sought to under-stand Chariot’s legacies and the context for archetypal pat-terns of thought that events of the late 1950s and early 1960shad generated, and which continue to influence us today.Readers who approach The Firecracker Boys in this mannerwill be impressed by the author’s diligent scholarship. Take,for example, the theme of exercising academic freedom inconnection with scientific probity. O’Neill deftly recountsthe steps by which Les Viereck came to perceive collusionbetween the AEC’s John Wolfe and the University of Alaska.Viereck arrived at his crucial decision by the end of 1960:much as he yearned to teach there, his ethics and the protec-tion of his own credibility as a scientist simply barred himfrom continuing contract research for the AEC through theUniversity of Alaska. Brina Kessel’s attempts to intercede inViereck’s behalf with President Wood were rebuffed, and amonumental clash of loyalties took shape. This clash playeditself out upon the futures of Don Foote and Bill Pruitt, bothof whom remained on contract for some months after Viereck’sresignation. Released from contractual obligations, Les stillcontributed by helping other scientists plan upcoming 1961field work, and finishing reports from 1960. Viereck’s “beinggrand about the whole situation” (p. 187) first baffled, thenincreasingly nettled those at the University who placed high-est value on the corporate loyalties they considered implicitin contract research (p. 179). Soon enough the Wood viewprevailed: twin loves for truth and for the Arctic that Viereck,Foote, and Pruitt all shared—while admirable—were incon-venient luxuries that a young university growing into Presi-dent Wood’s mould of thinking could not afford to retain asfaculty strengths. The pessimist in me saw the corporatistparadigm for universities gaining an early stranglehold inAlaska; the optimist in me rejoiced at the vindicating honoursand accolades bestowed on Viereck and Pruitt almost exactlyone-third of a century after Les Viereck composed his letterof resignation from Chariot research.Other historical themes thread their way through DanO’Neill’s account. Project Chariot was the seedbed for for-mation of the Alaska Federation of Natives, and the extin-guishment of Native land claims by federal legislation (AlaskaNative Claims Settlement Act) in 1971. The ad hoc Chariotmodel for environmental studies being conducted in advanceof major federally supported projects was institutionalized—for better or worse—by the U.S. National EnvironmentalPolicy Act (NEPA) of 1970. When the first real exercise ofthe NEPA’s intent proved to be the public debate overconstruction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1971, the AEC’spublished volume of Project Chariot environmental studies(Wilimovsky and Wolfe, 1966) became the de facto proto-type for subsequent “Environmental Impact Statements” inthe United States and, to some extent, in Canada. And yes,even stirrings of gender equity can be found in the roles andrights of women in various episodes of this Chariot chronicle.Universities are not the only traditional institutions held upto scrutiny by O’Neill’s chronicle for their conduct during theProject Chariot years. The first few State of Alaska Legisla-tures, the press, sectarian and ecumenical church groups, andeven chambers of commerce were unprepared to deal with theimplications of Project Chariot, and uncertain what role, ifany, community doubt should play in Cold War Alaska.Within each of these communities of representative civicthought and action, conduct ranged from acquiescence andsupport for the AEC’s risk-taking, to doubt and dissent, atdifferent times and in different settings. This review barelyhints at the story’s depth, for two or more themes intertwineat times. An early prototype emerges, for example, for anetwork of doubters that allied the concerns of scientists andAlaska Natives, and used the information highway of churchpulpits to spread concerns nationally (p. 222). The ambitiousscope of this book can perhaps be conveyed by pointing outthat any one of these themes could stand alone as the subjectof research for a doctoral dissertation. My admiration for DanO’Neill’s scholarship and writing soared with the secondreading. I reflected on Dan’s opening statement, “This did notstart out to be a book,” (p. 295) to a section that explains howhis research originally was to have been preserved primarilyas a documentary film. Lucky for us, but his shift of mediumfrom film to book has left unfilled the “niches” of bothdocumentary and dramatic film treatment of important mate-rial. Perhaps Hollywood’s failure to pick the Chariot storyfor dramatization has spared arctic scholarship having tosidestep messy trivializations.180 •  REVIEWSEarly in 1995, students from Point Hope approached mewith a request that I teach a seminar course in Barrow forpeople interested in the legacies and confusions connectedwith Project Chariot. By the time Dan’s book had appeared afew months earlier, “Project Chariot” had come to connoterenewed public fear and loathing on Alaska’s North Slope.Fear was centered on cancer risks, and loathing was directeddually at “evil science” and at the U.S. federal government.Dominating the understanding or misunderstanding of ProjectChariot was its perception primarily as some radioactivetracer material that had been buried at Ogotoruk Creek inAugust 1962 (p. 278, 367). Ironically, it was Dan himselfwho had triggered the alarm over this tracer material in 1992,after discovering its existence upon reading 30-year-oldcorrespondence and AEC project files in Livermore, Califor-nia, and elsewhere. Ironically too, the 1962 tracer experimentwas an afterthought, an experiment neither designed as, norfunded by, Project Chariot or the AEC’s bioenvironmentalstudies; indeed it was conducted after the AEC had secretlydecided to abandon Project Chariot’s cratering experimentaltogether (p. 254, 279). Students requesting the seminarwere deeply troubled, partly by the cancer scare associatedwith the 30 years of radioactive decay by some 26 millicuriesin buried tracer substance, and partly by the ugly inferencesof genocidal motivations toward the Iñupiat on the part of theAEC and its accomplices. Following a generation and a halfof the story’s dormancy and willful forgetfulness about theCold War scheme, offering a dispassionate seminar any-where within the University of Alaska system promised to bea challenging, perhaps delicate, undertaking.After consenting to lead the seminar (and the University ofAlaska Fairbanks’ gratifying approval of the proposed courseoutline) I began my third reading of The Firecracker Boys,and at the same time began preparing a chronological “in-structor’s concordance” for Dan’s book. Using computerspreadsheet software to enter and sort the book’s majorevents and supporting documents by dates into one sequentialorder, I confronted the only significant flaw in the book: itsendnotes are maddeningly difficult to connect to the textwithout page numbers or another system to position them.One of the book’s 19 chapters, as I recall, has 112 supportingendnotes. This flaw is not the author’s fault. Instead, itrepresents the publisher’s failure to anticipate northern read-ers’ and students’ reading the book in the same serious wayit was crafted. Nor is Dan O’Neill to be faulted for histhematic “yarn-spinning” approach, which required his chap-ters to overlap in time, to tell a coherent story. A strictlychronological account would have had no more coherence orappeal to thoughtful readers than a printout of my spreadsheet,or of newspaper clippings, files, and letters stacked chrono-logically for the years 1945 to 1993.The first seminar to use The Firecracker Boys was con-ducted in Barrow over five weekend sessions in the spring of1995. Experiences with “The Project Chariot Story” forcollege students were revealing. First, pain lingers on fromthe wounds inflicted by Cold War insensitivities towardcommunity and culture. Half of the first class of North Slopestudents found they were not yet ready for the seminar’srevisiting of the agonies that their families had enduredduring Chariot, or as later outgrowths of the project. For thosestudents who did persist, however, the seminar itself becamepart of a still unfolding episode in the Project Chariot story.That is, patterns of healing through understanding haveemerged from the seminar’s dynamics. Second, studentswere naturally eager to invite the author himself, first byaudioconference, then in person, to take part in the seminar.Dan O’Neill agreed to both invitations, and his availability asa discussant has now become a popular highlight for studentsenrolled in expanded offerings of this course, both in Barrowand in Fairbanks. Dan’s popularity in this forum no doubtreflects the oral historian in his background.The seminar has also hosted a number of discussants whoare treated by the book as key players in the Chariot era of1957–66 (Celia Hunter, Ginny Wood, Al Johnson, Rev.Richard Heacock). Other discussants with intimate knowl-edge of technical, legal, and administrative matters, or themesin the wider story, have further enriched the Chariot seminar.In the absence of seminar participation, so far, by any defend-ers of the AEC’s conduct in the Chariot era, the responsibilityfor reconstructing attitudes and conduct by such Chariotsupporters falls on the instructor. However awkward, playingdevil’s advocate is absolutely essential to balanced discus-sions of the full dimensions of the Project Chariot story. Thisis the true test of scholarship and insight in The FirecrackerBoys. By refraining from cheap shots, and by avoiding the useof unsoftened black colours from his palette, Dan makes itpossible to see the thinking of Chariot’s apologists in context.Thus, he leaves the door open for thoughtful dialogue. Some-day, I’d like to believe, one-time apologists, heroes, andvictims will come together through that open door, andcelebrate completing the healing process. And I imagine theirconcurrence taking shape against the background of stilluntold parallel stories from the former Soviet Union. Wounds,narrow escape, and all, the process worked, whereby dissentin a free society enabled that society to avoid committingnuclear folly in the Arctic.Tested and examined, discussed from many angles, laughedabout, sometimes agonizing, at other times triumphant, DanO’Neill’s scholarship in probing, then crafting The Fire-cracker Boys story has proven monumentally durable. Thisvolume’s versatility—thriller, thematic discourse, and cata-lyst for healing—commends it to everyone’s attention.REFERENCESWILIMOVSKY, N.J., and WOLFE, J.N., eds. 1966. Theenvironment of the Cape Thompson region, Alaska. Springfield,Virginia: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.David W. NortonNatural Sciences and Museum StudiesIlisagvik CollegeBarrow, Alaska, U.S.A.99723-0749

The Firecracker Boys, by Dan O’Neill

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