The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [233]
The AEC had chosen a site at Ogotoruk Creek, about thirty miles southeast of the Inupiat Eskimo village of Point Hope, as a nuclear test ground. Rumors swirled through Point Hope about the planned detonation. Would the residents get radiation sickness? What was the timetable? Would the people be paid reparations?
The truth was that the AEC did plan to detonate an atomic device, 100 times more powerful than the bomb used at Hiroshima, in Arctic Alaska. Ground zero was Ogotoruk Creek. The scheme—which later became infamous—was called Project Chariot. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was overseeing the project. As the director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California–Berkeley, Teller publicly announced the program on June 9, 1958. The AEC would detonate a 2.4-megaton atomic device on the northwestern coast of Arctic Alaska. According to Teller, there were two reasons for the explosion: to stay competitive with the Soviet Union, and to create a deep-water hole, which could thereafter be used as the Arctic harbor for the shipment of coal and oil extracted on the North Slope.51
Following Teller’s stunning announcement, Lewis Strauss, the feisty chairman of the AEC, asked for 1,600 square miles of land and water in Arctic Alaska to be withdrawn from the public domain. Teller himself came to Alaska to promote another supposed reason for Project Chariot: jobs. Alaska could become an oil producer like Texas or Saudi Arabia. New federal funds would come pouring into Alaska. Traveling around Alaska to win support from various chambers of commerce, Teller promised that “the blast will not be performed until it can be economically justified.”52 Doctor George Rogers, an Alaskan economist, recalled having breakfast with Teller in Juneau that summer. “He gave me the pitch again [for Project Chariot],” Rogers recalled. “Then I said, ‘Well, the Native people, they depend on the sea mammals and the caribou.’ He said, ‘Well, they’re going to have to change their way of life.’ I said, ‘What are they going to do?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when we have the harbor we can create coal mines in the Arctic, and they can become coal miners.’ ”53
But many Alaskans asked smart questions of Teller as he went around the territory. Undaunted by his well-earned fame as a nuclear scientist, they wanted answers: Wouldn’t it take decades for such a port to be operational? How would the money generated trickle into working people’s bank accounts? Meanwhile, the national conservation groups seized on Project Chariot as the worst idea ever conceived by mankind. Albert Einstein called it lunacy. Alliances of concerned citizens were organized to save Arctic Alaska from becoming a nuclear testing ground. “I was running the Camp Denali lodge when I learned about Project Chariot,” Virginia Wood recalled. “This was a turning point for me. I knew we’d have to organize against the Project. That was beautiful country up there, the homeland to the Native Alaskans! I voted for Eisenhower. . . . I think. But I knew this one was wrong. That whole Arctic area needed to be left alone.”54
The AEC was surprised by the backlash against Project Chariot in Alaska. Because the territory was preparing for statehood in 1959, the assumption was that only the Inupiat would complain—and they didn’t matter in Washington, D.C. Recognizing that a potential economic boom wasn’t a compelling argument, the AEC shifted gears. John A. McCone, now chairman of the AEC, testified in Congress before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that they were seeking an alternative to the Alaskan harbor because they couldn’t find a corporate partner.
The AEC now went back to the drawing board. What was needed, they determined, was a Project Chariot Environmental Studies Program. Being out of tune with the ecology movement,