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By Root 3147 0

the AEC had underestimated the impact Lois Crisler and Walt Disney had made on the American psyche with regard to Arctic Alaska. The environmentalists had depicted Project Chariot as bombing polar bears, caribou, seals, and whales—species the American people cared deeply about. The AEC had gotten ahead of itself. When Teller went around Alaska, he repeatedly claimed that the fish around Point Hope wouldn’t be affected, that nuclear testing wouldn’t be harmful to humans, that there would be no seismic shock, and that the people of Japan had already recovered from radiation sickness—none of which was true. Teller, for all his talents, may not have been entirely sane.

A group of scientists at the University of Alaska, led by William Pruitt, stepped up to dispute the AEC’s scenarios. Never resorting to emotionalism, giving only the biological facts, Pruitt correctly noted that the food chain in the Arctic was hypersensitive and fragile. Caribou became his Exhibit A. Recent nuclear fallout in the Pacific had already affected the tundra; North Slope caribou suet in the late 1950s had a level of strontium seven times higher than the cattle in Texas or Oklahoma. Because caribou grazed on lichen and other rootless plants, the amount of nuclear dust they ingested was extremely high. They ate radioactive lichen “straight up,” before it was integrated with other earth compounds. The same scenario applied to many of Alaska’s migratory birds.55

Once Professor Pruitt had presented these counterarguments in a public forum, the Inupiat angrily entered the debate. Caribou meat was the staple of their lives—material, cultural, and spiritual. On the North Slope, the Gwich’in people had a creation story, passed down for 1,000 years, that the caribou had absorbed a chunk of human heart and the Gwich’in, reciprocally, held a piece of the caribou heart in their own bodies. In this way, each would always know what the other one was doing. Their relationship went beyond symbiosis; they were one. Upon felling a caribou, Gwich’in hunters offered a prayer of appreciation to their brother species, immediately biting into the heart at the “kill spot” to show honor and gratitude. That was the burden and joy of Gwich’in history. Would Gwich’in hunters get radiation sickness, after Project Chariot, from eating caribou heart? If the caribou died off, would the Gwich’in also die? Furthermore, because the caribou were so far-ranging, the impact of the project would be broader. Caribou migrated more than 500 miles around Alaska each spring, and not only the Gwich’in depended on them for sustenance. All the North Slope tribes who relied on caribou as a food source would become ill.

With emotions running so strong, the Eisenhower administration ordered the AEC to tone down the rhetoric. While Project Chariot wasn’t canceled, it was “deferred.” Still, rumors circulated in the beat and Native underground in the late 1950s that the U.S. military had injected Eskimos with radioactive iodine-131 as part of a research program to learn whether soldiers “could be better conditioned to fight in cold conditions.”56 Evidence for this claim is rather scant. But in any case many Native Americans in Alaska were feeling empowered to fight for the ecological integrity of their region.

There is no paper trail to clarify what President Eisenhower thought of Project Chariot; he may have pulled the plug on it himself. Douglas L. Vandegraft of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believed that Eisenhower had a quasi-purist view of the Arctic and Alaska; in fact, he wasn’t keen on seeing either the north pole or the south pole developed for economic purposes. What interested Eisenhower was atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Project Chariot, however, was too dangerous—and absurd.57

The 1950s were a time when faith in science—and the urge to explore new frontiers, using new technological developments—was soaring. The United States had sent a Jupiter-C rocket into space for the first time in 1956; and in 1957 the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik. Despite the cold war, a remarkable