Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Matter of Progress
Author(s): Scott Kirsch and Don Mitchell
Source: Social Text, No. 54 (Spring, 1998), pp. 100-134
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466752 .
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Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man"
EDWARD TELLER, GEOGRAPHICAL ENGINEERING,
Time and place have always played an active role in the making of science
and technology. But for Dr. Edward Teller, Alaska's North Slope oil boom
of 1969 must have seemed an unfortunate, if still promising, near miss of
history and geography. When Teller announced at a Houston press con-
ference that plans were under consideration at the Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory in Livermore, California, for the use of nuclear explosives to
excavate a harbor offshore from Prudhoe Bay to serve North Slope oil
tankers, his trademark nuclear optimism was tempered by a less charac-
teristic dose of political economic realism (fig. 1). Funding for the project
would have to come from the oil companies, Teller said, because "the
Bureau of the Budget would never give us the money, so private enter-
prise will have to do it" (Wall Street Journal, 9/25/69). "The U.S. is out of
money," he observed (Oil Daily, 9/25/69). Missing, at least in news
reports of the press conference, was Teller's well-rehearsed, media-worthy
flair for describing such projects as the momentous triumphs of a scientific
civilization. This was not the case a decade earlier when, without legiti-
mate economic incentive, Teller and the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) pursued another "instant harbor" north of the Bering Strait in
Alaska. At that time, with preliminary government funding secured for
what was to be the first of many nuclear-blasted civil engineering projects,
Teller had boasted to the Alaskan press of his ability to carve a harbor
in the shape of a polar bear, so complete was the AEC's control over
nature (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 7/17/59). And in some ways, he was
quite right.
Both Alaskan harbor schemes were part of the AEC's Project Plow-
share, a program launched in 1957 to research, design, and implement the
"constructive" uses of nuclear explosives. Nuclear excavation, the deto-
nation of shallowly buried hydrogen bombs for massive earth-moving
projects like harbor and canal works, was considered the most promising
Social Text54, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1998. Copyright ? 1998 by Duke University Press.
Figure 1: Concept drawing for nuclear-blasted harbor offshore from Prudhoe
Bay, Alaska, 1969. Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Library.
For Plowshare's of the Plowshare applications and, for a time, the most economically and
technically feasible. A new sea-level Central American canal, dramatic
visionaries, transformations of continental river systems (which would help to irrigate
the deserts, ending world hunger), and Plowshare harbors on every con-
there were few tinent except Europe were thus presented-and, to a degree, sold-as
projects well within the reach of atomic age science. Drawing on and con-
inconveniences
tributing to a discourse which presented the scientific "conquest" of
nature as a progressive and positively heroic enterprise, Teller and his
in the earth's
colleagues engaged in tireless promotion to employ nuclear explosives in
the "work of peace" (for examples see Teller 1960, 1964; Teller and Lat-
geography that
ter 1962; Teller and Latter 1958; Sanders 1962; Johnson and Brown 1958;
could not be Stanford 1958).
Still, it was one thing to make these grandiose plans from Livermore,
overcome and quite another to carry them out beyondthe boundaries of AEC labo-
ratories and test sites. What was needed to assure public acceptance of the
through the program, it seemed, was an exhibition of nuclear excavation, performed in
a remote region, which would demonstrate both the power and the safety
cheap, of Plowshare techniques. And for this, the AEC had settled in 1958 on
Ogotoruk Creek, near Cape Thompson, Alaska, for a harbor plan code-
manageable,
named Project Chariot. But what might have at first seemed to the Liver-
and spectacular more scientists as a straightforward operation-even after the project's
economic rationale crumbled-resulted in four years of political and sci-
power of nuclear entific controversies over the potential impacts of the Chariot blasts on the
nearby Eskimo village of Point Hope, and on the regional ecology of
dynamite. northwest Alaska. Instead of functioning as an effective public spectacle,
the failure of the project to take form in the Arctic landscape became a
staggering defeat from which, arguably, the Plowshare program would
never fully recover (Coates 1989; O'Neill 1989a, 1994). In fact, the coa-
lescence of science and politics which ultimately kept Chariot out of the
landscape threw into stark relief certain ideological contradictions of mod-
ern science and served to raise questions about what a characteristically
modernscience should be.
This essay examines how the definitions of progress employed by
Plowshare promoters functioned in opposition to a contradictory strain of
modernist discourse that stressed human interrelationships with nature
rather than conquest and mastery of it. Through an exploration of the
AEC's failed campaign for nuclear excavation in general, and for Project
Chariot in particular,we relate how this spectacle of science, ideology, and
politics played out at once over the discursive terrain of scientific progress,
and over the tundra of Alaska's northwest coast. The "responsibility that
comes with greater power over nature," Edward Teller knew (Teller and
Brown 1962, 57), is nothing without the power to demonstrate it. And
that power, we argue, depends not only on the histories and geographies
we create, but also on those we prevent.
102 Kirsch/Mitchell
Teller and Nuclear Excavation
"It sounds fantastic," Teller conceded. "It is on such a vast scale that I
would call it geographicalengineering.But essential parts of Plowshare are
backed by solid scientific testing" (ibid.; emphasis added). Indeed, for
Plowshare's visionaries, there were few inconveniences in the earth's geog-
raphy that could not be overcome through the cheap, manageable, and
spectacular power of nuclear dynamite.
Geographical engineering, of course, was really nothing new. Scien-
tifically engineered transformations of landscape to improve or facilitate
the conditions of production and exchange, military fortifications, water
management, and so forth were part of an ancient, and in some ways
technologically cumulative,history (see Cosgrove 1990; Kirsch 1995; Mat-
less 1992). Teller's terminology stood self-consciously on the shoulders of
engineering wonders like the Panama and Suez canals which had, quite lit-
erally, remade the geography of the planet. And the conversion of military
technologies to civil uses was also a long-standing enterprise; Livermore
scientists pointed out that more chemical high explosives had been used in
commercial mining and engineering applications than in World War II
(Johnson and Brown 1958). What was new about Plowshare was the scale
of energy available through thermonuclear fusion, which would seem to
take the so-called conquest of nature to a more expansive geographical
scale. And this technological capability stimulated a new scientific, dis-
cursive, and geographical project from the weapons designers and atomic
scientists at Livermore. But what was also new to Livermore's landscaping
techniques was the question of fallout, and with it the emerging sciences
Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 103
that dealt with radiation (in chemistry, biology, ecology, and regional stud-
ies), weapons testing, and "permissible doses" for civilian populations.
As debates over fallout were carried out publicly and in the scientific
community, advocates of Plowshare sought legitimation through tri-
umphalist ideologies of progress which positioned Plowshare at the apex
of an incrementally technological past, and as the foundation for "our
nuclear future" (Johnson and Brown 1958; Teller and Latter 1958). Push-
ing Teller's geographical engineering onto the tracks of this linear his-
tory, one fawning Plowshare supporter proposed that
There was "a correlation between excavation and the development of civ-
ilizations," and thus earth-moving was the "measure of man" (ibid., 23).
Yet while the promise of a global map benevolently reshaped through
nuclear dynamite suggested, for Plowshare boosters, a dramatic new stage
in "scientific civilization's" mastery over nature in the atomic age, these
visions of science, nature, and progress did not go uncontested in the
public sphere.
Teller recognized from the beginning that there would be "emotional"
objections to Plowshare, yet for him these objections could be resolved into
technical issues. Emotional objections were predicated on the original use
of atomic explosives: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such
emotional responses could be allayed if peaceful uses were demonstrated
and engineers designed "a project so that all economic consequences are
predicted and complete safety assured." "Hence," Teller proclaimed, "the
first step in a nuclear-construction project must be made by the engineer
with an adequate supply of information" (Teller et al. 1968, vi).
Teller was disingenuous. He knew rather that the first step was to sell
Plowshare to a skeptical public and scientific community, and to an enthu-
siastic but still cautious Congress and president. And even as he made
known his disdain for emotion on the part of his adversaries, Teller
appealed directly to what was dramatic and courageous in modern sci-
ence. In one speech, for example, Teller enlisted the wisdom of historian
Arnold Toynbee in a call for what seemed a scientific "gut-check" vis-ia-
vis nuclear experimentation:
Kirsch/Mitchell
times the ascentfails, sometimesit ends in disaster.The developmentnever
takes place without a dangerous,exacting, deadly challenge.In a way we
cannotcomplain.The challengeis here. We may fail, but I hope that it will
not be said thatwe havenot tried. (Teller1964, 71)
Teller's call for faith in the scientific enterprise was made explicit in a
1960 article in Popular Mechanics entitled "We're Going to Work Mira-
cles." The article described Project Chariot and several other Plowshare
projects on the table at Livermore and went so far as to suggest the possi-
bility of using nuclear explosives to modify the weather in "the distant
future." Teller navigated his discussion of Plowshare between the estab-
lished scientific principles of the day and those developments which he
anticipated in the years to come (like that of a "clean" or fallout-free
bomb). Insisting that the dangers of fallout from nuclear testing had been
exaggerated, Teller argued that what was needed to bring Plowshare to life
was less speculation and more experimentation (explosions in places like
northwest Alaska, for example). The article sought to mobilize not just
popular support for and confidence in the program but also our techno-
logical and geographical imaginations; Teller wanted to get people as
excited about Plowshare as he was. For Teller, geographical engineering
was not just progress, it was spectacularprogress.1
Kirsch/Mitchell
Whether or not Teller's concern for the "backward countries" of the If, as Teller said,
Southern Hemisphere was genuine, and whatever the appeal to Liver-
more of the idea of planetary engineering, a survey of Livermore docu- Chariot was
ments clearly suggests that Plowshare was never only an ideological enter-
prise. The work of Plowshare-the construction of knowledge about needed as a
"nuclear cratering" and the shopping of these techniques to outside com-
demonstration of
mercial and government interests-was carried out with the continuing
goal of putting geographical engineering into practice. "But," Teller Plowshare
added, "Plowshare should be demonstrated at home before it is exported
to others."
techniques before
This demonstration project was to take place on Ogotoruk Creek on
Alaska's northwest coast, in what must have seemed to Project Chariot's they could be
site selectors as an ideally remote, barren, and frozen wasteland to colo-
nize for science. Before plunging into necessarily finer detail of Chariot's used more
contexts and controversies, we need to tease out some of the conjunc-
tures of science-as-experimentation and science-as-spectacle. For it was extensively along
precisely throughthe conventions of experiment and spectacle that Teller
and his colleagues attempted to create the intellectual and geograph- the southern
ical space of a "model harbor" in a place seemingly on the margins of
land masses,
civilization.
If, as Teller said, Chariot was needed as a demonstration of Plowshare then the project
techniques before they could be used more extensively along the southern
land masses (and specifically for a new Central American canal to facili- was explicitly
tate trans-isthmian traffic), then the project was explicitly designed as sci-
entific spectacle. The spectacle of Chariot would be not only a set of designed as
images and texts, and not only the morphology of a nuclear excavation
site, but also a particular relationship between people that is mediatedby scientific
these abstract and concrete factors. Following Guy Debord's (1994) still
relevant critique, this relationship is, at least by design, chiefly a one-way spectacle.
form of communication, transmitted from the makers of spectacle to the
audience they create: spectators. For Livermore, this relationship between
atomic scientists and an audience of spectators would have been ideal; the
extent to which scientific, government, and popular audiences acted as
spectators and not participants in Teller's geographical engineering was
the degree to which Livermore could carry out its plans-and make its
own public safety decisions-without outside interference (see Kirsch
1997).
Yet there is no doubt that Chariot was also a scientific experimentin
the most basic sense: the AEC had never made an instant harbor before,
nor had it ever set off hydrogen bombs in an Arctic ecosystem. More
specifically, the project was to yield important data for Plowshare's nuclear
excavation program. According to a letter from Livermore director John
Foster to AEC director of peaceful nuclear explosives John Kelly (4/27/62,
Kirsch/Mitchell
Figure 2: Teller (left) and Gerald Johnson (second from right) mapping
the future in Alaska,1959. CourtesyUniversityRelationsNegative Collection,
Archives,Universityof Alaska.
110 Kirsch/Mitchell
Figure 3: Final configuration for Project Chariot. The predicted distribution of
radioactivity is substantially less than the nearly 10 percent of radioactivity
released by Project Sedan, the experiment in Nevada that eventually replaced
Chariot. Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Kirsch/Mitchell
science. Shortly before Plowshare was hatched in Livermore, geographers,
anthropologists, ecologists, historians, biologists, and others had gathered
in Princeton, New Jersey, for the Wenner-Gren symposium with the goal
of understanding nothing less, in the wake of the sort of spectacular
progress heralded by Teller, than whether "we are living in a moment of
great progress or great aberration in the human adventure" (Thomas
1956, xxxv). Where Teller called on Toynbee and other Whiggish histori-
ans to valorize his vision of earth-moving as the measure of man, "Man's
Role" participants harkened back instead to a progressive ecological tra-
dition developed in the nineteenth century by American naturalist George
Perkins Marsh, the fin-de-siecle Russian geographer Aleksandr Voeykov,
and the early-twentieth-century French geographer Vidal de la Blache,
who variously sought to penetrate the mysteries of ecosystem dynamics
and the role of humans in them. If Teller and other Plowshare enthusiasts
wanted to show how nature (always referred to as female) could "be put
to work for us," the "Man's Role" participants confidently argued that
"nature always contained man, but all the while is being changed in the
course of his own self-transformation. The dichotomy of man and nature
is thus seen as an intellectual device and as such should not be confused
with reality; no longer can man's physical-biological environment be
treated, except in theory, as 'natural"' (Thomas 1956, xxxvii).
Theory perhaps. Ideology certainly: the separation of humans from
nature is always an ideological project rooted in certain goals, certain
visions of the future. Hence, the organizers of the "Man's Role" sympo-
sium saw their meeting as "lay[ing] the ground work for more meaningful
formulation of research designs to learn more about what and how envi-
ronmental factors influence man's development and behavior"-and vice
versa (Thomas 1956, xxxvii). The Fairbanks biologists' demand that the
AEC formulate an adequate research design to study the "biological
costs" of its proposed detonation was clearly an attempt to shift the terms
of debate to those established by midcentury regional ecology of the type
espoused at the "Man's Role" symposium, to reformulate the public space
of science such that not just the voices of Livermore physicists and engi-
neers were heard, but also that the ecologists' own misgivings could
become legitimate.
When the AEC finally responded to the Alaskan ecologists, it did so
with fists full of money. On 18 February 1959, Livermore Plowshare
director Gerald Johnson confirmed to University of Alaska president Patty
that a biological program was ready to go, and, as Patty put it to the fac-
ulty, Johnson would be at the university at the end of the month "ready to
proceed on the spot with the awarding of contracts" (Patty to Wiegman,
2/18/59, PC). Though contracts were not actually awarded on the spot, by
know, for instance, what plants and animals occur in this region, what their
distribution is, what their population density is, and seasonal migrations of
the animals in the region. We should understand much of the basic ecology
of the area, the interrelationships of all the animals with their environment;
the structure of biotic communities; the dynamics of population fluctua-
tions; the food chain-energy flow and factors; and much more. A full
understanding of the ecology of the Ogotoruk Creek region becomes espe-
cially important in view of the radiation after-effects of harbor construction.
We should take the opportunity to study the biology of the region before the
detonation, so that we can properly evaluate the after-effects of the blast,
from both the physical and radiation aspects as they affect the regional ecol-
ogy. (An EcologicalStudy . . . of the Cape ThompsonRegion, PC)
The University of Alaska studies were just a few of the more than
thirty studies eventually done under the auspices of a newly created Pro-
ject Chariot Environmental Studies Committee, chaired by career AEC
scientist John Wolfe. In addition to the University of Alaska, scientists
affiliated with the University of Washington, the Hanford Radiation Lab
(operated by General Electric), and the University of California were
associated with the project. The Chariot Environmental Studies Com-
mittee itself, which was charged with coordinating studies that ranged
from core drilling and radiological analysis to examinations of marine
fisheries and human ecological studies of nearby communities, was com-
posed of seven scientists (geologists, marine biologists, Arctic health spe-
cialists, and radiologists), all of whom, excluding the ecologist Wolfe and
one other, had extensive field experience in the Arctic.
If University of Alaska scientists sought to use their studies to change
the terms of the debate, to open new arenas for dissent, then they did so
under conditions not of their own choosing. As John Wolfe remarked to
Brina Kessel, the coordinator of the University of Alaska studies: "There
would not have been any program such as this at all if it were not for the
idea of nuclear excavation. We still ride on the coat-tails of that idea, since
the actual detonation has not received approval. We are obligated there-
fore, to support researches useful to the idea but at the same time we have
insisted on studies contributory to science" (Wolfe to Kessel, 3/20/61,
PC; original emphasis).
Kirsch/Mitchell
The Liberal's Dilemma: Human Rights
and the Matter of Progress
116 Kirsch/Mitchell
emphasis). Though quite ambivalent about the plan when he took the
research job in early summer 1959, by the end of summer, "I became
worried that the AEC had not told the people of Point Hope about Char-
iot. I began to wonder why but, in all cases, I always tried to tell the truth
when questioned about such a complex thing as Chariot. I began to edu-
cate myself in nuclear history." In March 1961 Foote wrote University of
Alaska botanist Al Johnson (who was on leave in Norway) that by Sep-
tember 1960, "I became exasperated with listening to the double-talk of
the AEC and the complaints of Chariot workers who did not like the
development of the Environmental Program or the general smell of things.
It is impossible to criticize from a position of ignorance so it became a
matter of 'put up or shut up.' The put up became a systematic and doc-
umented history of Chariot; a study which is still in progress" (Foote to
Johnson 3/15/61, DF).
As he developed his history, drawing on Livermore and AEC public
documents, technical reports concerning the test program, and other Plow-
share studies and newspaper stories, Foote sent chapters to his brotherJoe
in New England for editing and criticism. "You must take a more precise
stand on just what you think of Plowshare and of Chariot," Joe Foote
urged his brother in response to some of Don's early historical work.
I assumethat you are as much in favorof "progress"as I am, and that you
smile as much as I do when you hear the word. You are in the liberal's
dilemmaof advocatingvigorousprogresson the one hand, and defending
the rights of the individualon the other. You want advancementbut you
want it to be humane. It is much easier to want only progress-as Teller
does-or only the humane-as David Bradleydoes. It is most difficultto
want both, and you must be awareof the difficulty.If you condemn Teller
for pushingthe projectruthlessly,you may also haveto condemnprivatecit-
izens for throwingirrationalroadblocksin the way. Unless, of course, you
are simplyagainstthe industrialuse of nuclearexplosives-which I thinkyou
are not. It is one thing to say we ought to wait for clean devices and more
knowledgeof the biologicaleffects of radiation;it is quite anotherthing to
say that nucleardevices should not be used at all. I might add that any one
who says the latteris callingup an empty canyon.
Joe went on to warn against simply defaming Teller, either for his "black
past" or his seeming irrationality in the name of progress. "So write
humanely about Teller, with real compassion for the man, real respect. He
deserves both" (J. Foote to D. Foote 12/4/60, DF).
Don was acutely aware of the "liberal's dilemma" that guided his
growing opposition to Chariot and the AEC in general-and that it was a
dilemma which Teller did not at all share. Rather, as Don Foote under-
stood him, Teller embodied a different version of "progress,"one that car-
When the physicists really discovered (i.e., came to believe in) mathematical
models of reality they began a distinct move away from mechanical con-
cepts of reality based upon observable reality to a theoretical concept of
reality based on statistical occurrence of an observation. In dealing with the
. . . microcosmos or the macrocosmos, it has become literally impossible to
describe the individual or even pay attention to individual behaviour. What is
important is the mass (in the sense of many) behaviour. Not "how does the
electron behave, but how do electrons behave." Today physicists speak of
"probability" and "uncertainty" factors and in so doing are in sharp contrast
to the 19th century scientists who felt they were speaking in "absolutes." . . .
Truth is statisticaltruth. (D. Foote to J. Foote, 3/26/61, DF; original emphasis)
Foote's point is that the traffic between liberal notions of society (which
flowered in the nineteenth century) and similar physical theories which
were based on the behavior of individuals was giving way to theories of
"the mass" in both political economy and physical science. And there
were quite important consequences to this progressive change.
To me, Teller illustrates this philosophy. I do not see his concern with the
individual or do I see that he recognizes individual behaviour as important.
When he says that fallout is not harmful he means that in comparison to all
the people in the world the number which will be born deformed or have
blood cancer etc. is so minute it is of no meaning .... This is why Teller
speaks with such conviction using words like "will," "is," "are" and "shall."
He speaks of "probabilities" as if they were "absolutes" because this is mod-
ern physics. (Ibid.)
Kirsch/Mitchell
we're going to get the social side of our society up to the scientific side,
where we have to go in the future, is going to require experimentation. I
have no respect, I have understanding, but no respect for the concept
that wants us to be ostriches" (Wilimovsky qtd. in O'Neill 1989b, 1:111).
More specifically, Wilimovsky argued that opposition to the experiment in
Alaska was misguided. "Do I think that even if it went slightly wrong
would it do a great deal of damage? Well, then you have to ask the ques-
tion of damage in a time sequence, because the issue [that] comes up is
how much of this damage would be repairable, how much would never be
repairable, and so forth."
Against this, the Footes and some of their compatriots in the bur-
geoning opposition to Chariot tried to advance a notion of progress that
understood the protection of human livelihood as essential. The essence
of progress-and indeed of modern life-was not so much progressive
control over nature but progressive control over the conditions of every-
day life. For Don Foote, the biggest threat posed by Chariot was that it
would make the Eskimos of Point Hope and the other villages even more
dependent on outside income sources and welfare. Rather than remaining
the dynamic society that blended tradition with new technology, the Eski-
mos would become a dependent people. And this, to Foote, was the very
antithesis of progress. He was especially incensed, for example, with what
the Chariot Environmental Studies Committee did to his study that
showed how a blast at Ogotoruk would essentially destroy food supplies
for Eskimos (since it was and had long been an essential region for hunt-
ing caribou). The committee translated his work into the statement that
the blast should not be conducted if it would disrupt Eskimo food supplies
"without substitute" (AEC 1960). To Foote this was unacceptable, since
his argument was simply that anything that detracted from the autonomy
of individuals and cultural groups, no matter how small, was to be
opposed.
Those opposed to Chariot, especially those working as part of the
bioenvironmental program, drew upon the long liberal tradition of rational
discourse, and particularly rational scientific discourse, to show just how
pernicious was the Plowshare concept of "progress." Joe Foote may not
have been speaking for all of those opposed to Chariot when he said, "I
think it is silly to resist Chariot. The possibilities open to us in this area are
enormous, and perhaps in a few decades a mushroom cloud on the hori-
zon will be as familiar to us as vapor trails in the sky are today." But he
certainly was speaking for many more, especially many more of those on
the scientific staff, when he continued, "But I believe much more deeply
that the essence of civilized progress lies in procedure, in the way we con-
duct ourselves. That point is precisely where Don and I take issue with
Teller and Johnson .... the first two years of Chariot constitute a travesty
Kirsch/Mitchell
space." In order for the public space of the laboratory to function, there- What concerned
fore, it had to be not just public, but also disciplined: "It was public in a
very precisely defined and very rigorously policed sense: not everybody many of those
could come in; not everybody's testimony was of equal worth; not every-
body was equally able to influence the institutional consensus" (ibid., 78). opposed to
That is to say, those who constituted "the public" in the public space of
Chariot was the
the laboratory were highly differentiated, and some were excluded from
the public altogether. Creating this discipline was a process of rule- and
AEC'sseemingly
lawmaking, of creating boundaries that circumscribed space and activity.
It was precisely along these lines that dissident Chariot scientists continu-
complete
ally attacked Livermore, the AEC, and, especially, the Chariot Environ-
mental Studies Committee. Scientists working for the bioenvironmental abdication of
program certainly agreed that discourse in science depended on creating
a highly restricted but still public space, governed by all manner of rules of traditional
procedure. What they objected to was how, in this instance, those rules
had been constructed, how they were governed, and what they excluded. mores of scientific
This was the problem of procedure that Joe Foote worried about.
discourse as it
Perhaps the clearest early indicator that the committee planned to
proceed by excluding, rather than heeding, the dissent of its own scientists
allowed its
came on 7 January 1960, when the committee released a statement to the
press concerning the first season's bioenvironmental studies (conducted
potential
from June through November 1959). The committee reported that it was
its "unanimous opinion," based on information received as of 10 Decem- capabilities for
ber, that Project Chariot could proceed under certain conditions: that the
"preferred time of year for the detonation is Spring; i.e. March or April"; stupendous
that "debris, especially that of a radioactive nature," should be directed
over sea (though over land directly inland from the crater was acceptable); earth-moving
that doses of radiation must be kept below "that specified as acceptable to
the general public"; and that "the detonation [should not] cause signifi- feats to run
cant damage to the food sources of the indigenous human populations."
The committee supported its recommendations by pointing out that in roughshod
March and April, "few birds are in the area; most small animals are under over the
snow cover; most plants are under snow cover and their metabolism is
low; local hunting activity is low; the sea and inland waters are under ice; development of
snow is on the ground [and] it is expected that radioactive debris will be
flushed from the frozen landscape by the spring run-off of rapidly melting scientific truths.
snow; weather is generally good and daylight is increasing which will facil-
itate project studies" (AEC 1/7/60, DF). Contract scientists like Foote
and the Fairbanks biologists were quick to point out that, besides being
almost wholly wrong (it was subsequently shown) in its justifications for
the blast, the committee did not seem to have really regarded the infor-
mation available to it by 10 December, since many of the justifications
directly contradicted what little (historical) data was available for March
122 Kirsch/Mitchell
the scientific community. And when these young [Livermore] physicists
who had done the theoretical as well as the field tests told us the radiation
would be contained, we had no reason not to believe them" (ibid.,
124-25). Yet when faced with data on caribou consumption by Eskimos,
and with the importance of the Cape Thompson region to that consump-
tion (and hence with the danger Chariot posed to the local populace),
Wilimovsky no longer believed in the "fundamental honesty" of all scien-
tists (ibid., 115). In short, Wilimovsky claimed, scientists like Foote,
Viereck, and mammalogist Bill Pruitt simply exceeded their area of exper-
tise. In fact, what Foote, Pruitt, and University of Alaska student
researcher Peter Lent had shown was that caribou congregated in the
Cape Thompson area during the early spring (largely because high winds
kept much vegetation free of snow) and that this area was not only the
most important zone for hunting, but that the spring caribou kill on Cape
Thompson was a key ingredient in assuring survival until the late spring
whale hunt.
Neither Don Foote nor dissident scientists such as Viereck or Pruitt
were willing to accept the boundaries around legitimate discourse that
the committee wanted to establish, if for no other reason than they did not
necessarily trust the AEC to produce scientific results that contradicted
the desire to explode large bombs. For Foote, the need to expand out of
the field he was trained in was paramount. It was essential not just to
effectively oppose the project, but also to do well the job he was hired to
do. "I am afraid I must admit our biggest stumbling block has been our
unwillingness to do the fantastic job of reading in the field of radiation
biology. This must be done! . . . Had anyone . . . known the facts there
would have been a storm in Anchorage" at the meeting where many of the
contract scientists first expressed their dissatisfaction with the committee
for distorting their research. "Now it is here that [Livermore] will col-
lapse" (Foote to Viereck 10/9/60, DF; original emphasis). Foote was
proposing that those opposed to Chariot needed to do better science than
those in favor. In that way, as the truth emerged, Chariot would self-
destruct.
The conduct of the Chariot Environmental Studies Committee thus
raised important ethical issues about the nature of the scientific enterprise.
Neither the committee members nor the contract scientists disputed that
some form of dissent was necessary, even vital, to good science. Rather,
the question was one of who had the standing to dissent-and what form
that dissent should take. Foote was convinced that it was his duty as a stu-
dent of human geography to obtain all relevant information, and that
included information on cratering effects, throw-out of debris by the blast,
radiation biology and ecology, the physiological effects of various iso-
topes, and, indeed, the nature of the decision-making process that would
124 Kirsch/Mitchell
the field scientists for an official First Summary Report for the AEC. For
whatever reasons, Wolfe and the others on the committee chose to ignore
the results of the 1960 field season and only report the findings from
1959. Even so, the review copies sent to the scientists indicated that the
committee had made a summary of work "to date." Riddled with errors
and omissions, the summary report drew the ire of the researchers con-
tracted through the University of Alaska. University project leader Brina
Kessel compiled her researchers' objections to the draft report and sent
them to John Wolfe, only to be informed that her "commentaries . . .
arrived in the same mail cart that carried the [revised] report to press.
There was no hope of retyping" (Wolfe to Kessel 4/12/61, PC). Don
Foote too had sent a long and detailed list of corrections (both of fact and
interpretation) to the summary of his work, a list that was received in
plenty of time to be incorporated in the final document; but he was, for
the most part, simply ignored (O'Neill 1994, 188ff).
The ACS Bulletin thus served to correct the record. Drawing on the
reports filed by numerous investigators on the project, Foote, Pruitt, and
Viereck traced its history and outlined some of the probable conse-
quences of the blast on the Arctic ecosystem and the people living in it.
Les Viereck had already resigned from the Chariot environmental pro-
gram because of objections to how his scientific work was being used by
the AEC-a move that also cost him his job at the University of Alaska.
For the others, the response to the ACS Bulletin was swift. Bill Pruitt was
soon eased out of his position at the University of Alaska (which had no
tenure system) and later blacklisted from academic employment in the
United States. Foote hung onto his contract (which was separate from
the University of Alaska contracts) but found himself under increasing
pressure to resign, pressure which included constant denials of requests
for equipment necessary to undertake his research. He was also quite
likely investigated by an agent for the FBI or CIA (O'Neill 1994, 203-25;
chap. 17).
Despite this pressure, or more likely because of it, Pruitt, Viereck, and
Foote stepped up their organizing against the project. Both the proposed
blast and the controversy surrounding the misuse of scientists' research
had attracted the attention of Barry Commoner, who, working through
the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the St.
Louis-based Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI), sought to publi-
cize Chariot across the nation. CNI took as its mandate the dissemination
of information concerning all aspects of the nuclear establishment, but
especially scientific research concerning radiation hazards, to lay audi-
ences. CNI published a lengthy review of Project Chariot, focusing par-
ticularly on the movement and bioaccumulation of radiation in the Arctic
food chain. CNI's twenty-page "complete report on the probable gains
Kirsch/Mitchell
Figure 4: Big hole in the desert. With a 104-kiloton nuclear explosion, this
1,280-foot-diameter and 320-foot-deep crater was blasted at the Nevada Test
Site in 1962 as a substitute for Project Chariot. Courtesy Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.
tion called for, but that the Bureau of Land Management had not
adequately researched native claims to the withdrawn land before grant-
ing approval. Since the withdrawal had been approved for the preblast
studies only, the Department of the Interior would have to grant a new
withdrawal for the blast itself. Udall was prepared to block that with-
drawal unless questions of radiation effects and destruction of hunting
opportunities were adequately addressed by the AEC (Francis to Viereck,
8/14/61, WP).
The AEC seemed also to be gaining opposition from other quarters
of the administration and it was not at all clear that presidential approval
could be gained for a blast in the Arctic-especially at a time of renewed
interest in a test ban treaty. And by April 1962, the AEC's John Kelly was
recommending to the AEC commissioners that Chariot be abandoned.
But even here, Kelly was concerned that the abandonment be handled in
such a way as to minimize the appearance that either potential adverse
bioenvironmental effects or the mounting opposition to Chariot played
any role (Foster to Kelly, 4/27/62, LLNL). To that end, the AEC deto-
nated its first nuclear excavation "device" (called Sedan) in the Nevada
desert in July 1962, which, to a degree, conformed to the engineering
specifications of Chariot (fig. 4). Sedan was the largest blast to date in
128 Kirsch/Mitchell
forever an imagined geography. Still, we can wonder, what if the oil
reserves had been located close to Cape Thompson, and what if commer-
cial oil strikes had occurred just a decade earlier, when the government
was still eager to subsidize Livermore's "demonstration projects"?
Studies of the social construction of science have called into question
conventional notions of science as a rational public space in which the
truth will win out simply becauseit is the Truth-a procession through
which the scientific enterprise thus moves ever closer to a direct reflection
of nature. Such perspectives, as Bruno Latour's (1987) critique has
shown, are conceptually limiting because they use the outcome of a sci-
entific controversy (i.e., the representation of Nature) to explain the com-
plex processes which produced that very outcome. The controversies of
radiation science in the 1950s and 1960s were carried out quite publicly in
popular and scientific movements to end nuclear weapons testing and, as
we have seen, in the struggles to keep the likes of Project Chariot out of
the landscape. If Plowshare had been "demonstrated at home" (that is,
northwest Alaska), as Teller so graciously offered (Teller and Brown 1962,
84), before being "exported to others," how many geographies might
have been engineered before such progress was arrested?
Even at its most spectacular, progress is interpreted in terms of exist-
ing vocabularies (see Katz and Kirby 1991). It is largely through these
vocabularies of progress that discursive and material exchanges between
science and nature have taken place, or, more accurately, between the
(inevitably overlapping) science of knowing nature and the science of
transforming it. The matter of progress has been shaped by scientific con-
troversies which are tied to (but not reducibleto) particular historical and
geographical contexts. Whether we ultimately choose to see an enterprise
like Plowshare in terms of a triumph of science over nature, or in a more
sophisticated language of ecologies and dialectics, depends on the very
histories and geographies which both structured, and were structured by,
the sorts of controversies we have explored here.
This question of what if a nuclear harbor had been blasted in Alaska
in 1962 is now, of course, a moot point. But it took a great deal of work to
get to this point. That is, to most usefully interpret these events, we need to
understand that the defeat of Chariot was not because of the success-and
inherent rationality-of the deliberative processes of science, but precisely
because of the borderwars which challenged the boundaries of legitimate
scientific dissent, and not least, those which contested issues of land
tenure, as the Livermore scientists and technocrats tried to move their
nuclear excavation techniques from the weapons laboratory to the world
outside. The inability of the Livermore scientists to control the nature of
radioactive fallout, or more specifically, the failure to demonstrate that
control effectively, was ultimately a failure in the work of boundary mak-
130 Kirsch/Mitchell
tells only part of the story. We also need to better understand the social
and geographical wax and wane of boundary making, policing, negotia-
tion, and contestation. When it comes to the matter of progress, the very
terms of debate can become a border war.
Dr. Teller, for his part, would devote his scientific imagination and
salesmanship to X-rays and Star Wars and the drive to militarize a new
frontier where ecologists and native land claims had little authority. Such
a spectacular nuclear border war, Teller argued, was theoretically feasible.
An important test for one of Teller's missile defense schemes was con-
ducted on 6 November 1971, a mile below ground on Amchitka Island, a
"wildlife refuge" located fourteen hundred miles southwest of Anchorage
in the Aleutian chain. Over legal protests from environmental activists
(and made possible by a four-to-three Supreme Court ruling allowing
the blast), some seven hundred Livermore engineers and scientists set
off a five-megaton explosion in their new experimental space. It was the
largest underground explosion in AEC history, producing shock waves
which set off twenty-two minor earthquakes. At ground level, a crater
formed which became a lake a mile and a half in diameter. Geographical
engineering at last.
Notes
An earlier draft of this article was presented at the Western Humanities Confer-
ence, Santa Barbara, October 1995. Portions of the research were supported by a
National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (SBR-
9628292) and by a Dean's Small Grant and a Junior Faculty Development
Award, both from the Graduate School, University of Colorado. Thanks also to
the staff of Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska, and of the Lawrence Liver-
more National Laboratory Archives for making the research so easy. Special
thanks to Susan Millar and Andrew Ross for helpful comments.
1. Teller's arguments over the dangers of fallout (or, in his terms, the fallout
scare) were timely in nature, corresponding to public controversies and debates
over the Test Moratorium of 1958 to 1961 and the Limited Test Ban Treaty of
1963. On the fallout controversy and the American nuclear weapons complex see
Fradkin 1989; Hacker 1994; Hilgartner, Bell, and O'Connor 1982; Weart 1988.
2. Teller's arguments for the peaceful atom were not only heard by the mag-
azine-reading public. In a 1957 meeting with President Eisenhower, Teller
asserted that partly clean (fallout-free) bombs had already been developed, and
that totally clean weapons were a "matter of six or seven years" with continued
testing. This prospect apparently excited Eisenhower's imagination enough to
put off the much discussed Test Moratorium for over a year before other AEC
officials and scientists indicated that essentially no progress had been made on
the clean bomb. On these arguments, and the persistence of grandiose claims
throughout Teller's career, see Broad 1992 and Findlay 1990. "How to Be an
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