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The Firecracker Boys By Daniel T. O'Neill St. Martin's Press, 1994 374 pages; $23.95
As the nuclear arms race recedes, or at least mutates into new forms, we learn more and more about the ways it polluted and poisoned the streams of our national life--both literally and figuratively. Dan O'Neill's absorbing new book The Firecracker Boys is a major contribution to this ongoing process of historical excavation. O'Neill, a research associate in the oral history program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, recreates in careful detail the story of Project Chariot, a bizarre plan gestated in the late 1950s at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The plan called for the detonation of up to six thermonuclear bombs at a remote point near Cape Thompson on Alaska's coast, where the Ogotoruk Creek flows into the Chukchi Sea.
The initial public rationale offered for the plan was that the explosions could transform the mouth of this small stream into a major international harbor that would stimulate fabulous economic development, dramatically illustrate the peacetime uses of atomic energy, and provide a showpiece for the Eisenhower administration's Project Plowshare.
But the absurdity of the idea soon became apparent: The region, more than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is icebound for months at a time, and access to the coal fields of the interior would have required the construction of prohibitively expensive rail facilities. When the hoped-for private investment that was a crucial component of the plan failed to materialize, a more general rationale for Project Chariot emerged: that the "experiment" would advance nuclear knowledge, and thus in some vague way promote human happiness and well-being.
O'Neill, an engaging writer as well as a careful researcher, begins his account with a description of Cape Thompson's history and ecology, and of the local Eskimo economy based on fishing and hunting. He then establishes the larger context of Project Chariot's origins. It was the brainchild of the Hungarian emigre physicist Edward Teller, whose fingerprints criss-cross so much of our nuclear history.
A Manhattan Project veteran and "Father of the H-bomb," Teller in 1952 had become head of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory. In the late 1950s, as the hazards of radioactive fallout became increasingly apparent and a moratorium on nuclear tests...