Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man": Edward Teller, Geographical Engineering, and the

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
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 Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man"
EDWARD TELLER, GEOGRAPHICAL ENGINEERING,

AND THE MATTER OF PROGRESS

We would be unfaithful to the tradition of Western Civilization if we shied ScottKirsch

away from exploring what man can accomplish, if we failed to increase man's and
control over nature ... . Every citizen, whether he is a politician or a farmer, Don Mitchell
a businessman or a scientist, has to carry his share of the greater responsibil-
ity that comes with greater power over nature. But a scientist has done his job
as a scientist when that power has been demonstrated.
-Edward Teller, The Legacy of Hiroshima

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

Dr. Teller, the Manhattan Project, AEC, and University of California

physicist already famous for both his scientific and his political contribu-
tions to the development of the hydrogen bomb, was more than one of
Plowshare's chief architects; he was also the program's most vocal sales-
man. Teller saw Plowshare's potential in the most heroically modern of
terms as "a decisive victory in man's historic battle to shape the world to
his needs" (Teller and Brown 1959). And nowhere were these capabilities
more evident than in Plowshare's nuclear excavation projects. Teller's
logic was clear:

Strategicallylocated canals, deep harborsand navigableriversmean cheap

transportationand increasedworld trade. But Nature has not alwayspro-
vided waterwayswherethey are needed.
We now havehydrogenexplosivesproducingso littleradioactivefallout
thatthe blastingof man-madeharborsand canalsin manypartsof the world
is practical.We are, in other words, ready to dig harborswith hydrogen
explosions.And we can do it up to 100 times cheaperthan it could be done
with conventionalhigh explosives!(Ibid.)

"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

to changegeographyman removeseverincreasingamountsof earth.In fact,

earth-movingprovidesa roughindex of the marchof civilization.If civiliza-
tion is to progressrapidly,he must vastlyimprovehis alreadysophisticated
earth-movingtechniques.Man must use the most effective earth-moving
tools available,and, inevitably,must reachfor nuclearinstruments.(Sanders
1962, 19)

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:

You are familiarwith [Toynbee's]ideas of development,of sudden revolu-

tionaryheroic efforts in which men arduouslytry to ascendfrom one plat-
form to the next, from one state of human society to a higherone. Some-

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

Science, Ideology, and Spectacle

It is hardly surprising that, to persuade others to want what they wanted,

Plowshare scientists and supporters would take the theme of "man's bat-
tle with nature" to the seemingly logical extreme of nuclear combat. By
this time, celebrating the effort to control nature through science and
technology had been a tried and tested measure of what Neil Smith has
described as the fragile ideological dualism of nature. As Smith (1990, 15)
explains it: "The hostility of external nature justified its domination and
the spiritual morality of universal nature provided a model for social
behavior." Concepts of nature developed in science work on both sides of
this divide. On the one hand, modern science treats nature as the external
object of its inquiry; the very design of "scientific method and proce-
dures dictates an absolute abstraction both from the social context of the
events and objects under scrutiny and from the social context of the sci-
entific activity itself" (ibid.). Yet on the other hand, it is the natural sci-
ences that provide a powerful ontological basis for universalnature, which
encompasses human societies. This ambiguity of nature in science, of
course, is only compounded by the probabilities, uncertainties, and rela-
tivity of twentieth-century physics. Indeed, "the immediate object of Ein-
stein's relativity theory," Smith points out, "was a world of atomic and

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 105

sub-atomic motion in space-time, a world which did not even exist at the
scale of direct human experience" (ibid., 4).
However philosophically impoverished this notion of a divided nature
might be, and however ambiguous (though ultimately utilitarian) the role
of science in this dualism, this ideology has long served to legitimate the
business of, in Teller's words, "chang[ing] the earth's surface to suit us"
(Teller and Brown 1962, 64). Promoting Plowshare, however, was more
than legitimation and triumphalism ex post facto; it was instead a matter
of generating consent before any shots could be fired. Yet who, exactly,
would benefit from Plowshare applications? And what social, political, or
economic needs could an agency armed with nuclear dynamite fulfill? If
anything, the hard sell for Plowshare turned the aphorism "Necessity is
the mother of invention" on its head.
Seen from the context of a Cold War nuclear weapons laboratory, the
very idea that hydrogen bombs could be used for constructive purposes
was appealing in two significant respects. First, for scientists and labora-
tories devoted to atomic weapons design during the Cold War, Plowshare
seemed to offer the ultimate rationalizationthat their work in bomb design
was, like all science and technology, a neutralundertaking; whether their
bombs were exploded as tools of war or of peace was ultimately not their
responsibility (which was rather to demonstrate the power of science).
Second, and more palpably, the utopian promise of peaceful nuclear
explosions was frequently cited in arguments against test bans, moratori-
ums, and treaties, and for the need for more extensive nuclear explosives
testing. These two strains of logic commingled for Teller in his case for
"How to Be an Optimist in the Nuclear Age"-a worldview that Teller, no
doubt, was quite comfortable with.2
So while, on one hand, Plowshare was positioned on a verticalaxis of
human progress (the cumulative history of earth-moving), it was also
propped against a more urgent (but similarly idealized and scripted) hor-
izontal axis of Cold War geopolitics and developmentalism. Plowshare
was neededas a tool of Third World development in order to prevent the
spread of Soviet communism (and, in fact, the Soviets would engage in
their own ambitious peaceful nuclear explosives program, and Livermore
feared a "Plowshare gap") (cf. Sanders 1962). Again, Teller's logic was
compelling:

The worldneeds more harborsand canals.There is much too little protec-

tion for big ocean-goingvessels along the westernshoresof South America
and Africa. More watertransportation,because it is the cheapestform of
transportation,would speed the developmentof backwardcountries,would
increase trade, and would strengthen ties between peoples. (Teller and
Brown 1962, 84)

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,

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 107

LLNL),3 its purposes included "extending nuclear cratering knowledge to
a different media [other than desert alluvium], and to higher yields,"
"determining the distribution of radioactivity," and determining the
"effects of a large scale cratering detonation on the biosphere in a simple
and delicate environment." With an eye toward the nascent Panama Canal
Study, the Chariot blast would also extend knowledge of the short- and
long-term action of water on nuclear craters. Following a list of these and
other experimental contributions of the project, Foster added: "Perhaps
never stated, but of course always kept in mind, is another purpose of
Chariot, namely: . . . To dramatically demonstrate(a) the capability of
nuclear explosives to excavate large volumes of earth in a controlled and
constructive manner, and (b) that such excavations can be done safely
with minimal hazard" (emphasis added). Why this need for dramatics?
The boundary between experiment and spectacle was never clearly drawn
by Livermore, for Chariot was supposed to be both.
Like spectacle, scientific experimentation has long been a social con-
vention geared toward generating consent. Eighteenth-century natural
philosophy, for example, "set itself the task of producing dramatic and
wonderful active powers by the manipulation of passive and inert matter"
(Schaffer 1983, 3-4). As Simon Schaffer has suggested, by exploiting
their knowledge of certain patterns of natural order, "natural philoso-
phers could use their control over active powers to construct a theatre
with all the appeal and all the dangers that implied" (ibid., 14; original
emphasis). Whether this theater was legitimated in teleological terms or in
the more progressive vocabularies of Plowshare's "miracle workers," the
point is that the dramatic demonstrations which have been so central to
the construction of scientific knowledge are dependent on consent from
the audience which they create.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's (1985) account of the creation
of an experimentalspace from which scientists could produce knowledge
stresses the importance of "boundary maintenance" to early experimental
science. Within this space, dissent by witnesses and members of the
experimental community was possible, even necessary,to stimulate scien-
tific imaginations, debate, and knowledge construction. But dissent from
outsidethe experimental space-and outside the accepted conventions of
the "public" laboratory-could be disastrous. For Livermore, this kind of
boundary maintenance became a tightrope act as the geographical engi-
neers attempted to superimpose the boundaries of their experimental
space concretely onto the environs of Cape Thompson, Alaska. Here the
question of who would be the spectators, and from whom dissent was
possible, would decide the production of space itself. So Teller and some
fellow scientists barnstormed into Alaska, scientific, political, and ideo-
logical baggage in tow.

Kirsch/Mitchell
Figure 2: Teller (left) and Gerald Johnson (second from right) mapping
the future in Alaska,1959. CourtesyUniversityRelationsNegative Collection,
Archives,Universityof Alaska.

Big Ideas for Big People: Plowshare Comes to Alaska

If consent for a project like Plowshare requires a continual negotiation

between spectacle and experiment, on their first visit to Alaska in July
1958, Teller and his colleagues stressed the spectacular side of the equa-
tion. The Livermore scientists enthused at press conferences and in meet-
ings with area chambers of commerce about the economic potential of the
area along the Chukchi Sea, speaking of coal and petroleum deposits that
could be tapped if only there was "a safe haven" for ships plying the seas
of the region, and they argued that "the economic aspect [of the proposed
blast] is vital to our planning" (O'Neill 1994, 35). Livermore test director
Gerald Johnson was adamant: "We don't just want a hole in the ground.
We want to show the nation and the world what nuclear power can do
when used for peaceful purposes" (Juneau Daily Empire, 7/15/58). Yet
Teller's own grandstanding belied this point. It was on this first tour that
he boasted of Livermore's ability to carve a harbor in the shape of a polar
bear if that is what Alaskans desired; and only a year later Teller mused,
"If your mountain is not in the right place, just drop us a card" (Anchor-
age Daily News, 6/26/59). Teller appealed directly to Alaskans' sense of
destiny as the last (earthly) frontier: "Anything new that is big needs big
people to get going and big people are found in big states" (fig. 2) (Fair-
banksDaily News-Miner, 5/18/59).

as the "Measureof Man"

Earth-Moving 109
Many Fairbanks But while Teller and his Livermore colleagues found the wonder, awe,
and even much of the support they sought with the announcement of
scientists were such "big ideas" as Chariot, they also found that local business leaders,
newspaper publishers, and state government officials questioned the need
sure that if for a harbor there. From the beginning questions were raised about the
economic viability of the project. Some suggested harbors in other areas;
ecological studies others thought a new canal across the Alaska Peninsula would be the best
use for nuclear dynamite in Alaska. As impressive as the spectacle of
of the Ogotoruk
an instant harbor might be, the big people of Alaska wanted something
region were practical.
Early in 1958, Livermore had commissioned two reports justifying
implemented in the selection of Ogotoruk Creek. One presumably detailed the geology of
the region from Nome to Barrow (but which actually focused narrowly on
advance of the a small area around Cape Thompson and the mouth of Ogotoruk Creek)
(Pewe, Hopkins, and Lachenbruch 1958); the other purported to assess
blast, they would the economic viability of a deepwater port in this part of Alaska. (Accord-
ing to some economists who saw it, this study was so full of mispercep-
prove at least as tions, faulty assumptions, and poor analysis as to be laughable ["Longyear
Report," LLNL]).4 Livermore had settled on Ogotoruk Creek for several
much an Achilles
reasons. The first was its relative remoteness. For all the bravura con-
heel to the visions cerning abilities to contain fallout and the development of clean bombs,
Livermore really had little idea what the dynamics of a blast in permafrost
of planetary would be. Second, the site could be serviced relatively easily from Nome
and other coastal towns. Third, and this can only be surmised by the fact
engineering as that Livermore never sought to visit the nearby native communities until
forced to in 1960, well into the project, they anticipated that residents of
did the claim of the region would do little to resist the claims of the Livermore scientists,
and so would not pose much of a threat to the success of the project.
economic Much more challenging to the dreams of Livermore scientists (at
least early on) was the opposition to Chariot that quickly developed in
viability. Fairbanks. At first relieved that Teller was selling the harbor idea as eco-
nomic development, since the economic development aspects of the pro-
ject were patently absurd and would spell the end of the project, members
of the University of Alaska biology faculty grew increasingly alarmed as
Livermore continually changed tacks, partially in response to the sorts of
concerns about economic viability raised by newspapers and business
leaders. While retaining a language of spectacle which it deployed often to
bolster flagging support at various times during the career of the project,
Plowshare scientists soon dropped the economic development language
altogether and declared rather that they were in the business of making a
scientific and technological experimentthat would prove the efficacy of
earth-moving for other places. Teller had originally proposed a series of
row charges totaling 2.4 megatons (or 160 times the explosive power

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.

of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), but by the beginning of 1959, the

project had been revised downward to 460 kilotons (and later to 280 kilo-
tons) and was clearly seen only as an experiment in cratering (fig. 3)
(O'Neill 1994, chap. 5).
With the change in justification from economic development to
experiment, university biologists realized both that the project was going
to be more difficult to stop and that the terms of the debate had shifted
back to the grounds they knew best: the language of experiment. To be
successful, they knew, any experiment had to be rigorously planned and
carefully controlled. They could demand that the spectacular visions of
geographical engineering be based in a realistic assessment of the ecolog-
ical condition of the place set to be engineered. Many Fairbanks scientists
were sure that if ecological studies of the Ogotoruk region were imple-
mented in advance of the blast, they would prove at least as much an
Achilles heel to the visions of planetary engineering as did the claim of
economic viability. Science itself-just the sort of "information" Teller
proclaimed was essential to the development of nuclear dynamite-would
blow up the project long before any "devices" themselves could be
exploded. The scientists at Fairbanks therefore worked hard to shift the
boundaries of the experimental space Livermore was attempting to con-
struct around Project Chariot.

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 111

 Challenging the Boundaries
of Experimental Space: Enter Ecology

Working through university president Ernest Patty, the Fairbanks biolo-

gists sent a letter to the AEC suggesting the need for a complete series of
ecological studies to be made before the blast. The letter never received an
answer. When Livermore scientists Vay Shelton and Harry Keller visited
Fairbanksin January 1959 to sell the revised harbor-as-experiment plan to
the chamber of commerce, biologist Albert Johnson persuaded them to
confer with university scientists on campus. Shocked during this meeting
by the apparent fact that the AEC considered no predetonation studies of
the Cape Thompson region and that the AEC's representatives could
blithely declare that there would be no biological cost involved with the
explosions, the biology faculty at Fairbanks read a statement to Shelton
and Keller pointing out that if one of the purposes of "an experiment in
engineering with biological side effects" was to gather information "to be
used in planning further explosions," then "it therefore seems especially
necessary to gain as much information as possible." The biologists pro-
fessed to feeling "embarrassedthat it seems necessary to reiteratethat use-
ful conclusions are most likely to follow from a carefully considered exper-
imental design." After pointing out that it was the AEC's responsibility to
create such a design, the statement ended with a paragraph expressing the
scientists' concerns about adding radiation to that already existing in the
atmosphere (Statement 1/9/59, DF).
At Keller's request, biologist T. Sanders English forwarded the state-
ment to Gerald Johnson in Livermore on 21 January, writing, "There
appears to be a chance for you to do useful biological fieldwork that will
allow extrapolation for similar projects in the future." English reiterated
that the University of Alaska faculty saw no evidence "that such work has
. . . been contemplated on any realistic scale" and concluded the letter by
assuring Johnson that the university was "willing and even anxious to
have its people help you with their special knowledge of Alaska. The biol-
ogists certainly stand ready to do so" (English to Johnson 1/21/59, PC).
According to the Fairbanks biologists, a complete regional ecology of
Cape Thompson was an essential precondition to the success (or failure)
of Chariot, and of Plowshare more generally.
Regional ecology itself was a relatively new field at midcentury. Many
of its practitioners argued that human progress was now not so much
dependent on expanding control overan external nature, but more a prod-
uct of increased understanding of humanity's role in universal nature-
and the impact humans inevitably had on the natural world. Understand-
ing "man's role in changing the face of the earth," as an influential 1955
Wenner-Gren symposium put it, was the most pressing need facing

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 113

April biologists at the University of Alaska had hammered out a several-
hundred-thousand-dollar proposal for studies on everything from the dis-
tribution of flora and fauna in the region to the local human ecology. And
they had begun recruiting additional scientific staff from around the
United States, Canada, and European polar regions. The goal of these
studies was to

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

Chariot contract scientists frequently chafed against the degree to which

their science was made "useful to the idea" of Plowshare. Results were
misreported in AEC summaries, Congress and the public were misled,
and, as we shall see, scientists were reprimanded for illegitimate forms of
dissent. Steeped in the ideological tradition of the "Man's Role" sympo-
sium, many Chariot scientists were just as concerned with the way the
AEC, in its zeal for geographical engineering, seemed to be trampling not
just science but the very idea of progress itself. One of those scientists was
geographer Don Foote, who as a graduate student at McGill University
had been hired by the AEC to conduct human ecological studies in Point
Hope, the Eskimo village closest to ground zero.
Don Foote provides an interesting study in the contestations through
which science is always made. For a number of reasons, many of which
had to do with Foote's disappointment in the faculty and program at
McGill, Foote had more or less willfully flunked his Ph.D. comprehensive
examinations in geography in 1959 and was casting about for work in the
Arctic by the spring of that year. Foote sent letters to nearly every agency
he could think of, speaking of his interest in doing "regional studies." In
response to an inquiry to the Alaska Resource Development Board, Al
Anderson wrote to Foote on 19 March 1959, "You have undoubtedly
read press comments concerning 'Operation Plowshare.' . . . If it is carried
out, the scientists involved intend to make a complete catalogue of the
resources in the Cape Thompson area. I think a person of your training
might fit into a phase of their program ideally" (Anderson to Foote,
3/19/59, DF). Anderson suggested that Foote write to Gerald Johnson at
Livermore. On 24 March, Foote did just that, pointing out to Johnson that
as a geographer he was interested in "regional studies, planning and devel-
opment in the northern fringe areas of the world," that he was seeking
employment "with some group interested in regional studies," that he
would pay his own way to Alaska, and that he was "well acquainted with
the field study of microclimatology and regional climatology, geomor-
phology and the processes shaping the landscape, soils and to a lesser
extent vegetation." A month and a half later, Foote received a telegram
from John Wolfe: "With reference to your March 24 letter .... Can you
submit in greater detail concerning your proposed studies in Alaska thru
summer. Please indicate budget required" (Wolfe to Foote, 5/5/59, DF).
Compounding the generalities of his original letter, Foote responded that
he would conduct "a complete mapping of the study area, to include
topography, soils (including permafrost), vegetation, drainage lines and

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 115

What Foote' run-off rates, existing settlements, communication and transportation
links, and industry. Also mapped would be the climatic parameters of
work showed, ppt., temperature (surface and subsoil if possible), cloudiness and sun-
shine, radiative losses and gains available for plant growth. A brief dis-
quite quickly cussion of synoptic climate patterns would be added" (Foote to Wolfe,
5/6/59, DF). On 15 May, Wolfe tentatively offered Foote a contract and
was how
invited him to an organizational meeting in Seattle. Following the meeting
Foote submitted a fuller proposal on 26 May and a revised version on 8
important the
June, with a one-year budget of $20,451.12. His contract was finalized
Cape Thompson shortly thereafter and by August, after a summer of historical research in
the Arctic libraries of McGill and Dartmouth, Foote drove to Alaska to
region was to take up residence at Point Hope, an Eskimo village some thirty miles
north of ground zero.
the continually Foote's work at Point Hope stands as an incredible example of seat-
of-the-pants scientific improvising. By the end of his first year, Foote was
evolving "way of not only cataloging weather patterns and changes, but also logging the
number, length, and nature of Eskimo hunting trips and the amount of
life"of regional meat and other foods collected or purchased (by weight, type, and so
forth); collecting voluminous ethnographic information on the traditional
residents, and
culture of villagers; and teaching himself to train sled dogs, build sleds,
that Project and hunt for seal, caribou, and elk. Over time, Foote's studies led him to
begin enunciating a human-ecological approach based on energy flows in
Chariot the total environment as a means of understanding how Eskimos fit within
and transformed their environments. What Foote's work showed, quite
threatened quickly, was how important the Cape Thompson region was to the con-
tinually evolving "way of life" of regional residents, and that Project Char-
villagers notjust iot threatened villagers not just with direct radiation but with a thorough
disruption of hunting patterns-a disruption that would inevitably lead to
with direct a loss of autonomy to Eskimo groups as they had to rely more and more
on substitute food sources provided from outside.
radiation but with
This is not what the AEC, or the Chariot Environmental Studies
Committee for that matter, wanted to hear. And indeed, the committee
a thorough
continually distorted Foote's findings to cast them in a light more favor-
able to the project (see especially AEC 1960). Disillusioned by the actions
disruption of
of the AEC, and by the way it treated his work, by the end of 1960 Don
hunting patterns. Foote had begun seriously researching the history of Chariot and the
Plowshare program. But as he told it to various correspondents, he had
not always been so sure that Chariot was either unnecessary or wrong.
"Any deep-rooted, precontract existing ideas I had about Chariot," he
wrote to Environmental Studies Committee member Arthur Lachenbruch
(11/25/60, DF), "were a) nuclear war is just a bigger joke than war in
general . . . ; b) belief in the myth of a 'barren,' 'desolate,' etc. Arctic
could possibly have been one reason for choosing Ogotoruk" (original

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-

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 117

ried little if any regard for the role that "progress" could or should play in
individual development or liberation. Foote explained it with reference to
the sea change in scientific thought brought to the fore in the wake of the
Einsteinian revolution.

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.)

When dealing with probabilities-the tool of the technician as much

as the scientist in Don Foote's appraisal-individual cases fade to noth-
ingness, and those who would stand in the way of progress are either
hopelessly romantic or mere obstructionists. "I am not painting Teller
black," Foote argued to his brother. "But what I am saying is that you
must admit his philosophy is worth consideration with respect to a phi-
losophy which lays stress on the dignity and rights of the individual
human" (ibid.).
The "probabilistic" notion of progress is quite straightforward. Echo-
ing Teller's notions of progress, Chariot Environmental Studies Commit-
tee member Norman Wilimovsky later reflected: "If mankind is going to
advance, you have to take certain risks and chances. To think anything else
is ignorant. To think that science and mankind is going to progress, that

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 119

of fair procedure. Fraud was worked on Alaska; whether motivated by
malice or good faith is quite beside the point" (J. Foote to Klotts, 3/3/61,
DF). What concerned many of those opposed to Chariot was the AEC's
seemingly complete abdication of traditional mores of scientific discourse
as it allowed its potential capabilities for stupendous earth-moving feats to
run roughshod over the development of scientific truths. In short, they
feared that the AEC, including the Environmental Committee, was willing
to sacrifice the very rationality it claimed governed its program.

Scientific Discourse as a Rational Public Space

Geologist Art Lachenbruch, marine biologist Norman Wilimovsky, Arctic

biologists Max Britton and Robert Rausch, and radiologist Allen Sey-
mour all remember the Chariot Environmental Studies Committee as one
of the signal events in their scientific careers (O'Neill 1989b). Rarely else-
where, they all say, were they involved in a collective enterprise of such
import. And more important, rarely elsewhere did the deliberativeprocess
that lies at the heart of science work so well. Reflecting at the end of the
1980s on the nature of the committee, Art Lachenbruch described it as "a
rational forum, and the people speaking their mind, and ... I always feel
it if you're right and you're persistent that your message will get where it
goes, as long as you have a rational forum" (Lachenbruch, qtd. in O'Neill
1989b, 1:81). For Lachenbruch, the creation of a "rational forum"
allowed for the truth to win out. The truth thus remained an ideal, or a
goal, that can only be approached piecemeal through the process of ratio-
nal debate. In a letter to Lachenbruch in 1960, Foote had argued in much
these terms. He suggested that we needed to distinguish between
"TRUTH, as an ideal-in fact an unknowable-and truth as a temporal,
pragmatic, mutual lie. Since this latter truth requires mutual acceptance,
there must exist a media of communication between men" (Foote to
Lachenbruch, 11/25/60, DF).
Though Foote's position smacks of the sort of relativism that nowa-
days gets called "postmodern," similar convictions about communication
and what might be called the conditions of truth, similar and connected to
Lachenbruch's conception of a rational forum, were present at the birth of
modern science. As Shapin and Schaffer (1985) argued, the production of
scientific truth demands a disciplined and rational public space, a public
space that encourages dissent within its boundaries but polices against
irrational transgressions of those boundaries. Modern science has thus
been defined by the "Hobbesian problem" of creating order within which
dissent could flourish. Truth derived from public, collective experience.
Objective truth could not be produced "in a private and undisciplined

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 121

Neither the and April; second, that no studies had yet been conducted during the
time of preferred blast, so the justifications were merely unsupported sup-
committee positions; and finally, that the "preferred time" seemed to match exactly
the time Plowshare planners had claimed, both publicly and privately,
members nor was most suitable to them (see Johnson et al. to CES, 6/8/60, PC).
Foote was incensed by the procedures adopted by the committee-
the contract
and about the perversions of truth he felt these procedures led to. As he
saw it, when the deliberations of the committee could produce so dis-
scientists disputed
torted a document as the one that recommended a March or April deto-
that some form nation, the committee "violated certain principles which I hold so impor-
tant that I can no longer stand aside, silent. . . . This is a sin against
of dissent was science. Against truth. It cannot be overlooked; it cannot be excused"
(Foote to Rausch, 3/26/61, DF). The deliberative processes of science
necessary, even had failed-and, Foote surmised, were incapable of being achieved-sim-
ply because the committee had constituted itself in such a way as to be
vital, to good impervious to dissent, or at least dissent that mattered. As botanist Les
Viereck wrote in a widely circulated letter of resignation from the bioen-
science. Rather, vironmental program, the committee's recommendation of a spring deto-
nation "was the first indication that any of us had that the Environmental
the question was
Committee was merely going along with the predetermined policy of the
one of who had AEC and was not using the reports of the investigators to formulate their
decisions" (Viereck to Wood, 12/29/60, DF).
the standing to It was not so much that dissent from the contract scientists was
ignored, but rather that the committee found it illegitimate, or inadmissi-
dissent-and ble, as it seemed to transgress the boundaries of deliberation, boundaries
that themselves were set by "expertise." Committee chairman John Wolfe
what form that frequently complained, both in letters directly to contract scientists and in
reports to the AEC, that dissident scientists were simply out of their
dissent should league. They were fine scientists when they stuck to their own field, but
when they ventured into areas in which they were not trained-some
take.
aspects of ecology, radiation biology, geology, or nuclear excavation
itself-they had no standing before the committee. Their dissent was ille-
gitimate on the face of it and should not be accepted as part of the com-
mittee's deliberations; their dissent had no relevance to either the "exper-
iment" or to the spectacle.
Norman Wilimovsky remembered it this way: "The thing that I will
say is that I have had respect for the scientists that worked on the project
for the science that they did. Let me emphasize the science that they did.
But some of the individuals began to separate their science from what they
perceived as their social responsibilities, and their judgmental attitudes
towards what we should be doing to stop the project" (Wilimovsky, qtd. in
O'Neill 1989b, 1:114). Lest there be any doubt that Wilimovsky was
policing borders, he later argued, "I believe in the fundamental honesty of

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 123

 determine the fate of the Eskimos of Point Hope and other nearby com-
munities. To that end, Foote began gathering all unclassified data on
nuclear explosives that he could. And he made no secret of this, writing to
John Wolfe on 21 November 1960 requesting copies of all unclassified
technical reports on Chariot. In response, James Bolson of the AEC-SAN
contracts office replied, "We have reviewed the scope of work for your
contract and find that at present there are no publications we are aware of
from this office or [various contractors] which are required in fulfillment
of your contract for Human Geographical Studies beyond those which
have already been sent to you" (Bolson to Foote 12/19/60, DF). Similarly,
Foote was denied access to the minutes of the Environmental Committee.
While committee members remember the openness and give-and-take of
their meetings, such openness was denied to the workers whom the com-
mittee was meant to oversee and whose work they were meant to review.
The minutes "are internal documents containing information not only on
your contract, but also those of other organizations participating in the
Environmental Program," an officer at AEC-SAN informed Foote.
"Because of their nature and purpose, these minutes are for Committee
and Commission use only."6

A Failed Spectacle: The Triumph of Illegitimate Dissent

Such boundary policing would ultimately prove quite ineffectual. In many

ways the experimental program constructed by Livermore in the wake of
the early Fairbanks protests failed to generate any of the consent Teller's
geographical engineers hoped it would. Indeed, the very boundary-polic-
ing arguments of the Environmental Studies Committee, the AEC, and
Livermore were continually turned back on them by outraged polar sci-
entists who themselves could not accept publicists, engineers, and career
AEC scientists as legitimate dissenters in the realm of Arctic environmen-
tal science.
As opposition to Chariot mounted in the first years of the 1960s,
from contract scientists, from local Eskimos, and from activist groups in
Alaska and the other states, contract scientists used the distortions and
boundary policing of AEC and the committee as a point around which to
solidify that opposition. In March 1961, Foote, along with Pruitt and
Viereck, published a scathing summary of Chariot developments to that
point in the News Bulletin of the newly formed Alaska Conservation Soci-
ety (ACS). The ACS Bulletin was written in large part to counter the
official summary reports periodically prepared by the Environmental
Studies Committee. As the Alaskan scientists prepared their Bulletin in
March 1961, John Wolfe was likewise engaged in summarizing the work of

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 125

and risks" of Chariot included pieces by Foote, Pruitt, and Viereck
describing (respectively) the people, animals, and plants of the Cape
Thompson region, reprinted statements by Livermore's Gerald Johnson
and the AEC's John Kelly, and more evaluative articles by CNI physicist
Michael Friedlander assessing Livermore's fallout predictions, and by
Commoner assessing biological risks of Chariot. By raising questions
about the physical and biological uncertainties associated with the exper-
iment, the CNI report shocked the nuclear establishment to its core.
In May the Alaska Conservation Society Bulletin itself was reprinted
in its entirety as a special issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin (May 1961).
With the release of the Committee on Environmental Studies's First Sum-
mary Reportalso in spring 1961, and growing coverage in outlets ranging
from Science to OutdoorLife to the New YorkTimes, Project Chariot and
the ethical-scientific issues connected to it had become a national issue. By
1962, Harper's (4/19/62) had published a full expose of Project Chariot,
coauthored by Don Foote's brother, Joe. As with the concerns repeatedly
expressed by CNI, the central issue in all these accounts was the very real
question of whether the Livermore scientists had any sense at all of the
potential radiation hazard of Chariot-and if they did, whether they were
more concerned with obfuscating that hazard than addressing it.
Because the question of radiation containment was so important to
the proposed blast, public concern focused quickly on the effects of Char-
iot on the people of Point Hope. Galvanized by the near total disdain
with which AEC officials seemed to regard their needs and desires, the
Eskimos of Point Hope had been organizing opposition to the project
since November 1959. Assisted by members of the Association on Amer-
ican Indian Affairs, a local missionary, and a group of concerned activists
from New England (who worked to publicize the Eskimos' cause in the
rest of the United States), villagers questioned and petitioned the AEC
and their local congressional delegation and began the hard work of orga-
nizing Natives across Arctic Alaska-an effort that outlasted Chariot and
became instrumental in the Alaskan Native land rights movement later in
the decade (see O'Neill 1994, chaps. 9 and 15).
Cognizant of the potential threat to Point Hope villagers, and con-
cerned with the general arrogance of the AEC and Livermore, Secretary
of the Interior Stewart Udall proved to be a key opponent to Chariot. His
personal secretary established communication with Don Foote, Les
Viereck, and Bill Pruitt and became a reliable channel to the secretary for
concern expressed by villagers and research scientists. As secretary of the
interior, Udall was in a position to examine the AEC's withdrawal of land
from the public domain for Chariot. What he found, tipped off by Don
Foote (who was reporting the sleuthing work of Les Viereck's wife Terri),
was not only that the AEC had claimed far more land than their applica-

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 127

 North America and, besides ejecting some 10 million tons of earth (half of
which settled back in the hole) and creating a hole 320 feet deep and
more than 1,200 feet across, it created a dust cloud thick enough to
require Ely, Nevada (200 miles away), to turn on its street lights in
midafternoon. It also necessitated the evacuation of nearby ranches and
the closing of a highway for the better part of a week while radioactive
debris was swept into bordering ditches with pressurized water (Fradkin
1989). In addition, Sedan's dust cloud, like the clouds from many other
Nevada tests, deposited radioiodine in Utah's milk supply ("Project Man-
ager's Report: Project Sedan," LLNL; see AEC press release, 10/5/62). As
O'Neill (1994, 253-54) points out, a blast the size of Sedan (which was
only about a third of the size of the combined blasts proposed for Char-
iot) "could have dropped radioactive fallout over the entire length of the
North Slope of Alaska, or penetrated 1,000 miles into Siberia, depending
on the winds and differences in the geological characteristics of the
blasted rock." A month and a half later, the AEC declared it was putting
Chariot on hold because much of the data on the engineering uses of
nuclear dynamite they had hoped to get from Chariot were now available
from the desert shot.
With the botched science, with the adverse publicity Chariot was gar-
nering for the AEC in general and Project Plowshare in particular, and
with opposition arrayed from cabinet members to Eskimo mayors, from
scientists working in the trenches to clergy in the pulpit, neither the spec-
tacle nor the experiment seemed quite so necessary anymore. At least not
at this time, and in this place.

Epilogue: Nuclear Border Wars

Livermore's design for a harbor offshore from Prudhoe Bay-the consid-

erations which Teller had announced with such reticence in Houston in
1969-was neither so well known nor so controversial as Chariot. By this
time, Alaska was an oil state; after 1967, oil surpassed fisheries as the
leading source of state income, and the September 1969 auction of
450,000 acres adjacent to Prudhoe Bay had netted the state an unprece-
dented $900 million (Coates 1991). The necessity of getting this oil to the
marketplace, for Humble Oil (Standard), Atlantic Richfield, and British
Petroleum, meant exploring an array of transportation solutions, among
them a nuclear-blasted atoll harbor to be located some twenty miles off-
shore (Nordyke to Werth, 3/17/69, 4/21/69, LLNL). But the oil compa-
nies were ultimately more interested in efficiency than in demonstrating
"man's power over nature," and they settled for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline
to Valdez; the second Alaskan "instant harbor" remained, like Chariot,

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-

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 129

The inability of ing. It was also a triumph of dissent in both the politics of knowledge and
the politics of space, albeit chiefly a victory that preserved the status quo
the Livermore (i.e., a world without nuclear-blasted harbors and canals).
For Livermore, the failure to produce a "dramatic demonstration"-
scientists to in material form in the Arctic landscape-proved to be just the opposite of
the consent-generating conventions of spectacle and experiment. For
control the
example, as one Peruvian supporter of Plowshare techniques (for a trans-
Andean highway) reported to Gerald Johnson, "the attempt at getting
nature of radio-
Plowshare information to the President was not successful. His cousin,
active fallout, or Dr. Mufioz, refuses to believe your nuclear devices are beyond the theo-
retical stage. After speaking with him, an attempt was made at the High-
more specifically, way Commission. They asked, 'why don't they use this method in the
States, if it is so good?' The discussion that followed was very negative"
the failure to (Leahey to Johnson, 1/4/64, LLNL). Instead of an effective demonstra-
tion, carried out by engineers with adequate supplies of information,
demonstrate that Chariot served to raise ecological questions about nuclear excavation
which could not be easily dismissed elsewhere. In western Australia,where
control effectively, another instant harbor would make it as far as an announced interna-
tional feasibility study in 1969, an avid media booster pointed out in 1965
was ultimately a
that "The subject of Project Chariot is sure to be raised and the question
failure in the asked, 'If Chariot has not gone forward . . . why hasn't it?' You must
admit this is a curly question and one which must be asked or people who
work of boundary are the enemies of both our countries will very quickly ask it for us"
(Marshall to Palmer, 5/17/65, LLNL).
making. It was Opponents of Plowshare-aided by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of
1963, which provided that no radioactive debris should cross interna-
also a triumph of tional borders, and also aided by incompatibilities between nuclear and
conventional construction timetables-were able to prevent nuclear exca-
dissent in both vation in Alaska, Panama, California, Pennsylvania, and Australia. Yet
during the 1960s, they were unable to prevent Livermore from blasting
the politics of
several big holes in the Nevada desert within the experimental space of the
test site (Discussion of the Need for a Harbor Demonstration 11/18/68,
knowledge and
LLNL).7 This despite the fact that, as the Sedan shot demonstrated, the
the politics of radioactive debris produced by nuclear cratering tests could travel well
beyond the test site's boundaries (and repeatedly beyond international
space. borders as well, treaty or not). Advancements in the universal knowledge
of nuclear cratering could only be made in particularplaces, and the con-
tests over what counted as proper scientific knowledge were thus inter-
twined with place-specific political conflicts over the authority to control
actions in space. In some ways, making scientific knowledge is a cumula-
tive and, indeed, progressive process. But we need only to think of the
progressively more explosive science of bomb making to recognize that
the ideological conflation of science and technology with human progress

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

Earth-Moving as the "Measure of Man" 131

 Optimist in the Nuclear Age" was Teller's chapter on Plowshare in The Legacy of
Hiroshima (1962), a popular book written expressly to argue against the impend-
ing test ban.
3. Please see the list of abbreviations under Archival Collections. Given the
space limitations, we have eliminated full citations to much supporting docu-
mentation throughout the text. Full references may be obtained from the authors.
4. Evidence for this claim can be found in oral histories (O'Neill 1989b) and
in the records of Don Foote (DF).
5. David Bradley was the author of No Place to Hide (1948), a memoir of his
experiences as a doctor examining radiation poisoning after the 1946 Bikini test
shot.
6. While Foote was denied access to the minutes of the meetings for confi-
dentiality reasons, the committee seemed to have no objection to allowing Univer-
sity of Alaska president (and ardent Chariot supporter) William Wood to sit in.
7. The AEC and Livermore had a bit more success in securing permission to
conduct undergroundPlowshare tests outside of the Nevada test site, most notably
in New Mexico and Colorado.

References

ArchivalCollections

DF: Don C. Foote Collection, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska, Fair-

banks.
LLNL: Office of History and Historical Records, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, Livermore, California.
PC: Project Chariot Collection, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska, Fair-
banks.
WP: William Pruitt Collection, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska, Fair-
banks.

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