Spectacular failure, contested success: The Project Chariot bioenvironmental programme

Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 287-302

  Millar, Susan W S ^a   Mitchell, Don ^b  

^a State University   (United States)

^b SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992810124     PISSN: 09674608     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/096746089800500303     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Kessel to Boyd, 21 Apr. 1961, Project Chariot Collection, Box 1, File 4, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska.
2. For discussions of the Plowshare programme, see D. O'Neill, Firecracker boys (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1994); T. Findlay, Nuclear dynamite: the peaceful nuclear explosion fiasco (Sydney, Brassey's, 1990); E. Teller, ‘We are going to work miracles’, Popular Mechanics (Mar. 1960); S. Kirsch and D. Mitchell, ‘Earth-moving as the “measure of man”: Edward Teller, geographical engineering and the matter of progress’, Social Text 54 (1998), pp. 98-132; for Project Chariot, in addition to O'Neill, see P. Brooks and J. Foote, ‘The disturbing story of Project Chariot’, Harper's, 19 Apr. 1962, pp. 60-62; P. Coates, ‘Project Chariot: Alaskan roots of environmentalism’, Alaska Histor y 4 (1989), pp. 1-31.
3. Classic works in social studies of science include B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts (Los Angeles, CA, Sage, 1979); B. Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987); S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1985); S. Shapin, A social history of truth (Chicago, University of Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994); S. Traweek, Beemtimes and lifetimes (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1988); S. Fuller, Philosophy, rhetoric and the end of knowledge: the coming of science and technology stud - ies (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); D. Haraway, Primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science (New York, Routledge, 1989); S. Harding, Whose science? whose knowledge? thinking from women's lives (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991); B. Barnes, Scientific knowledge and sociological theory (London, Routledge, 1974); D. Bloor, Knowledge and social imagery (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); A. Pickering, ed., Science as practice and culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992).
4. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's attack on social studies of science, Higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), is the leader in this field. Gross and Levitt argue that social studies of science are nothing less than an attack on rationality, and that they simply deny that there is any such thing as reality, fact or truth. Such studies - at least the good ones - of course argue no such thing. Instead, they seek to understand the ways in which reality, fact and truth are socially derived, even if ‘nature’ (or any other object of science) is not completely reducible to social struggle, politics or language.
5. Chariot never took place: the project was cancelled in 1962, and with it went the last best hope for big earth-moving explosions outside the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada test site. See Findlay, Nuclear dynamite; Kirsch and Mitchell, ‘Earth-moving’, and Kirsch's paper in this issue.
6. See esp. D. Livingstone, ‘The history of science and the history of geography: interactions and implications’, History of Science 22 (1984), pp. 271-302; see also D. Livingstone, The geographical tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 29-30.
7. The eventual defeat of Chariot is a complex and exciting story. Involved in Chariot's demise were contract scientists like Don Foote and William Pruitt, whom we will meet in the course of this paper; their confederates in the bioenvironmental programme like botanists Les Viereck and Albert Johnson; early Alaska environmental activists like Ginny Wood and Celia Hunter; missionaries working in Eskimo communities such as Keith Lawton; dozens of Eskimo activists including Point Hope residents Dan Lisbourne, Joe Frankson and Rose Omnik; Eskimo reporter Howard Rock and his compatriot Tom Snapp (who founded the influential native newspaper the Tundra Times in large part to keep track of Chariot doings); St Louis biologist Barry Commoner (who traces his start as an activist in part to Chariot) and others affiliated with the Committee for Nuclear Information; native rights proponent LaVerne Madigan and her Association of American Indian Affairs; a small clique of activists centred around the New Hampshire home of Jim Haddock, who was drawn into the fray when he happened to meet Revd Lawton; and the Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall's executive secretary, Sharon Francis. These activists, working with the Chariot scientists and the information they were producing, were enormously effective in bringing the dangers of the project to national attention. O'Neill's Firecracker boys, though meticulously documented and scholarly in its own way, has the character of a good suspense novel. Concerns about destruction of the Ogotoruk Creek ecosystem were voiced as early as 1959, when botanists working on the project complained they could not keep construction workers and heavy equipment out of their study sites; L. Viereck to A. Johnson, 12 July 1959, Project Chariot Collection, Box 4, File 28.
8. Norman J. Wilimovsky and John Wolfe, eds, The environment of the Cape Thompson region, Alaska (Springfield, VA, US Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information, PNE-481, 1966).
9. J. C. Reed, ‘Ecological investigations in the Arctic’, Science 154 (2 Oct. 1966), p. 372.
10. John Kelly, ‘Foreword’, in Wilimovsky and Wolfe, The Cape Thompson region, p. 4.
11. This is the point of Latour's Science in action.
12. O'Neill, Firecracker boys, ch. 3; Kirsch and Mitchell, ‘Earth-moving’. Of particular interest is geographer Don Foote's contemporaneous sleuth-work into the mindset at Livermore as its staff sought to convince Alaskans to buy into Chariot; see esp. Don Foote Collection, Box 11, Files 18 and 19, Rasmussen Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks. These two files contain many of Foote's notes for a history of Chariot he wrote as an AEC contract worker in Point Hope.
13. Livermore had contracted with the E. J. Longyear Company - a mining firm frequently contracted to do drilling at the Nevada test site - to make an economic survey of the Cape Thompson region. Its report (Report to the University of California Radiation Laboratory on the mineral potential and the proposed harbor locations in northwest Alaska) was not publicly released when it was completed. Instead, Teller withheld the report until the Chariot site had won approval from the AEC, public land had been withdrawn through the Department of the Interior and Alaskan government had been secured. When it was later released, one Alaskan resource economist claimed that the report was almost laughably bad: it exaggerated mineral deposits, minimized trans- portation costs and did no market analysis at all: Rogers to Foote, 15 Feb. 1961, Foote Collection, Box 11, File 21. See also O'Neill, Firecracker boys, pp. 38-39. O'Neill provides a good overview of the response of the Alaskan press to Livermore's plans for instant harbours in the far north.
14. Teller was not one to dampen such ideas: he knew they only worked in favour of allowing him to blow his first big hole in the tundra. Teller, a master of the soundbite avant la lettre, liked to promise all manner of miracles, quipping at one point in Alaska: ‘If your mountain is not in the right place, just drop us a card’ (Anchorage Times, 26 June 1959), and another time claiming that Livermore's ‘geographical engineering’ techniques were accurate enough to dig a harbour ‘in the shape of a polar bear if desired’ (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 17 July 1958).
15. ‘As biologists we can view the proposed explosions (Chariot) as an experiment in engineering with biological side-effects. We are told that the results will be used in planning further explosions. It therefore seems especially necessary to gain as much biological information as possible, and we feel embarrassed that it seems necessary to reiterate that useful conclusions are most likely to follow from a carefully considered experimental design.’ Statement of UAF biologists, 9 Jan. 1959.
16. A. Johnson to L. Viereck, 21 Feb. 1961; Albert Johnson, Oral History Interview, in D. O'Neill (comp.), Project Chariot: a collection of oral histories (Fairbanks, Alaska Humanities Forum, 1989).
17. See A. Johnson to E. L. Bartlett, 21 Feb. 1959; Bartlett to Johnson, 24 Feb. 1959, both in Project Chariot Collection, Box 4, File 20; see also O'Neill, Firecracker boys, pp. 73-74.
18. Memo by UAF President E. Patty, 18 Feb. 1959, Project Chariot Collection, Box 3, File 20.
19. B. Kessel, A. Johnson, L. Swartz and W. Pruitt, ‘An ecological study of the flora and fauna of the Cape Thompson-Ogotoruk region, Alaska’, Project Chariot Collection, Box 9, File 74.
20. This is the conclusion of O'Neill, Firecracker boys, pp. 76-77. For a sense of how rushed the environmental programme was to be, see Johnson to English, 27 Jan. 1959, Project Chariot Collection, Box 3, File 20, in which Johnson says all the work needed to be ‘presented in the coming summer’. It seems that the meeting in Washington made it clear that at least two summer seasons would be needed.
21. On the importance of winning consent, see Kirsch and Mitchell, ‘Earth-moving’.
22. AEC press release, ‘Statement of the Committee on Environmental Studies for Project Chariot’, 7 Jan. 1960, copy in Foote Collection, Box 11, File 23.
23. L. E. Davies, ‘Proposed atomic blast in Arctic is called safe’. New York Times, 17 Aug. 1960.
24. The beginnings of public opposition to Chariot by contract scientists is detailed in O'Neill, Firecracker boys, ch. 11-13; see also Kirsch and Mitchell, ‘Earth-moving’.
25. Kessel to Wolfe, 15 Feb. 1960, Project Chariot Collection, Box 1 File 2.
26. Kessel to Saario, 14 Mar. 1960, Foote Collection, Box 21.
27. Wolfe to Saario, 13 Apr. 1960, Project Chariot Collection, Box 1, File 2.
28. Kessel to Wolfe, 19 Apr. 1960, Project Chariot Collection, Box 1, File 2.
29. See US Atomic Energy Commission, Project Chariot Phases I-V: Project Manager's sum - mary report (Las Vegas, Nevada Operations Office and Holmes and Naver, Inc. NVO- 7, Aug. 1964), pp. 2-7; cited in O'Neill, Firecracker boys, p. 212.
30. Wolfe to Kessel, 7 Mar. 1961, Project Chariot Collection, Box 1, File 1.
31. O'Neill, Firecracker boys, pp. 209-13, provides an excellent, accessible discussion of these issues.
32. See the letters cited in n.42 above, Firecracker boys, p. 211.
33. Wolfe to Kessel, 17 Nov. 1961, Project Chariot Collection Box 1, File 1.
34. Wolfe to Pruitt, 19 Dec. 1961, Pruitt Collection, Box 1, File 5.
35. O'Neill discusses this incident in Firecracker boys, pp. 195-205. The pertinent documents are Pruitt to Wolfe, 8 Jan. 1962, Pruitt Collection, Box 1, File 5; Kessel to Wolfe, 28 Feb. 1962, Kessel to Wolfe, 11 Apr. 1962, Wolfe to Kessel, 8 May 1962, all in Project Chariot Collection, Box 1, File 1; Pruitt to Wood, 2 Mar. 1962, Pruitt to Wolfe, 22 Mar. 1962, Wolfe to Pruitt, 27 Mar. 1962, Pruitt to Kessel, 30 Mar. 1962, Pruitt to Francis, 10 May 1962, Pruitt to Francis, 25 May 1962, ‘Statement to Project Chariot Environmental Committee and all concerned’, 24 Apr. 1962, all in Pruitt Collection, Box 2, File 10.
36. ‘Statement to Project Chariot Environmental Committee and all concerned’.
37. Pruitt to Kessel, 30 Mar. 1962, Pruitt Collection, Box 2, File 10.
38. For his troubles, William Pruitt found himself released from the University of Alaska (which did not have a tenure system) and blacklisted by UAF president William Wood and functionaries in the AEC. Likewise, botanist Les Viereck, who had resigned in protest from the Chariot bioenvironmental programme, found himself released from the university. There is some evidence that his attempts to return to university teaching were also resisted. Don Foote, after eventually completing his PhD in geography, was hired by an institute affiliated with UAF in 1968, but soon after died in an auto accident. O'Neill tells these stories in Firecracker boys, ch. 17.
39. The Committee on Environmental Studies for Project Chariot, ‘Preface’, in Wilimovsky and Wolfe, The Cape Thompson region, p. 6.