The Firecracker Boys by Dan O’Neil 1995, St. Martins Press

This book is the story of Project Chariot, a part of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Operation Plowshare. Project Chariot was an insane plan to chain several thermonuclear warheads, bury them in a pristine wilderness area of Alaska then detonate, creating an artificial harbour.

Of course, with the benefit of 20/20 hind-sight the lunacy of this plan is evident, the Sedan test carried out in Nevada released far more nuclear rubbish than anyone had anticipated. If the plan had been put into effect large tracts of Alaska would have been rendered permanently uninhabitable and the devastation to the environment would have been beyond belief.

The geopolitical implications were also not to be sniffed at, even the demented A.E.C. did not pretend that no radioactive dust would be hurled into the air, Alaska is located right between Soviet Russia and Canada, two sovereign nations who might not like having a massive lot of the stuff dropped into their back-yard. A.E.C. officials dismissed this concern by saying that they would wait until the wind was blowing the other way.

This was typical of the flippancy and dishonesty that emanated from the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, the unit of the A.E.C. which cooked up the plan.

LLRL, now going by the name LLNL, with the N standing simply for “national” was a quasi-autonomous unit within the A.E.C. bureaucracy. It was co-founded and headed by Edward Teller; who is popularly (and wrongly) credited with the development of the Hydrogen Bomb*. Teller was a hot-head and it is from his, and his scientists, attitude that the books title is derived, boys fulsomely playing with fire-crackers.

LLRL and Edward Teller lied repeatedly through their teeth about vital matters such as the release of radiation into the environment, what was going to happen to the Inupiat People** who lived in the area, the degree of engineering control that could be exercised over the blast, the economic viability of the harbor, and in-fact the idea that the harbor itself was the reason that the A.E.C. wanted to conduct the shot***

Eventually the plan fell to pieces as the lies were exposed and the catastrophic effect of the operation became more clearly understood by the public. In-spite of a wave of incredibly ignorant media-boosterism the project was put in permanent abeyance, it has never been canceled.

The A.E.C. itself no longer exists, it was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Comission and LLRL became part of what is now the Department of Energy.

All this is fascinating stuff and yet the book is so tediously dull I got about half-way through and abandoned the effort. It should be virtually impossible to write a dull book about this, it has something for everyone! Libertarians should be able to love the tale of government gone mad, liberals the disregard for the environment, conservatives the nostalgia. Students of history, journalism, Alaskan culture etc, etc. This should be a great book. Its falling so horribly flat is a huge disappointment as it is, to my knowledge, the only retail book on the matter ever published.

True, there are moments in the book that are quite good, such as the story of the “cassette tape fad” among the Inupiat; the unintentionally humorous remarks in the press such as its proclivity to refer to what were, in effect, secretaries as “leading atomic physicists” and hysterical predictions of everlasting propserity should serve as a cautionary tale to all.

I sadly cannot recommend this book as the prose is quite dense and over-verbose and the author seems to feel the need to bother us with endless paeans to the wild and so-forth that have little bearing on the subject matter.

Notes

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* Teller was a brilliant atomic physicist, yes; however he wrongly gets most of the credit for the H-Bomb, the first practical H-Bomb design was created by Stanisław Ulam; it did not work, but with some alterations by Teller it did. Ulam deserves most of the credit, if credit it is.

** Take the example of the Bikinians became welfare addicts in perpetuity after their island, immortalized in fashion, was wracked by a series of tests.

*** The experimental nature of the shot, who’s main goal was actually to acquire data was initially concealed.