Dan O’Neill: author on Project Chariot, the government’s plan to nuke Alaska

East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

In the late 1950s the US Atomic Energy Commission initiated Operation Plowshare, which was a research project designed to find peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, championed the first big project of Operation Plowshare which was to blast a deep sea harbor near Cape Thompson, Alaska, by detonating a series of nuclear bombs simultaneously. This proposal was known as Project Chariot. What the proponents of this plan insisted was that it was safe and would bring economic prosperity to Alaska. Edward Teller and his staff toured the state promoting the plan and stating over and over that these nuclear explosions would not cause any lasting harm to Northwest Alaska, specifically not to the people of Point Hope who lived just 30 miles from the planned harbor. If Project Chariot were to have been carried out it could have resulted in radiation exposure equivalent to up to 675 Chernobyl disasters. In his 1994 Book The Firecracker Boys Fairbanks author Dan O’Neill documents in riveting detail how the Atomic Energy Commission misled the Alaskan public, and how a group of concerned scientists and most importantly the Inupiat people of Point Hope themselves successfully fought back the US Government from conducting an atomic experiment that would have resulted in lasting nuclear devastation to our great state.