Heat (30 page)

We stand between two tongues of lava. A breeze blows from behind us, toward the lava, keeping its heat at bay, but when the breeze dies for a moment, the heat confronts us suddenly, reminding us of where we are, reminding us that we are standing next to, and on top of, a furnace.

With the burned tip of my walking stick, I poke at young black lava. It looks like rock, but the surface bends inward like soft plastic, flexible but impossible to penetrate.

I take my pan of Jiffy Pop from my pack and put it on top of freshly hardened lava. The heat prevents me from staying close to the pan, from keeping the pan moving. Within seconds the butter inside sizzles and the kernels pop, but without motion, the kernels on the bottom burn. The smell of burned popcorn replaces the smell of baked ferns.

Late in the afternoon, we head downward. Crossing newly hardened lava, we keep moving, and soon we are on older lava, on ground that hardened a year ago and two years ago and ten years ago. After a few minutes, we share the last of the water, looking back toward the flows. From here the live flows are invisible, hidden behind the dark line that marks the crest of the slope. We move on, downward, following the path of the lava, walking on young earth.

My fever is gone, no longer noticeable, my febrile search for live lava behind me.

Chapter 7

Boom

H
ad the government prevailed in the early 1960s, temperatures just below the tundra surface of northwest Alaska’s Cape Thompson would have jumped from somewhere around freezing to something like twenty million degrees. Atoms of heavy hydrogen, a key ingredient in thermonuclear weapons, would have collided and fused. In fusing, a portion of their mass would have been converted to energy. For a moment, a dot of ground in the Alaskan hinterlands would have been hotter than the surface of the sun. The double flash of light characteristic of hydrogen bombs would have been hidden beneath the tundra, but its heat would have abruptly vaporized soil and frozen groundwater. The blast would have sent seventy billion pounds of frozen dirt upward and outward, along with assorted animals and plants. Lemmings and ground squirrels would have flown through the air, and perhaps a surprised grizzly bear and foxes and maybe a few musk oxen, all sent skyward along with tundra grasses and flowers and the tiny shrubs that grow on windswept, frozen ground. It would have made the Sedan shot—the shot that created the Sedan crater in Nevada—look like a firecracker.

Seawater rushing into the blast hole would have boiled instantly. A massive cloud of steam would have risen above the tundra.

If the government were to be trusted, the Inupiat village of Point Hope, thirty-five miles from the blast, would have been safe. In the local language, the village is called Tikigaq, a word that describes the shape of the peninsula on which the village sits, the shape of an index finger curved outward into the Chukchi Sea. Point Hope is known to be among the oldest of the permanently settled Eskimo communities in Alaska. For more than a thousand years, the Inupiat remained here, staying warm enough to survive by burning seal oil and eating whale blubber. Before the Inupiat, another group of people, the little-known and long-gone Ipiutak, inhabited the same patch of land.

Had the government prevailed in the early sixties, a roughly rectangular and somewhat radioactive harbor a half mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long would have been connected to the sea by a channel deep enough for ships. Both harbor and channel would have appeared in a matter of seconds as fission and fusion converted the ground beneath to vapor. Now, had the government prevailed, that harbor would almost certainly be used to stage vessels for oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea.

What the government called Project Chariot, produced and directed by the Atomic Energy Commission, was the brainchild of a postwar program called Plowshare, which itself grew from Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations in 1953. The “greatest of destructive forces,” Eisenhower told the delegates, “can be developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind.” Twenty thousand copies of the speech were printed in ten languages. “It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers,” he said. “It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”

My companion and I book flights and pack our bags.

The road to Point Hope is not a road at all. Point Hope, like many of Alaska’s villages, lies well off the road system. It is on the coast, between the Novarupta volcano on the Katmai Peninsula to the south and Barrow to the north. It can be reached by barge or ship or, more easily, by small aircraft from Nome or Kotzebue. We go by small aircraft, a twin engine. We are accompanied by a pilot, a Bible-reading construction worker, two backpacks, a shotgun, twelve cardboard boxes of groceries stacked against a bulkhead, three empty seats in the passenger compartment, and one empty copilot’s seat. We fly north along the coast, passing over the village of Kivalina, the thin beaches that separate the village from ocean waves rapidly disappearing, being eaten by a warming and rising sea, its people wrangling with the government for years now, pushing plans to move the entire community to higher ground.

Over the pilot’s shoulder, I read gauges that give altitude and fuel levels and temperatures of 200 degrees for both engines, 200 degrees from tiny explosions against pistons and from the friction of moving parts.

It is September and cold here above the Arctic Circle. The cold seeps into the plane, but my feet sweat in heavy socks and boots. To the left a whitecapped Chukchi Sea stretches out toward Russia. To the right, north of Kivalina, a gravel beach marks the shoreline. Behind the beach, lagoons stretch along the coast. Behind the lagoons, rolling hills of tundra reach into the distance. We pass over a long, empty road that leads from a dock to the interior, to the Red Dog Mine, invisible from here but famous as a source of lead and zinc and controversy.

The pilot points out Cape Thompson, the site of the abandoned Project Chariot, the place where Edward Teller would have touched off four hydrogen bombs to make his harbor, but also to test his bombs, to see what two megatons of explosive power could do, to see what happens when you pop off buried devices holding 160 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Teller, genius that he was, knew that there were no funds to do anything but set off the blast and study the amount of dirt that it moved, the radiation it released, and the water-filled crater it left behind. There was no money for wharfs or roads or warehouses. Wharfs and roads and warehouses were not Teller’s business.

Years earlier, Teller had worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer, “Oppie,” as he was known. Teller, it is said, dreamed up the hydrogen bomb while working for Oppie. The hydrogen bomb was dubbed “the Super” to distinguish it from the fission bombs that would soon be dropped on Japan. The Super became Teller’s personal obsession.

Teller is seldom described as a patient man. “What Edward can’t carry in his head and solve in his head,” a colleague once said, “he doesn’t want to bother with.” He could not carry all the details of a hydrogen bomb in his head. He had help from other geniuses, from machinists, from technicians, from politicians, from taxpayers’ dollars. But despite the help, Teller became known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, as if he had sketched the plans at his kitchen table and assembled the Super on a workbench in his garage.

Teller, looking for a place to see what his Super could do, found Cape Thompson on a map, an empty stretch of Arctic coast. Its proximity to Russia—two hundred miles across the Chukchi Sea—may have been an added attractant. But he was stopped by a handful of academics and the Point Hope Inupiat, hunters who spoke a guttural language and ate whale and seal and caribou and who at that time lived in sod houses. And so the valley next to Cape Thompson lies more or less intact, we hear, but for eroded airstrips and abandoned equipment. Ogotoruk Creek, shallow and clear, sparkling as it falls over stones, winds through tundra as it finds its way down the valley. Next to its mouth, the steep bluffs of Cape Thompson rise vertically from the sea, crowded with puffins that are visible even from our altitude.

When I tell the pilot that we intend to walk from Point Hope to the Chariot site, he looks at me sideways. “You’re going to walk?” he says.

“Yes,” I tell him. “It is thirty-five miles each way, and we have five days.”

The blasting cap is to the stick of dynamite what the atom bomb is to the hydrogen bomb. The blasting cap has little power compared to dynamite, but it creates the temperatures and pressures needed for detonation. The atom bomb has little power compared to the hydrogen bomb, but it creates the temperatures and pressures needed to force hydrogen molecules together, to ignite the fusion reaction that makes the Super super.

Another difference between the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb: atom bombs have been dropped on cities.

Gokoku Shrine, ground zero at Hiroshima, was next to an army facility. The shrine had been built as a memorial to victims of the Boshin War, a civil war fought in part over the opening of Japan to foreigners in the 1860s, in the time of the Pennsylvania oil boom and Mark Twain and John Tyndall.

After the bomb fell, gravestones one thousand feet from the Gokoku Shrine were fused with mica. Mica melts at 1,600 degrees. Roof tiles a third of a mile from Gokoku Shrine melted. Clay roof tiles of the kind used on homes in Hiroshima melt at about 2,400 degrees. Telephone poles two miles from the shrine were charred. Telephone poles made from Japanese cedar ignite at about 500 degrees.

The temperature at the shrine itself reached 11,000 degrees, four times hotter than the inside of a blast furnace. Anyone close to the shrine was immediately incinerated. Survivors described birds igniting in midflight, sounding like the men who fight the hottest of forest fires.

The flames near the center of the city sucked air from outside, creating raging winds. The fire and smoke created their own weather. A thick cloud formed above the city, a miasma. From the miasma, rain fell in heavy drops.

Nine out of ten people within a half mile of the shrine died within minutes. Farther out, survivors wandered, injured and in shock, as the firestorm engulfed their city. Men and women staggered with burned hands stretched in front of them, hands that they had held out to protect themselves from the heat, hands now in so much pain that they were held aloft, as if in prayer. Soldiers, staring toward the source of heat, apparently in search of American bombers, were blinded, their eyes burned away. Others, immobilized by their burns, lay on riverbanks and drowned when the tide came in.

This was a time before the possibility of atomic bombs was widely known. The survivors on the ground speculated wildly about the air strike. Only three planes had been seen. The Americans could have dropped
Molotoffano hanakago
—Molotov flower baskets, a kind of cluster bomb. They could have sprayed gasoline. They could have sprinkled magnesium powder onto the city, and the powder, hitting power lines, could have ignited.

On August 7, 1945, the day after the bombing, from a Japanese radio broadcast: “Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being investigated.”

One hundred forty thousand people died. I feel sick when I read the history of Hiroshima. I feel sick to write about it.

In the late 1950s, environmentalists did not call themselves environmentalists. There was little that would be recognized as an environmental movement by today’s standards. When the government hired the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to undertake environmental studies at Cape Thompson, Teller may have assumed that he was buying friends. Instead he found biologists like Bill Pruitt and Leslie Viereck who openly criticized the government for botching facts and downplaying biological risks. He found a young fisheries ecologist named Tom English who called the Chariot scientists “the firecracker boys” and talked of the Atomic Energy Commission’s “mendacity.” Teller sewed up the support of pro-development political leaders in Alaska but failed to consider the irritating academics, the Inupiat, and the annoying reality that what he proposed to do was horribly unreasonable.