Heat (34 page)

Uranium atoms, by their nature, occasionally fall apart. When they fall apart, they send neutrons flying outward. At critical mass, the loose neutrons fly into other atoms, forcing those atoms to break apart. With neutrons flying everywhere, smashing into atoms to set free more neutrons, and more, and still more, a chain reaction leaves in its wake the pieces of broken uranium atoms.

The broken atoms, in breaking, lose mass. It is as if the two halves of a broken cookie weigh less than the whole cookie. The missing mass has become energy: E = MC
²
.

In this sort of chain reaction, resulting from slamming together two bricks of uranium, the energy released is sudden and devastating. The best thing that can be said about it is that it blows itself apart very quickly, the force of the explosion sending whole and broken atoms of uranium in all directions, reducing the mass of uranium below criticality, snuffing itself out.

Making an atom bomb is simple in principle, but in reality there are tough challenges, especially if it has never been done before. Key among these is the challenge of obtaining the right fissile materials, materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And although simple in principle, there are details to be worked out. In wartime, progress on the bomb required secret cities. It required Site X in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to enrich uranium, Site W in Hanford, Washington, to produce plutonium, and Site Y at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on the details of bomb design. And Teller was already dreaming of his Super, his hydrogen bomb, a device that would require a yet-to-be-
​invented
atomic bomb to set it off, to trigger the fusion reaction that would create far more energy than the slamming together of bricks of enriched uranium.

From start to finish, from the initiation of the Manhattan Project on December 6, 1941, to the detonation of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, took eleven years. And Teller was itching to dig an instant harbor along the coast of Alaska.

On day two we walk another eight miles on the gravel beach, beautiful but eventually monotonous. I talk to Point Hope Inupiat hunters out scouting for caribou. They ride Honda four-wheelers, using the beach like a highway to get to the hills surrounding Cape Thompson. It is early for caribou, they tell me, but the migration will arrive soon.

We come across a thirty-foot bowhead whale, dead and floating in the surf, as bloated as a beached walrus. Without dismounting from his four-wheeler, a hunter tells me that the whale might have been killed by hunters from another village. “Maybe Wales,” he says, “struck and lost.” Wales is well to the south, on a tip of land that forms the choke point of the Bering Sea. The wounded and eventually dead animal would have had to swim or float two hundred miles before washing up here.

Another Inupiat hunter tells me that the sea ice, in spring, melts from beneath. The currents are changing, he says. The elders have never seen ice like this before, ice that melts early and does not return until late in the year.

Ringed seal mothers carve lairs in the sea ice and the overlying snow. In the lairs, they birth pups, small white butterballs, unable to swim for their first few days of life. When the thaw comes early, the lairs collapse. Gulls attack the pups from above.

By midafternoon we come to bluffs that mark the end of the beach, the northern edge of Cape Thompson. The bluff forces us inland, into the foothills. We walk over dry tundra with ankle-breaking tussocks, tight clumps of sedge that form little mounds. We step over a stream that has cut its way into the frozen ground, forming a miniature valley. The hills in this country—the last of the mighty Brooks Range that crosses northern Alaska—are rounded. Pockets of deep snow sit in the shadows on north-facing slopes. Windswept hillsides, sparsely vegetated, look salty from a distance. Weather has exposed pale mineral soils and rock.

Eager to see Chariot, we walk late into the evening, but the remaining distance is uncertain. My companion, wisely, wants to stop. We camp that night on a bed of moss. I pump the stove, holding the pump knob between still-burned fingers to pressurize the fuel tank. I create a flame of gasoline that burns yellow and blue and makes the stove hiss like a jet engine.

The ingenious little stove was developed in response to the U.S. Army’s World War II request for something that could run on gasoline or kerosene, something that could be easily ignited in temperatures from 60 below to 125 above, about the size of a quart bottle, and no heavier than three pounds. The engineers at Coleman pulled something together over two busy months, drawing from earlier designs of larger field stoves, which in turn had evolved from even earlier designs of kerosene lamps of the sort used in the 1860s to burn rock oil. World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle called the jeep and the Coleman GI pocket stove “the two most useful non-combat pieces of equipment to come out of the war.”

William Coleman’s company started as a provider of kerosene lamps and ended as a manufacturer of stoves, first for farmers, then for the army, and now for backpackers. The reliability of the Coleman backpacker stove is renowned. They are sometimes described as being “almost bomb proof,” which seems, this close to Chariot, remarkably appropriate.

Ship-mounted weapons that spit Greek fire, described in the
Alexiad
, were early flame throwers, but the modern flamethrower did not come into regular use until the trench warfare of World War I and, even more commonly, during World War II. The modern flamethrower was invented in Germany around 1901, where it was called the
Flammenwerfer.
The soldier wears a backpack with two tanks. One tank holds pressurized propellant gas, and the other holds a flammable liquid. The gun itself, connected by a hose to the backpack, consists of a valve and a pilot flame or an ignition coil. Modern flamethrowers can throw flames more than 250 feet.

Soldiers operating flamethrowers, if taken prisoner during World War I or World War II or in Korea, were often executed on the spot.

Poo-tee-weet.

Across the water, the Soviets had their own Plowshare program. They called it, in English, “Program Number 7: Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy.”

The Soviets built an instant though somewhat radioactive reservoir in Kazakhstan. They tried but eventually abandoned attempts to explosively dig a forty-mile stretch of a canal that would have diverted water from the Pechora River to the Kama River, and from there into the Volga River, and ultimately into the Caspian Sea. They built underground storage caverns for oil and gas.

Have an oil or gas well that fails to produce? No problem. Set off a small nuclear weapon near the bottom of the well to fracture the rock, and the oil or gas flows. This was done nine times in the Soviet Union.

Have a gas well that is burning out of control? Again, no problem. A properly designed bomb placed the right distance from the well snuffs out the flame and seals the holes through which the gas found its way to the surface. This was done four times in the Soviet Union. The first time it was tried, it extinguished a well fire that had been burning for three years, a well fire that had defied all conventional means of control and wasted enough gas to power a city the size of Saint Petersburg for several years.

Need to better understand the country’s geology? Between 1971 and 1984, the Soviet firecracker boys used thirty-nine atomic bombs for something called “deep seismic sounding,” the exploration of the earth’s crust and mantle through reflections of shock waves along thousands of miles of transects.

In Anchorage, Teller once told a friendly audience, “The Soviets are doing it; we are not.” Before the Soviet Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program was over, they had set off well over a hundred bombs.

In 1990 the International Chetek Corporation of Moscow tried to privatize the Soviet experience with bombs for peace. At a scientific meeting in Ottawa, Canada, the company’s president told the audience that his organization was ready to demonstrate the use of nuclear explosives for the destruction of toxic waste. The idea was simple: haul your waste to a Siberian test facility, inject it a half mile underground, and incinerate it with the extremely high temperatures of a nuclear explosion. The impression of the meeting’s chairman: “Everybody in the room thought they were nuts.”

Now, halfway through day three and still some distance from Chariot, we walk along a winding stream laced with morning ice, the mud and sand of its banks peppered with tracks from caribou and musk ox and bear. My feet are wet.

The stream is a tributary to Ogotoruk Creek, which, had Teller set off his bombs, would now flow into a radioactive harbor.
Ogotoruk,
in the language of the Inupiat, means a hunting bag, a poke, suggesting the importance of the area for subsistence hunters. Had Teller prevailed, we would be walking toward a point that would momentarily have been among the hottest spots in the solar system.

The authors of
A Nuclear Family Vacation
dodged from here to there, looking at sites loosely associated with potential Armageddon. I am not a lover of warmth, I am not a thermophile, but at this particular moment I want to go somewhere that does not involve cold, wet feet and frozen ground. At this particular moment, standing next to the iced-over Ogotoruk Creek, firewalking sounds increasingly attractive.

We move through stands of chest-high willow, fine cover for grizzly bears. I slide my gun from my shoulder and carry it in my hands. It is foolish to walk through a willow thicket in bear country, but there is no obvious way around.

We break out of the willow and come to a sharp bluff. Just beyond the bluff, the Chukchi Sea comes into sight, dark blue against a clear sky. Where the land meets the sea, we see for the first time the huts and scattered equipment left behind by Project Chariot.

It is another two miles through marshy tussocks crunchy with ice. As we move closer, the wind coming off the Chukchi Sea increases into a gale, and details of the Chariot camp become more apparent. Two huts remain standing, and next to them stands rusting machinery—a grader, a dozer, and an all-terrain vehicle called a Weasel. The abandoned airstrip, too eroded for use, runs inland from the coast.