The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement (2007)
by Dan O’Neill
There is no better book tying the work at Los Alamos National Laboratories to Alaska than this story. At the end of the Second World War, Edward Teller, who had overseen the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, was afraid that the atomic bomb development momentum would wind down now that the war was over. To keep the momentum going Teller began to look for peacetime uses for atomic technology. As implausible as it seems now, one of his projects was to create a deep-water port far above Alaska’s Arctic Circle using six thermonuclear devices. As part of the planning for this project, they released radioactive elements in the air at the port site to asses the impact of nuclear fallout on the area. The test radiation had an immediate impact on the people living around the project and on the caribou, the animal they depended on for survival. O’Niel tells a riveting story of a nuclear disaster in the making.
