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Book Review
| Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving. By Scott Kirsch. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 257pp. Photos, maps, figure, tables. $39.95.
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| In the late 1960s, in a last attempt to rescue Project Plowshare from scientific, political, and other pressures that spelled its demise, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers to support nuclear excavation of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway through northwest Mississippi using over eighty nuclear bombs of 10 to 50 kt yield each. The planned canal ran within fifty miles of 340,000 people, a detail that Plowshare scientists underplayed even though previous Plowshare tests indicated the persistent problem of venting of radioactive gases and dust against predictions. In Proving Grounds, David Kirsch discusses the history of Project Plowshare, the U.S. effort to employ nuclear bombs to build harbors and canals, overburden removal, railroad and highway cuts, dams, reservoirs, and the political and environmental issues surrounding Plowshare. |
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This is a marvelous book. Thoroughly researched using archival materials and extensive interviews, well written, engaging and measured in tone, the book raises a series of important issues about the nature of modern science. Those issues include what makes for scientific truth, the nature of evidence, how is science funded, and the impact of secrecy on the conduct of research. Kirsch is restrained in discussing the hubris and disingenuousness of Plowshare scientists and their projects, carefully exploring their motivations and rationale on the basis of their own words and standards. |
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Plowshare scientists pushed their technology in spite of great uncertainties about utility and safety of nuclear excavation. One example suffices. Kirsch's analysis of Project Chariot, an effort to build a nuclear harbor in northern Alaska, reveals "invention as the mother of necessity." The harbor had no real reason for being—the site was ice-locked nine months out of the year, and nearby and "proven" mineral deposits were, in fact, hundreds of miles away. Yet scientists chose Ogotoruk Creek because of its seeming remoteness, ignoring the Eskimos and caribou in the area. The scientists believed that Plowshare required a rapid and glorious demonstration of nuclear earthmoving to enable other projects to go forward. This meant moving from an incomplete experimental basis to full-scale demonstration without pause. |
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The scientists had to demonstrate that explosions were safe for humans, flora, and fauna, yet they had no internal groups engaged in that kind of research, and when they contracted with others to conduct the research, they tended to ignore, or at best selectively read the results since that research indicated great risks to all. In their bomb designs they assumed that fallout would go in predicted directions—away from people, farms, villages, fishing regions—without any basis to assert such predictability. In fact, research on Alaskan ecosystems showed crucial food chain relationships between radioisotopes, lichens, caribou, and humans. Yet scientists and government officials connected with the Plowshare program remained determined to explode nuclear bombs in spring at the precise time that the hunting practices of the Eskimos indicated the greatest risk to them. |
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Plowshare was caught up in pressures to achieve at least an atmospheric nuclear test ban. How could scientists minimize fallout or prevent it from traveling across borders? They had to make "cleaner" bombs and bury the explosives deeper. But Plowshare scientists feared a ban of any sort without testing ideas on a large scale would leave them with insufficient data for their plans to improve on nature. This did not limit their hubris: they advanced three different proposals for a new ocean-level canal near the Panamanian isthmus, with calculations to build the canal calling for 437 thermonuclear explosives with a total yield of 275 megatons. |
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Perhaps Kirsch could have mentioned the extensive Soviet program and some of its common approaches and differences—programmatic, scientific, and political—with the American one. For example, to what extent have the environmental costs of the nuclear age fallen disproportionately on indigenous people, such as the Nenets and Komi of Novaia Zemlia and the Bikinians and Inuits in U.S. programs? |
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Proving Grounds will be welcomed by historians of the nuclear age and cold war, environmental historians, U.S. historians, and geographers. |
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Paul Josephson teaches at Colby College and is the author of a forthcoming history of recreational machines in North America. |
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