In the 1950s, US scientists planned to use nuclear bombs to blast a harbor on the Alaskan coast: Project Chariot, a Cold War scheme to reshape the map with atomic blasts

It’s 1958. Congress has just passed the Alaska Statehood Act, making it possible for the territory to become the 49th state of the United States. Around the same time, US scientists proposed using nuclear bombs to blast out a brand-new harbour on Alaska’s northwest coast, not as a weapon but as a construction tool.

This was a genuine government-funded scheme called Project Chariot. According to a US Department of Energy fact sheet, the selected site was Cape Thompson on Alaska’s northwest coast, with plans to bury nuclear devices in the ground and blow them up to create a deep-water port. It may sound unbelievable today, but the plan came close to moving forward.

The bigger plan behind it: Operation Plowshare
Chariot was not alone. According to the research, ‘Project Chariot: How Alaska Escaped Nuclear Excavation,’ by Alaska historian Dan O’Neill, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it was the flagship project of a larger Cold War program called Operation Plowshare, run by the US Atomic Energy Commission to find peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.

Edward Teller, the physicist often known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, pushed hardest for the plan and headed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. O’Neill’s research shows that Teller toured Alaska promoting the harbor as an economic benefit for the new state and linking it to a plan to ship coal from the state’s north. But the numbers never made sense. The harbor would be frozen nine months of the year, and a new railway across the Brooks Range would have been needed to reach it. Eventually, Alaskan business leaders acknowledged there was no real economic case for the project.

Bombs as bulldozers
If one harbor seemed too small, some Plowshare planners imagined something bigger: a new sea-level canal through Panama or Nicaragua, blasted out with nuclear explosives. Chariot was to prove the concept could work. The original design called for four 100-kiloton devices plus two one-megaton devices, a combined yield of 2.4 megatons, according to O'Neill's research.

To gather data first, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted tests in the Nevada desert. Engineers exploded a 104-kiloton device underground on July 6, 1962, in a test called Sedan. The blast created a crater approximately 1,280 feet across and 320 feet deep. It remains one of the largest man-made craters in the United States and can still be seen by visitors today, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. O’Neill’s research also found that the test produced some of the highest radioactive fallout of any nuclear test ever conducted in Nevada.

The people who said no
In Alaska, the Iñupiat community of Point Hope, whose subsistence depended on hunting caribou, was among the first to resist. O'Neill's research found that scientists studying the region had found radioactive fallout moving up the Arctic food chain unusually fast, from lichen to caribou to people, and warned that the blasts would thaw the permafrost, making the ground around the harbor unstable.

That local resistance grew into something bigger. National groups like the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society joined in, and the movement is now viewed as one of the sparks behind the modern American environmental movement, O'Neill notes. It also helped build support for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which Congress passed in 1971. Even the Soviet Union objected, calling it a way to dodge the nuclear test ban treaty then under negotiation.

Quietly shelved, never officially killed
Under public pressure and with no obvious economic benefit, the Atomic Energy Commission placed Project Chariot “in abeyance” in 1962. The Department of Energy fact sheet says it has never been formally cancelled to this day, and radioactive material buried at the site during a 1962 experiment was only removed, at government expense, in 1993.

Why this Cold War story still matters
By the 1970s, Operation Plowshare had fallen victim to costs, safety concerns, and a changing political climate regarding nuclear weapons. It remains one of the most unusual chapters of the Cold War, when the same technology designed to destroy cities was promoted as a tool for building harbors and canals. Project Chariot is a reminder to a generation brought up on stories of nuclear anxiety that the atomic age had far stranger ambitions than most of us ever learned in school.