Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant. Knopf, 414 pp., $32.50
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell. Little, Brown, 385 pp., $29.00
In 1957 Manley Natland, a geologist working for the California-based Richfield Oil Corporation, was sent to the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada, where he hatched a terrible plan. Extracting crude oil from tar sands is a slow, dirty, and expensive task, requiring the separation of bitumen—a thick oil substance—from the sandy peatland of the Canadian forests. Seeking a more efficient method, Natland figured that setting off nuclear bombs might make the process easier.
His idea, later named Project Oilsand, was in line with the nuclear fever dreams of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when scientists and politicians in Canada, Russia, and the United States were considering all variety of ways of “taming the H-bomb.” (Another government initiative, Project Plowshare, championed by Edward Teller—“father of the hydrogen bomb”—was exploring the use of nukes to build canals, dam rivers, and dig for precious metals.) Speaking before the Atomic Energy Research and Development Subcommittee on March 22, 1960, the president of Richfield Oil, W. J. Travers, proposed exploding a nine-kiloton atomic device—just over half the strength of “Little Boy,” the bomb US Air Force pilots dropped on Hiroshima—1,300 feet underground in the Canadian wilderness. “The explosion,” said Travers, “would suddenly liberate 9 trillion calories of heat,” as well as, he hoped, lots of oil.
Setting off radioactive bombs under the earth dangerously contaminates the water and surrounding dirt, but Travers told the committee members that “based on available information, Canadian and United States scientists who have carefully studied the safety problem are convinced that the proposed 9-kiloton test would not result in harmful effects.” The US government not only approved the proposal but agreed to supply the bomb. The plans were eventually set aside without being tried—perhaps owing to fear of Russian espionage rather than safety concerns. Yet given the zeal with which humans in the last three quarters of a century have found other ways to suck vast amounts of petroleum out of
