Nuking Alaska: Notes of an Atomic Fugitive

As if, in midcentury Alaska, you needed more ways to die.

From the creator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinsons comes an unnervingly funny tale of life in Alaska during the tensest times of the Cold War.

Peter Dunlap-Shohl grew up on the front lines of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, where Alaska residents lived in the shadow of a nuclear arsenal nine times the size of the Soviet Unions. This graphic novel recounts the surprising and tragicomic details of the nuclear threats faced by Alaskans, including Project Chariot, championed by Edward Teller and his firecracker boys in the late 1950s and early 60s; the nearly nuclear disaster caused by the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964; and the 1971 test of a nuclear warhead on the island of Amchitka. Dunlap-Shohl shares the terrible consequences that these events and others had for humans and animals alike, all in the service of atoms for peace.

Drawn with Dunlap-Shohls characteristic editorial cartooning style, Nuking Alaska is a fast-paced reminder of how close we came to total annihilation just a half century agoand how terribly relevant the nuclear threat remains to this day.