First in-depth account of scheme to engineer with atom bombs

[Celebration]

http://www.sciencenewsdaily.org/story-9083.html

What would you think if someone told you that not so long ago, the U.S. government, led by gung-ho scientists, seriously considered exploding 300 or more atomic bombs to blast a sea-level canal in Panama? Or up to 764 in northern Colombia?

Excavating a nuclear canal through the Central American isthmus would have required 20,000 times the explosive energy of the atomic bomb that shattered Hiroshima, engineers estimated.

You'd think that someone was kidding, right?

But that's just what government scientists hoped to do. They also came close to detonating a nuclear device in the early 1960s in the pristine northwest corner of Alaska near Point Barrow to "build" a harbor.

[salvorhardin]

1. Edward Teller

Edward Teller I presume had a serious guilt complex over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He was nuts about expanding atomic weapons into civil engineering to improve society. This is nothing new though, we've known about this for decades. Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman both wrote about Teller as did many other scientists. This is just the first book to tie it all together.

[benburch]

3. I had lunch with Teller once... nt

[Ian David]

2. The Chinese actually did some test projects like that

It didn't work very well.

[NNadir]

4. Here is a list of every nuclear test from 1962-1992, radioisotope release,

etc, etc.

All of the bomb tests listed as "Plowshares" were attempts to find civil engineering "uses" for nuclear weapons.

I count 25 of these tests. Many were conducted away from the Nevada test site. The first test of this type, the Sedan test in 1962, created the largest man made crater in history and released 15 million curies of radioactive fission products into the atmosphere. The cloud wafted over much of Nevada, California, Utah and Arizona.

http://www.lanl.gov/history/hbombon/pdf/Radiological%20Effluents%20Released%20from%20U.S.%20Continental%20Tests,%201961%20Through%201992.pdf

Actually the only possible civilian use for nuclear weapons is to fission their cores in nuclear reactors. In fact it is both necessary and important to do this.

The only place where nuclear weapons were actually used for engineering projects was in the former Soviet Union.

[Igel]

5. Here are some uses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy

Soviet, of course.