That's the Bomb

What was operation Plowshare? And are there peaceful applications for nuclear explosions?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that the looks of the future and says, do
you hear the people see? I'm Jonathan stri I'm La,

(00:22):
and I'm Joe McCormick, And today we're going to be
looking into some excellent retro futurism. Yes, the future of
the past. Yeah, what the past thought about the future?
There you go, There we go. Do you remember those
times when we looked at the advertisements for the kitchen
of tomorrow from the nineteen fifties, where they thought we

(00:43):
would have giant, you know, multi refrigerator sized machines that
would automatically make meals for us that looked about the
quality of a microwavable dinner. I remember the heavy dose
a misogyny that went along with those advertisements. Yes, well,
of course it's assumed the man would still stay in
the kitchen because that's where she lives, that's right. Yeah,

(01:04):
so she didn't have to cook anymore, but she was
still in the kitchen all the time. Yeah, but it
appeared that she was also probably on like a lot
of valumes, so she probably didn't mind. The nice thing
is today we're going to talk about something much less offensive,
the use of nuclear weapons. So yeah, this episode, you guys.

(01:24):
So this was something that before we even get into it,
I was on Reddit and I jumped into the futurism
subreddit and one of the things someone shared was a video.
It was an old film from the sixties about a
government program called Project Plowshare, and I had somehow never

(01:45):
really heard of this, and I'm amazed. I'm amazed I've
never heard of it because it's terrific, like in the
grammatical sense of the word, like it inspires terror and
also awe. So this film was put up by the U.
S A Tom Energy Commission circa nineteen sixty five, and uh,
it's it's, you know, the full on nineteen sixties drama,

(02:07):
you know, with all the really great music and all
of the really great narrations. Peppy it was, And it's
talking about using nuclear bombs to essentially make really big
holes on purpose for because it's so much better. It's
so much better than traditional explosives at making holes. It's
really good at that. Yes, Um, so okay, So so

(02:28):
if you do want to watch this, then you should
totally should It's really great. Um It's it's labeled as
being from nineteen sixty one, but I think that's inaccurate
because in the film itself they reference events up to
nineteen sixty four. So at any rate, though, you can
you can google it on it's on the YouTube's yeah,
and there's a couple of different locations. Also, there's an

(02:49):
entire report about Plowshare that's available on the Department of
Energy's websites. You can actually go you can read about
all the different tests they did. But before we into
what it was specifically and how it came about, they've
got to backtrack just a bit and talk about the
events that led up to Project Plowshare becoming a thing. Yeah. Sure,

(03:11):
because the question that I'm sure many of you, like
we asked, is why would anyone decide that it was
a good idea to try to use nuclear bombs to
do stuff. It sounds like something that would come to
mind if you had a bunch of extra nuclear bombs
lying around and you were trying to figure out what
to do with them. It's not like it's kale. It's

(03:32):
not like, oh man, I didn't use all this kale.
Still Joe is pretty right. Um. But but to me
it sounds like the sort of thing that you would
suggest before you had a full understanding of the implications
of nuclear weaponry. But that's not the case. This was
well after we understood at least a good amount about

(03:53):
what nuclear weapons were capable of. So during World War Two,
I'm sure everyone who's listening to this is aware of
the Manhattan Project, which was an R and D operation
that the US government oversaw to develop atomic weaponry. And
this was a very high importance to the US government
because everyone knew that other world powers were also working

(04:16):
on this, specifically the Germans. Early on, we're working on this,
and in fact, some of the scientists we had working
on the Manhattan Project were originally over in Germany, but
then we got them and brought them here and then
they worked for us. Some of them did. Some of
them were more let's say pragmatic, right like they were

(04:39):
working for one government in order to advance science, and
then another government came along and said you're with us now,
and they said, well, as long as I get to
do the science, I will continue to do. So I
wonder if some of them just kind of saw that
the tides were turning and said, Hey, that other place,
I mean place, sounds like a better place. To be fair,
it was tough being a physicist in Germany during World

(05:01):
War Two. Oh yeah, yeah, we we've talked. I can't
remember whether it was on this show or on tech
stuff about some of the really deep personal, impossible to retroactively.
Uh suss out reasons that that people had, that scientists
had for getting out of Germany. Yeah, of course there
were Jewish scientists who wished to defect early on. There

(05:24):
were other scientists who were not Jewish, but who sympathized
with their Jewish counterparts and found themselves in a very
delicate position because on the one hand they didn't want
to have to pick up everything and leave that. On
the other hand, they very much objected to what was
going on. At any rate, the United States, their program,
the Manhattan Project, was successful before anyone else was able

(05:48):
to develop a working atomic weapon, and once the bomb
was developed, it was obviously put to devastating effect, and
shortly after the conclusion of World War Two we enter
it into the atomic age, that really the nuclear age,
where we got into the Cold War between the United
States and the then Soviet Union, and both countries began

(06:12):
to build and stockpile nuclear weapons, and it was this
idea of mutually assured destruction, the idea that if both
parties had massive stockpiles of weapons, no one would dare
use it because to do so would be pure madness. Uh,
that's a philosophy that no one really wants to put

(06:33):
to the test. Right, Well, putting it to the test
would sort of defeat it, right, It would prove it wrong.
It gets into Dr Strangelove territory. Right. So, Uh, during
this time of tension in the Cold War, which some
of us in this room are all enough to remember
what it was like, I'm assuming me I was alive then.
I mean I remember a little bit of that, Like

(06:55):
I remember when it was over, and not really understanding
fully why all of my you know, grown ups were
so emotional about it, but you know, but I remember it.
Did the Soviet Unions still exist when the first teenage
mutant Ninja Turtles movie came out, the first movie, I
don't think so that was that? Was that ninety one? Anyway,
this is a tangent well at any rate, Yeah, I

(07:17):
remember from the Reagan years specifically, how there was still
a very anti Russian kind of mentality and a lot
of US culture, So this was something that was deeply
ingrained in the US and presumably in the Soviet Union
or the then Soviet Union, I should say. So. One

(07:37):
of the things that came up during this process of
building up this stockpile of weapons was an idea of
what if we could utilize nuclear explosions not as weaponry,
not as a bomb, but as a tool. So we've
used explosives as tools for ages, drilling, tunneling well I

(07:58):
guess not drilling wells sort of in aid of drilling unembin,
and so the thought was, well, these nuclear explosions have
potentially thousands of times the power or or even more
than conventional high explosives. So if you could figure out
a way of channeling that properly, then you could find

(08:21):
peaceful uses for this technology and do much more work
on a much faster scale than you would using older methods.
From that perspective, you could say, all right, well that
makes sense, but there are some other big questions we
have to answer, things like what do you do about
fallout and stuff like that. So early on, back in

(08:42):
nineteen fifty three, so not that long after the conclusion
of World War Two, President Dwight Eisenhower actually proposed looking
into that sort of use for nuclear technology, not just
nuclear explosions, but nuclear technology in general. And he called
his idea Atoms for Peace. Okay, but wouldn't this include

(09:03):
just standard nuclear power, that was nuclear fission reactors of
the kind we have today, Yeah, exactly, because he was thinking, well,
you know, we've demonstrated that splitting an atom results in
the release of a massive amount of energy. If we
can do a controlled version of that, as opposed to, um,
you know, a release of that energy, if we could
channel that energy somehow, then that would be a great

(09:26):
boon for mankind. So the way you said that made
it sound kind of like it was Eisenhower's idea to
use fission power. No, he was. He was simply it
was simply a champion of it in the Yeah. Well yeah,
his simpolitical implementing, Yeah exactly, which with scientists designing the
reactor might have been sitting around one day going like, hey, hey,

(09:48):
you guys. The point being that without the political there
is no movement because there's no money. Very good point.
So the Atomic Energy Commission ended up taking over this idea. Now,
the Atomic Energy Commission would later um would dissolve back
in nine. It would be eventually be replaced by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration, and

(10:11):
then later still the Department of Energy. And then you
also had another party that was involved in this, the
University of California Radiation Laboratory, which today we call the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Oh man, the Radiation Laboratory is
a good name. Yeah, well, gosh, I can't imagine. So
they got together and launched this new program, the Plowshare Program,

(10:34):
on June nineteenth, nineteen fifty seven. The Radiation Laboratory was
in charge of administering the program. The Atomic Energy Commission
was in charge of making sure they could fund the program,
so that they were the department that the money came from.
So probably the most notable personality attached to this was
Dr Edward Teller uh the father of the bomb, right,

(10:57):
fusion bomb? Yeah, yeah, specifically the few Jian bomb. He
hated that term. From what I understand, he did not
like being called the father of the fusion bomb, which
I guess made everyone call him that even more, or
father of the hydrogen bomb is also the way that
it has been worded, So the distinction there being between
the hydrogen fusion bomb and the types of atomic bombs

(11:19):
we dropped in World War Two, yes, which were fission
not fusion. So the operation actually takes its name plowshare
from a biblical verse Isaiah, chapter two, verse four. May
I read it you may ah? It is that they
shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up their sword against nation,

(11:41):
neither shall they learn war anymore. Yeah. A lovely sentiment, yes,
turning the weapons of war into tools of agriculture and
peaceful use, which is exactly what the the outspoken philosophy
plow Share was. You could argue that perhaps the motivations
weren't quite so altruistic in the Cold War. Was any

(12:03):
stated motivation the actual motivation, Yeah, I mean we've talked
about this with the space race, right, Like the space
race was largely in fact primarily fueled by the Cold War,
right right, because it was all about like, hey guys,
check out these really big rockets. Yeah, we could use
these really big rockets to go to the moon or
bomb the crap out of your country. Yeah, it's essentially

(12:26):
what was going on now. Granted, scientists were taking advantage
of that situation in order to advance our knowledge, and
we're very thankful for it. It's unfortunate that the Cold
War was the the factor that actually got literally the
space race off the ground. But at any rate, same
thing here, yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that

(12:48):
people have pointed out is that Operation Plowshare would allow
for national security measures to be strengthened by saying, look
at all these other countries that are trying to rush
toward developing nuclear technology. Because by the nineteen sixties you
had several nations that had developed at least some level
of nuclear power, including China. So the USSR in China

(13:11):
being to two nations that the US was not terribly comfortable,
uh having, as nuclear power peers. There was a worry
that other nations would also rush to develop this technology,
and and many of the nations stated officially that their
interest in nuclear technology wasn't in nuclear weapons, but rather

(13:33):
to use nuclear power in positive ways. And so the
US folks in Plowshares said, Hey, if we create a
program where we can do we can put nuclear explosions
to peaceful use, and we control those nuclear devices, and
we essentially allow other countries to make use of that
technology with our supervision. They don't have to go out

(13:56):
and develop it themselves, making ourselves sort of the gate
keepers of nuclear technology very much so. So, you know,
the way I worded this in our notes, in a
kind of snarky way, was like like the US saying, oh,
you want a bomb so that you can make a canal, Well,
it just so happens we can do that for you.
We just hold onto the keys for the bomb. How

(14:18):
we just will hold onto those and you just show
us where you want the canal to go. And uh.
And so you know, I don't know how sincere the
actual stated motto of Plowshare was. However, I know that
there were plenty of people working earnestly to try and
find real practical ways to use nuclear explosions in peaceful applications.

(14:45):
So it's not like everyone there was snightly whiplash secretly
working on an evil scheme. That's not the case at all. Sure,
there was probably minimal mustache twirling, at least on the
science level. I'd imagine the threat of nuclear war made
everybody a little crazy. Yeah, definitely, there were certain days
when I was I was just not having any of it. Joe,

(15:06):
I'm just gonna tell seven year old me very little
tolerance for the threat of nuclear annihilation, right, uh okay,
So so what what are some of these scientific proposals
for how we can peacefully use nuclear weapons? Okay, I've
got one about in cooking, you know, like industrial cooking,

(15:27):
Like we really need to cook a whole bunch of
chickens at once to make a bunch of stow first dinner. Yeah, yeah,
no, no no, no, no, totally. I mean you know this
is like like you know, your Thanksgiving, your your around Thanksgiving,
your a restaurant that does catering. You've got like a
hundred and forty birds to cook. Come on, man, I've
got I've got an even an even better example for you.
Refrigerator delivery, as seen in Indiana Jones in the Kingdom

(15:50):
of the Crystal Skull got to deliver a refrigerator by
you dare not speak its name. Alright, So all joking
aside and painful memories of terrible franchise entries, we can
talk about some actual projects that were underneath Project plowshare. Well,

(16:10):
we already mentioned basically digging. Yeah, an excavation was originally
thought of as the most promising of all the potential uses. Uh.
It certainly was viewed as the one that would be
likely to be the most beneficial, the quickest, meaning that, uh,
you know, we already knew that an explosion could move

(16:31):
a lot of earth, so and we already had used
high explosives to do this, so presumably it would not
be that difficult to figure out a way to use
nuclear explosions to do a similar thing. However, the projects
started to encounter problems other than the technical variety at early.
Early example was a project called Project Chariot, which was

(16:54):
supposed to take place in Alaska near an area called
Cape Thompson. The site was at the mouth of a
body of water, the the Ogatoric Creek, and it was
about thirty miles from a village called Point Hope. It
was a in u piat Eskimo village, and I apologize
for completely butchering pronunciation, by the way, but it included

(17:18):
land that had previously been requested by the natives under
the Alaska Native Allotment Act, so it was already something
that was going to run into problems even without the
nuclear part of this issue. UH. In the summer nineteen
fifty eight, Native Eskimos heard rumors that the Atomic Energy

(17:38):
Commission planned to detonate a two point for mega ton
nuclear bomb, which is a bomb that would be a
hundred times more powerful than the one that was dropped
on Hiroshima, and it was scheduled for detonation in nineteen
sixty two if they were to stay on schedule. The
reason for it being pushed back to sixty two was
that there was going to be a lot of construction
that would be required up to the point of detonating

(18:02):
this bomb, and the whole purpose of it was to
dig out a harbor off the coast of this part
of Alaska in order to allow for an easy access
way for transportation that would be shipping stuff like non
renewable resources you know, coal and oil from Alaska to

(18:22):
other locations. Also would include another explosion that would dig
out an ocean trench way to connect the harbor to
the actual ocean. So the rumors were true. UH, it
was absolutely what the Atomic Energy Commission was planning on doing,
and so the negatives began to protest this and to

(18:44):
ask for more information. Meanwhile, the government was actually getting
a little bit of local support, particularly from the media
in Alaska, but financial leaders were not so quick to
jump on board. They were starting to ask very difficult questions, likeviously,
the development of a nuclear explosive is an expensive endeavor.
It's not like these things are cheap to to create,

(19:07):
especially the whole R and D process of making sure
whatever casing you create actually gives you the effect you need.
I mean, obviously you're not just hoping that an uncontrolled
explosion is going to do what you want it to do.
You have to design the device so it directs the
energy in the proper way. Right. It can't just go
outward in all directions equally if you want to do

(19:29):
a specific not for most tasks, right, So the idea
being to build a kind of rifle barrel for a nuke,
or yes, some sort of some sort of device where
it directs the explosion initially in the way that whatever
you're intended outcome is is the one that's most likely
to happen. Keeping in mind, yeah, instead of just like

(19:53):
a pile of gunpowder, right, which obviously doesn't explode, but
you get what I'm saying. So the the people who
were in the financial world in this part of Alaska,
we're saying, I don't know that this makes any more
sense than conventional methods of excavation. It may very well
be that we could just use normal construction and save

(20:16):
money and also not put anything at risk. Sure well,
and and furthermore, one of the other arguments was that,
you know, no one was sure at that point whether
the resources that they were looking for in that area
of Alaska were present, yeah, or at least not even
not present in numbers worth you know, doing all that work. Yeah,
If you're talking about a multimillion dollar risky endeavor and

(20:39):
there's no guarantee that the resources you would be able
to ship are actually in that part of Alaska, at
least in numbers worthy of you know, this kind of
of work, it becomes a question of, hey, what's the
return on investment? Forget the fallout issue, forget the radiation issue.
If it doesn't make financial sense, why would we support this?

(21:01):
And in fact, this led to the Atomic Energy Commission
changing its proposal in June of ninety nine because they
could not find a customer for the harbor. The folks
in Alaska. We're saying, like, even if you put it here,
it's not really you're not going to use it. We're
not there for shipping, and the stuff might not be there.

(21:23):
And and then of course there were also the other
protesters who were saying, we don't know how this is
going to affect the environment. We don't know how it's
going to affect the wildlife, we don't know how it's
going to affect the people who live thirty miles away.
And without any of that knowledge, how can you go forward?
And thus the a e C Comes up with a

(21:43):
brilliant idea of reframing this as an experiment to see, um,
what a nuclear explosive could do with the geophysical, environmental,
and health impacts in the area, so including health impacts
on human beings. In other words, the concerns that people
had about the environment and health impact that became the focus.
Now like we're worried about what this will do. Is

(22:06):
you know what, that's a good idea, Let's find out
what it will do. It sounds like some maleficent momentum. Well,
and it gets a little worse really. In March nineteen
sixty uh, the atomic energy Commission sent representatives to Point
Hope to talk to the natives there and address concerns.

(22:26):
And by address concerns you mean lie. Yeah, they lied,
or at least they stretched the truth. No, they lied.
I can't get around this like you would have to
be overly generous to say they stretched the truth. According
to a report filed by Don Charles Foot, who was
a geographer who actually was present, he filed a report

(22:47):
with the Atomic Energy Commission, and his his report actually
contains this quote. He says that there would not be
quote any danger to anyone. This is what the representatives
were saying, any danger to one if the fish were utilized.
That the effects of nuclear weapons testing never injured any people.
That's a lie anywhere. That once the severely exposed Japanese

(23:10):
people recovered from radiation sickness, there were no side effects.
Also all that the residents of Point Hope would not
feel any seismic shock at all from Project Chariot, and
that copies of the environmental program studies would be made
immediately available to the Point Hope Council. Upon the return
of the a e C officials to California, the village
council unanimously voted to oppose the detonation. You could say

(23:35):
they were skeptical of the a C representatives. So ultimately
the a C canceled this particular part of Project Plowshare
in nineteen sixty two. Uh and uh, the Plowshare overall continued.
That wasn't like the beginning of end. That was one
project under this umbrella operation. So other proposals besides using

(23:57):
it for excavation, and there were lots of excavation proposals
for canals and that sort of stuff included, um, well,
there was one that was a sea level canal across Panama.
That was one of the proposals that was left, but
they were never actually developed into actual projects. There were
other ones too, not just digging canals. There was also
tunneling possibility, blowing up holes in the sides of mountains

(24:22):
and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, you know, if you need if
you need a road to go somewhere and there's a
pesky mountain in the way, then why not use a
nuclear bomb to just blow in the mountain. I can't
I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want
I mean, it would probably work, yeah, I mean, I mean,

(24:42):
you know, you definitely make an impact, that's for certain. Um,
I think think of the gas mileage you would save
on alone find not having to make cars go all
the way up the mountain and all the way back down.
Right right, Yeah, you've sold me. And another potential use
was using nuclear explosions for underground engineering, which is similar

(25:02):
to tunneling, but in this case specifically with the goal
of increasing permeability and porosity of rocks through breaking and
fracturing them. Oh, this is like accessing tight gas and
stuff like. Yes, yes, so if you were to discover
that there's a deposit natural gas, but the rock that
is between you and the natural gas is not particularly

(25:24):
permeable or porous, is very difficult to get at the
natural gas. Yeah, this is like nuclear fracking basically. Like
it's it's saying that if you just break up that
pesky rock with a nuclear explosion, then you can extract
the stuff inside it that you want to with all
the with all the opposition people have to fracking, can
you imagine what it would be if they were saying

(25:44):
we're going to use some nuclear bombs. I honestly cannot.
That is literally beyond my imagination. And I deal with
people on the Internet every day. I like that They
called it gas production stimulation. Yeah, well, I mean that's
exactly that's pretty much what people say about fracking, right,
you want to stimulate the well. I mean the problem
is people have this idea that when you when you're

(26:07):
accessing oil or natural gas, it's always just going to
be like a big lake underground, you can just stick
a straw in it. But instead it's it's locked up
in porous rocks and sometimes it's hard to get at. Yeah.
The interesting thing is that this became the most promising
of all the proposed uses of nuclear bombs during the

(26:27):
testing phase. None of it was ever actively incorporated into
a civilian use or anything along those lines, but there
were a lot of tests that were part of the
Operation Plowshare, and uh, out of all of them, a
excavation stuff was not nearly as promising as the gas
productions to nuclear fracking. Yeah yeah, yeah. Another idea that

(26:51):
was floated at the very least in the video was
the thought that these explosions would be creating huge numbers
of the ray you active isotopes that were being used
in science. We're short on isotopes. Blow up another ball. Well,
I mean that is, it's not true. We certainly have

(27:13):
made an impact on the chemical signature of the surface
of the Earth since the advent of the atomic age, right, yeah, yeah,
we've introduced things to planet Earth that you wouldn't expect
to find in nature. Oh yeah, And and there are
some really scientifically interesting results of the amount, the sheer
amount of atmosphere nuclear testing that we're done back in

(27:35):
these sorts of times, because every single thing on this
planet that's carbon based has enough of this nuclear fallout
in their cellular systems that you can put a pretty
accurate date on how old the cells in like your
body are. Yeah, it actually ends up so that's cool,
actually ends up being something that should take into account
when you're carbon dating something. Yeah. Yeah, we've screwed up

(27:56):
carbon dating whatever. Guys, it's good future generation if you
if you happen to know the general era and you're
just trying to narrow things down a bit, you can
account for it. But for a major dark age and
then there's a resurgence and they're like future paleontologists trying
to understand things, it's going to be really confusing. Why

(28:17):
just leave random things around just in case you know,
so that way I can really confuse the future paleontologists, Like,
here's where they kept their ovens in the middle of
this field. For some reason, I just like doing that.
That was the field where we test nuclear cooking, right, Yes,
as opposed to the great Great refrigerator graveyard from all

(28:40):
the failed delivery tests. Uh so you know, you might
be curious, like did they actually detonate any nuclear bombs
as part of Operation Plowshare in the I'm curious they
did a lot, Yeah, quite a few. Um, technically they
had twenty seven nuclear explosive tests with thirty five individual

(29:01):
detonations because some tests had multiple debtonations as part of
the test. For example, when they were talking about doing
the harbor excavation, they were thinking about doing two different
detonations at one point, one for carving out the harbor
and one for carving that trench to the ocean. Um
and tests were mainly conducted at the Nevada test site,

(29:22):
so we're not talking about going out into the field
and testing it there from most of them, Yeah, yeah,
so this was an area that had already been designated
like this is where we test these. It wasn't like
they were down in like the Everglades in Florida, like
like like trying to dig out canals there these things
alligators to rock it off. Yeah, I mean, I think

(29:44):
that would explain a lot about Florida having grown up there.
So wait, we're talking about this in the past tense.
When did this stop? Yeah, so nine was when it stopped.
I'll talk a little more about what happened with that.
But uh So, some of the the projects that were
codenamed like like you know, we had Chariot earlier, but

(30:04):
at the Nevada Test Site, you had projects named things
like Sedan Click a tat hand car, and Sulky that's
my favorite of Sulky Templar, which is a close handsome cab.
They did not they did have some other ones that
were kind of similar. They also had Vulcan Project Vulcan. Uh.

(30:26):
These were all nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site,
but they also had non nuclear tests, in other words,
high explosive tests using conventional explosives to sort of measure
the difference between the two, kind of get an idea
of of explosive design so that you could again get
the effect that you really wanted. And those included project
names like Toboggan, Hobo, Stagecoach, and Scooter. Meanwhile, Plowshare also

(30:53):
had other projects. One was called Project Gnome, which was
a test of underground explosives that took place in Carl's
b add New Mexico. I I play, I play a
gnome in D and D in the game that I'm
currently playing. So that that was that was what that
giggle an explusive temper. She does, she could very well
fit in with with Project plow Share. She she could

(31:16):
just be would actually totally approve of that. She doesn't
hold very high regard for so much. How much are
gnomes in D and D like David the Gnome? Very little?
I would say that David the Gnome was closer to
what D and D would consider a halfling. Okay, that's fair,
Thank you Joe for allowing me to continue the show.

(31:39):
Uh that so Project Nome was going to be a
actually was a three kiloton test in an underground salt
bed deposit. Now, the main purpose of that one was
to study isotope and energy production from an explosion to
better understand how nuclear explosions might be used for peaceful purposes.
So a lot of these tests weren't let's just see
if we can dig a canal. It was really examining

(32:00):
this release of energy and figuring out how best to
put it to use. It wasn't you know. I know,
we're being a little cavalier with the description of the program,
but they really were trying to understand this from a
scientific perspective. Oh yeah, yeah, no, I didn't. Yeah. I
hope that we're not putting off the concept in any
way that you know. It's a bunch of kids going like, yeah,

(32:23):
let's see what happens if we explode what over there? Hey, y'all,
I got some M E. D s. Let's go put
them in the trash can. Yeah, that's my youth, all right.
So there were also a nuclear test near Grand Valley, Colorado,
and Farmington, New Mexico, and the final detonation. You know,
I said that the program ended in nineteen seventy five,
but the final detonation actually happened on in May nine

(32:43):
seventy three. It's called Rio Blanco and it was a
three explosive test with each explosive at thirty three kilo
tons uh, And it was a natural gas stimulation experiment
near Rifle Colorado and um killo tons. By the way,
when we saykill a ton in Megatan, in case you
don't know, that's the equivalent amount of TNT that would

(33:05):
create a similar explosion. So obviously one of the big
advantages of a nuclear explosion because you have a much
smaller compact package in the explosive device than you would
if you had to use a comparable amount of t
n T. Man. Yeah, it is a pain to shift
thousands of killo tons of t n T to a
test site in the desert. Yeah. Well, I mean if

(33:27):
you're if you're using it to actually do something, like
you really want to dig a canal, and you're figuring out, oh,
we're gonna need ten tons of of TNT to do this,
or we could use one ten kill a ton nuclear bomb.
Then you're like, well, I can see where the practical

(33:47):
side it's like building a better battery out of radioactive
material that will mess up your world for generations to come. Now,
you know, we make a lot of jokes as if
it's just kind of ridiculous to think that nuclear nuclear
explosions could be used for any purpose other than warfare weaponry.

(34:07):
But I don't know if that actually is a ridiculous idea,
because I think there are perhaps some cases we can
think of where we would want a ton of energy
released very quick for a non killing purpose. Sure, And
and to be fair, there was a lot of research
into how to create a nuclear explosion and control the

(34:30):
issue of fallout so that you don't have an ongoing
problem that continues well after the explosion. Yeah, that seems
like one of the biggest drawbacks exactly. Well, and also,
you know, to put all of this a little bit
into perspective, it wasn't until the nineteen nineties that that
wartime nuclear testing was discontinued in many countries. And I

(34:51):
mean North Korea is still doing it sure today. So
there was a moratorium that happened briefly at the very
beginning of Operation Plowshare, like right nineteen sixty one, but
it ended in nineteen sixty It might have even been
late nineteen sixty one or early nineteen sixty two, and
the Soviet Union started doing underground tests in the usaid
all right, games on, right, yeah, yeah, And and and

(35:12):
for furthermore, I don't think it was until the or
the first decade of the two thousands that we started
really getting reports back on exactly how damaging even that
kind of testing can be. Yeah, we didn't have the science.
I mean, there was no way of knowing, right, That's
the kind of knowledge that you gain only through the
passage of time, and that's unfortunate if it's a negative

(35:34):
impact in the case of fallout, that's obviously the case.
Um Well, by the early nineteen seventies, it was pretty
clear to the U. S. Government that Plowshare was not
going to be able to continue. It was not receiving
very much support, certainly not from the public and also
not from politicians. And since it's a government agency and
against its money from the government, that translated into a

(35:56):
lack of funds, which meant that projects were getting cance
Like some of the projects that had been planned never
went through, not because anyone protested them, but because there
was not enough money to actually do them in the
first place. So by nine the program was completely discontinued. Also,
the Atomic Energy Commission dissolved by the end of nineteen So, uh.

(36:18):
The interesting thing to me is that the idea, and
you were kind of alluding to this, Joe, the idea
of using nuclear explosions to do to do constructive work
in some way, or at least to do non weapon
work in some way. Isn't gone. There's still suggestions that
helped pop up today. Now, I bet some of these

(36:39):
suggestions are still stupid, some some of them are at
least some of them are met with critical skepticism. Let
us say that you have an example I do, I do,
and then and there were some that didn't include in
this layout that we could have talked about, like the
idea of using nuclear explosions to propel spacecraft into space.

(37:00):
We I think we may have mentioned that in the
previous episode, but that we're really looking at other stuff here,
like uh, in two thousand ten, there was a CNN
reporter named John Roberts who was covering the British Petroleum
Deepwater Horizon crisis. You guys remember that obviously right offshore
oil drill that that you know, there was a terrible

(37:22):
failure and we were having oil just uh leak into
the ocean and it was just directly from the well
and it was a huge pr disaster for BP as
well as a true environmental disaster. So John Roberts at
one point and kind of in an offhand way, and
and not necessarily in a serious way, said drill a hole,

(37:45):
drop a nuke, and seal seal up the well. So
use a nuclear explosion, uh to collapse the well in
on itself and thus stop the oil from leaking into
the ocean. Uh. There was some opposition to this proposal.
You could explain it out that there were a few issues.
There was one that, um, you couldn't really be sure

(38:07):
that this wouldn't make things worse, Like it wouldn't just
open the well up even more and create an even
greater problem that would be harder to fix environmentally. No
one was really sure how that might impact the area
the ecosystem, and keep in mind the explosion and also
the residual radioactivity. Yeah, and ecosystems are connected to other ecosystems, right,

(38:32):
It's not like an ecosystem is a self contained static
environment that nothing ever enters into or leaves. So unless
you're talking about maybe like a terrarium, yeah, or maybe
an entire like if you're looking at a global ecosystem, Yeah,
the global ecal ecosystem is pretty well contained. Yeah. You
don't tend to see like dolphins fly off into space
except in Douglas Adams novels. So at any rate, people

(38:55):
were saying, you know this, we we don't know what
could happen as a result of this, either from technical
or health standard. It would be monumentally shortsighted to try
this approach. And also politically, this was during a time
when President Barack Obama was arguing for global nuclear disarmament.

(39:16):
So to say like, hey, everyone needs to get rid
of their nuclear bombs. By the way, we're totally going
to use one right now. Um that it's probably not
the most prudent political approach. And um. Also there's been
a lot of treaties about the use of nuclear weapons,
mostly say hey, don't do it. Uh, so that would

(39:36):
also be an issue. So people were essentially saying it's
practically politically mostly do some of the treaties say I
don't do it unless you're real mad, you know. I
just I hate to speak in absolutes. I like to
give myself a wiggle room, just in case. Somewhere in
tiny little print, it's like, okay, if you if you
super pinky swear that it's not for destructive use, is well,

(40:01):
I mean, if someone pulls out your controller chord when
you're playing Super Mario Brothers. That is justification for nuclear attack. Absolutely, Yeah,
I agree with that, you know any rate, Uh that
that's that's these problems are best solved by a cup
of mountain due to the face. That's one example of
someone suggesting using nuclear explosions for something other than as

(40:25):
a weapon. Surely there's a more interesting one than that.
There's one that was very recent. It was back in
um when Elon Musk, one of our our favorite folks
to talk about on the podcast. He was on an
appearance of U at the Late Show with Stephen Colbert
and UH. In the midst of a discussion, conversation turned

(40:45):
toward Mars, as it always does, and Musk kind of
casually said that one way we could try and tear
a for Mars is by detonating some nuclear bombs over
the polls. Colbert's response was, you're talking like a supervillain.
This is what supervillains say, which was not inaccurate. It's

(41:05):
not incorrect. Yeah. He later clarified that he wasn't talking
about like dropping a bomb on the pole, but rather
detonating them above the poles in the Martian atmosphere, which
is already pretty thin. Uh. The idea being that using
fusion based nuclear weaponry, you could create miniature pulsing stars,

(41:27):
and you'd have to do a series of these explosions
to continue uh having a star present at the polls.
But these stars would heat up the planet enough to
melt some of the frozen carbon dioxide to turn it
into gas form. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, So
if you if you flooded the Martian atmosphere with greenhouse gas,

(41:48):
then at least in theory, it would trap some of
that heat and help the planet go on a warming trend. Yeah,
like like a relatively rapid climate change trend tore something
more habitable. But yeah, they also said that you know,
after a century or so, you would probably have safe
levels of radiation around the polar regions. Um so yeah,

(42:11):
just within a century you would be able to actually
put stuff there. But in any rate that well, I
mean it kind of makes sense because terraforming is a many,
many years project anyway, It's not like you started one
year and move in three years later. Look, I saw
Star Trek to Wratha con and the Genesis project. I
know that it only takes a day. No, I I

(42:33):
agree with you entirely, so when we say rapid terraforming,
we're talking obviously relatively so, because any any other approach
would take much more time, like only a couple of
centuries rather than a couple of millennia. There are people
who have maybe not dismissed this idea, but at least

(42:53):
expressed concern about such an approach. James Lewis for the
Center of the Center Forced Tegic and International Studies, said
that any idea that sounds like a scene from a
Schwarzenegger movie is open to question um, which is fairly comedic,
but there were more specifics. Uh. Michael Mann, who is

(43:13):
the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn
State University, said that a nuclear explosion could force a
lot of particles up into the atmosphere. Uh that would
block sunlight from reaching the surface of Mars from penetrating
the atmosphere. This is the old nuclear winter hypothesis exactly so,
which is the opposite of warming a planet up. Exactly so.

(43:34):
So you would end up either preserving or making Mars
even colder than it already is. You make it even
more difficult for you to achieve the goal of terraforming it.
That as a possible outcome. Um and others pointed out
that it also might be a little premature to talk
about terraforming another planet when we still haven't figured out
how to take care of the one we're on. Well,

(43:54):
I don't know that that sounds like what about is
um um? Maybe? I mean, I'm not saying we shouldn't
figure out how to take care of the one we're on,
but it's not an either or Well, I think I
think the I think it's moral on the lines of
how can we be sure we can fix the problems
of another planet when we haven't been able to fix
the problems that we're on now? Right, So the idea

(44:16):
being that when's that tipping point, like there's too many
problems here, Well, well those other problems are way more
fun to work on. Let's just go there. Plus if
we screw up, there aren't any people there, So yeah,
well that that is one thing I would propose, is
it's possible that before we start terraforming Mars, we need

(44:36):
to spend more time looking for signs of life and
previous life on Mars to make sure that we don't
erase evidence of the most interesting thing we might find
in the interstellar So that was that was another argument
that other scientists were proposing as well, saying, yeah, like
if we we could, we could kill whatever is left there. Yeah,
if we're if we're trying, I mean, like, if it's

(44:57):
to the point where we're trying not to like make
rovers move so fast that they'll upset the Martian dust,
then probably a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere might be
a bit much. It would also cause an e MP
surge that could destroy Martian technology. I mean, we supposed

(45:18):
to find that Martian time machine, leave it working, all
those Martian soap operas will go off the air. Uh Well,
and more seriously, I mean we've already talked about in
previous episodes the difficulty and in figuring out whether or
not there are any signs of life on Mars because
of the chance that we could ourselves contaminate the samples

(45:41):
just by bringing along microbes from Earth that then could
be interpreted as being a microbe from Mars. In fact,
it was just a hitchecker the whole time. Um, if
we drop a couple of nuclear bombs that in some
areas on Mars, there's a good chance that we could
eliminate any possibility of finding anything, and then we're even
more uncertain in the future when we send rovers or

(46:01):
other devices to the planet to look for signs of
life if in fact that was there already, or if
we brought it there accidentally. On the positive side, something
like that would absolutely kill off the Mars one project.
Yeah for sure, And I would be real excited about that.
We wouldn't have to we wouldn't have to wait for

(46:23):
a reality TV show to fl I'm I am confident
that that is not going to go anywhere. I from
what I understand, they are well behind any of their
fundraising goals. Yeah. Odd that people aren't aren't lining up
to pay for a what seems like a practically impossible project.

(46:44):
I think. I think you guys, we've found the two
things that I feel like real comfortable being snarky about
on air, and that's casual use of nuclear weapons and
Mars one. So I'm glad that we got to talk
about them both in the same episode. And and of course,
like I said, there were other potential uses for nuclear explosions,
covering like the idea of nuclear propulsion for spacecraft. I

(47:07):
think this is not something that is completely off the table.
For future US there there have been designs in the past.
In the past, like Project to Ryan was a proposal
for nuclear nuclear thrust propelled spacecraft, so you detonate a
nuclear device and then you would capture that energy and
with I think there have been different kinds of designs,

(47:28):
some involved like a uh spacecraft with a sling shotting
kind of back and forth motion with a parachute that
would catch the explosion, and then there are other designs too.
But yeah, it seems like that could be a very
interesting option, especially if you're talking about a very long
mission that you want to accelerate to very fast speeds

(47:48):
to to shorten the length of the trip. Obviously, it
doesn't make sense if you're going to the Moon, but
it might make sense if you're trying to go to Saturn. Yeah,
it does cause people to voice concern and legitimately so
about what happens in the event of a launch failure
and you happen to have what is equivalent to a

(48:09):
nuclear bomb on board that rocket that would otherwise be
launching into space and uh that I mean, that's one
of the things that people have have brought up as
an objection to this kind of approach, I think quite obviously,
the solution is we build our new production facility in
orbit so that we're making the bombs in a space station, right, Okay,

(48:30):
because blowing up the space station, it's basically okay, blowing
up Cape Canaveral would suck. I don't mean the space
station like the I s s like a fully fully
automated space station. This is reminding me of a terrible
asylum movie I watched called The Terminators, and uh and
and so I'm having flashbacks to that. So I'm going

(48:51):
to wrap this up. It was a really interesting kind
of way of looking back at what was I would
argue in timistic, even set aside the cynical, uh underbelly
of whatever the motivations might have been, there was an
optimistic view of what can we do with this technology
that isn't destructive. Let's try and find a way of

(49:13):
making use of this in a way, in a way
that's not about ending the lives of thousands of people.
And uh, I like that, even if ultimately it was
not a fruitful effort. You know another thing that that
does occur to me in terms of peaceful uses of
nuclear weapons will weapon right there in the title peaceful

(49:34):
uses of nuclear explosions would be that might become a
more useful thing once our society grows to something more
like the next level of the Cardashov scale, Because when
you're talking about the surface of the Earth, there are
just not many things that you need that much energy
that fast for, especially with all the risks associated. But

(49:57):
when you're when you're talking about engineering gigantic projects in space, uh,
then then I can maybe see more what's going on,
maybe stellar engineering, stellar engineering, or planetary engineering. If we
want to get all the elements in place for our
own dicensphere, then we're gonna be nukes might be useful.

(50:18):
I mean, I think I think I can see where
Elon Musk is going with this. Yeah, I mean it'll
you know. I can definitely understand the critics as well.
But if we can find ways of making a responsible
use of this possible, where we have minimized risk and
we have maximize return, then I don't necessarily have an

(50:38):
objection to it, apart from my initial emotional reaction, which
is always gonna be please don't. That's always gonna be
my initial emotional reaction to this um partly because I
grew up during the Cold War, so uh, you know,
it's it's one of those things that's kind of deeply
ingrained in my brain. But maybe one day we will
figure it out and be able to put it to

(51:00):
use in a way that no one really has. Uh,
you know, a credible objection to time will tell. But
something I want you guys out there to think about is, Hey,
you've got ideas for episodes that we should cover here
on We're thinking of topics for our episodes or ways
that we could use nuclear weapons and peaceful Sure if

(51:21):
you if you're like, you know, I like that fried
chicken idea. Yeah, you let us know. Our email addresses
FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you
can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At
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You can leave us a message there and we will

(51:41):
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(52:03):
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