Project Plowshare
Growing up in the 50s and 60s, during the first frantic decades of the Cold War, I heard a lot of strange things to do with atomic weapons. One of the oddest was a program for the development of techniques using nuclear explosions for construction purposes. I suppose this was to help calm people’s fears of nuclear annihilation, sure these things were hellishly terrifying to all of us, but hey, we can also use them for good. Project Plowshare was started in June, 1957, as part of a worldwide ‘Atoms for Peace’ program. The idea was to use the ‘friendly atom’ in such things as medical research, massive earth removal projects and find ways to use them in nuclear power plants. We could use all those nuclear bombs for good things instead of just blowing up cities and nations.
Some of the proposals for Project Plowshare, (you know, the Isaiah Bible verse for beating our swords into plowshares), even if they were atomic swords. Anyway, how about widening the Panama Canal with nuclear explosions? Or perhaps blowing up a path for a new sea-level canal through Nicaragua, hey, and call it the Pan-Atomic Canal. One proposal which came close to being carried out was Project Chariot, using even bigger hydrogen bombs to create an artificial harbor in northern Alaska. It was only stopped because they actually became concerned for the native Eskimo population and the fact that there was really nothing much there to use it for. In 1956 the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal seizing it from British and French interests. They began charging their own tolls to pay for the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile river. To create an alternative to the Suez Canal there was a proposal to use 500 nuclear explosions to excavate a canal through the Negev Desert in Israel to bypass the Suez.
Other proposals to use nuclear excavation techniques included a project to use 22 explosions to excavate a huge road-cut through the Bristol Mountains in the Mojave Desert for a super highway and new rail line. Some included blasting caverns for water, natural gas and oil storage. They considered using blasts to connect underground aquifers in Arizona or cutting paths on the western slope of the Sacramento Valley for water transportation. Even deep atomic explosions were proposed for natural gas fracking purposes, but canceled after the recovered gas was found to be too radioactive to use safely. The program was finally shut down in 1977 as more was learned about radiation dangers and because of other public concerns. In all, there were 35 nuclear warheads used in 27 separate tests to study the feasibility of the peaceful use of these weapons. True to form, the Soviet Union ran it’s own program called ‘Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy.’ Even though some of their tests were more successful, they eventually stopped their projects as well.
(Many of the mostly underground Nevada tests occasional leaked radiation which drifted over into Utah. Fortunately my family didn’t move to Utah until 1960, so I probably missed the worst of the 1950s tests.)
