That's the Bomb

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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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?

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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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 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. 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 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,

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

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

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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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, 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, 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 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

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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 Twitter we are FW thinking, and on Facebook search FW is thinking. We will pop up in the search results. You can leave us a message there and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places