Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/03/using-atom-bombs-to-dig-ditche.html
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$2m for 2m tons of TNT?
Pray tell, where might one procure TNT for the lowly price of a dollar a ton around these parts? (#AskingForAFriend)
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When all you have is thousands of thermonuclear devices, the solution to every problem is “more nukes”
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I bet a larger percentage of people today would believe this is a good idea than the percentage of people back then.
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does nobody remember their history?
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And it’s great for those tough stains around the house!
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Costco…try one of their monthly runout specials.
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How do you get to be called Athelstan?
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The day after my wife and I got married in Vegas, we went on a bus tour of the Nevada Test Site. One of the highlights of the tour was a stop at the Sedan crater, where there’s actually a little observation deck you can stand on to look over into the crater (sorry, no cameras allowed, of course). It’s impressive, to say the least.
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They had just discovered what was then the most powerful force in the world, and needed to throw a lot of ideas against the wall. Maybe ditch digging? Or perhaps we could use it to clear land for development?
And then the military was giddy to use it in every type of warfare. They had an air-to-air nuke that could be used to wipe the sky clean, and Davy Crockett recoilless rifles that could fire a tiny tactical nuke for such a short distance that the rifle crew was inside the blast radius.
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The Soviet Union actually did experiment with this, with often disastrous results. And the concept never did quite die-out despite that. Lyndon LaRouche infamously promoted the concept in the '80s, I think, as a means to building Moon bases by using neutron bombs in boreholes to explode spherical chambers under the surface, their walls conveniently vitrified shells. And of course, we periodically hear the proposal of nuking Mars as a means of terraforming, most recently among Musk’s online bloviations. A notion I like to call ‘ballistic terraforming’ as it also relates to the concept of directing comets to impact the planet as a means of warming it.
The rich today seem particularly inclined to dredging-up variations of these untenable mid-century fantasies of Big Machine Futurism; the future as characterized by gigantic constructions and machines expressing the top-down prowess of state and corporate industry, the total conquest of nature, turning the mundane into spectacle. Giant trains, ships, busses, and planes. Giant buildings. Giant space wheels to make Levittown On Orbit. Giant domes to make Levittown Under Glass. Giant robots plowing and devouring their way through the landscape leaving giant highways in their wake. I guess these are the sorts of ‘solutions’ you arrive at always seeing the world from god’s eye view. With the brute force of money, everything’s simple --and subtle as a wrecking-ball. They seem to have missed the memo that this is now the age of Small Machine Futurism and stigmergic organization. I’m so often reminded of Theodore Sturgeon’s The Skills of Xanadu.
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I also see it in a ham-fisted fascist way: “let’s get this done, and worry about the consequences later.”
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a “second Panama Canal” could be dug for “a tenth of the cost of doing it mechanically.”
And it’s 100% safe because I don’t live there!
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- Drop nukes
- Giant ants
- Ants dig ditches in exchange for sugar
- ???
- Profit!
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Once again, the inimitable Scott Manley has made a video about this and other proposed peaceful uses for nuclear weapons.
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“Most of the radioactivity could be kept underground so that workers could go into the craters within a week or two and people live nearby within a year,”
Think about that for a minute. We can send workers in within a week, but if we want people to live it’d take a year. Workers, expendable.
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You can send a worker in for a few hours at a time, if he isn’t pregnant. But people living nearby implies chronic exposure,
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