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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: jtchew@netcom.com (Joe Chew)
Subject: Re: Nuclear explosion in 1950's Soviet Union?
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 22:15:38 GMT

>[the s-shaped thing in a sink drain that holds water] is called a "trap."

Before this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thread turns into an only-the-kitchen-sink thread, I'd like to propose the following FAQ addition for commentary.

T. Several countries considered nuclear explosives for really large

scale civil engineering and even performed proof-of-principle experiments (e.g., in Project Plowshare).* U. The Former Soviet Union used nuclear explosives in actual mining. Fb. ...on a widespread or routine basis. T. The putative cost of a nuclear explosive could vary widely, depending

on how you burdened it with the defense program that made it possible.

The * indicates a pointer to further discussion, to wit:

The onetime consideration of nuclear explosives for excavation and related purposes is not a secret. Perusers of libraries with good technical collections will find considerable information about it in the open literature. Examples include Weaver, ed., _Education for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosives_, Tucson: University of Arizona Press (1970), and _Peaceful Nuclear Explosions_, an annual proceedings that was put out well into the late 1970s by the International Atomic Energy Agency. One of Weaver's contributors further points out that

     A general, accessible reference {...}   is chapter 3 of _The 
     Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives_, E. Teller et al., 
     New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1968 {...} The book has a fairly 
     extensive collection of references.

Both peaceful nuclear explosions and the kind of epic terrain modification for which they would be useful have of course fallen into disfavor, so the field is far less active than it once was (one can scarcely imagine an engineering course on the subject being taught at Berkeley today, as it was during the mid-1960s heyday of this endeavor).

Numerous related items of various levels of content, graphical richness, and voracity are available on the Internet. Good places to start include http://www.oz.net/~chrisp/atomic.html http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd.html both of which contain numerous related links. Or you can just look for likely keywords such as "Plowshare" on your favorite search engine.

--Joe