I have blogged about various ideas for using nuclear bombs for civil purposes such as excavating, mining, fracking, etc. The Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. on this sort of idea but both countries came to their senses and dropped the concept. Recently, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, was being interviewed on a TV show.
In the summer of 1950 President Truman had committed the U.S. to the development of a thermonuclear weapon because the Soviet Union had exploded their first nuclear device the previous summer. Truman wanted a more powerful bomb based on hydrogen fusion. A group of physicists, many of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project, were assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A group of these physicists often met at the Fuller Lodge for lunch.
