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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Pease read Part 1 first)
Digging canals has often been suggested as a possible peaceful use of nuclear bombs. At one time, the AEC proposed digging a back-up for the Panama Canal using nuclear explosions, but nothing came of it.
In the early 1960s, Edward Teller who worked on the Manhattan Project was an enthusiastic supporter of using a 200 kiloton nuclear explosion to create an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson which lies along Alaska’s northwest coast. Some experiments were carried out that resulted in radioactive contamination of the area. The cleanup of that contamination has just concluded.
Project Carryall was a project that was dedicated to digging a new route for the Santa Fe Railroad and an adjacent public highway through the Bristol Mountains in the Mojave Desert. The plan called for the simultaneous detonation of twenty-two nuclear devices of up to two hundred kiloton yield each along a two mile stretch of the Mojave Desert. The plan was never carried out.
In the late Fifties at the beginning of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the U.S. was in a panic because the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. In 1958, the U.S. Air Force decided that one way to demonstrate technological might in general and military superiority in particular would be to send a nuclear bomb to the Moon and detonate it for all the world to see. The idea never took off and in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty was signed by spacefaring nations that included a provision to ban the placing of nuclear weapons in Earth orbit or beyond.
There have been numerous suggestions, novels, movies and TV shows that say one way to stop an asteroid from striking the Earth would be to blow it up with nuclear bombs. However, while some asteroids are big rocks, others are loose aggregates of smaller rocks and gravel loosely held together. If we hit one of that type of asteroid with nuclear warheads, it could cause the asteroid to disintegrate into a whole cloud of debris that would rain down on the Earth and wreak havoc.
The idea of quenching a hurricane with a nuclear detonation mentioned which was mentioned above can be ruled out with a simple comparison of the power of current nuclear warheads and the power of a full-blown hurricane. A hurricane is so much more powerful than any nuclear bomb ever built by the human race that there is little chance that a bomb or bombs would have any effect on either the course or strength of a hurricane. In addition, much radioactive fallout will be distributed throughout the storm front and wind up raining down on a large area. Obviously, it is not a good idea.
Part of the motivation for “peaceful uses” of nuclear explosives was to create and fund more infrastructure and research for the development of nuclear weapons. Fortunately, aside from commercial nuclear power generation, none of these “peaceful uses” for nuclear energy have been found to actually be useful.