It may seem obvious why the vast majority of the people on Earth are opposed to nuclear weapons. They are insanely powerful and destructive. They could vaporize big cities in a blinding flash of light and heat. That being said, there are other reasons that nuclear weapons are being opposed.

           From a strictly military point of view, the strategic ballistic missiles and huge bombs may be useful for deterrence but they lack the discrimination of a good tactical weapon. Powerful explosives are an important part of any military arsenal but in a sense, nuclear bombs are too powerful. There have been attempts to make smaller nuclear weapons such as mortar shells that could be used on a battle field or against specific military targets but there are still problems with their manufacture, deployment and use which make them less attractive. And there is the problem of the bright red line of non-nuclear war versus nuclear war. If one party starts lobbing tactical nuclear weapons around, the other party will be motivated to consider the use of strategic megaton warheads in response.

            Usually the intent of warfare is to defeat an enemy by destroying their military capacity. Wiping out civilians has been a secondary and somewhat frowned upon goal. There have been famous instances where a conquering army has completely destroyed their opponents’ cities and, in the instance of Rome and Carthage, rendered their land uninhabitable for generations. These are the exceptions rather than the rule. Generally, the conquerors have wanted to exploit the citizenry and physical resources of their defeated enemies. There have been efforts to create a ‘neutron’ bomb which would wipe out people but leave buildings intact but that still leaves an empty city with no workers. Strategic nuclear weapons are just too destructive.

          Nuclear blasts throw huge amounts of dust and debris into the atmosphere including radioactive particles. This material, called fallout, falls back to the ground over time. The area surrounding the destruction caused by the explosion itself can be rendered uninhabitable by fallout. Depending on the size of the blast and the location, fallout can be caught up in high air currents such as the jet stream and carried for thousands of miles, even circling the planet. So, regardless of where an explosion occurs, entire hemispheres of the Earth can be threatened by the fallout. If either India or Pakistan attacked the other, the prevailing winds would carry fallout back to the land of the attacker. If a nuclear exchange of one hundred big warheads took place, enough dust and smoke would be injected into the atmosphere to cut sunlight down to the point where agriculture would be threatened. This is called a nuclear winter and millions if not billions would starve.

          There has been much work on treaties to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the few countries who possess them. However, the fact that a country without nuclear weapons feels threatened by a country with nuclear weapons is a very strong motivation to acquire them. The world has been lucky so far that some insane leader of a country with nuclear weapons has not attacked an enemy but it could happen. There are politically unstable countries that possess nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan, that could disintegrate into chaos leaving the world wonder who is going to wind up with the nukes. If a non-state player such as a terrorist group got their hands on a nuclear bomb, they could take out a big city. These are just some of the political problems of nuclear weapons.

          In the end, nuclear weapons are a very bad idea for a number of reasons, military, political, climatic, environmental and health.  The whole world would suffer in a nuclear war broke out anywhere. For all these and more reasons, nuclear weapons should be eliminated as soon and as completely as possible.

Peace symbol made by combining the semaphore flag positions for ‘n’ and ‘d’, standing for nuclear disarmament:

              There are two major intertwined streams that are the basis of the Atomic age; nuclear power and nuclear weapons. They were born together in the early 1940s in the midst of war. Nuclear weapons helped to end World War II in the Pacific. During the Cold War, the race to build and deploy nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain terrified the world in the 1950s. At the same time, commercial nuclear power reactors were built in Russia, England and the United States to utilize the vast potential locked in the uranium atom and demonstrate that nuclear chain reactions could have an important peaceful application.

             Reacting to the horror and devastation of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan and the growing arsenals of nuclear weapons, major protests against nuclear weapons began with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s first Aldermaston March in England in 1958, the Women Strike for Peace marches in sixty U.S. cities in 1961 and the Australian Peace Marches in 1964. While nuclear weapons could be deployed against military targets, their enormous destructive power was a threat to major population centers. Millions of civilians could be killed and huge areas rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war. The major strategy of the time relied on the fear of such devastation to both sides in a nuclear war was called mutually assured destruction or MAD.

              Nuclear power held great promise but there were concerns that its implementation would not be as free from problems as had been promised. Issues with uranium mining, reactor safety and the disposal of nuclear waste sparked a backlash against all the positive advertising by governments and industry. These concerns prompted major protests against nuclear power in France and Germany in 1971. Hundreds of thousands of people marched against nuclear power in France and Germany during the late 1970s. The U.S. Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the U.S.S.R. Chernobyl accident in 1986 each spurred huge protests against nuclear power by proving that the concerns of the nuclear power critics were valid.

               During the 1970s, there were movements in the direction of winding down the tensions of the Cold War and reducing the nuclear weapons inventories. Unfortunately, with the election of the belligerent anti-communist Ronald Reagan, the Cold War thaw disappeared and once again the threat of nuclear rose to terrify the world. Arsenals were expanded and insane talk of a winnable nuclear war emanated from Washington, D.C. In reaction, anti-nuclear protests spread across the world once again. There was some work on nuclear disarmament during the Reagan Presidency which continues up to the present. However, massive protests still occur demanding the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

              The Japanese Fukushima accident in 2011 resulted in massive protests against nuclear power generation worldwide. The Unit 4 reactor at Fukushima was severely damaged and a pool full of nuclear fuel rods may collapse and burn at any time which would threaten the entire northern hemisphere and our global civilization. Despite continued support by some governments and huge lobbying and advertising efforts on the part of the nuclear industry, worldwide support for the use of nuclear energy for weapons and power generation is waning and the Atomic Age may be drawing to a close.

               One of the biggest security issues that the U.S. has to deal with is asymmetrical warfare. Our focus was on nation state fighting nation state in the last century but in the last few decades we have been dealing with attacks by organizations or lone individuals. This makes responding to attacks more difficult because we don’t necessarily have a readily identifiable foe in a known geographic location to counter attack. We are constantly debating proper ways of dealing with such attacks and one big problem is matching our response to the level of attack. If the attackers are dug in in civilian areas, there is a big problem of collateral damage and the death of bystanders if we use the full power of our military.

              Evolution of weaponry has also aggravated the problem. With the development of every more powerful weapons we are now at a point where a single person can bring down a passenger plane or blow up a building. High capacity magazines in assault rifles allow individuals to kill dozens of people in minutes. Chemical weapons deployed by individuals could threaten thousands and biological weapons could threaten millions.

             Perhaps the most serious scenario is one in which a single individual obtains and detonates a nuclear bomb. I have spent a lot of time in this blog discussing big nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles. However, a lot of research and development has been done on tactical nuclear weapons in the kiloton range that could be deployed by small teams or even single soldiers on a battle field. A series of small nuclear missiles as well as nuclear mortar shells have been designed and, in cases built.

            Some work has been done on what have been called suitcase nukes. This would be a nuclear bomb small enough for one person to carry. The U.S. and Soviet Union develop nuclear bombs that one person could carry in a special backpack. There are reports that Israel has created nuclear bombs that could fit into a suitcase. This type of nuclear weapon has been popular in movies, television and novels because it would be so difficult if not impossible to defend against. What we have is the prospect that one person could bring such a bomb into a densely populated area and kill hundreds of thousands of people. This is scenario is perhaps the culmination of asymmetrical warfare.

           I have never been a fan of Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia. Although touted as a brilliant legal scholar by the Bush administration, I find his grasp of the Constitution weak, his legal reasoning confused and his recall of history often mistaken. On the bench and in his written opinions he is arrogant, sarcastic, and vicious against those who disagree with him. The reason that I mention Scalia is that in a recent discussion of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, he said that obviously it was referring to personal weapons and did not extend to such things as cannons, mortars and artillery pieces. Then he said, on the other hand, there are shoulder fired rocket launchers that could bring down planes. They did fall into the category of personal weapons and would have to considered and debated. Not sure if he was serious or just thinking out loud. However, in the current debate over the Second Amendment, some of the extremists admit that they want to own enough power weapons and ammunition to take on the U.S. Federal government. I am afraid that some of them would love to get their hands on a suitcase nuke.

(BTW, I feature suitcase nukes in the novel that I am currently writing – Tripod of Saints.)

Container to carry the U.S. Mk-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition:

              I have been a fan of science and technology since I was a child. Many years ago I worked on projecting technological development and anticipated a lot of what has come to pass with computers and the Internet. I have always believed that science and technology could solve the problems confronting humanity if used with proper foresight and caution. Unfortunately, there are often unforeseen consequences following the adoption of a new technology. While this may be true of nuclear energy, sadly, many of the problems were clear from the beginning and were ignored.

              I recently published a series of books on sociology that I have been editing for over ten years. They are available on Amazon under the name of Stuart C. Dodd. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Washington for many years. His pursuit of an understanding of human society took him far beyond the bounds of his discipline. He tried to develop a model of the universe that included all the physical and social sciences. When we first met, we discovered a mutual interest in understanding things from a global perspective. This is the perspective that I bring to nuclear energy.

              Thinking about the human race and the use of various fuels down through history in a global perspective takes you beyond the usual concerns of what it costs to obtain, how you use it and what pollution/waste does it generate. There have been other periods of history in which the use of a particular fuel that allowed a particular society to flourish wound up destroying their environment to the point where the civilization collapsed. Most people would agree that the environment is important but don’t perhaps fully realize that nuclear accidents that release massive amounts of radiation could conceivably spell the end of our civilization.

             There are interesting connections between the type of facility needed to utilize a form of energy and social factors such as politics. Some types of fuel, such as uranium, are  expensive and scarce and require special massive equipment to generate power. This leads to centralization of power generation with attendant problems of distribution and disruption of huge populations if one plant fails. Massive investments are required for such energy sources which in turn depend on large pools of capital which restrict their use to certain types of economic and political systems. In contrast, other types of fuel and sources of energy are highly distributed and can be utilized at a local level without centralization of equipment, investment and control. These distributed systems might allow for a more decentralized type of economy and political system than we currently have in the U.S.

             In situations where environmental degradation, waste disposal and centralization are ignored, massive power stations such as nuclear power generators provide seemingly cheap energy. The availability of large amounts of inexpensive electrical power encourages energy use and discourages conservation and efficiency. Centralized power use generates so much heat that huge columns of warm air rising above big cities alter weather patterns over large areas.

             We will be exploring the direct problems of nuclear power generation such as cost, waste disposal, environmental degradation, impact of accidents, etc. in future posts, but we will also spend time addressing larger and more indirect issues raised by nuclear power.

 

               The nuclear power industry was spawned by research that developed nuclear weapons. The U.S. government pushed the idea of the Peaceful Atom in the 1950s partly to ally the public’s fears of nuclear technology resulting from the bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. It also was seen as a way to invest more funds in nuclear research than would have been made available by Congress for weapons development.

                As time went by and other countries joined the nuclear weapons club, the parallel development of nuclear power generation continued. Some of the same materials and equipment that are necessary for creating nuclear reactor power stations can also be used to purify uranium to the point where it can be used in nuclear weapons. Plutonium can be extracted from nuclear reactor waste for use in nuclear weapons. While the countries with peaceful nuclear reactor power generation generally are in favor of other countries supplementing their internal power generation with nuclear reactors, those countries which currently possess nuclear weapons are in favor of disarmament and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The fact that a country can possibly develop nuclear weapons under the guise of developing a nuclear program for power generation is currently roiling the international scene as accusations of such actions are being leveled at Iran.

               The global anti-nuclear movement in growing and the international trend is toward nuclear disarmament. I strongly support their efforts to make the world safer and I will devote space in my blog to their work. The problem of nuclear proliferation is one of the arguments against the use of nuclear reactions to produce electrical power but, however important, confuses the issue when talking about the pros and cons of nuclear power on its own merits.

                I will be devoting a great many of my future blog posts to the arguments against nuclear power. The proponents of nuclear power have powerful and rich corporations on their side as well as many government agencies both here and abroad. Their side of the argument is well represented in speeches, advertisements, government programs, books, magazine, etc. I want to contribute in my own way to making certain that the argument against nuclear power is equally well presented to the public.

                 One of the big problems with the opposition to nuclear power is that it is often in the form of fighting against a particular problem associated with nuclear companies and nuclear facilities. One group is opposing a particular mine, another group is trying to prevent a nuclear reactor from being built or restarted, a third group is attacking a plan to site a nuclear processing plant, a forth is attempting to stop the creation of a nuclear waste facility. There are many other groups with specific concerns that are working against the nuclear industry. But the proponents of nuclear power are bigger, richer, more influential and more unified in their actions and goals than any one interest group opposing them. My blog will try to cover as many of the major problems with nuclear power generation as possible as well as highlighting groups working to solve all of these problems.

             There are some interesting parallels between the current debate on guns and the long running debate on nuclear weapons. Both debates revolve around a particular type of weapon and who should have it under what circumstances.

             One of the profound things that the nuclear debate has highlighted is the question of when is enough enough. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have thousands of warheads which could destroy the other many times over. Both sides accumulated these weapons out of fear of the other side and their fear ran away from reality. Other countries only have arsenals in the hundreds of warheads but even an exchange of one hundred nuclear bombs could have devastating consequences for the entire world. In a similar fashion, you have people arming themselves past the point of utility. Why would anyone person in our society need 10 guns, 100 guns, 1000 guns? The gun shops will happily sell a hundred assault rifles to one person at one time. This is just plain nuts. Unless he is planning on reselling them, he could not possibility use all of them.

            Then there is the question of the sanity of the person who wants the guns. Part of the gun debate is over making sure that people who are mentally ill are not able to purchase a gun. In a similar way, there is a debate over whether some country led by people whose sanity is questioned should be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

           Mexico is being flooded with guns smuggled in from the Unites States. Incredible harm is being done to their society with tens of thousands of people being murdered by these smuggled guns. The international community fears that there may be countries, organizations or individuals who would sell nuclear weapons to others who would use them to harm the people of countries that they hate or disagree with about something. Just as law enforcement agencies work to prevent gun thefts, illegal sales and smuggling, national and international agencies are trying to prevent the illegal proliferation of nuclear weapons.

           Asymmetry is also an issue. The idea of a small nuclear state such as North Korea attacking a huge nuclear state like the United States would be like a few criminals attacking the New York Police Department. The problem is how to respond with appropriate force to such threats in order to minimize collateral damage to bystanders.

           India and Pakistan are neighbors who are not getting along and have been involved in military exchanges in the past like a couple of people who live near each other and have had fights. Both India and Pakistan feel that they need to have nuclear weapons in case the other side uses them. But just like the situation where statistics show that owning a gun to protect yourself is likely to lead to you being harmed, if either India or Pakistan started a nuclear war, they would wind up eating the fallout from their own weapons.

         And, finally, part of the problem in both cases is that there are powerful rich organizations and individuals who profit handsomely from the sale of weapons and who apparently have no concern about who might use them and for what purpose.

         The human race as individuals and as nations really has to find better ways to resolve disputes than to resort to the use of weapons which may be as harmful to the user as they might be to a target.

               I have covered many topics related to radioactivity in this blog including reactors, bombs, accidents, organizations, heath effects, environmental effects and so on. During my research for these blog articles, I have come to the conclusion that it is time to end the use of nuclear reactors to generate electrical power. There are many arguments pro and con for the inclusion of nuclear generation in the mix of sources of commercial electricity. I have mentioned both in previous blog entries. In my estimation, the reasons to stop using nuclear power far outweigh the reasons to keep using it.

               In future blog posts I am going to concentrate on the arguments against nuclear power including profiles of groups that are opposing its use. I have tried to be honest and objective in writing this blog, reporting as accurately as I can the results of my research into matters nuclear. I will continue to be as honest as possible about the nuclear power situation but I will be concentrating on criticisms of this source of power.

               I understand that the world is currently in a desperate position with respect to the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere leading to global warming, the rise of sea level and wild weather with more droughts, hurricanes, record breaking temperatures, etc. It is absolutely critical that we roll back our production of CO2 from power generation and fossil fuel use or we risk the end of our global civilization. Nuclear power has been offered as a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 production. Setting aside all the dangers and problems association with nuclear power for the moment, I want to focus on why the CO2 argument is a lot weaker than most people realize.

               The construction of a nuclear power plant is a huge undertaking. A great deal of fossil fuel is utilized in the creation of the materials and equipment required. The transportation of all these things to the site and the preparation of the site consume fossil fuels. The mining and refining of uranium for fuel requires fossil fuels. The enormous amount of concrete that goes into building a nuclear power plant generates a huge amount of CO2 as it cures. If the spent fuel rods are stored on site in dry casks, they are made of steel and concrete which consumes fossil fuels. If the spent fuel rods are transported to some temporary or permanent storage site, more fossil fuels are burned. And the creation of a permanent spent fuel rod facility will require still more fossil fuels to dig. And finally, nuclear power reactors have a limited lifespan after which they have to be decommissions which depend on fossil fuel. All of these activities require the burning of fossil fuels which generate huge amounts of CO2. When the CO2 footprint of nuclear power generation is discussed, there is not enough emphasis on all this CO2. I have heard it said but I cannot quote the research to prove it that it takes about fifteen years of full time operation of a nuclear reactor generating power before it compensates for all the CO2 generated to create a fuel it. And most reactors are licensed for about 30 years initially although many have their licenses extended.

            One of the primary arguments for nuclear power generation, the reduction of CO2 production, is not as beneficial as it has been portrayed. Other arguments such as low cost of such power have been proven false. When nuclear power generation was being sold in the 1950s to civilians, some proponents claimed that the power would be so cheap that it could be given away for free. Well, that has certainly turned out to be false. With the price of alternative sustainable power constantly dropping and the cost of nuclear power stable or rising, it is far past time for the world to begin phasing out nuclear reactors for commercial electric power generation.

              Since the development of nuclear bombs in the 1940s, suggestions have been made for possible civilian peaceful uses of these powerful explosives. The United States explored some of these possibilities in Operation Plowshare and the Soviet Union worked on them in their Nuclear Explosives for the National Economy program. The primary use was for large scale earth moving but there were other uses such as seismic exploration and sealing major leaks in gas fields that were considered. Despite the hostility between these two nations during the Cold War, there were several bilateral conferences where scientists from the two nations compare notes on their experiments. After over one hundred explosions were triggered during the tests, in the end, both of these projects were cancelled due to technical problems, environmental pollutions and public opposition. Since the Soviet ended its program in 1989, there have been no other serious explorations of peaceful use of nuclear explosions.

             Another plan for peaceful use of nuclear explosions that never got beyond the study and planning stage called for the use of nuclear explosions to generate electricity. The idea had been around since 1957 when it was suggested that megaton fusion bombs be exploded in a cavity dug out of solid granite to heat steam. As part of Operation Plowshare, Los Alamos National Laboratories researched the concept under the name Project PACER during the 1970s. They considered the use of thermonuclear fusion bombs but later decided that atomic fission bombs would be a better choice.

             The basic idea was create an underground chamber where nuclear devices could be exploded to heat steam for power generation. An early design called for a one thousand foot diameter dug five thousand feet underground in a salt dome. It would be filled with water. Fifty kiloton bombs would be dropped in at about the rate of two a day. The resulting steam would be run through a heat exchanger and the secondary steam would power a generator. Estimates were made that two gigawatt of energy could be generated in this way

              A later design called for kiloton nuclear bombs to be detonated every forty five minutes. The heat of their explosion would be captured by molten salts running down the side of the chamber. The molten salts would enter a heat exchanger where the heat would be used to generate steam. The steam could then drive a turbine to create electricity.

              After the cancellation of Operation Plowshare, additional studies and designs have been explored. One of these later designs was based on a steel cylinder one hundred feet in diameter and three hundred feet tall with walls that were four feet thick. The cylinder would be embedded in concrete in a hole in the ground. The cylinder would be half full of molten salts which would be continuously pumped to the top and allowed to flow down. In this rain of molten salt, a one kiloton fission bomb would be detonated every forty five minutes. A heat exchanger would generate steam from the molten salt to drive a turbine and generate electricity.

               One of the problems with these bomb generator is that they would require a steady supply of small nuclear bombs which would make the economic feasibility of such a system less attractive. The cost of fueling a PACER style system was estimated in one study to be about ten times the cost of fueling a conventional light water reactor.

              Since the development of nuclear bombs in the 1940s, suggestions have been made for possible civilian peaceful uses of these powerful explosives. The United States explored some of these possibilities in Operation Plowshare and the Soviet Union worked on them in their Nuclear Explosives for the National Economy program. The primary use was for large scale earth moving but there were other uses such as seismic exploration and sealing major leaks in gas fields that were considered. Despite the hostility between these two nations during the Cold War, there were several bilateral conferences where scientists from the two nations compare notes on their experiments. After over one hundred explosions were triggered during the tests, in the end, both of these projects were cancelled due to technical problems, environmental pollutions and public opposition. Since the Soviet ended its program in 1989, there have been no other serious explorations of peaceful use of nuclear explosions.

              One project that was proposed in the U.S. but never developed involved the use of nuclear explosions to power a spaceship by what was called Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. A company called General Atomics initiated research into such possibilities in what was called Project Orion in 1958.

              The basic concept was to build a spaceship that would have a shock absorbing disk on the back end. Nuclear bombs, either fission or fusion, would be tossed out of a hole in the center of the disk and their explosions would accelerate the ship. Theoretically, the idea was found to be quite attractive. Space propulsion systems are rated on “thrust” and “specific impulse”.   The thrust is a measure of how much force the propulsion system can generate. To launch a vehicle into space, the thrust must be greater than the force of gravity, analogous to horsepower in a car. Specific impulse is a measure of how much speed can  be generated by a unit mass of propellant, analogous to miles per gallon in a car. Usually, in space propulsion systems, there is a trade-off between thrust and specific-impulse but for the proposed nuclear propulsion has both high thrust and high specific impulse.

            One drawback of the NPP engine is the fact that its thrust comes in the form of explosive bursts. This means that there must be a way to absorb the shock of each blast and protect the rest of the ship from being shaken apart by changing stresses. In addition, there is the problem of intense radiation from the bomb blasts. The rest of the ship and especially the crew must be protected from the radiation. The shock absorber disk can also provide shielding. The design of such a craft would be long and thin with the engine on one end and the crew quarters as far away as possible on the other end.

            With the passage of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 which prohibited nuclear explosion in space, interest in Project Orion waned and the project was dropped in 1965. Through the years since, a number of studies have been done on different configurations of shape and nuclear propulsion for interstellar craft for exploring beyond the solar system. Some of these designs would utilize a greater number of small nuclear explosions from pellets as opposed to the nuclear bombs envisions for Project Orion.

Artist’s conception of a Project Orion vehicle from NASA:

                While the United States had Operation Plowshare to explore the peaceful use of nuclear explosions, the Soviet Union also had a similar program.  It was called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (NENE). A literal descriptive name but lacking in the resonance of Operation Plowshare.

               Following the detonation of their first nuclear bomb in 1949, the Soviets said that although they would have as many nuclear bombs as they needed in case of a war, they were dedicated to the peaceful use of such explosives for “blowing up mountains, changing the course of rivers, irrigating deserts, and charting new paths of life in regions untrodden by human foot.” However, they strongly advocated total nuclear disarmament and this impeded their research into peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.

               The Soviets waited until the mid-1960s to start their NENE program. Initially aimed excavation and petroleum stimulation, their program eventually expanded into other areas of interest. Broadly speaking, the Soviets were conducting tests for two categories of applications. 

               Employment of Nuclear Explosive Technologies in the Interests of National Economy was the name for the part of NENE that was focused on creating underground water reservoirs, dams and canals and the creation of huge underground caves as places to store dangerous toxic waste. Between 1965 and 1989, the Soviets exploded one hundred and twenty four nuclear devices in research on these possible uses for excavation.

               Peaceful Nuclear Explosive Technologies in the Interests of National Economy was the name for the other part of NENE. It focused on the use of nuclear explosions as a ground wave generator for seismological mineral exploration, shattering bodies of ore to make mining easier, cracking underground formations to make the extraction of gas and oil easier, and created underground chambers to store the gas and oil. This part of NENE exploded one hundred and fifteen nuclear devices as part of their research.

              In addition to all of the test explosions, the Soviet Union actually used nuclear explosions in real world applications in several cases. A gas field in Uzbekistan had been burning out of control for three years when a thirty kiloton nuclear device was used to snuff out the fire. A forty five kiloton nuclear device was used to seal a blow out in another gas field.

             Some of these underground tests released radioactivity into the atmosphere that was detected beyond their borders. Another test failed in its objective but polluted local water with plutonium that remained far beyond safety limits for decades. A third blast release a radioactive plume in near a populated area and the site could have been flooded by a nearby river which could have polluted a huge area.

            NENE ended in 1989 as a part of the Soviets unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. Overall, the results of the tests were disappointing with respect to the goals of the tests and showed many problems with the civil use of nuclear bombs.

Lake Chagan in Kazakhstan created by a nuclear explosion: