Nuke It how Project Plowshare considered using nuclear explosives in construction

During the Second World War, few who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb knew the effects of nuclear radiation well. Before 1963, it was common practice to conduct nuclear tests above ground – so much so that bomb tests in Las Vegas were essentially a tourist attraction. More than five hundred such nuclear weapons tests have been carried out.

While the devastating power of a nuclear weapon was known – not just through tests but also through actual use of the weapons in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the United States began a program called Peaceful Nuclear Explosions in the 1950s. It may seem insane in hindsight, but part of the program was the Ploughshare Project, named after a verse in the Bible about how “they will plowshares their swords.”

Project Plowshare was an Atomic Energy Commission program that began in June 1957 to study the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including those for civil and industrial projects. This included the construction of ports and canals as well as the revitalization of natural gas reserves.

One of the suggested uses for Project Plowshare was to refer to atomic bombs to blow up a new canal across Central America. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson even ordered a study to determine a location for building a new canal at sea level. The so-called Pan Atom Canal was to be created through a series of “controlled blasts” to literally cut a hole through hundreds of kilometers of rock. It was supposed to use 250 devices in twenty-seven separate detonations, each ranging from one to eleven megatons! At the bottom, each detonation would be more than sixty times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was also found that the project can be completed quickly, cheaply, takes less time, and costs less than what was spent building the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

The study was the most comprehensive to date on nuclear excavation, and it seemed the only reason the project might not move forward is because it found that the Panama Canal would not exceed capacity by 1995.

There were, however, somewhat less ambitious plans. Project Chariot called for the construction of a new port off the rugged Alaska coast at Cape Thompson containing a few dozen hydrogen bombs, while Project Carryall was to include a series of 22 atomic bombs to carve a road through the Bristol Mountains in the Mojave Desert of California.

The United States was the only nation actively considering how nuclear weapons could be used in construction projects. But the Soviet Union’s “Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” program considered how to dig huge holes with nuclear weapons. A total of 151 experiments were carried out. These experiments were conducted in the United States from 1957 to 1975 and in the Soviet Union from 1965 to 1989.

Environmental concerns and opposition to atomic energy or nuclear devices led to the demise of the Ploughshare Project, which was finally discontinued in 1977.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites. He writes regularly on military small arms and is the author of several books on military headgear, including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

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