As British Petroleum scrambles to affix a four-story, 70-ton dome over the massive oil geyser venting toxic sludge into the Gulf of Mexico, people everywhere are wondering what else can be done to stem the deadly tide.Komsomoloskaya Pravda, Russia's best-selling daily publication, has an idea: Why not just nuke it?
During the Soviet years, Russia's communists had to deal with numerous oil disasters and on five different occasions they employed controlled, underground nuclear blasts to quickly solve the problem.
[The] underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel," Pracda reported.
"It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities," added Moscow reporter Julia Ioffe, writing for True/Slant. "The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals."
And those 169 underground blasts do not count the Soviet military's tests of various atomic-yield weapons, the paper noted.
Russia's success in capping major oil leaks with nuclear demolitions has an almost perfect record of success: only one detonation failed to accomplish its purpose. The last such explosion took place in 1979, according to Ioffe.
