Success rate does not illustrate simplicity, especially not with that small of a sample set. That could be the equivalent of saying, "Putting a man on the moon is so simple, in fact, that the United States has used their method once and it has never failed."

Actually, the US did it 6 separate times. And there were deaths, they were just on earth during testing.

But could a large conventional blast do the same thing?

You think the greenies are (rightfully) pissed now? Tell them you're going to set off high-yield explosives in the ocean. Their heads would "pop" [wikipedia.org].

For some reason I see many people in boats waiting to pick up all the dead fish that float up from the nuke blast. Sort of a super sized red neck fishing lure.

On a serious note, as others have said, there is a lot of methane down there. I remember seeing a deep sea sub video of the methane bubbling up in the Gulf of Mexico. They captured it in a tube and the methane formed methane crystals due to the cold and pressure down there. Unless the plan is to cap the entire Gulf of Mexico to capture this methane, I would like to see a bit more informed planning.

What was their alternative?

They didn't have firepower or mechanized armor that could match what the Germans had. But they did have many, many people.

Regardless, their technique worked. In fact, it worked so well that they alone were responsible for much of the damage that Germany sustained.

Hurricanes release energy equivalent to a large nuke every few minutes.

That comparison hand-waves away the shape and concentration of the energy, but it starts to narrow down the scope of the situation.

Also, I'm sure there is data from previous underwater blasts (so they should have some idea if it will be an additional catastrophe, or a ripple).

Can be viewed here. [rt.com]

Synopsis: If the oil leak is in a desert where nothing of value is living anyway and it has been going on for several years and it shows no sign of stopping and you've tried just about everything else, then a nuclear blast could work. However, in the gulf of mexico it makes no sense because we haven't tried all that many things and the leak hasn't been gong on for several years and there's lots of things around of value, including people and marine wildlife.

OK, there's not a lot of life down there to be affected, and the radiation isn't going to propagate without a lot of dissipation. Got it. OK with it. It's an environmental catastrophe, but nowhere NEAR the scale of the one we are currently experiencing, and you gotta go with the lesser evil even if it is an evil.

But that still leaves me with a big, possibly unfounded, concern.

I'm not a civil engineer, but how much do we really know about the seabed at those depths? I mean, are we placing these wells where they are because we know the thicknesses with a decent level of confidence, or only because we know the crust we have to drill through is thinner there and therefore easier to drill through?

If the crust is thinner, how do we know that the area we are placing the nukes is thick enough to withstand the explosion? I mean, the idea is to shift a crapload of rock, right? What happens if the crust underneath is thin enough that it ruptures, or there are cracks or fissures we expose in the process? Can we guarantee that won't happen to a relatively high level of confidence? What are the odds that we might cap this hole, but make one ten or a hundred times larger - large enough that it's uncappable even employing the same dramatic technique, and spews out oil at rates that make the current spill look pathetic?

This is a bad and extreme situation, agreed, but what is the risk that this plan would make it far, far worse?

Their enemy also had Mussolini as an ally. The guy fancied himself the next Roman emperor and a military genius, and Germany routinely had to divert resources to bail him out. When Italian forces invaded Greece in 1941 it was rapidly pushed out, even losing territory it controlled prior to the attack; the German Twelfth Army had to be sent down to rescue it, depriving Germany of more than 150,000 men that could have made a difference in Operation Barbarossa.

Of course, the fact that Mussolini's senior officers were also incompetent (based on the perceptions of Erwin Rommel, among others) didn't help. Hitler wasn't the military genius he thought himself to be, either, but he had good officers that knew how to work around him until they were relieved of their commands.

No one is saying Western efforts were easy. But they simply do not match the scale of the Russian war machine. And while American material contributions were desperately needed and gratefully received, I recently read(*) that they amounted to no more than 7% of Russian industrial output.

(*) The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts

Yes, by all means, let's punish the people who were *right*.

      Right about what?

      You are typing on a computer to tell me that I need to consume less energy? I bet you use electricity and drive to work, too. That resources need to be managed more carefully because of our overpopulation? Agreed. That people should be attacked/bombed/killed for it? Nope. That the Earth is warming and sea levels are rising? Agreed. Lying to people and ignoring this trend that has been going on for the past 100,000 years since the last ICE AGE - hmmm, nope.

Douchebag.

      Well, I have planted over 500,000 trees. I own a managed forest that used to be scrub-land. Well I didn't physically plant them, I paid 175 people to do it for me. What have YOU done apart from re-cycle your tin cans? Stop being a hypocrite and start using your brain. It doesn't matter HOW MUCH we "conserve" if we don't stop breeding like rabbits, the J curve is going to happen. But in the mean-time I have a lot of hardwood to sell to humanity.

their public promise to make good is hard to renege on

I guess you don't know a lot of lawyers then.

But Africa was Italy's spoils, as per the Tripartide pact -- Italy wanting to move into former Roman territory, and Africa being sort of completely worthless to Germany. But, perhaps if the US/UK/France/etc hadn't remained mostly neutral during the Spanish Civil War and come in on the side of the Republic, then it wouldn't have been an issue. Or, if, you know... the Treaty of Versailles not been a total screw job, pissing off all of Germany and giving the NSDAP something legitimate to gripe about as a foot up on their regular agenda. But, who's counting?

Except that Sea Lion wasn't achievable. How do you land troops across a body of water without air and naval supremacy? Landing operations are hard enough when you have both of those things. They are next to impossible without them.

Sandhurst ran Sea Lion through a few wargames in the 70s. Not once was the German side able to win. The best they could manage was to use mines and submarines to delay the Royal Navy. Mines and submarines could slow down the British response to a landing but they could not stop it. Eventually the Royal Navy would have reached the English Channel and at that point all bets are off.

Sea Lion was a fantasy.

This whole revisionism that swings the pendulum of near-complete responsibility for toppling Germany from the US to the USSR is just as wrong-headed as the original assumption. Do you really think the USSR could have survived a German military undivided by multiple fronts powered by an industry undisturbed by coordinated day and night bombing by the US and Britain?
The USSR DID survive a German military undivided by multiple fronts powered by an industry undisturbed by coordinated day and night bombing by the US and Britain.

Combined US and British strategic bombing started in March of 1943. The vast majority of the German forces in the Stalingrad pocket surrendered in February of 1943. Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily) was in mid 1943.

Could the USSR have beaten the Germans without the Allies, probably not, but they certainly could have survived. Even if the major early Soviet victories had gone to the Germans (Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad) there still would have been A LOT of people/equipment/industry/will left to fight the Germans.

I also have to point out that the "wholly assembled aircraft" the allies provided to the Russians were for the most part shit, and the myth that the Soviet industry was "crippled" at the start of the war is just that, a myth. That is unless you consider US industry "crippled" (For example the USSR produced just about the same number of tanks in 41/42 as the US did, and while lagging behind the US in aircraft production still managed to outproduce the Germans)

While this is right, but in general perception, the lie that US single-handedly won WWII is much-much more popular than the other lie that USSR single-handedly won WWII. Stupid Hollywood movies and ignorant people taking them for history is a big reason for this.

Even otherwise, US has more of a (cultural and informational) influence on the rest of the world than USSR/Russia - lot has to do with Americans speaking a (variant of a) much more popular language than Russians do.

Hence debunking one lie has been much more important than debunking the other. So much so that I never heard anyone telling that Russians single-handedly won the WWII.

The largest ever tested was the soviets... 50MT... it was believed they also had plans for a 100MT that was never built. I think at some point the realized it was easier to pack a bunch of smaller warheads into the same ICBM for better effect.

I think they could have named the 100MT one the "Planet Cracker"....

I clicked on the "Read More ..." link expecting to find a discussion of the pros and cons of using nukes as engineering tools. And all I find so far is a discussion that should have been Godwinned out of existence long before it reached its current state.

Over the past half century, there have been some interesting proposals for engineering uses of nukes. One of my favorites was only a short distance south of the current record-setting oil spill: The proposed sea-level canal across Central America.

There have been several analyses of the possibility of such a canal. It could be much wider, deeper and cheaper than the current Panama canal, which is too small for many of the largest ships these days. Most of the proposed sites go across southern Nicaragua, where the passes through the mountains are lowest and widest. Several of the proposals amounted to burying a chain of nukes in a line through the area, and setting them off. The result would be a chain of interlocking craters with bottoms below sea level. A bit more work with large bulldozers to even out the shore line, and we'd have a canal.

There were various reasons why funding for these projects (through the US Congress, of course) was eventually rejected. One of the funnier ones came from research biologists. They pointed out that the Caribbean is a few meters higher than the east Pacific, so there would be a slow but significant east-to-west current in the canal. This would carry not just water, but lots of biological material, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. (The other direction would also happen, but would be limited to a few good swimmers).

The biologists thought this was too good a scientific opportunity to pass up, and started submitting grant proposals to do the Pacific-wide baseline population studies that would be needed to understand the ecological catastrophe that would follow. They argued that we missed a good opportunity by not doing the studies before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built, so we were unable to track in detail the catastrophe that exterminated the Great Lakes' fishing industry, as the sea lamprey ate up all the fish in the lakes. They didn't want to lose out on all the valuable biological data that would follow the much larger catastrophe after the seal-level canal in Central America pumped thousands of new species into the tropical Pacific.

After enough of these grant proposals were submitted and Congress learned about them, the funding proposals for the canal were quietly "misplaced" and no longer discussed. Some of the biologists followed up by talking about their great disappointment that they would not be able to study such a large-scale biological "experiment". They didn't much lament the loss to engineers by the loss of a project to do large-scale nuclear construction, though I suppose in private a lot of civil engineers must have also been shedding crocodile tears over this loss to their profession.

Using a nuke on the BP well wouldn't do anything so biologically spectacular, of course. But I can see biologists hurriedly asking for funding to study the effects on the Gulf ecology. If it could be done right, we could get a lot of useful information out of the experiment.

Anyway, I'm still hoping to read lots of comments about nuclear construction ...

(Lessee; do I need a smiley to deflect the moderators who lack the humor gene? ;-)

Most modern warheads are in the mid-kiloton range, actually (at least in the US). There are a few megaton-class weapons in stockpiles still, but there's really not much point in using them. Megaton weapons were handy when delivery systems were relatively inaccurate, but as CEP [wikipedia.org] values decreased, there's much less need to use lots of (very) expensive materials and larger, heavier missiles and whatnot to deliver the bigger warhead.

I believe the only megaton-class weapon the US still has in active service is the B83 bomb, which has a maximum yield of 1.2Mt according to Wikipedia. Like many modern weapons, the yield can be fine-tuned prior to delivery by varying the amount of tritium in the core. The 'average' of all current weapons in the US arsenal is around 425kt...that's all the max yields added up and divided by the number of weapons (seven). Leaving out the B83, the average is around 300kt.

Man, this entire story was godwined in 1 post.

I was hoping to see some insightful comments about using nukes to stop the leak, but no, instead it apparently is WWII historical scenario day on /.

BTW: I wonder if one of our bunker busters could be deployed to the spill site on the ocean floor. Those suckers are pretty big bombs and might just do the trick without all that radioactivity.

Actually from the beginning I've been thinking that a big explosion down there might just be what's necessary.

I wonder if BP just doesn't want the bill for that sort of thing. Lord knows the price they'd have to pay for the US to set off a Nuke would probably be a little steep.

Doesn't work anyway.

Conventional explosives allow you to carve out pieces you can haul away.

Nukes would leave giant boulders that would have to be dealt with using conventional explosives anyway. At least, those that the nuke didn't just fling onto the nearest city.

And there's the question of seismically destabilizing the surrounding area.

Not to mention the problems of nuclear fallout and contamination of the canal area. What good is digging a canal if you can't let anyone go through it for 10,000 years?

More than that, his misreading of the British people. He could have destroyed the British army at Dunkirk, but he allowed a retreat because he thought Nazi Germany and Britain could coexist peacefully. If he'd attacked before the evacuation could be organised, and kept the peace with Russia for a few more years, Germany might well still be in control of most of Europe, and possible a big chunk of Asia too. Without Britain as a staging ground, the USA wouldn't have been able to launch an effective force, and without Churchill probably wouldn't have cared about Germany after defeating the Japanese (which would have happened a bit later, without an influx of German scientists to help the Manhattan Project - Germany would probably have become a nuclear power at a about the same time as the USA if they hadn't faced the UK, USA and Russia).

The Russians aren't even the first to suggest this. It's brought up at Pure Energy Systems [pesn.com]. Considering the source, the views there should be taken with a grain of salt; it seems that they're probably overstating things a bit. Then again, maybe not so much, since the well does seem to have blown-up a platform and somehow foiled a "foolproof" blowout preventer.

So it seems that a large explosion to collapse a good bit of the well shaft suddenly would be a great way to stop the leak, rather than the half-assed methods tried so far. Does anyone seriously believe that dumping junk on the wellhead will accomplish anything meaningful, other than depositing even more waste into the ocean?

^ This, +1000. KP is Russian yellow press. When it comes to science and technology, they routinely spew complete bullshit.

That's KP, they are tabloid morons who don't know what they're writing.

There wasn't any "mysterious mushroom cloud there" - it was a fountain of gas mixed up with dust which blew out of the drilled hole (which didn't collapse). Because of extreme pressure and narrow outlet, it went up as high as 1km. In case of an underwater explosion near ocean floor, though, at worst you'd get a water burst on top.

Also, you severely overestimate the amount of radioactive contamination produced by a relatively small-scale (we're talking kilotons here, not hundreds of kilotons or megatons) nuclear explosions, as well as its ability to spread through water.