00:00In 1957, American scientists proposed dropping 250 nuclear bombs on cannon.
00:06Not to win a war.
00:08To dig a canal.
00:09This was Project Plowshare, the Cold War's most insane plan, hydrogen bombs used as construction equipment.
00:16The logic sounded airtight.
00:19Explosives had moved rock for centuries.
00:22A nuke is the same tool, only slightly larger.
00:26And the bombs were cheap.
00:28There was a second motive too.
00:30The public was terrified of nuclear testing, so why not rebrand the weapon as a peace machine?
00:36The man behind it was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb.
00:40His weapon was thousands of times more powerful than Hiroshima.
00:44He pushed for a bomb big enough to end civilization, and once suggested nuking the moon to impress the Soviets.
00:51But the idea that went furthest was turning bombs into earth mooners.
00:55Teller said a nuke could flatten a mountain.
00:58So why not use it to build?
01:01On the 10th of December 1961, the first test fired in the New Mexico desert.
01:06Three kilotons, buried deep in salt.
01:09The gold was not digging.
01:12Teller wanted to melt rock into a lake of lava, pump out the heat, spin turbines.
01:17Nuclear bombs has geothermal power.
01:20Hundreds of officials gathered on the surface, waiting.
01:24Countdown hit zero.
01:26The ground jumped.
01:28The blast carved a cavity 50 meters wide, more than 10 swimming pools of space.
01:33Then the fatal mistake.
01:35The roof was thinner than calculated.
01:38A jet of radioactive steam tore through the rock into the sky.
01:42The cloud drifted east over New Mexico and Idaho.
01:46Farmers found radioactive iodine in their milk.
01:49Parents bought powdered milk and refused to let their children drink local supplies.
01:54The project did not stop.
01:56It accelerated.
01:58Nuke the Canadian oil sands.
02:01Nuke a highway through the mountains.
02:04And the dream that never died, a nuclear canal across Panama.
02:07The favored route ran 80 kilometers through the Darien Gap.
02:12Flat, empty, rated by engineers as a perfect nuclear excavation site.
02:18250 bombs in rows, detonated in waves, yield equal to 8,000 Hiroshima's.
02:2443,000 people would be evacuated.
02:27The shockwave could shatter windows in Costa Rica.
02:30If the button had been pressed, the first salvo would vaporize hundreds of square kilometers of rainforest.
02:37Fallout would ride the Pacific jet stream, cross the Caribbean, and enter the food chain of two oceans.
02:44Tuna would come up over the limit.
02:46Fisheries might need decades to recover.
02:49But this was 120 megatons on Latin America.
02:52For the Soviet Union and Cuba, it would have been the greatest anti-American propaganda ever handed to them.
02:59In the end, America never pressed the button.
03:01In 1970, a presidential committee rejected the nuclear canal and recommended conventional digging.
03:08Every excavation project was canceled.
03:12Teller refused to accept it.
03:14He found one last lifeline.
03:16Nuclear fracking.
03:18Blast gas out of the ground with bombs.
03:20In 1967, in New Mexico, a 29-kiloton device fired 1,300 meters deep.
03:28Gas production jumped 6 to 8 times.
03:31It looked like a triumph.
03:33Except the gas was radioactive.
03:36Nobody dared cook with it, heat with it, or buy it.
03:40Two more tests followed.
03:42Same result.
03:44Gas out of the ground, useless, and the caverns never connected the way engineers promised.
03:49In 1977, after hundreds of millions of dollars, 27 tests, and 35 devices, Project Plowshare ended.
03:58No canal.
04:00No harbor.
04:01No highway.
04:03Not one commercially viable cubic meter of gas.
04:0720 years, 35 bombs, nothing.
04:11Today it looks like madness.
04:13But step back into that decade.
04:16A third world war could start any morning.
04:19Warheads rolled off assembly lines.
04:21Children played with atomic energy toy sets.
04:25Mushroom clouds were part of the weather report.
04:28Building the future with bombs genuinely sounded reasonable.
04:32What Plowshare left behind is not an achievement.
04:35It is a warning.
04:37When humans hold the power to erase themselves, the most dangerous thing is not evil.
04:42It is well-meaning certainty.
04:44And the crater it did dig is still lying quietly in the Nevada desert.
04:49It has never said a word.
04:51But it says everything.
04:52It is a warning.
04:52And the crater it says everything.
05:05The crater it says everything.
