Project Ploughshare aimed to develop nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes, but never went beyond testing. Applications included widening the Panama Canal and creating an artificial harbor in Alaska, but objections and little economic benefit led to the project’s end in 1977.
Project Ploughshare, officially known as Operation Ploughshare, was an effort to develop nuclear weapons for peaceful civilian purposes, such as creating artificial harbors or tearing down the underground walls between natural gas deposits. The project was named in 1961, from the biblical line about turning swords into plowshares. This is a metaphor for the recommissioning of any instrument of war into an instrument of peace. The Ploughshare project was mirrored by a similar project in the Soviet Union about a decade later, “Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy”.
Project Ploughshare never got beyond the testing phase, but there were many applications suggested. These ideas included widening the Panama Canal, creating a new canal through Nicaragua called the Pan-Atomic Canal, opening routes through the mountains for highways, connecting inland river systems, connecting aquifers underground in Arizona or the opening of underground caverns for the storage of water, gas or oil. None of these ever occurred, although tests did occur.
28 tests were conducted for Project Plowshare. The first application of peaceful nuclear explosives was to be Project Chariot, an effort to create an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska by chaining five thermonuclear explosions together. However, despite objections from the natives, and little economic benefit to be derived from the danger involved, the project was shelved.
A proof-of-concept atomic explosion took place shortly thereafter on July 6, 1962 at Yucca Flats in southern Nevada. The bomb was lowered to the bottom of a 194 m (635 ft) deep shaft and subsequently detonated. The explosion displaced 12 million tons of soil, creating a radioactive cloud that rose 12,000 feet (3.7 km). This cloud of radioactive dust then floated hundreds of miles southeast, dropping bits of material beneath it. The result was the largest man-made crater in the United States, 320 feet (100 m) deep, 1280 feet (390 m) in diameter.
The Ploughshare project continued for more than a decade until 1977, although all the explosions were just tests. In that year, Congress quietly cut off funding for the project and it was rarely mentioned again. In the 1970s and 1980s, popular opinion turned against nuclear testing, and today international treaties ban all non-underground nuclear explosions, making further research of the concept unlikely.
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