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Constructing big things is hard.

You have to excavate a lot of land.

You have to ship in materials, and you need to pay a lot of workers to actually do all of the excavating and building.

But what if I told you that there was a massive shortcut that you could take in the building process that would dramatically speed up your construction time like a great engineer doesn't sieve.

This is basically what happened back in the 19 fifties for Alaska when they were thinking about building a giant new harbor.

Except the shortcut that people were trying to sell them on wasn't a great engineer, but quite the opposite nuclear bombs.

Instead of spending all that time and money using workers and trucks to painstakingly excavate the land for the harbor like a responsible group of people might, a group of mad men initially planned to just various Siris of atomic bombs underneath the ground and just blow all of the land up like some riel life Minecraft, TNT shit.

Unfortunately, in reality, what works well in Minecraft for digging doesn't usually work out very well in real life.

You see, back in 1957 atomic bombs weren't really a scary to everybody.

Yet as they are to us today, they had only just been invented a little over a decade ago.

And the U.

S government was actively searching for potential peaceful uses of the bomb for construction purposes in a project that was code named Operation Plow Share.

As part of that operation, the U.

S.

Government did detonate a powerful atomic bomb underground in the desert of Nevada as part of the sedan nuclear weapons test.

In an instant, the bomb displaced over 11 million tons of soil and created a crater.

There was 100 m deep by 390 m wide.

The only problem with it was all the bad nuclear fallout down at the bottom, which meant that it wasn't actually safe to send anybody unprotected down there until seven months later, after the test had already been performed.

The test proved that in theory yes, you could cheaply and efficiently remove a lot of soil for excavation purposes by just bearing an atomic bomb and blowing it up.

The problems were the consequences that came after that, but consequences didn't really seem to matter very much to the team that was a part of Operation Plow share up in Alaska who wanted to demonstrate the peaceful power of nuclear weapons by building Alaska's newest harbor.

With, UM, the year was 1957 and the plan was called Project Chariot.

Alaska was in the process of being admitted into the union as America's newest state, and there was a general sense of optimism and ambition circulating in the air as a mostly underdeveloped and under populated territory.

Alaskans wanted to have a big and bold new project that would not only impress the rest of the country and celebrate their newfound status and entry into statehood, but would also encourage more economic development and immigration.

So enter the man of the hour, who had exactly the plan that Alaskans at the time we're looking for Edward Teller tellers proposal was quite simple, really.

The biggest cities in Alaska were, and still are Anchorage here, and Fairbanks over here.

But the northern slope of the state has almost always been mostly uninhabitable, and there's a lot of reasons for why that's the case, most notably because it's frozen with ice for nine months out of the year.

But Teller and Co.

Argued that they could increase the economic and population potential of the area by constructing a brand new state of the art 20th century harbor that ships could actually bring supplies and people into.

The only problem with that was that there really aren't any good natural harbors on the North Slope of Alaska.

So Project Chariot intended to solve that geographic problem by building a man made harbor here at Cape Thompson, basically in the middle of nowhere on the Chuck CeeCee, and they were going to do it by blowing up a bunch of nukes.

The plan was to drill a syriza five holes into the bedrock right by the coast, place three small nuclear bombs in the front three and two big nuclear bombs in the back to then change the detonations together to generate five massive craters all in a row, like the sedan nuclear test produced that would then hopefully flood with water from the Arctic Ocean boom.

You've now created harbor and just like 10 seconds, and it only cost the price of whatever five nuclear bombs cost.

Sounds pretty simple, right?

Wrong.

On paper, this seems to make some kind of crazy sense because getting an entire construction crew with all of their supplies out to the middle of B F E Alaska, where there aren't any existing roads, would cost a ton of money and effort.

Simply transporting and using five nukes would save a lot of money.

But then again, why would you even really want to build a harbor here in the middle of nowhere in the first place?

Even if you succeeded with it, the harbor would be frozen over and completely unusable for nine months every year or 75% of the time.

Secondly, there were actually two inhabited native Alaskan settlements located close by within 40 miles of the blast site, and they probably wouldn't be very pleased seeing a Siris of freaking mushroom clouds so close by to their homes, the nukes would leave behind a lot of fall out that would not only transformed the harbor into a radioactive icy, slushy But it would also likely contaminate the local natives food supply with fallout by poisoning the nearby animals and fish they rely upon to hunt for survival.

No native Alaskan groups were ever consulted or asked for their opinion, while Project Chariot was on the drawing board.

Third problem.

Detonating five nuclear bombs just 180 miles away across the sea from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War era was probably not going to be a very good look internationally.

So in 1962 the economic petit Henschel of such a harbor in the middle of nowhere was in doubt, and the public opinion inside of Alaska had sharply turned against the idea of blowing up nuclear bombs in the state to build a worthless harbor project.

Chariot was put indefinitely on hold, but technically, to this day it has still never been officially canceled.

Sometimes it shouldn't take a lot of effort to learn that blowing up a nuclear bomb near an inhabited city to dig a hole in the ground is probably not a very good idea.

Other things in life, though, take a lot more effort to learn, like how to stay more organized and productive with Workers School, which you could actually do right now by taking this class called riel Productivity.

How to Build Habits The Last, which has taught on skill share by my real friend Thomas Frank.

He runs a YouTube channel that's called Thomas Frank, But even if you're already outrageously productive, skill share will definitely have something else for you.

It's got thousands of classes for creative people to improve their skills in every subject, from animation to coating to painting, to music to marketing and so much more.

There's plenty of options for you to take at any skill level, and the classes have short lessons that can fit into any schedule that you might have.

So to get two months of taking any class on skill share you want for free, they'll teach you how to be better at anything.