Name: The Most Insane Megaproject You Never Heard About
Uploaded: 2026-03-30T21:33:43.000Z
Duration: 13 min 6 s
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In the 1960s, the US planned to nuke Israel with hundreds of thermonuclear bombs.

All in the name of progress driven by a mad scientist to use the most destructive of weapons to build things, excavate canals, carve out harbors, tap oil and gas.

It kept the US busy for two decades, burned hundreds of millions of dollars,

and exploded dozens of nukes for a bright future.

In the most feverish years of the Cold War, when the world got terrifyingly close to blowing itself up.

Nukes for Peace Our story begins with the brilliant Hungarian physicist Ed Wood Teller, one of the key scientists of the Manhattan Project, the colossal effort that led to the first nuclear bomb.

But almost from the beginning he dreamt of destroying the world much harder.

Traditional nukes, like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki ones, release energy by splitting heavy atoms like uranium.

But these are rare, expensive, and the resulting bombs are difficult to scale up.

So Teller lobbied for a different approach: unleash the nuclear fire by smashing together hydrogen atoms.

That would allow for bombs thousands of times more powerful.

The problem was technically hard, but in the 1950s Teller solved it.

The terrifying new thermonuclear bomb made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers.

Nuclear fire strong enough to end human civilization itself.

The Soviet Union followed quickly and the new madness for destruction took over the world.

Teller was having the time of his life as he got to chase his nuclearest dreams like a bomb so powerful that it would wipe out civilization in one single strike - a real thing the US actually started working on.

We have told this story before, if you want to watch it.

And as the perfectly sane man he was, Teller had other great ideas, like nuking the moon to show the comets who is boss.

And if H-bombs could destroy the planet, maybe they could also reshape it.

Humans had been using explosives for mining and engineering for centuries.

And H-bombs offered the same service with much more enthusiasm at a decent cost.

Why not use them to dig dishes and make holes at a planetary scale?

The idea of "nukes for peace" was also pretty convenient.

With public opinion increasingly opposed to the arms race and ever more terrified by World War III, nuclear engineering was a way to keep on testing nuclear weapons without saying you were testing nuclear weapons.

So in 1957 the US launched Project Ploughshare, a bold plan to use nuclear explosions for peaceful engineering.

Cutting Through Continents In 1956 Egypt had just nationalized the Suez Canal, a vital artery for global trade and oil delivery to Europe.

So one of the first ideas of the new "build with nukes" doctrine was to blast open a new one through the Israeli desert.

On the other side of the world, the Panama Canal had long been in need of an upgrade.

Scientists explored extension routes and found they would need to remove 1.2 billion cubic meters of earth, 500 great pyramids of Giza.

A monumental task that would cost $6 billion if done with shovels, but only $3.1 billion with nukes.

But even Teller understood that before nuking through continents, you should start small.

So the first miracle of Project Ploughshare would be a new harbor in Alaska.

In just a few glorious milliseconds, five nukes with a combined punch of 170 Hiroshima bombs would carve out a 500 x 200 meter trench, opening the region to commerce and prosperity.

The local communities weren't thrilled at the idea,

but Teller insisted that the dangers of nuke engineering had been "greatly exaggerated".

The major concern was radioactive contamination.

Hmm, canals and harbors were great, but nobody wanted them glowing with radioactivity for thousands of years.

Luckily, Teller had a plan: nuking the land from below.

In a nutshell, nuclear excavation works like this: you drill a hole a few hundred meters deep and place the bomb at the bottom.

When it goes off, the blast hollows out a cavern in the rock and flash melts its walls into magma.

The molten rock pools at the bottom, the ceiling collapses,

and the collapse ripples upwards until it reaches the floor where it forms a crater.

The result is a massive hole on top, with the radioactive debris sealed under hundreds of thousands of tons of rock.

With the theory looking flawless on paper, the time had come to actually test it.

But before the government bombs anything, let's get some propaganda protection.

Our partner Ground News is a website and app built to help you think critically about the information you consume - a mission we fully support.

They curate news articles from across the globe, adding context on political bias, reliability, ownership, and

summaries that highlight what each side is leaving out.

You can even compare headlines to see how bias shapes the narrative.

Take this story about Finland planning to lift its ban on nuclear weapons.

Some frame it as a prudent response to the state of the world, while others warn of escalation.

Ground News also reveals blind spots - stories that only one side is covering, showing you what your usual news feed is hiding.

As information bubbles are becoming the norm, thinking critically about the news is no longer optional.

And Ground News makes it easier to do just that.

If you would like to give them a try, go to ground.news/nutshell or scan the QR code on the screen.

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The fiasco begins Ploughshare debuted in 1961 in the desert of New Mexico.

A nuke with the power of 3,100 tons of TNT was buried 360 meters deep in the heart of a salt deposit.

The goal was to explore a new idea to generate electricity.

The explosion would melt the deposit into a pond of red-hot liquid salt, whose heat could be pumped up to power turbines.

A hybrid of fusion and geothermal power brought to you by H-bombs.

Above ground, hundreds of officials, scientists, and

international guests had gathered to witness the birth of a new era.

Everyone held their breath as the countdown ticked.

And then, with a distant thud, the ground shuddered.

Deep below, the explosion hollowed a cavern the size of over 10 Olympic swimming pools.

But Teller's team had missed a tiny detail - the salt contained far more water than expected, which turned into superheated steam that massively amplified the blast.

The hole used to lower the bomb had been designed to collapse and seal itself after the explosion,

but the unexpectedly monstrous pressure broke through.

So a few minutes after the blast, a plume of radioactive steam erupted from the shaft, damaging cameras and instruments and bathing everyone in a strangely itchy sauna.

The US government tried their best to convince everyone that things hadn't been that bad,

but for some reason the masses had a problem with clouds of radioactive fallout, even from peaceful nukes.

So, to show the world how cool H-bombs could really be, he scheduled another test, one 30 times more peaceful.

In July 1962, while Cuban officials were visiting Moscow to negotiate a missile deal that would almost spark World War III three months later, a thermonuclear bomb worth seven Hiroshima nukes exploded 200 meters underground in the Nevada desert.

This time the goal was to test nuclear excavation itself and check how big the crater could get.

The blast displaced 12 million tons of soil and hollowed out a gargantuan crater, 100 meters deep and 400 meters across - the largest artificial crater in US history.

Bury the bomb too deep and you will only get a disappointing dent.

Bury it too shallow and you risk launching a radioactive cloud into the sky.

Someone had miscalculated the depth of the explosion and a plume of radioactivity punched through.

Fallout was detected as far as South Dakota and Illinois,

and panic broke out in Utah when radioactive iodine was found in milk.

It turned into one of the dirtiest tests on US soil ever.

The years that followed saw more peaceful explosions.

Meanwhile, Teller's proposals got weirder.

Liquefy tar sands in Canada - with nukes.

Blast a highway through the Sierra Nevada - with nukes.