This week in 1964, the US Atomic Energy Commission presented a report to Congress on an eye-opening idea: clearing land for a highway in southeast California with nuclear bombs.
If your head is spinning right now, maybe some backstory will help.
In the 1950s, the US launched Project Plowshare, which was supposed to find peaceful uses for atomic energy.
In that same decade, the US began building the interstate highway system, which, among many other uses, would allow the military to move its troops and equipment quickly in a national emergency.
The country was building a huge network of highways as quickly as possible, sometimes in places where crews had to move enormous amounts of earth and rock to make way for the roads.
And someone thought, well, why couldn’t we just use The Bomb to move all that material?
Specifically, the planners wanted to use nearly two dozen nuclear bombs to clear land for a stretch of Interstate 40 in the Bristol Mountains in California.
That would create a canyon with enough space for eight lanes of highway and two rail lines, and at a much lower cost than the usual method.
Of course, it would have also created enormous amounts of radioactive fallout.
The agency’s experts said this would be manageable, which was probably extremely optimistic, but the only way to know for sure was to run tests.
And atomic testing wasn’t exactly a speedy process.
The planned tests for the highway project kept getting pushed back and pushed back, to the point that the project itself couldn’t wait any longer.
Crews built I-40 the usual way.
And as more time passed, concerns grew about radioactivity.
By the mid 1970s, the US put Project Plowshare to bed, and probably started working on a way to clear rock and earth through the power of disco.
Each year the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Saskatchewan release a list of the weirdest reasons people have called 911 in the province.
It’s partly to remind people that 911 is only for really serious emergencies, and also because the stories are funny.
Last year’s list included a caller who was upset that their parents were making them clean their room, one who reported trouble with their washing machine, and a “concerned individual” who called 911 because they didn’t recognize one of the listed friends on their social media account.
America Almost Made a New Route 66 With 22 Nuclear Bombs (The Drive)
Mean cats, fox on the loose, math problems among calls to Sask. RCMP that ‘missed the mark’ (CBC)