Plowshares - by Anna-Sofia Lesiv - Second Nature

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Plowshares<br>or nuclear explosions for the national economy

Anna-Sofia Lesiv<br>May 26, 2026

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It took the French ten years and well over a million workers to dig a hundred-mile-long ditch through the Egyptian desert that would connect the Mediterranean and Red seas, cutting the shipping route between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles. The Suez Canal, when finally opened in 1869, was easily one of the greatest engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Nearly overnight, over ten percent of Britain’s total global trade started flowing through the strait, which quickly became the “jugular vein of the British Empire,” so when Egypt nationalized the canal in 1956, the British government lost its mind. The pound collapsed, Prime Minister Eden resigned in a feat of total political self-immolation, and the British Empire was brought to its knees.<br>The Americans watched closely. They were witnessing the definitive end of one empire, and the dawn of their own. It occurred to a few scientists at Lawrence Livermore that perhaps a rival canal might be opened, one that would make global commerce impervious to the politics of the Egyptians. You could carve such a canal right through Israel’s desert, and you could do it with a very fancy new construction technology that wouldn’t require ten years or millions of laborers. That new technology was, of course, the nuclear bomb. Livermore scientists drew up a draft proposal for detonating 520 2-megaton bombs daisy-chained through the Negev, which, to put in context, is 520 bombs, each with over one hundred times the destructive force of those dropped on Hiroshima. By 1957, the US successfully contained a nuclear explosion underground in a world-first, which suddenly made nukes for earth-moving purposes seem pretty plausible.<br>The Negev project was ultimately shelved for reasons, but the idea that the rules of geopolitics, regional power dynamics, and entire economies could be re-orchestrated with the carefully engineered detonations of a few subterranean nuclear devices lingered in the imagination — particularly in the mind of one central character, for whom seemingly any problem could be solved with megatons. Edward Teller, of course.<br>Bombs-as-shovels was already a well-established idea since the days of Alfred Nobel, but the atomic bomb promised to be the most efficient shovel ever devised by mankind. The possibilities were already obvious to pioneers of nuclear science the world over, and as atomic weapons became objects of public terror, it became quite politically convenient to rebrand nuclear explosions from being simply tools of mass destruction to tools of mass construction!<br>Here were the words of a Soviet representative in the UN following his country’s first successful nuclear test in 1949.<br>“Although the Soviet Union would have as many atom bombs as it would need in the unhappy event of war, it was using its atomic energy for purposes of its own domestic economy; blowing up mountains, changing the course of rivers, irrigating deserts, charting new paths of life in regions untrodden by human foot.”

In ‘57, Teller’s group at Lawrence Livermore gathered to discuss further prospects of nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes, whereupon a skeptical attendee, Isidor Rabi quipped, “So you want to beat your old atomic bombs into plowshares?” Rabi was referring to Isaiah’s vision of a future in which God makes war obsolete by beating swords into plowshares and turning spears into pruning hooks. It was a sarcastic comment, but was also incredibly apt for the objectives of the United States, so it stuck.<br>Project Plowshare became President Eisenhower’s — and Edward Teller’s — personal attempt at a New Deal, but with nukes this time. And, everything was on the table. You could build highways and railroads through mountains! Create artificial aquifers! Spawn new harbors! Generate straits! Unlock natural gas in the Rockies!

Edward Teller became the most vocal advocate of what was really on the table. For him, Plowshare was a whole new vision that would secure material abundance, a cleaner environment, cheaper civilian and commercial transport across the Americas, and much, much more. In an essay called Nuclear Ecology, he wrote, “In order to clean up our continent, in order to keep the civilized world free of dangerous contamination, we not only should tolerate Plowshare — we need it.” Below are just a few of the applications Teller saw Plowshare unlocking.<br>Mining & refining in situ!

“Instead of mining the raw materials, the nuclear device might supply the energy to utilize the Earth itself as the crucible, with only the useful reaction products mined and purified.”

Fracking for gas — with nukes!

“There is once again as much natural gas in the United States than the amount I have already mentioned; only, this additional one hundred percent is contained inside tight rock...