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Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: In the 1950s, scientists and engineers had yet to understand the long-term effects of radiation, and looked at nuclear weapons as just super-powerful conventional explosives.

Thus, Project Plowshare, in which we investigated using nukes to create harbors, dig mines, etc.

Let this serve as a reminder to exercise a degree of caution with any revolutionarily new technology, lest you look a catastrophic moron in the eyes of history. :)

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> In the 1950s, scientists and engineers had yet to understand the long-term effects of radiation

Marie Curie died in 1934. And there was that little experiment in Japan in 1945 that was 13 years old by the time this Alaska thing was being discussed

And Operation Plowshare didn’t end until the 1970s.

I think everyone knew very well about radiation risks in the 1950s.

I think also in the modern context we overstate the danger of nuclear fallout from nuclear bombs because we think of plant meltdowns like Chernobyl and not actual nuclear bombs (which to be very clear, nukes are still terrifying)

Yeah, you actually get more fallout from an uncontained meltdown than a nuke at ground level, by a really high margin. (Which should make sense - modern thermonuclear warheads are in the hundreds of kilogram range including explosives, electronics, and casings while a reactor at a power plant will generally contain a hundred tons of uranium alone.)

For example, you can visit the Trinity test site with no protective equipment, and the glass the ground turned into isn't incredibly radioactive. Compare to the area around Chernobyl's reactor #4.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are also very much populated today.

People just came from a global war that eradicated 3% of the global population. The danger of radiation seemed very tiny in comparison.

WW2 was 13 years before. And some of those 3% were in fact killed by nukes and radiation and fallout.

I have to ask gramps for the truth.

If by "some of" you mean "~0.025% of that 3%", sure.

If you work off estimates of around 75 million people killed in WWII and 150,000 deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki it's 0.2% of the dead were due to atomic bombings. Basically 1 in 500.

Compared to estimated 100.000 deaths in a single conventional incident (operation Meetinghouse, the bombing of Tokyo in March 1945), this didn't stand out particularly.

I think I misplaced a decimal point...

At least you tried to do some basic math unlike 99% percent of the people on HN.

> WW2 was 13 years before.

9/11 was 19 years ago which killed "only" a few thousand yet the event's influence is still felt. In fact, we still feel WW2's influence today. Or the influence of the US civil war if I look at current conflicts :/.

Some of those investigations were more than theoretical, as the Jicarilla Apache well know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy

Ah there it is. If someone hadn't linked to the fracking-with-nuclear-weapons project I was going to post it.

Fun pic of it here: https://twitter.com/whatisnuclear/status/1107498549074264065...

Source: This 370-page book called Plowshare; a selected, annotated bibliography of the civil, industrial, and scientific uses for nuclear explosions, compiled by Robert G. West [and] Robert C. Kelly.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015095076132&vi...

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