you gotta be fuckin kidding me!!! 169 nukes for mundane tasks like creating underground storage???

[ORDagnabbit]

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0504/russian-paper-suggests-nuclear-explosion-cut-gulf-oil-geyser/

t’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities," added Moscow reporter Julia Ioffe, writing for True/Slant. "The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals."

[onehandle]

1. It's not a bomb. It's a tool. nt

[spoony]

2. The US tried similar things to keep the bomb programs going

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

One idea was to free natural gas repositories with nuclear explosions, sort of the opposite of the Russian usage.