In Light Of BP’s Failures, Russian ‘Nuclear Option’ For Stopping Leak Gaining Traction

America may have reached the peak of desperation for finding solutions to the open oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. After a Russian newspaper suggested the tried and true tactic of sticking nuclear weapons under oil leaks to stop the flow, the idea of sticking a plutonium bomb in the Gulf is popping up everywhere as the only hope to save what little remains of the Gulf as it is now. The plan is only slightly less insane than it sounds.

The plan first appeared in the context of BP’s oil leak in Russian newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda, where writer Vladimir Nagowski noted that Russia and, previously, the Soviet Union, had dug a hole deep and large enough for a small plutonium bomb near the oil well and detonated it underground, making the hole collapse on itself and stopping the leak (Gawker dug up an instructional video of the plan). Yes, there is an Armageddon reference in his piece.

He also notes that nuclear “plugs,” sometimes three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, had been used five times successfully, with only one failure in 1972 that “mysteriously” left a mushroom cloud where the gusher was supposed to be. According to Nagowski, the risk of a mushroom cloud in the Gulf of Mexico is “only” 20%, so why not take a chance?

Some people are listening. Over at National Review Online, Daniel Foster is hoping the President is coming around to it. As long as the fallout is “a limited amount of radioactive material across the vast Gulf,” which is “preferable to the blanketing of thousands of miles of American coastline in ribbons of tar,” he seems to like the idea. Yes, you just heard the “Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean” argument again, this time to justify dumping a nuclear weapon in it. To Foster’s credit, the list of ideas BP has come up with, which he goes through in detail, don’t sound any more successful. He writes:

“The simple fact is that the leak has confounded all conventional efforts to quell it, forcing British Petroleum and its federal overseers to resort to a series of untested, increasingly unwieldy, and heretofore unsuccessful backup plans as the American people’s impatience and rage grow at geometric rates. In the madness that is Deepwater Horizon, The Bomb may be the sanest choice.”

Raw Story reports that the idea is also gaining some traction among energy experts like Mark Simmons, founder of energy investment bank Simmons and Company:

“Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge. ‘Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,’ he said.”

Adding weight to the possibility of using a nuclear weapon to solve the oil spill is the fact that President Barack Obama has assembled a team of nuclear experts to come up with solutions for how to handle the leak and the subsequent damage to the ocean, according to the UK Telegraph. The team, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, was described by BP CEO Tony Hayward as “lots of nuclear physicists and all sorts of people coming up with some quite good ideas actually.”

The most perplexing thing about this argument is why no one is suggesting a large amount of conventional weapons, rather than a small nuclear one, since conventional explosives would actually be available to BP without major government involvement, and would not mean the risk of significant radioactive contamination. So far, it appears that the largest members of America’s mainstream media are abstaining from bringing it up or supporting it, but as the idea seems to be floating around the internet, and worst case scenarios have the leak gushing well into August, we might be hearing more about the nuclear option as time goes by.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.