Nuclear Explosives as an Engineering Tool

Abstract

Nuclear explosives were originally developed as weapons of war. But they also represent the most compact sources of energy we have available. Thus it is not surprising that considerable multinational effort was expended to try to turn these devices into useful, reliable tools. From a purely technical view, those efforts were successful: problems connected with ground motion, air blast, and radioactivity were well defined and solutions developed that were expressed as operational restrictions. From a political or social view, the programs were less fortunate: efforts to limit the use and spread of nuclear weapons, while not always succeeding in their primary goals, have eliminated any current American work on the use of nuclear explosives as an engineering tool. However, much that was learned from the nuclear explosion research has proved applicable to the use of very large quantities of chemical explosives.