NUCLEAR EVERYTHING
Fans
of the old, but still wonderful, Road Runner cartoons might remember
Wile E. Coyote's favorite one-stop-shop for mayhem: The Acme Company. A
clever person – not one of us, alas – once said that Acme's slogan
should be "We Add Rockets To Everything."
This,
in a kind of round-about way, gets us to the 1950s and the
near-obsession that certain engineers had back then with a certain power
source. To put it another way, their slogan should have been: "We Add
Nuclear Power To Everything."
In
all fairness, reactors have proven – for the most part – to be pretty
reliable. Submarines, commercial power plants, and even monstrous
icebreakers have proven that nuclear power can be handy if not
essential. But back just a few decades ago there were plans, and even a
few terrifying prototypes, that would have made the Coyote green with
envy – and the rest of us shudder in terror.
Both
the US and the Soviet Union had engineers with lofty plans to keep
bombers in the air indefinitely by using nuclear power. Most folks, with
even a very basic knowledge of how reactors work, would think that was a
bit (ahem) risky, but what's even scarier is how far along some of
those plans got.
Take,
for example, the various projects the US undertook. In one case,
arguably the most advanced, they made plans to power a Convair B-36
bomber with a reactor. Scary? Sure, but what's even more so is that they
actually flew the plane, with an operational reactor, a total of 47
times.
While
that the reactor never actually powered the plane itself, and that
there were huge problems to overcome, didn't stop the engineers from
drawing up plans for a whole plethora of atomic planes.
But
what was perhaps even crazier than just powered a plane with a nuclear
reactor was the idea to use that power source as a weapon. Here, for
example, is a beautiful representation of the Douglas 1186 system, which
was supposed to use a parasite fighter to guide the warhead to the
target – and keep the poor pilot from engine's radiation.
But
the craziest of the crazy was the "Flying Crowbar." Not only was the
Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (to be formal), aka SLAM (to be short),
supposed to be a nuclear bomb deployment system but was also to use a
nuclear ramjet drive as a weapon: roasting the ground under it to a
Geiger-clicking nightmare while leaving a mushroom-cloud parade of bombs
behind it. Shuddering, by the way, would be a perfectly appropriate
response. Luckily, the Crowbar never got off the drawing board.
Leaving
the air to the birds, other engineers had different nuclear dreams: In
1958 the Ford Motor Car Company, not satisfied with the success of the
Edsel, put forth the idea of bringing radiation into the American home
... or, at least, the garage, with the Nucleon: a family car with an
on-board reactor.
While
some engineers played with the highways, a few looked to the rails.
Though neither the United States of the Soviet Union got very far with
powering a locomotive with a reactor, the USSR at least looked far
enough ahead to draw up some plans.
The Soviets, in a literally sky-high dream, even envisioned a new approach to flying their reactors: use a Zeppelin!
Still
other inventive types, determined to find a new use for the atom,
scratched their heads and came up with quite a few interesting, if not
dubious, ways of playing with nukes – but this time of the explosive
variety. Plowshare is one of the most commonly quoted of those
operations intended to put a smiley face in a mushroom cloud. A few of
their suggested uses include what they called the Pan- Atomic Canal: in
other words, using atomic bombs to widen the Panama Canal. They also
suggested using nukes for mining operations, though never really solved
the problem of dealing with then-radioactive ore.
It's
ironic that – what with the need to urgently replace our finite and
global-warming fossil fuels – that many are suggesting a new look at the
power of the atom. We can only hope that we, today, can be as
imaginative about it as they used to be back in the 1950s ... and a lot
more responsible.
