365 Days of Drabbles: Day Eighty-Three

[jeriendhal]

For Hellhound: "It was named after its unfortunate inventor"


* * *

There were three problems. One, it was a nuclear bomb the size of a house. Two, it was armed. Three, he was standing right next to the thing.

"Oh, it was never designed to be dropped from a plane," the colonel told him. "It was built for the highway administration."

"What?" he asked.

"The idea was to blow up mountains to make it easier to build the interstate system. You had to love the '50s."

"And now I have to turn it off," he said. "I don't suppose the project engineer is still around?"

"Sorry, Dr. Buttecrack died years ago."

Comments

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, not only were they really thinking of using nukes in roadwork, they planned to do it right here in Arizona.

IIRC it would have been roughly 5 or 6 "nuclear demolition devices" (not bombs, bombs are military, these are just industrial demolition devices, right?) to level a pass to I-80 wouldn't have to have any of those annoying dips and rises or turns but could just run flat and level for miles and miles.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

And you could have gotten a lovely tan as you drove!

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

It wasn't until a few years later that they noticed there was a town that would have been in the path of the fallout...

But that wasn't why the plan was canceled. It was the above ground test ban treaty that killed the plan. The ended up concluding that no matter what the did to claim it wasn't a test, that the Soviets would insist it was just a disguised above ground test.