The Michael Bay way

I imagine sometime last month President Obama was doing Irish Car Bombs with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and 82-year-old hydrogen bomb pioneer Richard Garwin when Chu got a brilliant idea.

In my conception of this meeting, Obama noticed how the shot of Bailey’s contained in the drink curdled explosively with the Guinness as Chu chugged it.

“Hey, Barry, what if we used a nuclear bomb to stop the BP oil leak?” Chu might have asked, letting a bit of the drink settle at the bottom of his glass.

I bet Obama looked over to Garwin, who shrugged, “Maybe.”

Back in the reality of May 14, Secretary Chu, Garwin and four other nuclear physicists visited the Gulf of Mexico.

One plan some scientists are recommending would involve drilling a hole near the spill site that would eventually reach the gushing well about a mile below the Earth’s crust and detonating a nuclear bomb at the very bottom.

When it’s detonated, so the thinking goes, the shockwaves will compact the surrounding earth and crush the pipe, blocking the flow of oil. Because the nuke will be so far under the ground, it is hoped that the resulting radiation will never see the light of day or even touch any water.

Like curdling Bailey’s, the thousands of feet of earth separating the bomb from the sea will contain the blast.

Russian online periodical Pravda reports that the Soviets performed a similar operation in 1966 when they had trouble containing a massive oil leak in Uzbekistan. Hell, they did it five different times, successfully fixing the problem in four of the cases. If vodka-sipping communists can do it, so can we.

I’m sure environmentalists are wary of this idea, but is it that much worse than plugging the hole with trash? When plugging an undersea hole with trash doesn’t work, you just have to send another cleanup crew to collect the residue. If the warhead plan doesn’t work, we’ll just have to deal with Godzilla, which would be easily remedied with yet another nuclear bomb.

Now, I don’t say this often, but I think Obama is on the right track here. He’s pissed off, and rightly so. He wants to see some action that will silence the haters. This really shouldn’t be his problem. It’s BP’s mismanagement that led to the disaster, but Karl Rove is calling this catastrophe “Obama’s Katrina.”

First, when did Karl Rove become an environmentalist? And second, is Rove trying to say that dead, oil-covered animals are equivalent to dead Americans? I mean, to be fair, this is a totally reasonable comparison — if you’re a racist.

My only problem with this nuke plan is that I would not be able to see the explosion. The nuke would be detonated so deep underground that you wouldn’t even see fart bubbles breach the surface.

That’s why I propose they test another nuke a few miles away — a big one. A 15-megaton Mark 24 would make Michael Bay proud. And what could be a better way to celebrate the Fourth of July?


E-mail: nicjacob@indiana.edu