I honestly had no idea the Soviet Union had used nuclear weapons to close leaky oil wells. It sounds like something out of a science fiction tale or some badly-written email chain letter. But apparently it’s true:

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”

Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.

But there’s a hitch:

These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.

Of course this whole solution is unlikely to be utilized in the Gulf. Can anyone imagine Barack Obama, unilateral nuclear disarmament extraordinaire, detonating a nuclear weapon in order to stop an oil leak? Liberal heads would be exploding everywhere and environmentalists would march on Washington. Not going to happen.