On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture.
The nuclear bombs, it turned out, weren’t that effective for building canals, though they did create an “atomic lake” in the crater formed by the blast. But the tests had another lasting consequence, all but forgotten until now: They set in motion the first U.S. government research on climate change — a far-reaching project that has continued into this decade.
On the surface, the reaction to the Soviet tests was somewhat muted. Western countries, including the United States, detected the explosions and lodged a protest alleging a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Moscow wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the tests for several years.
But in the national security community in Washington, the blasts sparked panic. When intelligence officials briefed Stephen Lukasik, the director of the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had an immediate reaction: “Holy shit. This is dangerous.”
The Soviet Union, it turns out, had for more than a decade been studying ways to use nuclear weapons to create massive canals to reroute water for irrigation, and the plan involved hundreds of nuclear detonations. “The Soviets wanted to change the direction of some rivers in Russia,” Lukasik, now 87 years old, told me recently in an interview. “They flow north where they didn’t do any good for them and they wanted to turn them around so they would flow south.”
The Pentagon didn’t particularly care which way rivers ran in the Soviet Union, but it cared about how this ambitious act of geoengineering, which would affect waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, could potentially alter the world’s climate. Lukasik decided that DARPA needed to start a climate research program that could come up with ways to model the effects. The name of this climate program, highly classified at the time, was Nile Blue.
At first glance, DARPA might have seemed like an odd place to study climate change.