Genuine Lyin'
Socialist Weasel

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Child's Play: In a land of walruses and kings...
30 May 2010

The spin on the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is something to behold. According to BP and their apologists, this is all the fault of the big bad government. The government LET BP screw up, and now that they have, they aren't doing anything to fix the problem.

You see, it's like this. The government is like a negligent parent, and BP is the two year old child who just ran out into traffic to play. We should have known it would all end in tears.

Now that I've explained it to you in the proper frame, don't you just feel like giving BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, a big hug and then take him out for ice cream?

OK, personally, I would prefer to wrap old Tony in chains and lead weights, take him out to the gulf, and use his smarmy ass to try and plug the blowout, but I'm afraid that would just make the water oilier. And I would probably be violating one or more zoning regulations in the process.

Well, that leaves me completely out of ideas as to what we should do next. I don't see that as a negative reflection on my resourcefulness, since as far as I can see, nobody else has any good ideas on what to do next. That includes BP, which made $45 billion leasing public lands like the one Deepwater Horizon was sitting over and gets to make all that money off the American people based, in part, on a guarantee on their part that their actions won't injure the American people.

BP is drilling two more wells, in hopes of releasing oil (hopefully under more controlled conditions!) and thus reducing pressure at the original blowout site(s). But there's no guarantee that will work, and what's more, the wells won't be drilled until late August.

Oh, and it's hurricane season. We just had our first tropical storm, Andrea, which fortunately passed to the south of the Gulf into the southern part of Mexico. NOAA is forecasting a very busy hurricane season with eight major hurricanes, and the El Niño, which usually defuses such storms, appears to be fading rapidly.

There's talk about dropping a nuke on the leak site, and hoping that fuses it shut. James Cameron movies notwithstanding, I'm not sure a delicate device like a nuclear warhead can withstand the pressures at 5,000 feet. Further, there's unconfirmed reports that there are actually two, and possibly three sites where the oil is spewing out. If there are, BP, which still has a virtual monopoly on investigating what the situation is down there, isn't admitting it.

So if you assume that a) the pressure won't destroy the firing mechanism, and b) you can get two or three nukes to go off within a millionth of a second so the first one to fire doesn't simply destroy the other one or two, that leaves the big question: would it work?

According to /Komsomolskaya //Pravda/, the old Soviet Union used nukes to shut down blowouts five times between 1966 and 1977. My assumption was that the nuke would simply melt the seafloor, fusing the leaks shut, but according to Pravda, “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/052910nuke/

So now we're lowering the nuke through nearly a mile of eddies and currents, and using a single ROV camera, controlled by the less-than-reliable BP, to make certain the nuke is positioned exactly so it will “squeeze the well's channel” shut. Then BP would have to get the ROV the hell out of there, because between the shockwave, the overpressure, and the EMP, you don't want the ROV anywhere near. On the surface and at least five miles away sounds about right.

Then another day passes, and the ROV is lowered to the blast site to ascertain the results. Even a day later, there would be a lot of radioactive silt for the ROV to have to move through, which would be a hazard to the electronics on board.

And if there ARE one or two other blowout sites, then they'll have to repeat the process—and hope that the second (and third) explosions don't “unsqueeze” the previous sites.

Obviously, the military would be in charge of the operation. I wouldn't trust the psychopathic liars of BP with a string of ladyfingers, let alone nuclear weapons. This is an outfit, after all, that, when doing an in-house evaluation of sensitive marine life in the area, had walruses on the list. Walruses. In the Gulf of Mexico. Talk about your koo-koo-ka-choob moments!

In addition to all that, there's a final reason why the USSR method may not apply. The Soviets used their nukes, not to seal blowouts as Pravda insinuated, but to blow out natural gas flameouts. It was the same approach Red Odair used, only on a bigger scale. The basic theory is the same as the one applied by a three-year-old to blow out the candles on his cake.

Taking that analogy, strained to begin with, a little bit further, this is more like trying to blow out a garden hose that is spurting water at high pressure.

At least the geography is on the side of the Strangelove crowd. With the media attention that has been given this year to volcanoes and earthquakes, it was reasonable for some to wonder if the drilling, blowout, nuclear explosions, whatever, could trigger something seismic. Fortunately, the Gulf of Mexico doesn't have any subduction zones or geosynclines, and is geologically stable, bordering on inert.

The Soviet approach on the natural gas flames worked four times out of five. I seriously doubt the Strangelove option would be successful in this case. We might just end up with poison clouds of crap in the Gulf that are not only toxic and carcinogenic, but radioactive to boot. Yum, Yum. Wanna buy some beachfront property cheap?

That doesn't mean it won't be tried. It's becoming clear that BP's contingency plans, piss poor to begin with, have petered out. And Obama is now under intense political pressure to Do Something.

Given that the government doesn't drill for oil, it's even less prepared for the blowout than BP was, and FAR less prepared than BP should have been. This means Obama's options are limited. But he -does- have nukes, in all shapes and sizes, and quite possibly ways of delivering them, even if that method is nothing more sophisticated than lowering the nuke on a cable.

And the situation is indisputably dire. The use of dispersants has actually made the situation worse, creating at least two vast plumes of crude oil droplets mixed with toxic and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, and one of the plumes is heading toward Alabama and the Florida panhandle, and the other is on track to utterly destroy the economy of the Bahamas.

The economic damage, not only to the US but to other countries rimming the Gulf (Mexico, several central American countries, and Cuba) will run into the trillions. The environmental damage is already beyond calculation; BP may have managed to sterilize the Gulf for a generation. And now there is a major health hazard, both from the oil itself and from the dispersants. The fumes are dangerous (and BP was forcing workers to work without respirators because it looked bad on camera—is there a REASON BP leadership aren't hanging from meathooks in front of their corporate headquarters?), and the dispersants, having created vast underwater clouds of oil and chemical droplets at all depths, have virtually assured that the entire food chain of the Gulf is contaminated at best, and flat-out poisoned at worst.

And the political pressure on Obama, originally just from Republicans eager to exploit the situation they largely facilitated to begin with in order to do political damage, is now taking a much more sincere and significant turn. People are frightened and desperate, and they have every reason to be. If he is seen as being incapable of a response, the political fallout will be severe, and probably fatal.

Even the smartest politician, faced with that sort of pressure, will do something, no matter how stupid, and I suspect that Obama is giving thought to doing something stupid.

Dropping nukes on the leaks might be the only option he has that will allow him to point and say that at least he tried something. If it works at all (unlikely), it's much more likely to do more harm than good, as happened with the dispersants. BP used them for cosmetic reasons—microscopic globules of oil aren't as unsightly as ones the size of a walrus—and turned a major environmental crisis into a complete catastrophe. Now it's Obama's turn. Even if his motives aren't as malign as BP's, they're still cosmetic, and likely to do even more damage. At least the oil reservoir is down far enough that we don't need to worry about the nukes tearing open yet more spills. But using them is a very bad idea, even in a situation where there don't seem to be any good ideas.

Unfortunately, the same sort of politics that put people like BP in control over our lives are the same ones that will govern whether we try to nuke the warheads.

But there is a bright side: it's not likely to kill any walruses in the area.

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Zepp was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and spent his formative years living in various parts of Canada from Halifax to Victoria, and then the UK, South Africa, and Australia before moving to the United States, where he has lived for 40 years. Aside from writing, his interests include hiking, raising dogs and cats, and making computers jump through hoops. His wife of 25 years edits his copy, and bravely attempts to make him sound coherent. Zepp lives on Mount Shasta.