Daily MOS: The Nuclear Potato Cannon

Physics class wasn’t without its entertainment growing up in small town NH. Once a year, the seniors in advanced physics would head outside and use a homemade device to shoot potatoes into the wild blue yonder. You know, for our education.

I hadn’t considered the possibility of building a powerful enough cannon to yeet the taters into orbit.

Today’s Moment of Science… the nuclear potato cannon.

The basic design of a potato cannon is based on a WWII era anti-aircraft weapon called the Holman Projector. The DIY version, thus far unproven in falling Nazi aircraft, is generally made with a lengthy bit of PVC piping utilizing one of several methods of compressing gas to unleash upon the unsuspecting spud.

I told you that story to tell you this story. Because we’re not talking about a potato cannon.
Per se.

After the US dropped Castle Bravo, their biggest piece of thermonuclear fuckery from the Cold War, the idea sprouted that perhaps there was a safer way to blow their dicks off. It would be nearly another decade until dropping bombs above the ground was banned, but Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, that fucker took a piece of the planet with it and was enough for them to start researching safer alternatives.

So, nuclear test Pascal B.

From May to October of 1957, Operation Plumbbob was a series of twenty nine explosive tests, many of them nuclear. Most tests were done above ground, being dropped from airplanes, balloons, towers, or just detonated sitting on the surface of the Earth. In August, Dr. Robert Brownlee from Los Alamos National Laboratory was tasked with blowing up one of these little bastards underground.

There had been previous underground tests. So far the attempts hadn’t so much contained the explosions as they had given the nukes an easy way to cleave craters in the Earth.

For test Pascal A, a device was lowered down into a slender 500 foot borehole and detonated. But something peculiar happened. Only expected to go off with the explosive yield of 1kg of TNT, it was estimated to have gone off with 55,000 times that charge.

Brownlee called it the “biggest damn Roman candle you ever saw.”

So naturally they had to do it again.

This time though, safety first. They were like “eh, idk, maybe stick something on top of it?” So they jammed a 2,000lb steel lid on it.

Brownlee later said he was sure a ton of steel wasn’t going to stop the blast, so he did the only scientifically responsible thing: set up cameras to take pictures of the manhole cover being shot to kingdom come. Which makes me suspect he knew he’d made a nuclear potato cannon.

Nuclear energy in the 1950s was a bit too ‘fuck around and find out’ for my taste.

With the detonation of Pascal B, the camera was only able to capture one image of the disc because it was blasted away so quickly. According to calculations, it was estimated to have flown at 66km/s. Never mind far surpassing the velocity needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere, it was going fast enough to escape the solar system.

After an extensive search, the steel lid was never found.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, delighted with the notion that we shot a flying saucer into space, but also pretty sure math says this thing vaporized before hitting lower Earth orbit.

To get more tales of nuclear fuckery, fuzzy critters, and occasional rocket scientist orgies, head to patreon.com/scibabe.

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