From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech
Subject: Re: Project Thunderwell?
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 16:41:51 GMT

In article <4jsl2k$aud@daily-planet.nodak.edu>
adkins@badlands.NoDak.edu (Lance K Adkins) writes:

>...a small nuclear device placed at the bottom of a 500 ft. shaft with a 4 in.
>thick steel plate on top. When the bomb went off, the cover was blown off at
>exceptionally high velocity and was never found again...

Not quite correct.  The correct statement is that the cover was never
found again.  Precisely what happened to it is an open question. 

According to folks who knew the people involved, the plate was *not* a
planned experiment -- it was there only because some of the people running
the test said "oh, let's try it and see what happens" -- and the evidence
that it actually went anywhere is slim, a single film frame showing a blur
which *might* be the plate.  Even the calculations which suggested that the
plate might have reached escape velocity were quick, back-of-the-envelope
affairs, and nobody ever studied the question in enough depth to decide,
for example, whether the plate would have survived passage through the
atmosphere.
-- 
Americans proved to be more bureaucratic           |       Henry Spencer
than I ever thought.  --Valery Ryumin, RKK Energia |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu