Talk about conviction. Now that the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico is growing and containment efforts are proceeding at a snail's pace, the talk of shutting down the leak through brute force—the nuclear option—has intensified among outspoken pundits, energy experts, and some scientists.

But top officials say “no way”, go so far as to call the proposal “crazy”. As a workable option, though, it’s not all that radical. The force of an explosion of a several kiloton nuclear device, if positioned properly, should snap the well shut.

The logistical problem, discounting the certain public outcry, is where to touch off the device to make sure it works as advertised. According to the few successful efforts by the Russians in the 1960s to extinguish gas-well fires, the detonations were positioned around 1,000 feet underground just meters from the well bore. In the case of BP’s leaking well, the bore is at 6,000 feet. Detonating the device beneath 1,000 feet of rock would theoretically turn the rock to glass, plugging the hole permanently. Is there a risk the blast could simply create a radioactive oil leak, or make the leak even worse? Yes. But even Tony Hayward concedes in his testimony before Congress today that his company has been more successful in rounding up the oil than in stopping the flow. Which is to say, not at all.

BP, of course, has little other choice. The U.S. government would have to be willing to take over the effort for the nukes to appear on the table, and BP would probably go bankrupt before then. But what if it were to come to that? For brief time in the early 1960s Project Plowshare explored the use of nuclear bombs for peacetime activities. At the time, the deleterious effects of airborne radiation were not widely appreciated, and it was thought that, like dynamite, fissile explosions could revolutionize large-scale engineering projects. There were plans in the U.S. to use Peaceful Nuclear Explosions—the name for the official program which had several restrictions, including yields under 150 kT—to accomplish major tasks, like widening the Panama Canal and creating an artificial harbor in Alaska, in the blink of an eye. The Russians, with their transparently named “Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” program, went further by actually conducting projects like diamond mining (few diamonds, but lots of radiation), river damming (the infamous 140-kT Chagan test that mostly served to anger the U.S.), and seismological shifting for the oil and gas industry (a near calamity when the Volga threatened to flood the explosion chamber).

In the U.S., aboveground tests quickly soured on a public that by then was well aware of the hazards of radiation poisoning, so the tests were realigned to help the energy industry by stimulating the flow of natural gas in difficult deposits. The first such test, Project Gnome, was a failure after the desired flow didn’t appear and the public expressed some understandable reservations over being supplied with radionuclide-laced gas. There were subsidiary experiments. The effort to pipe water through the superhot cavity to generate steam for electricity was inspired by the finding that 30% of the energy released by the bomb was converted to heat in the rock, but rapid cooling would kill the steam generation quickly. Another aim to recover useful radionuclides at the explosion source was also impracticable.

But the seismological portion of the experiment was considered a success, and Project Gnome, believe it or not, pointed the way to a theory that a bomb could be used to reduce the viscosity of oil in the Athabascan Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, and aid recovery. Obviously, that theory was never explored as Project Plowshare fizzled. This was probably fortunate as the Russians met with calamity after calamity. Even now, natural gas wells near the Nevada Test Site have to skirt around radioactive cavities created by hundreds of nuclear tests.

If we want to plug the well tomorrow, a nuclear blast is the best way to get it done. But peacetime nukes have too much liability. The U.S. has signed numerous treaties that would stay its hand, even if it were in charge of the oil recovery and leak stoppage effort, which it isn’t. And we must consider the 3.1-kT Project Gnome, which created radioactive leaks despite being detonated more than 1,100 feet underground. We can’t discount the fact that nobody has ever bothered trying to detonate a nuke under nearly a mile of ocean.

The option of using a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—a conventional explosive—to collapse the well pipe has also recently been floated. But again, the risk of worsening the leak and destroying the borehole is high. Higher, perhaps, than with a nuclear bomb.

This much is clear, however. If the relief well and cap strategy works—and some say a relief well has a 95% chance of neutralizing a leaky well—we will have a dodged a bullet. And a potential nuclear calamity on top of an oily one. Just give it some time.