this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.
Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.
I'm doing neither one, but it's pretty clearly not an idea for this time. We lack an awful lot to be able to pull off a project at that scale, but frankly that makes me more curious not less.
Even not underestimating the scale, I'm not sure it would work because all the debris would need to be ejected from the thousands-of-kilometers-deep hole. And then you'd also have to have a solution to stop the walls from caving in before the next bomb had a chance to arrive. It's almost as if you not only need thousands of extremely powerful (even for nukes) bombs, but also need to deliver them in a continuous stream to keep the blast pressure up and the hole open.
I feel like, at that point, the easier strategy to accomplish your goal would be redirecting a large asteroid to impact the planet, or something like that.
And we would fuck that up and alter the orbit of Mars.