An interior seaway for northern Africa

One of the difficulties confronted in advancing explosives-engineering is that experimentation is both hazardous and expensive. This is particularly true of engineering experiments employing nuclear explosives, because there is a possibility that personnel located many miles from the center of the atomic blast may suffer from fallout or the migration of radioactivity through groundwater to public sources of drinking water. As a consequence, in order to establish courses of instruction in nuclear explosives engineering, it is necessary to use the special technique of deep consideration of a problem as a substitute for a laboratory exercise. This paper represents a summary of one such exercise in which students were assigned the task of performing the preliminary engineering on a project which could, if implemented, have considerable beneficial effect on a rather large area of the world. The possibilities of this project coming into being are quite remote in our time, largely due to the political ramifications and the current tendency to overemphasize the hazards of anything pertaining to nuclear explosions. But, as a classroom device, the use of the Project Analysis as a teaching tool has proved invaluable in training the students to think of the whole system involved rather than a part of it. This paper, primarily a summary of a report submitted by a student team in the course of Engineering with Nuclear Explosives at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1968, speaks for itself in its inventiveness and its expression of deliberate concern for the betterment of mankind. A minimal amount of additional material was added by the senior author to draw attention to recent related events and publications. The students named the study 'Project Pecos Bill' after an American folklore character, a mythical super cowboy who invented roping and other cowboy skills. During a very dry spell, Pecos Bill is said to have used a pointed stick to dig the Rio Grande River and bring water from the Gulf of Mexico. The poignant results of his work can be seen in the agricultural splendor that is the Rio Grande Valley. The parallel to this present study is obvious