A few weeks ago, I was looking through records in the British National Archives
for a separate video idea that didn't end up going anywhere,
but while I was researching I found a completely different report,
secret and restricted when it was written but now unclassified,
and it's the first time in a long while that I've read some old archive file
and my jaw has literally dropped. It was called:
"Possible Sites for Completely Contained Nuclear Explosions in North Yorkshire."
North Yorkshire is a beautiful area that includes two national parks.
This is the middle of one of them.
It is stunning, it is historic, it is not somewhere that I'd
expect anyone to try and set off a nuclear explosion.
The report was written in June 1969, so just for context,
we're talking full Space Race, white-heat-of-technology era.
Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon only about a month after that report was written.
And the report is talking about Peaceful Nuclear Explosions.
Which was an idea that was in fashion
among some nuclear scientists and policy makers at the time.
Maybe, the theory went, we could create artificial harbours and canals
using nuclear bombs.
No more years of mechanical digging,
just put a few well-placed nukes in the ground and, boom, boom, boom,
there's your new canal.
Or maybe we could help stimulate production in gas wells,
basically nuclear fracking.
Or, and this was charitably the most practical idea,
create enormous underground cavities for gas storage,
instead of having to use big above-ground tanks.
The US did run a couple of dozen nuclear tests like that
under the rather Biblical title "Operation Plowshare".
The Soviet Union eventually ran more than 200.
But those are stories that have already been told by a lot of other people.
By the 1970s, the US and the Soviets would work out that it was a bad idea:
if you use a nuke, either for fracking, or to create underground gas storage,
the radiation ends up contaminating the gas.
But until that was figured out... well, I don't think many people
have actually noticed the records about it since it was declassified,
but it turns out at least some people in the UK were interested as well.
Those people worked at the Gas Council, and the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment,
and the report shows that they were seriously trying to work out
if nuclear bomb gas storage caverns were a good idea.
I kept researching, and found they'd commissioned a full study,
laying out the pros and cons, comparing the cost to other methods of storage.
They had picked a site.
Which was here.
Actually, literally, exactly there, bottom of that ravine.
Wheeldale, in the middle of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park.
The plan was: buy all the land for about a mile around.
Drill down 2,000 feet, about 600 metres,
with a special extra-wide drill bit,
big enough so they could drop a 25 kiloton nuclear bomb
down to the bottom of the hole.
I say "drop". Lower.
That's a big enough bomb to annihiliate a city in the open air.
Plug up the hole, cover the top so nothing comes out, hopefully.
Evacuate the thousand or so people who live nearby, just in case.
And then... boom.
Not much would happen on the surface.
There'd be a bit of a jolt and a rumble, a few birds startled into the air.
The local towns of Pickering and Whitby, about ten miles away each,
they'd feel a minor earthquake,
and maybe a couple of buildings would get a few small cracks in them.
I'm not kidding, that's what the report actually says,
it just phrases it a little bit more delicately than that.
It's not clear whether the locals would actually have been told what was going on,
but I think it would have been impossible to hide.
After that, they would let the giant cavern that had been created 600 metres down
cool for a few months, and then flush out and remove
most of the radioactive stuff that was left behind,
which it turns out would have been a lot more difficult than
they thought at the time.
Finally, they'd put some pumping equipment in here at the top, and presto,
giant underground high-pressure gas storage tank for relatively not much money.
And after a couple of years, they can sell most of this land back.
Cost of the explosion, in today's money, adjusted for inflation: about nine million pounds.
Which is... not actually bad for a giant gas storage tank?
I suspect that was a very optimistic estimate, though.
Even that was more expensive than setting up liquid natural gas storage above ground,
but once you've the made the cavern, it's much cheaper to run this way.
If, that is the explosion works as predicted. And if there's really no radiation left over.
There were a lot of risks.
Now, as far as I can tell,
this never got anywhere near the Prime Minister's desk,
there was never some high-up government meeting trying to work out whether they should
nuke a bit of a national park.
I suspect it would have been a very bad political decision.
And a very bad environmental decision. And a very bad financial decision.
And... look, I'm sure there is some possible alternate history where this happened,
but things would need to have been very different.
The last reference I could find is from November 1969.
The plan was worked out in theory, and the minutes of the meeting from then
say that "further thought would be given to what action should follow".
And at some point, in some other record that I missed,
or maybe that is still restricted,
I'm sure there'll be a note that says they decided not to pursue the idea.
Peaceful nuclear explosions would eventually be banned by treaty,
conveniently just after the point at which the US and Russia
found out they weren't a great idea.
And the North Yorkshire Moors, thankfully, were never nuked.