One of the Soviet Union's greatest natural assets is the Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of salt water. Much of Russia's annual fish catch and most of its black caviar come from the Caspian; tankers ply its waters, carrying oil from Baku to ports in the north. But the Caspian is in trouble. Since 1930 its water level has dropped more than eight feet, leaving fishing villages and port facilities high and dry; the fish catch has been cut more than half. To compensate for the continuing water loss, the Soviets are planning a bold and imaginative project that calls for use of nuclear explosives to blast out more than half of a 70-mile canal across northern Russia.
The huge canal would connect the Pechora River—which flows north into the Barents Sea region of the Arctic Ocean—with the southward-flowing Kama River, a tributary of the mighty Volga (see map page 82). Once the link is made and the necessary dams constructed, part of the Pechora's water will be diverted downhill into the Kama and thence into the Volga, which is the Caspian's major source of new water. The increased flow should stabilize the level of the inland sea. At a recent meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, the Soviets tried to assure fellow members that the explosions would not only cost considerably less than conventional explosives but produce no dangerous fallout either in the U.S.S.R. or abroad. As proof, they revealed hitherto secret details of a 1971 test along the canal route. It involved the simultaneous detonation of a row of three 15-kiloton nuclear charges (compared with 20 kilotons for the Hiroshima bomb), spaced about 500 ft. apart. The blasts produced so little radiation and such stable walls that technicians were able to walk along the rim of the 2,600-ft.-long crater only two days later. The only damages were some cracks in the brick ovens and wall plaster of nearby log cabins. Although the Russians have not done any further blasting, they say that the job could be done with some 250 nuclear devices, mostly in the 100- to 200-kiloton range, fired about 20 at a time.
American reaction to the project is mixed. Physicist Glenn Werth, of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, praises it as both safe and economical. He notes that the Russians have already set off nuclear blasts to stimulate further output from old gas and oil fields, control runaway gas well fires and remove earth for strip mining without any major hitches.
Other American scientists, however, warn that reducing the northward flow of the Pechora's relatively warm fresh-river water could reduce the temperature of the Arctic Ocean and cause the ice to expand. Or the Arctic Ocean could become saltier, resulting in a lower freezing point and causing the ice to melt. In either case, the river-reversal scheme has the potential to cause major climatological repercussions.