DARPA once had a plan (Project SEESAW) to use a particle beam to blast incoming Soviet warheads out of space. The beam required more electricity than existed on Earth. Their solution? Use nuclear bombs to blow holes in the bottom of the Great Lakes and drain them in 15 min through enormous turbines.

Gonna save the country from nuclear attack by nuking a substantial part of it is the best genre of cold war planning...and surprisingly common.

Would watch the movie

If you built your gigantic AI datacenter under the great lakes you could power it and cool it with the output from the turbines at the same time. This could still work!

Drain them INTO WHERE? Were the nukes supposed to blast a void big enough for them to flow into or did they think they were blasting their way into the hollow earth??

I mean, technically that is a solution.

I wish this kind of nonsense had stayed confined within the well-paid, cocaine/LSD-drenched hallways of DARPA, instead of escaping into the wider well-paid, cocaine/LSD-drenched world of VCs.

This seems more practical than AI.

I wonder which science fiction author paid off his bar bill with the money he made suggesting this to them.

I’d be shocked if you haven’t already read Nuking The Moon by Vince Houghton but this seems like a good time to recommend it here

"The good news: we can eliminate the Russian nukes before they detonate. The bad news, is...uhh, we have 5 giant, shipwreck-filled craters where the Great Lakes once stood." "Is that it?" "Yes, and if the Russians have more nukes, we have more lakes. Or we can invade Canada or whatever." "Proceed."