Is there a true 'nuclear option' to seal the Gulf spill?

Word has it that the Soviets used tactical nuclear weapons to seal similar leaks back in the day.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.'

Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.

These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.

Happily, with a track record like that, "the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%," KP writes. "The Americans could certainly risk it."

KP must be unfamiliar with the American strain of Leftist moonbats, who would sooner reduce an entire continent to a subsistence-level existence than allow the use of modern technologies like, say, DDT. As for nukes? The Leftists would rather nuke an American city than risk the life of an American Eel.