The Atomic Age of the 1950s was dominated by the race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to develop increasingly powerful nuclear weapons, as well as parallel efforts to better harness the power of the atom to produce electricity. But another front opened in 1957, when a group of U.S. nuclear scientists proposed using nuclear explosives for large-scale earthmoving, an effort known as Project Plowshare.

One of the first offshoots of Plowshare was Project Chariot, a plan by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to use nuclear explosions to excavate a harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska. The scheme was pushed in 1958 by physicist Edward Teller, director of the commission’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (LRL), known today as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.