Canada's (fictional) Earth Cannons?

May 11, 2008 11:06 PM

Looking for a short story or possibly a novel involving Canada, gravel and orbital denial.

I'm 0 for 2 when it comes to getting vaguely remembered things identified so I'm hoping I'm due.

I'm pretty sure I read a story years back in which Canada was a pariah state for gunking up the sky. As I remember it, with the world on the brink of a nuclear war, Canada put nukes at the bottom of mineshafts, filled them with gravel and detonated the bombs. This blew tons of junk into the upper atmosphere/low orbit that made missiles (and satellites) into swiss cheese. Besides making ICBMs unworkable, telecommunications and any peaceful exploration of space were off the menu for some years to come. The rest of the world was pretty upset.

It doesn't seem a terribly Canadian thing to do, but that is what sticks in my head. Please tell me this rings a bell for one of you out there in AskMe-land.

posted by codswallop to media & arts (5 comments total)

Is this it?
posted by Happy Dave at 1:59 AM on May 12, 2008

Found that by googling "short story canada mineshaft nuke" by the way.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:59 AM on May 12, 2008

Nope, not it. Thanks though that looks interesting in its own right.
posted by codswallop at 4:56 PM on May 12, 2008

I should probably just make up a memory with a few interesting-sounding keywords and I bet I'll get a lot of answers.
posted by codswallop at 11:01 PM on May 13, 2008

Well, I've had no luck either, but I did find this rather illuminating but very long conversation at an astronomy forum about orbital denial. Might be some clues in there?
posted by Happy Dave at 4:44 AM on May 14, 2008