1963: A long bus ride through the Hindu Kush

I began my engineering career in the early 1960s, an era  when big was beautiful. This was also a time of great rivalry between the US and the Russians. As often as not this required demonstrations of who was the bigger man. Edward Teller, who will make a guest appearance later in this story, had designed and tested his hydrogen bomb on a Pacific island a few years before; the stolen Russian version inspired rational terror in us all in the following year. My first experience with a nuclear weapon was as a young army lieutenant in 1961 -- a later post for this blog -- and the Berlin blockade, followed soon after by a near miss of war in the Cuban missile crisis. There was a good deal of talk of Atoms for Peace too. The Bay Area Vallecitos plant, said to have been assembled from the innards of a Russian submarine,  was commissioned in the late 1950s, and by 1963 PG&E, having failed to build a plant at Bodega Bay near San Francisco, had purchased a lonely coastal site at Diablo Canyon, even securing an endorsement from the Sierra Club that this would be a good site for a 2000 Mw plant.

Afghan "terrorist" country today,  
peaceful in 1963 when I took 
my  long bus ride through the 
Hindu Kush

In those days my fondest dreams were about building big dams. I try now to recover that feeling. Was it fear or bravery that drove us to these things? The Russians had talked the Egyptians into letting them build the Aswan dam. One of my jobs, just out of the army, working for a famous engineering firm of the distinguished old fashioned partnership type, in New York City was to engineer a way to save the temples of Abu Simbel from the destructive rising waters behind Aswan. But we had some big dam tricks too, embodied in the great Tarbela Dam in Pakistan, which created an enormous 300 foot deep reservoir on the Indus River, then and now the biggest dam in the world and producer of almost twice as much power as Diablo Canyon.  MIT engineer John Lowe was in charge of that project,