Shrinking Aral Sea

Re:Shrinking Aral Sea by flohofwoe on Thursday October 22, 2015 @02:54AM (#10430770)

I recently learned about another somewhat related large-scale Soviet environmental project called the 'Northern River Reversal', which probably would have undone the damage to the Aral Sea (but most likely would have messed up the environment in northern Siberia even more). Within this project there were also tests performed for the 'Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy' program where nukes were used to dig out parts of a planned river-reversal-channel.

Crazy times.

[edit, link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal]

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shrinking Aral Sea by larsga on Thursday October 22, 2015 @06:42AM (#10431465)

Kapuscinski has an outstanding piece on both of these projects in his book "Imperium". Basically, the real purpose of these projects was to remove all the private fruit gardens and replace them with state-owned cotton farms. State-owned in this case really means "owned by the families that ran the Soviet republic", of course, since these were largely independent of Moscow.

[ Parent | on HN ]