How the Soviet Union planned to flush the United States with a devastating tsunami

In 1961, The New York Times reported that the USSR was preparing a powerful explosion. This message was for good reason. The Avalanche plan called for the explosion of 100 million tons of trinitrotoluene off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the United States. The rising tsunami wave was supposed to hit the United States, causing significant damage.

This was an alternative to creating nuclear weapons. The alternative is quite tough, entailing mass casualties among the civilian population. The author of the project was an outstanding humanist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov.

Academician A. D. Sakharov

But the USSR was not the first to create a man-made tsunami. The Americans already had a project Seal. His task was to completely destroy the enemy, washing him off the surface of the earth. Once, while clearing coral reefs in the Pacific with explosives, US Navy officer E. A. Gibbson noticed how explosions created a large wave. Military trials were not long in coming and began in 1944 off the coast of New Caledonia. The Americans blew up 3,700 bombs.

This was found out by Soviet intelligence and reported to the leadership of the country. Work on the Soviet project began in 1953. On August 12, tests of the Soviet hydrogen bomb were conducted at the Semipalatinsk test site. The problem was as follows. The bomb was very massive. The inability to apply it made all the work pointless from a military point of view. It was difficult to get to the goal. Bombers carrying her through the air could easily be shot down. Then Sakharov came up with the idea of delivering a charge to the place of destruction with the help of a torpedo placed on a submarine. Andrei Dmitrievich reported on his plan to L.P. Beria, who was responsible for the nuclear project. To this, this thought seemed promising.

L.P. Beria

According to the military, the nuclear submarine was supposed to deliver a T-15 torpedo to the US shores. The torpedo monster reached 25 meters in length and 1.5 meters in diameter. According to the developers, it could cause a wave 60 meters high, which could wash away a city like New York.
They discussed various options for delivering a charge to the shores of the United States. It was possible to launch a torpedo from a long distance, and using the clockwork, detonate it at the right time. Or leave it in advance off the coast of the United States and also program it in time.

Later, in the 2000s, our physicists learned that for the use of their similar torpedoes, Americans considered the Arctic Ocean. But later they abandoned this idea. They calculated that the tsunami would not destroy the enemy. The wave will not reach either the European part of Russia or Siberia. Further work on the project was meaningless.

Our experts, in turn, realized that only California would be able to destroy, the Cordilleras would stand in the way of the waves and prevent the tsunami from entering the country. Such an undertaking could lead to a mass death of the civilian population and did not solve any military tasks.
In the mid-1970s, Academician Sakharov revised his political views and became the leader of the dissident movement. He believed that the USSR should do everything so that the Cold War never became "hot."