Would I do it? I’d consider it, after exhausting other options. I’d have a bunch of people examine the possibility in parallel with other options, getting to the point where we’d need treaty variances and reporting back. It would keep a couple of government scientists at LALN or LLNL busy for a couple of weeks.
But I’m not running the show. There’s this guy, named “Obama,” who had *zero* executive experience before taking this job, who is treating the office of POTUS as on-the-job training, with a bunch of idiot ivy-league academics for advisers around him, who, according to a survey by Forbes Magazine, has the lowest proportion of staff with private sector experience going back to LBJ’s administration, who is in charge. He’s a lawyer, and not a very good one at that, and is surrounded by people who are grifters and cronies from Chicago. If you’re going to get something out of him, you need to give something first. That’s the way Chicago politics works.
You’re going to advocate using a nuke to this crowd, not to me.
And no, I don’t really care about the people of gulf. After Katrina, I’ll wager a lot fewer people in the US care about the people of Louisiana than did before that sorry spectacle. Lots of people will cry crocodile tears and blubber that “they care!,” but then go out and drive their gas-hog SUV. Actions speak louder than words - they claim they care, but their actions say that they care about cheap oil more. I’m old enough to not care what people think about me to be brutally honest.
By the by, it was a Democrat Senator from Louisiana that screwed Nevada with the Yucca Mountain repository. Nevadans have never forgotten that legislation, nor the name of the guy who did it: Bennett Johnston.
I’d wager that most people of the gulf area don’t give a rat’s ass that suspending drilling leases costs jobs across the rural west[*], or that pulling grazing leases destroys family ranches of 100+ years, or that the stupid way that firefighting has turned into a national industry across the west is cratering hunting opportunities, habitat, communities, etc. I’m just all out of sympathy for other regions of the US after they’ve given us westerners a good screwing in all our orifices. You yourself betray this attitude with your use of the phrase “lifeless desert like Nevada.”
[*]Word is, the Obama administration is going to push to get yet more land throughout the west designated as “wilderness” in the next couple of months before Congress gets out for summer recess. More oil, gas, uranium, etc put off-limits - which is what is forcing the oil companies out into deeper and deeper water in the first place.