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America Wanted to Nuke the Moon and Other Weird History

Khalid Elhassan October 15, 2020 32 min

United States - List of nuclear weapons tests of China — Nuking the Moon. Stillness in the Storm

19. Isolated Vulcan

Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

Vulcan, WV, was described thus in a 1972 book: “Their biggest problem was that the state had forgotten to build a road into the community. Although state maps showed a road into Vulcan, it was nowhere to be found. The only way people could get in and out was to drive up the Kentucky side and walk across a swinging bridge, which was too narrow for a vehicle. The bridge had been built by the coal company years before and was on the verge of collapse; although there were boards missing, the children had to walk across it to catch the school bus on the Kentucky side…“

Lack of a road was a serious hardship. On their way to and from school, Vulcan’s children had to crawl under parked railroad coal cars – which often blocked the community’s sole bridge. One child lost a leg doing that. There was a side road that ran through Vulcan. However, it belonged to a railroad that placed it off-limits, and vigorously prosecuted those who used it for trespass.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.