← Back to the front page

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

16. Vulcan’s Scheme Might Have Been Weird, but it Worked

Vulcan’s plea for foreign aid made the small community famous. Bridge Hunter

The USSR’s embassy in Washington DC sent a senior journalist on December 17^th, 1977, to meet Vulcan’s mayor and survey the problem. The Soviets authorized their emissary to promise the locals that their government would keep an eye on the situation, and pay for building them a bridge if their own government did do so soon.

Within an hour of that visit, word filtered down to reporters milling about Vulcan that West Virginia’s government had agreed to build a bridge. The state legislature authorized $1.3 million for the task. Today, a one-lane graffiti-covered bridge connects the people of Vulcan to the outside world.

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.