It's not often that news of a massive military breakthrough comes out of New Zealand, but local author Ray Waru has changed that for good.
Waru wrote in his new book "Secrets and Treasures" that the U.S. and New Zealand worked together during WWII to create a bomb that could cause a 33-foot tsunami.
The news was picked up by The Telegraph and is quickly working its way across the Internet and into conspiracy theories everywhere.
From The Telegraph:
The plans came to light ... [when] Ray Waru ... examined military files buried in the national archives.
"Presumably if the atomic bomb had not worked as well as it did, we might have been tsunami-ing people," said Mr Waru.
"It was absolutely astonishing. First that anyone would come up with the idea of developing a weapon of mass destruction based on a tsunami ... and also that New Zealand seems to have successfully developed it to the degree that it might have worked." The project was launched in June 1944 after a US naval officer, E A Gibson, noticed that blasting operations to clear coral reefs around Pacific islands sometimes produced a large wave, raising the possibility of creating a "tsunami bomb".
Called "Project Seal," the design team reportedly went through 3,700 bombs before declaring success and deeming it capable of destroying coastal cities around the globe.
Using 10 successive detonations about five miles from shores the bomb would require about a million pounds of explosive.
"If you put it in a James Bond movie it would be viewed as fantasy but it was a real thing," Waru told The Telegraph.
News of the bomb has been around for years, though this is the first time anyone has declared it a success. In 1999, The New Zealand Herald found an expert who said it was "viable" but that the program ended in obscurity without conclusive results.
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