A secret project during World War II sought to develop a way to use tsunamis as a deadly weapon.

" It's been revealed that the United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests in the 1940s of a 'tsunami bomb' designed to inundate coastal cities. "

Known as 'Project Seal', the weapon would have been used to attack enemy cities by generating tsunamis on demand. Both New Zealand and the United States conducted underwater testing that suggested the concept was feasible. Ultimately however the idea was shelved indefinitely a few months before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945.The plans for the weapon were discovered by New Zealand author and filmmaker Ray Waru. "I came across actually by chance a series of Project Seal reports that were made a long time after the war that were sitting on the desk of a man who was vetting military material," he said. "Over a period of several months they carried out almost 4,000 test explosions to kind of calibrate the size of the explosions, the number of explosions and the depth of the explosion in the water needed in order to create a tsunami effect."