You’re a veteran of the Iraq war and a former Navy submarine officer who’s now a scholar of nuclear policy at Columbia University. You’re also among the newly emergent big-bang crowd that wants to blow up the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico.

I advocate the demolition of the well. It’s feasible to use nuclear explosives. The Russians did it four times with a 100-percent success rate. But I fear the mere mention of the nuclear option has only given opponents and unnamed oil engineers a straw man to attack.

I’m sure you’re aware that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, appears to be opposed to the idea of blowing up the well to bring it under control.

He seems to oppose using nuclear weapons. The approach I favor is a conventional demolition, not nuclear. Any combination of explosives that could be used to break the well and bury it under a lot of rock could be effective.

Why hasn’t that been done?

I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.

Why is the language of drilling so studded with macho jargon, as in “top kill”?

I think people want to overdramatize the problem. It’s really an underwater-plumbing problem.