Former president Bill Clinton has endorsed the logic of the Foster Option (to be distinguished from the Foster Plan), in a video Greg has featured over at Planet Gore.

Watch the devilishly insightful ex-prez argue for exploding the well and choking out the leak with rock debris:

Unfortunately, Clinton doesn’t go far enough, saying “by the way, you don’t need to use a nuclear weapon — I’ve seen all that.” I’d love for him to unpack that. Does he mean he’s seen contingency plans for conventional and atomic detonations? Because nobody — but nobody — has satisfactorily made the case that a deliverable amount of conventional explosives could stop the leak, or even not make it worse. In fact, the best evidence the layman can have that a conventional blast is implausible is that it hasn’t been attempted. Nor has anyone of prominence in the administration even discussed it publicly. I think they know it is likely to turn one big leak into a hundred small ones.

Clinton realizes this later in his remarks. “This is a geological monster,” he says. “You can basically put in a huge amount of explosives down there. . . but what else would you do that might upset the eco-structure of the Gulf?” If you get to the right depth, and set up the blast below an impervious layer of rock, you choke off the wellhead and keep the fallout from reaching the ocean floor. Now, I am obviously not a nuclear engineer and I haven’t seen the stratigraphy down there, so I don’t know if all the technical pieces of the puzzle fit (do we have a credible delivery vehicle etc.).

But I know this: At those pressures and depths, you have to throw the rule book out the window. You can’t bring C4 to a plutonium fight here. Thirty kilotons, dropped down one of the relief wells, blam-o.

Nuke the well.