Over the past 13 years a considerable body of data on explosive cratering has been developed for application to nuclear excavation projects. These data were obtained from some ten cratering programs using chemical explosives (TNT or nitromethane) and seven nuclear cratering detonations. The types of media studied have ranged from marine muck to hard, dry basalt, although most effort has been devoted to craters in NTS desert alluvium and basalt. Considerable effort has also been devoted to the study with chemical explosives of the use of linear explosives and rows of point charges. This paper is intended to be a summary of these data and a statement of the understanding which has been developed from them.

One of the techniques by which highly ionized plasmas can be generated in the laboratory makes use of strong, electromagnetically driven shock waves propagating into a cold gas. In this paper the phenomenon is analyzed as a one-dimensional single-fluid hydromagnetic problem, neglecting dissipation behind the wave. We hypothesize that the rarefaction wave remains attached to the front. In the limit of essentially complete ionization behind the front the problem can be solved analytically as long as the transverse magnetic field there remains small compared with the longitudinal field.