No Challenge Too Big or Too Small: From Kuwait's Reconstruction to the Limitless Potential of Human Engineering

No Challenge Too Big or Too Small

At 18 years old, I skipped my high school graduation and flew straight to Kuwait. It was 1991, the First Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in chaos. Apart from the occasional flicker of generator power, the grid was essentially dark. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Enormous oil field fires burned across the desert, turning the sky overhead a deep, suffocating black. Everything needed to be rebuilt — and fast.

I had come to take part in that reconstruction effort, an international operation to repair the wounds of war. It was the first time I had witnessed an engineering project of such staggering scale. The challenge had to be advanced on multiple fronts simultaneously just to get the country functioning again.

No matter where you looked, there was work to be done. I was attached mainly to a labor crew doing rapid repairs on doors and windows blown out during the fighting. But there were far more daunting tasks at hand. The most dramatic were the enormous, roaring flames. Iraqi forces had set fire to hundreds of oil wells, most of which were still spewing black smoke and petroleum fumes. On the worst days, the sky stayed dark from morning to night; the air stung your eyes and scorched your throat.

The scene was so apocalyptic that Carl Sagan himself warned of potentially severe environmental consequences. He predicted that if the smoke from the burning oil fields reached the stratosphere, the effects could resemble those of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia — the event behind the so-called "Year Without a Summer" — with global temperatures dropping 0.4 to 0.7°C and widespread crop failures worldwide. Fortunately, Kuwait's smoke columns never rose that high. Regional temperatures did dip somewhat, but the global impact was negligible. As it turned out, predicting what will or won't reduce global temperatures is remarkably difficult. (Dear reader, I've planted a thread here to pull on later.)

Red Adair Company, Boots and Coots, and less cinematically named firms such as Bechtel poured into Kuwait after the ceasefire, working to extinguish the massive blazes and cap the wells. In the handful of hotels in Kuwait City that still had working phone lines, I would occasionally run into these crews — men and women covered head to toe in black oil and soot.

Putting out the fires demanded creative thinking on every front. Engineers working in the burning oil fields discovered they could reverse-flow existing pipelines — originally built to pump oil out to sea — to draw seawater in from the Persian Gulf. A Hungarian company converted a piece of equipment dubbed "Big Wind": a modified Soviet T-34 tank chassis fitted with two turbine engines salvaged from MiG-21 fighter jets, each capable of blasting 220 gallons of water per second. I never saw it in action myself — only in footage — but the machine became legendary.

Other tasks were less cinematic but no less grim. Retreating Iraqi forces had left booby traps throughout the country. They had stuffed grenades into pipelines — including at one facility where I worked. They had planted landmines everywhere, and every one of them had to be found and removed. Many were small plastic "toe-popper" mines, designed not to kill but to maim. Locating them was painstaking work. Despite largely successful clearance efforts, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of mines still remain in the ground today.

This illustrates something important: we cannot solve every problem. But we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge, and through human ingenuity, leave the world better than we found it.

That is the central theme of MIT Technology Review's July/August issue. The challenges we face come in many forms. Some are vast but knowable — tunneling beneath the ocean floor, for instance. Some exist at the nanoscale, representing decades of dedication and research, such as the story of ASML, the company with unique capabilities that produces the world's most advanced chip-making machines. And some challenges are planetary in scale, pushing us into truly uncharted territory — like the prospect of a future in which we deliberately engineer a Tambora-like shading effect, cooling the Earth through calculated human intervention.

By the time my 90-day contract in Kuwait was up, the devastated landscape had begun to show the fruits of that massive international reconstruction effort. The air wasn't exactly fresh, but breathing it no longer felt like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. On beaches that had been mined, families splashed in the waters of the Gulf. Lights came back on. Taps ran with clean water. Markets reopened. It was a transformed place.

Yes, forces both within and beyond our control will always disrupt the existing order. People will make mistakes, or act out of self-interest at the expense of others. But we are also capable of working together, of showing up — and when the smoke finally clears, we find that we have made real, tangible progress.

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