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Welcome to Dateline, I'm Paul Murphy. In this edition a special report from Laos
where one of Australia's major construction companies is waiting for the go ahead to build a huge dam.
But our Laos' plan is to develop the country's hydroelectric power resources a recipe for disaster.
Also this week it's 50 years since America started the nuclear arms race with tests at Bikini Atoll.
Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
On July the 1st 1946 they detonated Abel.
The size of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, it was the first of a series called Operation Crossroads
designed to show what nuclear bombs would do to a fleet of unmanned, redundant and captured warships.
Dropped from a super fortress, Abel missed by half a mile.
Most of the ships survived, though the radiation would have killed anyone on board.
The results of that radiation 50 years on later in the program.
Laos was one of the last Southeast Asian countries to embrace the market economy.
Wedged between Thailand and Vietnam, it's a reminder of what Indochina once was.
Nearly half of Laos has forest cover, unpolluted air and its rivers flow from wild mountains down to the Mekong.
But Laos desperately needs to earn export income.
Its solution? To sell hydroelectric power and some 60 dams are planned.
Laos has already signed up with Thailand and Vietnam to buy electricity.
But will it lead to environmental disaster or to a sustainable use of resources?
Dateline's Mike Carey has just filed this report on Laos' dam destiny.
We'll fall back, we'll fall back.
Bun Bang Fai is the Laos rocket festival.
Before each rainy season, bamboo and black powder rockets shoot into the air to bring on the storms.
It's an ancient fertility rite and traditionally young men dressed as women go about telling obscene jokes.
And young women defend themselves with enormous wooden carvings of the male phallus.
The most outrageous aspects of Bun Bang Fai were outlawed recently, not that everybody has heard.
While the banter may not be as explicit these days, the bamboo sperm still fly high to impregnate a heavily overcast scion.
Laos has always depended on the rains and never more so than now.
In the next 25 years, Laos wants to become the Kuwait of South East Asia.
Instead of oil, its resource is water.
Instead of petrodollars, it will produce wealth through hydroelectric power.
Well, I think you can see it in many ways.
You have to first of all try to put yourself in the place of the Laotian government,
who themselves perceive great opportunities for development of the country through hydro power
and who are also being told by many outside players, whether they be companies who want to build dams,
whether it be the World Bank, whether it be other organizations, that this is the answer to your problems.
Now from the point of view of the government who is being presented with these opportunities, it all looks very tempting.