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Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space
- tchvil 5y ago"There was even a plan, which ultimately fizzled, to set off a nuclear blast on the moon." Humanity at its best
- Roritharr 5y agoA friend of mine had the interesting theory that this will inevitably happen some time, even if it would just be for entertainment purposes.
- quickthrower2 5y agoNYE 2081? Or maybe a weird version of angry birds for a trillionaire
- mhh__ 5y agoAs much as I know I it's an awful thing to happen on earth even as a test, there's a part of me that clearly has a Promethean desire to observe a nuclear explosion. I applied to work for a job at a (explosions rather than power) nuclear agency, didn't get the job, slightly glad I didn't now really.
- HPsquared 5y agoI wonder... would that be visible from Earth, and what would it look like? Probably wouldn't show on a full moon, but maybe a new moon?
- JasonFruit 5y agoWe could make it a lot easier to see the man in the moon.
- joconde 5y agoThis has got to release energy similar to a meteroid impact, right? Do we know if there was any chance of side effects on the Moon and/or the Earth? (e.g. slight changes in orbit or mass, debris in space, etc.)
- messe 5y ago> Do we know if there was any chance of side effects on the Moon and/or the Earth? Pretty much none. The moon is big, and even nuclear blast would release a comparatively tiny amount of energy.
- ben_w 5y agoOnly in a “well technically” sense. Moon weighs far too much for a mere nuke to do much to its orbit or mass, and any debris you kicked up with one would be lost among all the other bits of grit too small and common to bother enumerating.
- azernik 5y agoAnd most of the debris (anything that goes flying at less than 1.8km/s) will just fall back down.
- messe 5y ago2.4km/s. Anything not launched at escape velocity will return. Objects at orbital velocities will return to the impact site after a single orbit (more or less, this isn't counting the effects of earth's gravitational pull).
- mbreese 5y agoBut wouldn’t it take a while? I’m imagining a dust cloud of epic proportions. But I guess without an atmosphere, the only effect would be gravity, so it would all have to settle back down somewhat quickly? I’m imagining a sci-fi plot where you have two competing moon bases. And as one group is leaving, they detonate a bomb which kicks up enough debris to incapacitate the other base.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoNuclear energy was just a by-product. Every nuclear power plant had to produce weapons grade plutonium. At its height the US had 50000 nukes.
- mjklin 5y agoAnd a plan by Edward Teller to create a harbor in Alaska using atom bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot
- jbrnh 5y ago"The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement" by Dan O'Neill is highly recommended.
- Simplicitas 5y agowe keep forgetting we're just apes
- Koshkin 5y agowe also keep forgetting we're 66% just water
- DaniloDias 5y agoListen- that thing keeps giving women periods. Somebody had to do something.
- dang 5y agoMaybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- moneytide1 5y agoBecause an EMP would show us who we really are.
- Saptarishi 5y agoOr a solar flare. Nature's wrath is unimaginable.
- axpy906 5y agoLike the Carrington Event but with modern tech? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
- fataliss 5y agoThe space race was a wild time. "Accessory to War" by Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a fun and easy read that talks about some pretty sketchy things. And it's nothing new either, the whole WW2 showed in full display that leaving the military leverage science is a dangerous pandora box.
- justinator 5y ago"once" is an interesting word to use, as many nuclear bombs were set off in space, and many, many more at a high altitude in our atmosphere.
- yeuxardents 5y agoAll that radiation floating around, landing on crop fields and soils..something like 1000 atmosphere bomb tests and 2000 underground tests. I am sure that none of the atmosphere bombs spread radiation around that people breathed in or consume, nor the underground bombs touched any aquifers.../extreme sarcasm
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoPlenty in the ocean too.
- beerandt 5y agoNegligible compared to naturally occurring radioactive elements.
- londons_explore 5y agoHas anyone done estimates of how many cancer deaths this caused?
- jcims 5y agoPretty good video from Veritasium o related to this, about how Kodak detected the presence of nuclear weapons tests. https://youtu.be/7pSqk-XV2QM https://youtu.be/7pSqk-XV2QM
- mdp2021 5y agoShould not the difference be measurable? Do not we have recordings before those tests?
- beerandt 5y agoOnly one fusion bomb in 100-mile space. 6 100-mile space detonations counting 5 <2kt fission bombs. As many as 18, if you count all detonations above ~10 miles.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agothe best deterrent to all those nasty alien probes.
- dsq 5y agoWhat always filled me with a chilled fascination were the names themselves: "Starfish Prime", "Castle Bravo", "ivy Mike". Innocuous code names, infused with so much dreadful portent.
- amelius 5y agoAnd decades later, people were afraid that the commissioning of the LHC would cause the collapse of the universe.
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoWe just happened to be lucky enough to exist on the timeline where LHC didn't collapse the universe.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThat's not really how it works. We have a decent model of physics where the LHC does not collapse the universe, and that model doesn't rely on the anthropic principle; for the LHC to be able to collapse the universe, fundamental laws of physics would have to have been different, which isn't just “the timeline”. I know quantum physics is weird, but there are still regular ol' real-valued probability estimates too.
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoIt was just a joke.
- johnchristopher 5y agoMandatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A :)
- Synaesthesia 5y agoThis experiment showed how easy it is to disable satellites, just set off a nuke at very high altitude, and the resulting debris will circle the globe and ionize satelittes' fragile electronics.
- dncornholio 5y agoOne of the biggest mistakes of mankind. Especially in hindsight. "Starfish Prime serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation" Bad things will happen. Don't need to be a scientist to understand that. I fail to see any value of this information.
- ransom1538 5y agoMy favorite story was from the Manhattan project. A small handful of physicists were not convinced a nuclear reaction at this scale would stop. According to their calculations - the reaction could consume a larger portion of the planet. Oh well. Let's roll the dice.
- marcosdumay 5y ago> A small handful of physicists were not convinced Somebody came up with the idea, and was immediately dismissed by the most pessimist estimates. After somebody spent 10 minutes doing the math, there was no doubt anymore.
- ithkuil 5y agoFrom Wikipedia: > Edward Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei.[note 2] Bethe calculated that it could not happen,[34] and a report co-authored by Teller showed that "no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started."[35] In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned the possibility of this scenario to Arthur Compton, who "didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington" and was "never laid to rest".
- pstanger 5y agoThe results were surprisingly bad, but the article concludes with a number of learnings, a detection system, and a radiation mitigation system that all came from the fallout of this test. It was a reckless experiment, but not without its silver linings
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tamaharbor 5y agoAnd most people think scientists are wonderful and know everything all the time.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoIt was one of a long series of high-altitude tests in 1962's Operation Fishbowl - besides all the satellite damage it even threatened the Apollo program. https://www.wired.com/2012/03/starfishandapollo-1962/ https://www.wired.com/2012/03/starfishandapollo-1962/ Fishbowl had multiple disasters. The following launch exploded on the pad, and contaminated Johnston Island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl NPR showed some dramatic footage back in 2010. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/07/01/128170775/a-very-scary-light-show-exploding-h-bombs-in-space https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/07/01/128170775/a...
- SCAQTony 5y agoAn "effing" bad idea, but a positive outcome is that the world knows it is an option against a killer asteroid. YMMV
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoI've wondered about that. Where is a better place to set off a nuclear bomb?
- dang 5y agoPast related threads: The U.S. set off a nuclear bomb in space in 1962 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867200 - July 2021 (52 comments) A Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs in Space (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853823 - Dec 2019 (2 comments) Starfish Prime - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19096803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19096803 - Feb 2019 (3 comments) In the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671438 - June 2017 (70 comments) Declassified footage shows 1st ever nuclear explosion in space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8067009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8067009 - July 2014 (1 comment) A Very Scary Fireworks Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488320 - July 2010 (24 comments) Starfish Prime, outer space nuclear test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114 - July 2010 (24 comments)