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Comment by chris5745 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine without early and widespread warning, an asteroid impact could be mistaken by nation-states for an attack. What safeguards (if any) might we have or develop to prevent an asteroid hitting country 1 from causing a “counter” strike by country 1 against country 2?

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Very unlikely that China, Russia, or US (and its allied countries) would misidentify a nuclear attack. There are massive surveillance resources dedicated toward atmospheric sampling, etc. etc. and a non-nuclear explosion would be correctly identified as such in very short order.

On top of that, even a 30-meter asteroid impact would release more energy on impact than a typical nuclear warhead. A 250-meter asteroid might release more energy than ALL nuclear weapons used in the world to date.

Atmospheric sampling is definitive but slow, because it necessarily propagates at wind speed. I do agree misidentification is very unlikely.

They would identify initially using the global seismic network..

Would country 1 counter-strike without getting confirmation that it was, in fact, country 2? How would they know it wasn't country 3, 4, or 5?

If you ask what the known U.S. procedures and plans have been, the answer is a resounding YES, they would have nuclearly attacked ALL their enemies at once according to the man whose job was to evaluate these procedures and plans of the U.S. military:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-doomsday-machine-978140888...

Just a sample quote:

"I soon discovered that in the plans of Pacific forces, from top to bottom, there was no provision at all for attacking only the Russian targets in their sphere. In every plan for war with the Soviet Union, Chinese targets (including every major city in China) were also struck."

In the whole book there are many accounts on that, on the various levels of the chain of command, even intentionally designed to act independently.

More transparency is still needed there, probably much less was changed in the following years than it ever admitted to any civilian, including the presidents, again according to the book, so the state is more than scary and when I read that insider info, I consider these involved really completely mad. Most of them Nazi-like "we just follow the orders" mad, and some simply pure evil mad.

Similar to the cyber attack attribution problem, isn't it?

Stuxnet had some pretty program time traces in the code.

I think apart from the energy release there are few similarities with a nuclear explosion (no EMP, no radioactive fallout) plus I have to imagine any air defense radar system could detect the incoming asteroid in its final moments.

This is a legitimate concern with the "young" nuclear powers, like India and Pakistan. Their detection technology is less mature; their command-and-control systems are less mature; there's a higher level of tension between the two. Neither country is incompetent or hungry for war, but it's worrying to me. I'd expect them to behave rationally, but if the timing happened to coincide with a particularly combative episode, things could get out of control. I'm not even going to speculate about how North Korea might react; they're a total wildcard.

This is just alarmist. The bravado shown on TV is surely not taken seriously by the authorities themselves for they know the consequences. So even if the point of impact coincides with the crescendo of tension to the T, sanity will prevail despite it seeming otherwise.

That is a very naive point of view. You don't know that their systems are "less mature". And do you really think thousands of seasoned scientists on both sides are going to misclassify any such event?

Not sure, but that scenario does sound like a interesting plot for a book or movie.

Niven and Pournelle thought so as well when they wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" [1] in which "...China, anticipating the coming ice age launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia. The last Soviet Premier reassures the US that they are not the target, and he requests help against the unprovoked attack."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer

Major nuclear powers all operate satellite based infrared launch detection systems. A rocket launch is a very unique thermal signature. I imagine China and Russia have satellites watching the north Dakota icbm fields, and vice versa.

One big safeguard is that no launch would be detected?

Failure to automatically launch the missiles.

In that case that might even be planned incompetence.

Second asteroid hitting country 2

And of course, causing a counter-counter strike from country 2 against country 1. Messy!

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Why would you do any of that? Comment without reading? Comment while knowing you are not informed?

Are you just commenting for the sake of commenting?

Is this satire?

You're right, I should not have posted. I'll ask DanG to delete it as I can't.

It's was not entirely clueless as I actually know a little about this, but still. Sorry all.

Likely. Protesting sites that require tracking scripts to display text and images.

> Article requires js

You can read it without js, when you disable css

Also, it really could be an attack. It's within the realm of plausibility for country 1 to launch a nudging vehicle to push a space rock into a collision course with country 2.

Eh maybe. It strains plausibility. We can't even accurately predict where deorbiting satellites will end up... It's pretty hard to imagine a nudge with the required delta-V and accuracy to hit a specific nation. Too far away and you get too much uncertainty, too close and you don't have enough dV for the push. Even if it could be done with today's technology, the potential for error is high, and if you screw up, you've accidentally started another war or "bombed" your own country. Can't imagine that a military with the requisite technology to pull this off wouldn't be able to think of a less-risky way to obliterate their enemy.

”We can't even accurately predict where deorbiting satellites will end up...”

I think that’s because they are so small. The impact of earth’s atmosphere on a 100m solid rock will be negligible in comparison.

Their speed perpendicular to earth also is very low, meaning they spend more time in the athmosphere. I guess they may even bounce of it a couple of times. If so, computing impact location requires calculating how many times a skipping stone will skip.

(But no, I don’t think we have the technology to make this an effective weapon. I would go for that rail gun on the moon instead. Still not quite within reach, but it would be a lot easier to get targeting accuracy)

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