Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space | Hacker News Reader

Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space

nationalgeographic.co.uk

80 pointsHooke56 comments

It 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/

Fishbowl had multiple disasters. The following launch exploded on the pad, and contaminated Johnston Island.

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...

"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.

All 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

Plenty in the ocean too.

Negligible compared to naturally occurring radioactive elements.

Has anyone done estimates of how many cancer deaths this caused?

Pretty good video from Veritasium o related to this, about how Kodak detected the presence of nuclear weapons tests.

https://youtu.be/7pSqk-XV2QM

Should not the difference be measurable? Do not we have recordings before those tests?

Only 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.

One 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.

My 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.

> 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.

From 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".

The 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

Yes good things came out of it, but those things weren't actually foresighted. You can't make me believe we have to blow bombs in space to measure weather, detect radiation or mitigate it.

They never ever actually had to proper equipment to even measure any results.. It was by luck we got to notice the changes in earths magnetic field.

> Bad things will happen. Don't need to be a scientist to understand that.

I think it's a mistake to look at past errors this way, as if it was obvious and easy. The reality is that, in foresight, the risk is uncertain, it's hard to get other people to face with unseen risks, and that all applies to yourself too.

And all that makes it very hard to get yourself to stand up to social pressure and assert a risk that is uncertain and unseen to you. If you are wrong - or even if you are right, but it's a 50-50 chance of disaster (or 25-75 or 10-90, all much too dangerous) and the dice roll is fortunate - you look like a fool. If you are right, you rarely get credit in a situation like that - you've just made everyone else look bad.

The way to look at something like Starfish Prime is to ask: given the human dynamics described above, how do we set up systems to prevent such outcomes? How could I handle it effectively, even in the absence of such systems?

It actually is obvious and easy. Plenty of people were against these tests back in the day as well. You should not roll dice with humanity.

The 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.

What 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.

Past related threads:

The U.S. set off a nuclear bomb in space in 1962 - 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 - Dec 2019 (2 comments)

Starfish Prime - 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 - June 2017 (70 comments)

Declassified footage shows 1st ever nuclear explosion in space - 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 - July 2010 (24 comments)

Starfish Prime, outer space nuclear test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114 - July 2010 (24 comments)

And decades later, people were afraid that the commissioning of the LHC would cause the collapse of the universe.

We just happened to be lucky enough to exist on the timeline where LHC didn't collapse the universe.

That'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.

It was just a joke.

This 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.

Mandatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A :)

An "effing" bad idea, but a positive outcome is that the world knows it is an option against a killer asteroid. YMMV

I've wondered about that. Where is a better place to set off a nuclear bomb?

the best deterrent to all those nasty alien probes.

Because an EMP would show us who we really are.

Or a solar flare. Nature's wrath is unimaginable.

Like the Carrington Event but with modern tech?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

"There was even a plan, which ultimately fizzled, to set off a nuclear blast on the moon."

Humanity at its best

A friend of mine had the interesting theory that this will inevitably happen some time, even if it would just be for entertainment purposes.

NYE 2081?

Or maybe a weird version of angry birds for a trillionaire

As 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.

I 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?

We could make it a lot easier to see the man in the moon.

This 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.)

Only 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.

And most of the debris (anything that goes flying at less than 1.8km/s) will just fall back down.

2.4km/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).

But 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.

> But wouldn’t it take a while?

The Moon's Hill sphere is just under 52000 km in radius. This is the distance at which the Earth's gravitational influence is greater than that of the Moon. Using Keplerian orbital mechanics (i.e. KSP-style patched conics) as an approximation, a circular orbit at that distance takes about two weeks. This is the longest possible orbit around the moon (approximately), and therefore an upper bound on the maximum amount of time it can take for something to shoot up from the moon and fall back again.

EDIT: A couple of things to note: in the absence of other bodies, my argument wouldn't apply, as the Hill sphere would be infinite. I'm assuming here, for simplicity, that anything that exits the Hill sphere doesn't fall back. This is not entirely accurate. It's possible that something might enter orbit around the Earth, and hit the moon at some point in the future, but I'm ignoring that.

> 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.

> This has got to release energy similar to a meteroid impact, right?

A pretty small one, perhaps.

This educational video explores the thought experiment pretty well:

Kurzgesagt: What if We Nuke the Moon? (9 min) https://youtu.be/qEfPBt9dU60

Nuclear energy was just a by-product. Every nuclear power plant had to produce weapons grade plutonium. At its height the US had 50000 nukes.

And a plan by Edward Teller to create a harbor in Alaska using atom bombs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot

"The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement" by Dan O'Neill is highly recommended.

we keep forgetting we're just apes

we also keep forgetting we're 66% just water

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And most people think scientists are wonderful and know everything all the time.

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