Atomic bombs in space still scare us

In 1982, Pres Ronald Reagan was considering what became known as “Star Wars,” a plan to protect the United States from Soviet missiles by deploying up to thousands of weapons in space.

At the same time, as a young science writer, he reported how beams from a single nuclear detonation in orbit could wipe out entire fleets of battle stations and lethal laser beams.

“Star Wars: Pentagon Madness”(“Star Wars: The Pentagon Madness”) read one of the headlines.

Decades later, Reagan and the Soviet Union are gone, but anxiety about a high-altitude nuclear explosion remains alive, reignited most recently by the Russian president’s alleged war aims. Vladimir Putin.

Last month, U.S. spy agencies told Congress, as well as foreign allies, that Putin could deploy and use an atomic bomb in space capable of disabling thousands of satellites.

Presumably not only military and civilian communications links would be at risk, but also satellites that spy, monitor the weather, broadcast broadcasts, enable cell phone maps, create Internet connections and perform dozens of other modern tasks.

Impact

The simple statement of such a manifestation can help Putin to scare his opponents.

“Its purpose is the same as Star Wars was for us in the 1980s,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who publishes a monthly report on space.

“It’s to scare the other party.”

But to actually wage war, analysts say, the step is difficult to imagine, unless Putin wants some of his most important allies and supporters to confront the prospect of war indescribable pain.

In a 2010 study, five nuclear experts explained how astronauts hit by the most powerful rays would experience two to three hours of nausea and vomiting before radiation sickness left them to deal with “a 90% chance of death.”“.

THE International Space Station It usually hosts seven astronauts:

three Americans, one foreigner and, as you might imagine, three Russians.

Lightning could also turn the space station of Putin’s main ally, China, into a death trap.

Beijing’s shiny new outpost is home to three Chinese astronauts and will be expanded to accommodate even more.

China’s satellites628 according to a recent count) would represent a further vulnerability.

Stephen M. Younger, former director of Sandia National Laboratories, which helps produce the country’s nuclear weapons, said in an interview that a Russian space explosion could blind Chinese reconnaissance satellites and thus end the main way the country tracks the US Navy’s Pacific. Fleet.

“It’s not going to be very good,” Younger said of the loss of eyes in the Beijing sky during the war.

Putin’s alleged maneuver, he added, represents more bravado than a serious war plan.

“Putin is not stupid,” he said.

The idea behind nuclear weapons, said David Wright, a nuclear expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that “we become discouraged in part because the weapons would cause significant collateral damage to ourselves and other countries.”

Such deterrence could also apply to a space bomb, he added, unless an attacker is desperate and consider the risks acceptable.

“It would be dangerous for the Russians themselves,” said Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and longtime federal government adviser who helped design the first hydrogen bomb of the world.

Climbing

Since Putin invaded Ukraine, he has issued nuclear threats that analysts consider crucial to his strategy of deterring Western intervention.

If it were to put an atomic bomb into orbit, it would violate two key treaties of the nuclear age (signed in 1963 and 1967) and signal a serious escalation.

On February 20, Putin denied plans to put a nuclear weapon into orbit.

“Our position is clear,” he said. “We have always been adamantly against and now we are against the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.”

But days later, on February 29, in his annual State of the Union address, he returned to his usual saber-rattling, warning that the West was at risk of nuclear war.

Putin singled out states that helped Ukraine attack Russian territory.

The West must understand, he declared, that such assistance risks “the destruction of civilization.”

Nuclear weapons in general, and space bombs in particular, are the antithesis of precision.

They are indiscriminate, unlike conventional weapons, which are normally characterized by their millimeter precision.

In 1981, when I first wrote about orbital nuclear weapons as a reporter for Science magazine, I referred to the chaos of space as “Chaos factor”.

The unexpected phenomenon came to life in July 1962, when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb about 650 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean.

The dark skies lit up.

In Hawaii the streetlights went out.

In orbit, the satellites failed.

To the president John F. Kennedyuneasy about technical surprises, worried that lingering radiation from nuclear explosions could endanger astronauts.

In September 1962 he canceled a test code-named Magpie.

The hydrogen bomb was supposed to be detonated at an altitude of more than 1,300 kilometers, the highest of any test explosion, American or Soviet.

The following year Kennedy signed a treaty banning experimental explosions in space.

The scientific world then made an important distinction about space detonations that does not exist in most current debates.

They are atomic explosions They have immediate effects in addition to residues.

The initial repercussions are the best known.

A bomb’s beams travel great distances to produce lightning-like flashes of electricity in satellites and terrestrial grids, burning out electrical circuits.

Experts call them electromagnetic pulses or EMP.

The pulses knocked out the lights in Hawaii.

But what caught Kennedy’s attention was a long-term effect:

As the radioactive waste and charged particles from a nuclear explosion pump out from the donut-shaped natural radiation belts surrounding the Earth.

These belts are intense, but they are nothing like what they become when amplified by bomb radiation.

The five nuclear experts who wrote the 2010 study linked such overloading of the belt not only to risks for astronauts but also, after the July 1962 test, to significant damage at least for eight satellites.

The most famous victim was Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite.

As the years went by, I became concerned that this complicated topic was being oversimplified. gr

Fringe groups and hardline politicians have raised the alarm about Russian EMP attacks on the country’s power grid, though they rarely noted the risk to Moscow’s spacecraft and astronauts.

Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA officer, warned in a 2017 report that Moscow was prepared for surprise EMP attacks that would cripple the United States and take out its satellites.

In 2019, Pres Donald Trump ordered the strengthening of the country’s EMP defenses. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the order “sends a clear message to adversaries that the United States takes this threat seriously.”

National security experts know how weapons of mass destruction get caught in cycles of fear that vary with the political winds.

After decades of thinking about the fundamental aspects of nuclear explosions in space, I have come to view the risks as extremely low or nonexistent because a detonation (as McDowell, Younger, Wright, Garwin, and others have argued) would harm not only those attacked, but also the ‘attacker.

“Maybe the Russians will decide that their astronauts will take one to return home,” McDowell said.

“But I think Putin, crazy as he is, won’t do it.”

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