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A Look Back At Bombing the Van Allen Belts
An anonymous reader points out a recent story at NPR describing one of the greatest lightshows in history — a US hydrogen bomb test 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean in 1962. The mission came about after James Van Allen confirmed the existence of radiation belts around the earth that now bear his name. As it turns out, the same day Van Allen announced his findings at a press conference, he "agreed with the military to get involved with a project to set off atomic bombs in the magnetosphere to see if they could disrupt it." According to NPR, "The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth's atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might 'alter' the natural shape of the belts." The article is accompanied by a podcast and a video with recently declassified views of the test. They also explain how the different colors of light in the sky were produced.
You are most certainly wrong. They never said that. The Iranian regime has simply said that the government of Israel should not exist in its current form, a sentiment quite popular around the world (read: in countries not the US and Israel). If they hate the Jewish folks so much, why do 25,000 of them live in Iran? Please, stop disseminating your nonsense. It's not helping anyone. Take issue with Iran, please - it deserves it - but don't do it by lying.
There's another aspect to be concerned about when more people get nuclear weapons.
I am an Air Force missileer. The US nuclear arsenal has an unbelievable amount of safeguards and fail-safes - procedural, physical, and technical. I dislike saying that anything is "impossible", but for anyone unauthorized to get access to one of our nuclear weapons and manage to use it (that includes us) is the closest thing to impossible that I can think of.
I am not nearly as confident that the rest of the nuclear world has safeguards anywhere nearly as good, and that's what worries me.