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A Look Back At Bombing the Van Allen Belts

Posted by Soulskill on from the shiny-and-fallout-y dept.

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.

28 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. I can't see the tags... by chill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But if anything ever needed the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag, this was it.

    Wow, cool! Let's nuke it and see what happens!

    The mind boggles.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:I can't see the tags... by Rotworm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, nowadays our view on the environment is that it is fragile. In the sixties the general view on the environment was that it was robust. For instance, abandon a suburban house and nature will take it back over time. The summary quietly acknowledges this viewpoint, they were trying to see if they could disrupt the magnetosphere, much less damage it.

    2. Re:I can't see the tags... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow, cool! Let's nuke it and see what happens!

      And the truth about the origin of global warming is finally revealed!

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    3. Re:I can't see the tags... by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      And, Jah-Wren probably deserves "insightful" mods.

      Mankind still has little understanding of the magnetosphere, the Van Allens, and the ionosphere. Those nuclear blasts MAY HAVE started something. Just because we didn't change anything in any measurable way, doesn't mean that other changes, like global warming, aren't due to that tampering.

      Of course, I'm something of a global warming skepticist - so I'm not exactly arguing that is the case. I'm just pointing out that man should tread more carefully than he has in the past. It's kinda stupid to blow things up just because you can.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    4. Re:I can't see the tags... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But if anything ever needed the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag, this was it.

      Wow, cool! Let's nuke it and see what happens!

      The mind boggles.

      Oddly, mine doesn't.

      Right now, *today*, there are thousands of politicians and millions of people who would tell you that global warming can't be man made because, like, the world is big and stuff, and so there's no way we could possibly damage it. Why would you expect people back in the dawning days of the nuclear age to think any differently?

    5. Re:I can't see the tags... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, nowadays our view on the environment is that it is fragile. In the sixties the general view on the environment was that it was robust. For instance, abandon a suburban house and nature will take it back over time. The summary quietly acknowledges this viewpoint, they were trying to see if they could disrupt the magnetosphere, much less damage it.

      It's not fragile at all. However, the environment's capability to support human existence possibly is (as it gets worse, it can lead to fighting and wars over basic human necessities like water).

      After all, it's been around a long time, and evolution's worked fine so far. Our way of life and humanity, well, who knows?

    6. Re:I can't see the tags... by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, nowadays our view on the environment is that it is fragile. In the sixties the general view on the environment was that it was robust.

      The environment is quite robust.
      The problem is that humans have a long tradition of overexploiting/overloading nature.
      The end result is that the environment either doesn't have an opportunity to, or can't regenerate itself.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    7. Re:I can't see the tags... by barzok · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In the sixties the general view on the environment was that it was robust.

      And in the 40s, the scientists running the Manhattan Project were afraid that the device detonated at Trinity would ignite the atmosphere.

    8. Re:I can't see the tags... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Those nuclear blasts MAY HAVE started something.

      So much for taking care of the ozone layer if they are going to make it glow in red with that blast. "Where did those ozone layer holes came from?"

    9. Re:I can't see the tags... by oldspewey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The environment has, and will continue to, have the ability to regenerate itself. The interesting question is whether it can do so in a way that allows the continued existence of 7+ billion highly exploitative bipeds with a complex economic and agricultural system.

      Barring some sort of global cataclysm, the "earth" and the "environment" will definitely still be here in a thousand years. Millions of species will be here, actively filling their various ecological niches. Whether humanity is one of those species is a matter for some debate, but the earth will be doing just fine, thanks.

      --
      If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
  2. Hypocrasy by jvillain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is amazing how the US comes down on on other countries for even thinking of having 1 bomb. While their history is of irresponsibly setting them off like fire crackers on the 4th. How many atolls no longer exist? How many places on earth are radioactive? Yet we are all supposed to believe that they are the sole responsible country on the earth.

    1. Re:Hypocrasy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Do you really think that other countries should set off nuclear weapons in space just because politicians and military folks in the U.S. (most of whom are either dead or retired now) were once stupid enough to do so?

      Hypocrisy *in this case* is a wonderful thing.

      We learned our lesson, and we are not going to allow other nations to repeat our mistakes. Atleast not in this case.

    2. Re:Hypocrasy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In other words: "We made some horrible choices getting where we are now. For the sake of humanity, do not make the same mistakes we did!"

    3. Re:Hypocrasy by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You probably have citations for your claims. May I look at some?

      I always thought that the western world didn't want Iran to have nukes because their president and their ayatollahs frequently pass judgement on Israel, saying that they should be bombed out of existence. I could be wrong. Maybe all those speeches are just so much propaganda, and I've been drinking to much Kool-Aid. Ayatollah Kookoomaniac and President Abinutter have really been searching for a way to play kissy-huggy with the Jews, right?

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    4. Re:Hypocrasy by whatajoke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Manifest destiny is probably to blame here. Until americans do not get rid of their self-righteous crusadic attitude, it is difficult that they will realize how other countries see them.
      Other countries make horrible mistakes too, like war. But members of public against these mistakes are not condemned as unpatriotic, or anti-national. Just look at how the movie Green Zone was branded unamerican. I don't know how americans starring in the movie must have felt about that insult. I would have been furious enough to rip somebody's head off on being called anti-naional.

    5. Re:Hypocrasy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Yes and no. New designs and ideas were tested; using fission to trigger fusion, for example, or exploring the effects on different environments (as is the topic of this article).

      After the first couple a-bombs, the destructive potential may have been well understood, but not the science.

    6. Re:Hypocrasy by Teancum · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Something completely missing from this article is nothing about the history of the high altitude tests and some of the significant concerns raised about those tests.

      Perhaps more significant is the rapidity with which the Partial Test Ban Treaty was negotiated, approved, and ratified when the full impact of these tests were finally realized. It is important to note that both the USA and the Soviet Union were involved with these tests, and it wasn't just a one-sided thing. The largest problem is that continued testing of nuclear weapons would have essentially ended manned spaceflight for awhile until the radioactive materials would dissipate from the upper atmosphere... potentially taking as long as a hundred years or more if it was really pushed.

      BTW, if you are complaining about islands, atolls, and other underground and surface tests, nearly every nation who has detonated a nuclear bomb has been involved with this sort of contamination including "enlightened" countries like England and France. Opposition to other countries getting nuclear weapons isn't restricted to the USA either, but America is painted as the bad guy usually. Most countries who can afford nuclear weapons, such as China, India, and Pakistan, already have them. Countries like Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, and Belarus even gave up nuclear weapons that they had at one point. South Africa even had nuclear weapons technology at one point. The number of countries with nuclear weapons or at least the capabilities of having them is quite a few. Some countries like Japan certainly have the wealth and the technology base to build them, but don't for very deliberate political reasons (not that I blame them for that attitude either).

    7. Re:Hypocrasy by Pentium100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe it has something to do with the fact that nobody has invaded the USA recently enough for currently alive people to remember it.

      Maybe if more people knew what it's like to lie down in some ditch and hear bullets flying over it, be forced out of home because it currently is too near the front line or even worse, having your house (and everything you own) destroyed by a bomb (or the retreating army lighting it on fire so it could not be used by the enemy) with or without your loved ones in it, they would not talk about war as if it was a good thing.

    8. Re:Hypocrasy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      And how do expect that nations that aspire to have an industrial base as big or bigger than the first world nations to do? That they should be happy to live in clean forests? "Oh, that so great, I don't have a job, I live in a hut but ours rivers don't catch fire!"

      Fuck off.

      I'll kill every single tree in the Amazon if that means a sizable industrial base and jobs to people.

    9. Re:Hypocrasy by fermion · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Much of the power of US comes from the fact that it is vicious, but more or less fair. In the revolutionary war,captured redcoats were often left to travel to the POW camp after promising to lay down arms. In the revolutionary war, the loser confederates were not, overall, made the subject of vengeful attacks, but rather reintegration through reconstruction.

      As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, they certainly solidified the US repetition as vicious. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. What this means is that other countries have be nuclear states, but how many would really use it. Only the US has proven it.

      The ban on nuclear weapons is not a US thing. The NPT is a united nations issue. The US is a position to help enforce it. The treaty between the US and Russia is meant to reduce the stockpiles and help reach a nuclear free world. The NPT is separate and meant to minimize the number of nuclear powers, given that most of the civilized world has reached a consensus in that we cannot use these weapons.

      It is true that the US has become particularly more vicious in the past 10 years, mostly due to religious fanatics taking over the US, much as they are taking over in other parts of the world. This is changing to the point where many extreme right conservative think our mix of nuclear weapons will be insufficient to defend against the modern random aggressors.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    10. Re:Hypocrasy by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It is amazing how the US comes down on on other countries for even thinking of having 1 bomb. While their history is of irresponsibly setting them off like fire crackers on the 4th. How many atolls no longer exist? How many places on earth are radioactive? Yet we are all supposed to believe that they are the sole responsible country on the earth.

      Amazing? Not at all. It's called "self preservation." Funny you should mention firecrackers: they're illegal in many states (which pisses me off, actually: paternalistic politicians trying to "protect the children"), and if you knew more about us, you might understand their cultural and historical relevance. Regardless, you can complain about our history of testing nuclear weapons, but you know, we don't anymore. You also conveniently forgot to mention that Russia has a similar history, and in fact set the record for the largest fusion explosion ever: fifty megatons of TNT equivalent, and that was tuned down from the design yield of one hundred megatons, over concerns about fallout. I believe our biggest detonation was about twenty-five (and at that, it exceeded expectations.)

      Just get one thing through your silly little head: this is NOT A MATTER OF FAIRNESS. It's just not. We aren't discussing trade agreements, or illegal immigration, or any of a hundred other issues that the world faces every day. We're discussing weapon systems that can kill millions of innocent people in a few milliseconds. Do you really want everyone to have them? Is it "fair" that a city should die because you don't like the U.S.?

      Look, the United States and Russia exercised the requisite restraint during the Cold War and after. Yes, that was the desired outcome of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), but put it this way: MAD worked. No ICBMs were fired, no long-range bombers dropped heavy weapons on Moscow or Washington. So here's the question: do you honestly believe that all countries in the world capable of building atomic weapons would do the same? Do you believe that the leaders of all countries are sufficiently rational to understand the concept of MAD? Yes, we dropped small tactical devices on an enemy twice during World War II, but when you consider the power of modern fusion weapons when compared to Fatman and Littleboy, well, you really need to rethink your position.

      This is a matter of "we have them, Russia has them, China has them, England has them, Israel has them, and a few other countries have them, and that's enough." It less to do with who is the "most responsible", and more to do with the odds of thermonuclear weapons being used increasing the more nations have them. Consequently, we'd like to keep anyone else who doesn't already have them from acquiring them, and the United States is hardly alone in that position. Nobody who has atomic weapons, nobody who has seen what they can do, is at all comfortable with an unstable nation owning them. You can bitch all you want about that, but the fewer nations that have the things the better.

      You're concerning yourself that it's "unfair" that the United States and a few other powerful nations have nuclear weapons and don't want anyone else to have them. Well, you're damn right, it may be unfair, but it's the sanest approach to the issue that we have. And you know what? The first time some two-bit "nuclear power" like Iran, Pakistan or North Korea decides turn a few square miles of someone else's city into a glass lake, you'll be the first to complain that the United States should somehow have prevented those deaths. I just know it.

      Hypocrites.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    11. Re:Hypocrasy by JSBiff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "It is true that the US has become particularly more vicious in the past 10 years, mostly due to religious fanatics taking over the US, much as they are taking over in other parts of the world. This is changing to the point where many extreme right conservative think our mix of nuclear weapons will be insufficient to defend against the modern random aggressors."

      Oversimplify much? I'm no particular fan of G.W. Bush, or the war in Iraq. Afghanistan, I think, was unfortunately necessary, but certainly a continuing tragedy. My point is, while Christian conservatives have certainly had an impact on U.S. politics, to say that religious fanatics have taken over the US is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? G.W. Bush might have been an Evangelical, but the wars the U.S. engaged with weren't about trying to enforce a religion on anyone. They were, in the end, basically wars driven by fear, I think. The U.S. was attacked by true religious fanatics in a spectacular way that caused a lot of terror. I think, perhaps, the terrorists didn't forsee the real end-result of that terror. U.S. Foreign policy since 9/11 was, in my opinion, not driven primarily by creed, but simply by fear, by a desire to protect ourselves. I'm not saying that makes it right, but it does make the parent post wrong.

      Yes, yes, I don't think the war in Iraq really had a substantial basis in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. They weren't really linked with Al Qaeda. But, the administration and much of the public (including what you call "religious fanatics") *perceived* a terror threat from Saddam. Even though there were no links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, there was a not entirely irrational or unfounded fear of Saddaam allying with terrorists. He is known to have supported the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who killed Israelis. Although it turned out he didn't have WMD at the time of the invasion, he had certainly been pursuing a nuclear program in the past, and had kicked out U.N. IAEA inspectors for a period of years. He was certainly no friend or lover of the U.S. in particular, or "The West" in general. He *had* used aweful weapons, like Chemical Weapons, against civilian populations (his own people, at that - certainly someone who would use terrible weapons against the civilians under his own rule would not blink an eye at using such weapons against foreign civilian targets, if given opportunity).

      Were there other possibilities for dealing with Saddam instead of invasion - possibly. From what I've read about the history of the invasion, the Bush administration rushed things, jumped the gun. But that doesn't mean there wasn't any non-religious basis for the invasion.

      While I think the war in Iraq may have been a mistake, I think people oversimplify things a lot, whether it's the "No Blood for Oil" crowd, who I think there is substantial evidence to show they are just wrong about presuming Iraq to be a war for oil, or people such as the parent post, who just say that the U.S. has been taken over by religious extremists (the Christian-right in the U.S. is predominantly nowhere near as extreme as the Islamist-extremist [I suppose you can probably find an extremely small number of examples (from my experience, it's not any statistically signifance proportion of U.S. Christian's) of Christian's who are almost as extreme as the Islamic global-jihadists, and in any case, the religious right was far from having complete control over U.S. politics or policy, though they were influential during the Bush years).

    12. Re:Hypocrasy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Are you serious? Let me give you a relevant quote:

      Our dear Imam (referring to Ayatollah Khomeini) said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map for great justice and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.

      (emphasis mine)

      There were some questions in the media as to whether this was the correct translation, but the fact is that "wiped off the map" is the term the office of the President of Iran used in their own translation. Doesn't get much more clear than that.

      Combine that with Ahmadinejad's rampant antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and I think that the GP was perfectly accurate in his assessment of Iran.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel

    13. Re:Hypocrasy by jvillain · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >"They're an unstable, volatile government that was put into place only a few decades ago through an uprising. Add the fact that they are a government controlled by religious ideology, along with being the arch-nemesis of Judaism, and it's a boiling kettle."

      That's right. It was so much better when it was a blood thirsty dictatorship put in place by the British and US governments than it is as a democratically elected government.

    14. Re:Hypocrasy by dbIII · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hate of Israel and the USA is a good "we've always been at war with Oceania" rallying point for hardline Iranians that want to get as much power as popular support can get them while the real power lies with the theocrats. We shouldn't read much more into it or even assume most of the population think that way.
      An atomic bomb would more likely be used in the situation of "nice Island you've got there Bahrain, be a pity if something happened to it - we'd like to help but we're just a bit short of cash".
      It's a bit of a race between their current regime dies out and is replaced or getting nukes.

    15. Re:Hypocrasy by lordlod · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That very recent United States policy is very pretty, but it only holds true until they change their mind. If someone invaded the continental United States, destroyed critical infrastructure and occupied US lands it would change very very quickly.

      The simple fact is that there has never been a war between two nuclear states. There has never been an invasion of a nuclear state.

      If your country was being routinely threatened with invasion and bombing why wouldn't you try and build a nuclear deterrence.

  3. More like: "What Possibly Went Wrong..." by Trip6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Do we know of any long term consequences of these ill-advised tests?

    --
    I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
  4. Re:Azimov story... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, lights and transportation and warm shelter are so unwise. (facepalm)

    Look, just because a Native American says something does not make it a universal truth. That attitude is just as woo as any religion or new age bullcrap.