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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.
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.
At least it will be a very pretty ending when the nuclear war begins.
These images look very similar to what I had seen last night. The colors bouncing off of the clouds lit up the sky quite well. In fact, if no one replies in the next few minutes I can probably assume that was the end of humanity.
In the end I suppose it's time to do what I always wanted to do. You know, the things we won't do because of societies "rules." However, now that society no longer exists I can finally bathe myself in chocolate sauce, whip cream, nuts and ride my bike around town screaming who has a banana!
Even being the end of the world it's shaping up to be a great day.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
The article listed the questions the experiment was to answer and then concentrated on political, visual and show-business value of the experiment but it didn't answer the questions in the end.
Could someone...?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Isaac Azimov wrote a short sci-fi story about an explorer, who had just come back from visiting the newly contacted planet "Earth", adding humans to the "Register Of Intelligent Life". Some minutes later, after the explorer explained how humans tested atomic bombs "on their own planet" the registrar erased the entry as being unqualified for inclusion under "Intelligent".
In case anyone got interested, the 1958 test was called Operation Argus.
By the way, despite what TFA says, there are two electron radiation belts, not just two of them at all; there's also a proton one. Wikipedia considers it to be a part of the inner radiation belt, but the accepted terminology says otherwise to the best of my knowledge.
was to nuke rainbows. A high ranking general was quoted as saying the military applications of rainbows and rainbow based technologies can't be ignored.
(puppy eyes)
on Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea
"The Van Allen Belt Is On Fire!"
I like microcars
... but the more I read about what some of these scientists got up to the more I begin to wonder if some of them weren't borderline insane or at least so totally absorbed in the narrow science they were persuing that they didn't think about or didn't care about the potential consequences if things went wrong.
... if this plan involved any of the same people who wanted to set off a nuclear bomb on the moon.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Wasn't this premise the Pilot Episode?
"It's an imperfect world,screws fall out..."
This test series (specifically, Starfish Prime) uncovered the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effect, an unexpected side effect of nuclear explosions at altitude. The gamma rays from a high altitude burst hit atoms and thus eject electrons high in the atmosphere over a wide area, more or less simultaneously, and the current from the ejected electrons can cause a very wide-spread electromagnetic pulse, which can knock out power lines and electronics at great distances (> 1000 km).
So, I guess we can call Allen the father of the EMP, although I am not sure he would have wanted the honor.
Do we know of any long term consequences of these ill-advised tests?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Those radiation belts are composed of trapped electron and proton particles, bouncing back and forth along those magnetic field lines. There are several numerical models that predict what the population of these particles based on their location, and general behavior under different conditions (solar cycle variations, solar flares, etc).
Anyone building a satellite will use those models to determine what levels of radiation levels the satellite will encounter along its orbit, and add on the appropriate level of shielding to protect the electronics.
A nuclear bomb will never be able to alter the shape of the belts. All it will do is add a spectacular amount of electron and proton particles to the radiation belt, potentially frying the electronics of most of the low to medium orbit satellite (geosynchronous ones will probably be ok). Depending on the size of the bomb, the radiation belt may take weeks or even months to return to a 'natural' state.
There are some experiments in the works to 'tweak' the radiation belts by beaming low frequency EM waves, to change the energy of the existing particle populations. In theory, that will enable some of the particles to become 'untrapped', thereby reducing the overall population.
We've found the cause of Global Warming!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That made no sense, whatsoever.
echnologically?
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You are the one that is not seeing the full ramifications.
The world is trying to disarm from a weapon that no one wants used.
Enough of the anti-this and anti-that bullshit. The world wants nukes gone, it's a zero-sum game.
After all, America is by far not the only nation who wants nukes to be diminished. If you haven't noticed, the nuclear stockpile has been dropping by huge amounts over the last 30 years. Have you missed that, or are you just conveniently not seeing it?
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What about the depleation of the ozone layer? Any correlation?
Nah, that part's pretty well known. Ozone depletion is due to pollutants that naturally and unnaturally come from societies in large numbers.
It's something that's been fought against since the 80's.
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Thanks for sharing that.
I don't think we have come far enough to fall on our swords... while an atrocity, it can be fixed.
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yeah because we had nothing to protect us from solar radiation previously!
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It is sometimes baffling that after the past half century of America being a nuclear power, we are actually still here.
excuse me sir you seem to have dropped this "t" please place this at the front of the 13th word
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has been addressed above. The simple: no mistranslation or opaque intent, only useful idiots like yourself.
damaged by dogma
Wanting something does not make it the right decision or even possible. The reality of the mater is unless we collapse into a world wide dark age, creation of nuclear weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction) is going to become more and more trivial. 60 to 70 years ago building nuclear weapons was a national effort of great expense by major world powers using custom built ultra high precision machine tools. 30-40 years ago it was could it was a major effort second tier nations (India, Israel, etc) mostly working from the design information of those that came before, using some of the best off the shelf machine tools to manufacture. Today it is mostly an issue of gathering the building blocks, and assembling them with a few minor engineering modifications using black market copies of cold war era bomb plans using CNC machine tools that are found in many of the better equipped small machine shops. If this trend continues, in another 20, 30, or even 40 or 50 years, building a nuclear weapon will be within the range of any reasonably wealthy small group of individuals with the required basic skills and access to raw materials. (We have already seen laser systems made from scrap laser printer parts that can zap misquitos out of the air, how long before someone comes up with a way to to gassious isotope separation the same way)
My favorite part of the NPR article was the sub-headline: "Discover It, Then Blow It Up".
Kinda sums it all, doesn't it?
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
but it was _us_ who scorched the sky...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvKp_CcrI94
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
Some countries like Japan certainly have the wealth and the technology base to build them, but don't for very deliberate political reasons
Gojira!!
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
... and you will see that in general terms the above poster is correct. There's no point comparing with utter basket cases and saying we are obviously better because that is answering a different question.
The most insightful point there is the "thinktank" parking lots for poorly educated hard drinking future hangers on to make up numbers in government ARE prone to such incredibly fucked up ideas. They are being listened to for advice instead of real experts with experience and/or education.
We've had the truly bizzare situations of making threats to bomb an allied nation "back into the stone age" and the stupid name calling and attempted framing (for trading yellowcake from Niger to Iraq) of France - vicous and stupid behaviour that nobody would have imagined Reagan, Carter, Clinton, Bush Snr etc to have indulged in.
Aargh, I hate this bit of historical revisionism. Like any city they certainly had civilians in them, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both ports, and both had war industries and/or military facilities. They were entirely legitimate military targets by WWII standards and Japan would not have surrendered if they hadn't been atom bombed. (In fact, even after the second bomb there was a failed coup, an attempt to prevent Japan from surrendering.) They only surrendered because we claimed to have more bombs, even though more would not have been ready for months.
It has been convincingly argued that without the atom bombs, Japan would not have surrendered, and that the bombs actually saved lives because any invasion would have been incredibly bloody. (The US is still using Purple Heart medals made in anticipation of the invasion, and near the end the Japanese were arming women and children with bamboo spears to fight the invaders.)
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
How many of those secret tests affected our lives? Can you safely say the nuclear residue from these tests did not damage our world? Radiation is energy that affects all matter, we humans are no exceptions. We have the power to destroy us, and the future. I hope we do, mankind doesn't deserve the privilege to live.
We test in the High altitude, deep sea, deep underground- irradiating material for years to follow in the groundwater, trade-winds, and currents of the worlds oceans. Consider the mentalities- Tesla reveals ubiquitous energy which only requires small charges pulsed to the ionosphere which would power the entire planet indefinitely and the only reason I have surfaced for its being left undone is uncertainty of the result of charging the upper atmosphere. But all kinds of misguided testing with toxic fallout is acceptable.
That's a long first name there.
Okay...
Maybe that was his middle name?
In which case, his full name would be the impressively silly James Van Allen Allen Van Allen.
I kinda like it.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."