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The possibility of war in space is always a hot topic of discussion.
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As our society becomes more advanced, it seems only natural for warfare to move away from the surface of the Earth, and instead to space.
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In fact there were some worries that North Korea would detonate a nuclear bomb in space above the United States.
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Today, Life’s Biggest Questions asks: what if we detonated a nuclear bomb in space?
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Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, I’m Charlotte Dobre.
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Don’t forget to give us a thumbs up, subscribe and ask us a question you have always wanted to know the answer to.
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The truth is, if a nuclear weapon were detonated in space, it would look a lot different from a detonation on Earth.
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When nuclear weapons were being tested, primarily by the US and Russia during the cold war, they were detonated underwater, in the mountains, in Earth's atmosphere and even in space.
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During Project Fishbowl, the United States tested nuclear weapons at high altitudes.
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On July ninth, nineteen sixty-two, during the Starfish Prime Project, a one point four megaton nuclear bomb was detonated two hundred and fifty miles, or four hundred kilometers above the surface of Earth.
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More specifically, above Johnson Island, an island in the middle of the pacific ocean near Hawaii.
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And the results were nothing short of incredible.
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To this day, it was the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated in space.
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So, here is the deal: in a vacuum like space, there is no atmosphere, which means there's no air.
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In order the nuclear weapons blast to occur, there needs to be air to heat up.
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So, when nuclear weapons are detonated in space, there's no mushroom cloud or blast wave.
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Blast waves are what cause most of the damage when a bomb is detonated on the surface of the Earth.
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Instead, collosal amounts of heat and light, plus X rays and gamma rays shot out everywhere.
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Normally, the X rays and gamma rays from the sun are interrupted by the atmosphere, so we don’t feel their effects.
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When the nuclear bomb was detonated in space, there was no fireball.
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The blast looked like a round sphere, and the entire sky became illuminated.
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At the same time, the radiation from the detonation caused beautiful auroras within a few thousand miles of the blast.
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This is because the blast releases charged particles, electrons and protons, that interact with Earth's magnetic field.
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Auroras occur naturally at the poles of our planet whenever there are solar flares or charged particles that reach our planet from the Sun.
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But with the case of a detonation in space, the auroras would spread across thousands of miles of ocean, and their reflection in the water would make it truly an incredible sight.
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And these auroras would be visible for hours if not days.
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Unfortunately, although auroras are beautiful, there would be a ton of radiation from the blast mucking about in Earth's atmosphere.
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These particles will create a small, but powerful electromagnetic field which could actually knock out power grids on the surface of Earth.
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This is known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
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With the case of the Starfish Prime bomb, the detonation blew out power in Hawaii, burglar alarms were set off,
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street lights stopped working, navigation systems and radar were useless, and no less than six satellites were disabled.
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And Starfish Prime was in the sixties, this was way before the Internet and cell phones.
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These days we are far more reliant on those things.
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Furthermore, the nuclear bomb used in Starfish Prime was a baby compared to the fifty megaton hydrogen bombs that currently exist.
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Starfish Prime had a blast that was equal to one point four million tons of TNT, which was one hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
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A fifty megaton nuclear blast in space would be powerful enough to wipe out all the power in Texas.
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In terms of warfare, detonating a nuclear bomb in space would be a powerful tool for disabling the power of an enemy country.
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According to a study, an EMP attack could wipe out ninety percent of the US population within twelve months of detonation.
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But the problem with that is, nuclear detonations are never good, even when they take place in space.
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The radioactive material that is released from a nuclear detonation in space does not go away.
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Instead, it spreads across the entire planet, and would affect us all.
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Thankfully, world governments know this, so since the Limited Test Ban treaty of nineteen sixty-three, there hasn’t been a nuclear detonation in space.
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I’m Charlotte Dobre and you’ve been watching Life’s Biggest Questions.