Comments on: Starfish Prime

By: Ed Graham

Ed Graham — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:17:58 +0000

I was on a troop ship directly under the blast. It was taking us to Hawaii then to the mainland from Korea. All shipping was cleared out of the area, but we just went through it. When the blast happened, we were all on deck to watch. It was spectacular. The entire sky lit up, it went from a dark evening to brighter than day. The light followed the magnetic field in a bright white line then slowly filled the entire sky from horizon to horizon. It stayed that way for about ten minutes then slowly faded in about twenty minutes. Naturally, there was no sound. At first the blast seemed to boil (bubble) the sky then it was just bright light that slowly faded into pastel shades. I was thrilled to see this once in a lifetime sight, and terrified that something went wrong and we had maybe created another radiation belt around the world.

By: ceseme

ceseme — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 01:13:57 +0000

I see this is an old post, but I can’t help but comment on how incredibly idiotically scientists behave. I had never heard of Starfish Prime before now, but I do remember the many nuclear tests they did, and as a child innocently thought nothing of it. (To think that children trust the adults in their lives implicitly.) Toying with nuclear genocide was not exciting enough to appease these “monkey-brained” scientists; they have now turned their attention to creating “miniature” black holes. Guess all that radiation impaired their sensibilities. It could turn out to be good news: if they get sucked into their work, maybe we’ll be done with this foolishness for a while.

By: Space Cake : Prot

Space Cake : Prot — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:40:09 +0000

I believe the boffins at your n.a.s.a where indeed trying to blow a hole in the van allen belts in an attempt to clear a safe route through them for a manned trip into deep space { so called moon landings }.

By: Captn Tommy

Captn Tommy — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:56:28 +0000

Gentle people:

The nuclear ship “Project Orion” “Dedalus” or whichever is entirly possible. The ship was/is to be built in earth orbit, propelled away from the earth by standard tech, rocket or electric propulsion, and then the nuclear Pulse propulsion would be fired.

The nukes used I believe are in the 5-6 Kiloton range. Hell its 2010, we should be able to use all the warheads on the launchers we put into orbit in the cold war.

Captn Tommy

By: SteveM

SteveM — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:29:07 +0000

Did anyone here actually, like, listen to the NPR story? Did everyone miss the part where they (van Allen and co.) thought that the explosion could be used to alter the Van Allen belts and channel the effect of the explosion to some distant location? So that you could have nuclear destruction nowhere near the actual explosion. These were not just scientists “goofing around” to “see what would happen”; these we serious weapon designers.

As for someone’s earlier question about what made this particular test so special for Krulwich to report on it; I think it was just the one closest to July 4th so he could tie it in to the annual celebration of fireworks.

By: T_U_T

T_U_T — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:29:34 +0000

Science isn’t immune from The Stupid.

Are you writing from an alternate reality ? One in which CP-1 melted down and destroyed the entire city ? No ? Then I suppose that fermi & co were not that stupid after all.

By: Travis D

Travis D — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:28:16 +0000

Imagine if we had just outright banned TNT based on how horrible it is a weapon. That would have been pretty shortsighted. We use TNT far more for constructive purposes than for anything else and who knows what we might be able to do with nuclear explosives.

By: John Nouveaux

John Nouveaux — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:07:21 +0000

“It’s hard to imagine doing something so naive and foolish as detonating a nuke just to see what would happen”

And Enrico Fermi & Leo Szilard (a couple of relatively “minor” names in physics;-) built the first successful nuclear “pile” (with the first controlled nuclear reaction) under the squash courts at the University of Chicago. In Chicago. USA. A city of some size and note. A city with lots of people. And everything. You know, Chicago.

Science isn’t immune from The Stupid.

By: Brian Too

Brian Too — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:59:22 +0000

My impression is that these tests were 99% military and maybe 1% science driven. It was all about calculating the potential lethality and destructiveness of the weapons.

Thought experiment. Take the military out of the equation so it’s just scientists doing science. How many explosions would have been set off? Maybe a couple.

Now do the opposite. It’s all military with no scientific participation or pretensions whatsoever. How many weapons tests get performed then (just pretend that the tests could be done without scientists)? All of them.

There’s a reason Edward Teller was called Dr. Doom, and that reason went far beyond his voice.

By: T_U_T

T_U_T — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:07:03 +0000

I can see how to do that with cartoon physics, but the real-world
one is just a bit different…

What a nice straw man of your own making you have just knocked down.

Of course in the real world the turn would be spread across several explosions. There would be almost no issues with stability. one million ton of inertia does tend to be very stable, and each nuke has enough power to correct what ever course deviation the previous explosion left the ship with. Even one or two consequent duds would not cause a failure because the inertia of the ship is so high. And there can be a lot of redundancy built in, in a ship of such gargantuan size.