Since we’re coming up on the Fourth of July, and towns everywhere are preparing their better-than-ever fireworks spectaculars, we would like to offer this humbling bit of history. Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled ”” and hopefully never will. Here it is:
(Some of the images in this video were until recently top secret. Peter Kuran of Visual Concept Entertainment collected them for his documentary Nukes In Space.)
If you are wondering why anybody would deliberately detonate an H-bomb in space, the answer comes from a conversation we had with science historian James Fleming of Colby College:
Listen to it all and most importantly take the time to watch the amazing video pictures.
Interesting that EMP effects appear to have been generally quite limited even though Honolulu at 750 nm distant would have been well within such a cone.
There are two possible factors involved. One is that such forces [i]do[/i] diminish as the square of the distance — EMP from a nearby lightning strike can be greater than that of a distant nuclear device — and the other is that in 1962 most electronic thingies ran on vacuum tubes, which are nearly EMP immune.
As a side note, the Russian MiG-25 is an interceptor that can fly well over 2,000 mph and can climb from the ground to 114,000 feet in under 4 minutes. When a Rooskie pilot defected with one about 30 years ago, lots of people made fun of its “1950s-era electronics” (vacuum tubes). Not my father, a 20-year Navy man specialising in radar; his immediate reaction was “That sucker was designed to remain totally operational in an intense nuclear environment. It’s immune to EMP!”
More likely these days would be an intense electro-magnetic pulse from a massive solar event. I was living in Québec in 1989 when such an flare created so much induced current in the long transmission lines that it blew stuff out across most of the province. Something like the [url=http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/]Carrington flare[/url] 130 years earlier would make that 1962 H-bomb explosion seem rather tame indeed.
Interesting side note…the world is in the process of transforming from ground based radar control of aircraft to satellite based GPS coordinates. This most likely looked like a good idea on paper, but with the increase in solar activity and its resultant magnetic storms capable of knocking a satellite out, I have misgivings about the wisdom of this transition. Then there is the incredible vulnerability to EMP. Finally, there is a vulnerability to system hack.
The videos were cool. As a veteran of the Cold War, it is frustrating that most people do not even consider it a war. It was. It was what is now called “Low Intensity Conflict”. Most people also do not know that more US military personnel were killed by hostile fire during the “cold” parts of the Cold War than were killed by hostile fire during Dessert Storm. In fact, there were only 2 fewer de-classifed deaths due to hostile fire during the “cold” parts of the Cold War than were killed by hostile fire during the Spanish American War.
I sort of remember this as a child here in Honolulu, and certainly remember people talking about it. I don’t know if it was ever made clear to us that it was in outer space, I know my impression from when I was a child was that somehow it was from a test blast in Kawajalein, which would in fact have been too far away to see.
This certainly wasn’t the only missile test here. I remember various missiles going off in the sky at night leaving different kinds of glowing colors (primarily green) that would linger in the air for a couple of minutes. These missiles were shot off from a range on the Island of Kauai, which is still working on the missile defense shield (hopefully among other things to protect Hawaii from a first strike by North Korea, which is an issue of concern here).
I hope that the Navy is still teaching and and insisting in competency in celestial navigation and CW (Morse code) radio transmission of information. These are safe from the effects of EMP. Actually, digitial information can be sent via a CW mode.
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I doubt that they are. I know the Army no longer teaches either Morse code or semaphore. Manual land navigation is probably out the window as well.