US on Nukes: We’re Keeping Them to Blow Up Asteroids

[CommanderFrank]

Any excuse to keep nukes on hand is suspect these days, but leave it up to the US government to announce their reasons with a straight face. The Wall Street Journal has reported the government has decided to hold back some nuclear weapons from disassembly just in case a wayward asteroid comes our way.

None of this is to say that the government is expecting any giant asteroids to smash into our planet any time soon -- it is expected we're free and clear for the next 100 years, at minimum.

 

[kbrickley]

As the quote from Contact goes, "There are a thousand reasons we can think of for the occupant of the machine to have this with them -- but mostly it's for the reasons we can't think of." ... You don't just suddenly make a nuclear device ... if the levels of the major powers are reduced and they have adequate security it would actually be more irresponsible to get rid of all of them than to keep a few around for emergencies ... the problem with nuclear weapons was not the weapons themselves (they remain the cheapest weapon in our arsenal) but the quantity of them ... 10,000 nuclear weapons is an unnecessary danger (but a smaller cache of 50-100 provide insurance in case they are needed for a variety of purposes)

 

[GlowingGhoul]

"Any excuse to keep nukes on hand is suspect these days, but leave it up to the US government to announce their reasons with a straight face. "

Any excuse?

 

[Cmdrmonkey]

While they could be useful for destroying or deflecting asteroids, the current launch mechanisms that are just designed to travel between continents are inadequate. You would need to mount the nukes on something equivalent to a Saturn V from the Apollo Program if you want to get serious about stopping near Earth objects.

 

[sir-gold]

Are they going to cyrogenically freeze Bruce Willis and all the members of Aerosmith too, just in case?

 

[Koolthulu]

Launching a nuke at an asteroid is about the least likely way of stopping one. If it does anything at all, it will just make things worse. Just shows that they don't understand anything about nukes or asteroids.

 

[westrock2000]

As the quote from Contact goes, "There are a thousand reasons we can think of for the occupant of the machine to have this with them -- but mostly it's for the reasons we can't think of." ... You don't just suddenly make a nuclear device ... if the levels of the major powers are reduced and they have adequate security it would actually be more irresponsible to get rid of all of them than to keep a few around for emergencies ... the problem with nuclear weapons was not the weapons themselves (they remain the cheapest weapon in our arsenal) but the quantity of them ... 10,000 nuclear weapons is an unnecessary danger (but a smaller cache of 50-100 provide insurance in case they are needed for a variety of purposes)

I have always liked that quote.

But back to your nuclear capability statement. We have had world peace between the major powers for 70 years now. That is a pretty long duration in the history of mankind, in particular since the mechanization of warfare. I have no doubt that M.A.D is responsible for that.

But at this point, I would start to blame the Internet and the power of public resentment of war for our stint of peace.

 

[bucketlist]

Bullshitmeter.gif

 

[Cmdrmonkey]

Launching a nuke at an asteroid is about the least likely way of stopping one. If it does anything at all, it will just make things worse. Just shows that they don't understand anything about nukes or asteroids.

I that depends on what they plan to do with the nuke. Destroying an asteroid could just create a shotgun effect that makes things worse. But using an explosion near the asteroid to deflect it could help.

 

[Magnus]

it is expected we're free and clear for the next 100 years, at minimum

Now, if only the Universe read or cared about political statements. Our ability to detect asteroids is pathetically inadequate. Fortunately, we're a small target.

 

[Etherton]

We will destroy ourselves long before the universe takes a swing at us...

 

[Magnus]

We will destroy ourselves long before the universe takes a swing at us...

I'd bet that way too, which is why I avoid gambling.

 

[M'ichal]

I know Russians can be rough, but to call them "giant asteroids"? Ouch...

 

[devonhiee]

We will destroy ourselves long before the universe takes a swing at us...

Just the US statement alone proves this.

Of course if Russia made the same statement, the US would be up in arms against them.

 

[dangerouseddy]

I would think we probably would detect an object until it was too late to do anything about it, I don't think mounting and launching a nuke into space would be quick.

 

[Magnus]

I would think we probably would detect an object until it was too late to do anything about it, I don't think mounting and launching a nuke into space would be quick.

It would still be quicker than not having any nukes to try with. Hope is a powerful defense. Without it we'd have killed our bosses, co-workers and, wives long ago.

 

[Etherton]

I was watching an episode of How the Universe Works the other day. They are under the impression that in the unlikely event we were to hit an asteroid with a nuke, it would rain down several smaller radioactive asteroids - effectively killing everyone anyway.

All we need is some popcorn to enjoy the show.

 

[JeffDC]

I was watching an episode of How the Universe Works the other day. They are under the impression that in the unlikely event we were to hit an asteroid with a nuke, it would rain down several smaller radioactive asteroids - effectively killing everyone anyway.

All we need is some popcorn to enjoy the show.

In the current era of lasers that operate up to 20 million degrees F, and both ground and space-based delivery systems now being developed for these lasers, nukes are or soon will be obsolete for this purpose.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

Launching a nuke at an asteroid is about the least likely way of stopping one. If it does anything at all, it will just make things worse. Just shows that they don't understand anything about nukes or asteroids.

I was watching an episode of How the Universe Works the other day. They are under the impression that in the unlikely event we were to hit an asteroid with a nuke, it would rain down several smaller radioactive asteroids - effectively killing everyone anyway.

All we need is some popcorn to enjoy the show.

You're just rehashing one possibility that has been passed off as fact in recent media. The reality is that we have no idea what the internal structure of asteroids is like or how they would respond to nuclear strikes, we've only examined their surfaces and fragments. Nukes may work well in many situations.

 

[Lith1um]

A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming

 

[BurntToast]

I that depends on what they plan to do with the nuke. Destroying an asteroid could just create a shotgun effect that makes things worse. But using an explosion near the asteroid to deflect it could help.

I'll take 1,000 city destroying fragments over a single mass world destroyer any day of the week. At least the other side of the planet has a chance.

 

[Dimethyltryptamine]

It would still be quicker than not having any nukes to try with. Hope is a powerful defense. Without it we'd have killed our bosses, co-workers and, wives long ago.

Comment flagged by NSA web crawler 1,567,454 for further analysis
Users ISP information added to list 'terrorists trying to steal our freedom'.
Note - Screen name leads us to believe User 'Magnus' has a superiority complex

That's what I think happens these days...

 

[kbrickley]

I was watching an episode of How the Universe Works the other day. They are under the impression that in the unlikely event we were to hit an asteroid with a nuke, it would rain down several smaller radioactive asteroids - effectively killing everyone anyway.

All we need is some popcorn to enjoy the show.

Not all of our fusion warheads have high radioactive aftermaths ... also, although we could likely survive (in some capacity) any strike except for a planet killer, it is that planet killer variety we most have to be concerned with ... if we broke the large planet killer into smaller non sterilizing pieces or deflected it, then it could be the difference between certain death and some small chance of survival ... in the long run it is certainly better to have an option you don't need to use than to not have that option at all

 

[xX_Jack_Carver_Xx]

Like, Duh.

Not that they would be an option in all instances, but it s critical to have the option.

What is needed is a FAST booster set that can get a 50-100-250 Megaton warhead to target tens of millions of miles out ASAP. Which is something we don't have.

There are ways of building a Fusion weapon that bypasses the current limitations, so a Gigaton or 10 Gigaton is possible.

 

[Dimethyltryptamine]

All this discussion tells me is that we humans should really consider placing nukes on the moon right now to actually have a better chance at deflecting a planet killer sized asteroid farther out in space.

Note to the US government, I don't mean blow up the moon, either.

 

[PersonalJ]

There's no serious threat from space on any human timescale. All the US government wants are nukes for Cold War 2.0.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

There's no serious threat from space on any human timescale. All the US government wants are nukes for Cold War 2.0.

I guess you missed the Russian meteor awhile back? With a Tunguska event every 100-200 years its only a matter of time until a city gets blown away.

 

[Fun]

Well, Apophis is coming. So yeah, there's that.

 

[sfsuphysics]

Destroying an asteroid could just create a shotgun effect that makes things worse.

I hear that all the time... usually in movies, and it's a fallacy. The shotgun analogy in no way takes into account our atmosphere, if you shoot a shotgun at a piece of plywood, most of the buckshot is going to get stopped (assuming a thick enough piece of plywood) if you shoot a slug at a piece of plywood it's going to blow a hole straight through it.

Lots of tiny fragments will have a sizeable fraction of their mass burn up in the atmosphere, much more so than a single large rock. If a large rock hits, you can get everything from a destroyed city, to nuclear winter effects, if lots of tiny rocks hit, you might get little craters here and there, but unless someone or something is struck directly that's about the extent of it.

 

[Dimethyltryptamine]

There's no serious threat from space on any human timescale. All the US government wants are nukes for Cold War 2.0.

I'm just glad you got 'space' all mapped out so you know exactly what's a serious threat. Just because that US gov wants to keep nukes in case [insert anything] does not mean asteroids aren't a serious threat. One decent sized one is all it takes and it could be on its way here, right now.

Also, for all we know...

Seriously though, not sure how up to date this list is but NASA is aware of at least 1,506 potentially dangerous asteroids.

 

[illumined]

Here's a couple of things to take into consideration.

1.) The Russians are never going to give up their arsenal. Their conventional forces have deteriorated to such a degree that they really aren't a credible threat to anyone with a half way decent military, let alone NATO. So to make up for this they plan to use a nuclear first strike to level the playing field. They call it "de-escalation"

2.) In future space warfare nuclear weapons will come into widespread use. Not against planets but against space stations and other spaceships. In space they aren't quite the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that they are here, but they still pack a much bigger punch than a conventional weapon.

So even for just the first reason the US arsenal isn't going anywhere.

 

[Lith1um]

/don't need a lot of mass when you're traveling between 25,000 mph to 160,000 mph, kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity. A meteor impact can have 100-150 times as much energy as the same mass of TNT. The question becomes how large would the fragments from the nuclear destruction of an asteroid be?

Physics 10 - Lecture 01: Atoms and Heat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0

Small chunks would lose their cosmic velocity several miles up, heavy chunks might hit the ground without appreciably slowing.

How fast are meteorites traveling when they reach the ground?

Meteoroids enter the earth’s atmosphere at very high speeds, ranging from 11 km/sec to 72 km/sec (25,000 mph to 160,000 mph). However, similar to firing a bullet into water, the meteoroid will rapidly decelerate as it penetrates into increasingly denser portions of the atmosphere. This is especially true in the lower layers, since 90 % of the earth’s atmospheric mass lies below 12 km (7 miles / 39,000 ft) of height.

At the same time, the meteoroid will also rapidly lose mass due to ablation. In this process, the outer layer of the meteoroid is continuously vaporized and stripped away due to high speed collision with air molecules. Particles from dust size to a few kilograms mass are usually completely consumed in the atmosphere.

Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to 180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to atmospheric drag.

Meteoroids of more than about 10 tons (9,000 kg) will retain a portion of their original speed, or cosmic velocity, all the way to the surface. A 10-ton meteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere perpendicular to the surface will retain about 6% of its cosmic velocity on arrival at the surface. For example, if the meteoroid started at 25 miles per second (40 km/s) it would (if it survived its atmospheric passage intact) arrive at the surface still moving at 1.5 miles per second (2.4 km/s), packing (after considerable mass loss due to ablation) some 13 gigajoules of kinetic energy.

On the very large end of the scale, a meteoroid of 1000 tons (9 x 10^5 kg) would retain about 70% of its cosmic velocity, and bodies of over 100,000 tons or so will cut through the atmosphere as if it were not even there. Luckily, such events are extraordinarily rare.
All this speed in atmospheric flight puts great pressure on the body of a meteoroid. Larger meteoroids, particularly the stone variety, tend to break up between 7 and 17 miles (11 to 27 km) above the surface due to the forces induced by atmospheric drag, and perhaps also due to thermal stress. A meteoroid which disintegrates tends to immediately lose the balance of its cosmic velocity because of the lessened momentum of the remaining fragments. The fragments then fall on ballistic paths, arcing steeply toward the earth. The fragments will strike the earth in a roughly elliptical pattern (called a distribution, or dispersion ellipse) a few miles long, with the major axis of the ellipse being oriented in the same direction as the original track of the meteoroid. The larger fragments, because of their greater momentum, tend to impact further down the ellipse than the smaller ones. These types of falls account for the “showers of stones” that have been occasionally recorded in history. Additionally, if one meteorite is found in a particular area, the chances are favorable for there being others as well.

source: http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/

 

[sfsuphysics]

Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to 180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to atmospheric drag.

This part is pretty cringe worthy, because they are accelerating the entire time they fall towards Earth up until they reach terminal velocity. The way this makes it sound is that they actually slow below terminal velocity and then speed back up which doesn't make much sense at all.

 

[Jagger100]

Unable to field a matching convensional military, nukes are the only thing that kept the Soviets relevant for decades. And its why 'Star Wars' was opposed.

Now that we have gutted and condtinue to gut our military and do too much stuff with tax dollars other than do the first and foremost job of a government, we have to rely on nukes to keep relevant.

 

[Phoenix333]

The concept of mutually assured destruction of an enemy nation is still a valid military deterrent for most nations. The problem is that the global nature of economics, and the fact that the US has moved its means of production into other nations, reduces the usefulness of that concept. The US won WWII in Europe because it could keep building tanks, plans, and bombs, while the Germans couldn't, since the US was bombing the German factories into rubble. Now all of the factories that make stuff for the US are in China and Mexico. The problem there is that if the US were to use nuclear weapons, China and Mexico and anyone else could just protest it by closing their borders to US trade. The US economy collapses, and its citizens starve.

The other problem is that it's unlikely for a nation such as China or Russia to launch an overt attack using nuclear weapons. An infiltration attack by Muslim terrorists is far more likely, but then who are you going to launch your nukes at? What city do you annihilate in hopes of removing a threat that is scattered all around the world? The only use for nukes at this point are as a "kill everyone else on the way out" option, but at the same time, if everyone else has nukes and the US doesn't... well then it's just a question of who wants to take a shot at the US first.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

The US won WWII in Europe because it could keep building tanks, plans, and bombs, while the Germans couldn't, since the US was bombing the German factories into rubble.

Nope. Allied air raids were largely ineffective at cutting German production. Even towards the end they had plenty of production resources to throw at expensive and complicated projects like the V-1/V-2 missiles and jet fighters. What they didn't have was manpower.

 

[JeffDC]

The concept of mutually assured destruction of an enemy nation is still a valid military deterrent for most nations. The problem is that the global nature of economics, and the fact that the US has moved its means of production into other nations, reduces the usefulness of that concept. The US won WWII in Europe because it could keep building tanks, plans, and bombs, while the Germans couldn't, since the US was bombing the German factories into rubble. Now all of the factories that make stuff for the US are in China and Mexico. The problem there is that if the US were to use nuclear weapons, China and Mexico and anyone else could just protest it by closing their borders to US trade. The US economy collapses, and its citizens starve.

Uh, we managed to survive 200+ years before Richard Nixon "opened the gates to China" and sold out America's labor force to multinational corporations. We managed to survive even longer without NAFTA.

We can manage to feed, house and build homes for ourselves, thanks. I don't think anyone will drop dead from a lack of $50 LCD monitors from China.

 

[Dekoth-E-]

I read this earlier and being that I used to work on US Nuclear weapons I wanted to weigh in..However after a ton of contemplation the only thing I really can say is summed up in this picture.

 

[Jagger100]

Uh, we managed to survive 200+ years before Richard Nixon "opened the gates to China" and sold out America's labor force to multinational corporations. We managed to survive even longer without NAFTA.

We can manage to feed, house and build homes for ourselves, thanks. I don't think anyone will drop dead from a lack of $50 LCD monitors from China.

They were opened not just for multinationals, but foreign governments and businesses. China is a willing off-shoring destination because they gain the know how out of the deal. One day the US companies will just be names and someone will realize this, and the last of big US companies will fade away completely as we go back to being a raw materials and agricultural supplier (aka a banana republic) again.

 

[vasta]

The concept of mutually assured destruction of an enemy nation is still a valid military deterrent for most nations. The problem is that the global nature of economics, and the fact that the US has moved its means of production into other nations, reduces the usefulness of that concept. The US won WWII in Europe because it could keep building tanks, plans, and bombs, while the Germans couldn't, since the US was bombing the German factories into rubble. Now all of the factories that make stuff for the US are in China and Mexico. The problem there is that if the US were to use nuclear weapons, China and Mexico and anyone else could just protest it by closing their borders to US trade. The US economy collapses, and its citizens starve.

The other problem is that it's unlikely for a nation such as China or Russia to launch an overt attack using nuclear weapons. An infiltration attack by Muslim terrorists is far more likely, but then who are you going to launch your nukes at? What city do you annihilate in hopes of removing a threat that is scattered all around the world? The only use for nukes at this point are as a "kill everyone else on the way out" option, but at the same time, if everyone else has nukes and the US doesn't... well then it's just a question of who wants to take a shot at the US first.

The majority of factories that make US goods are in China because China hasn't cared about pollution for decades even though recently China appears to be on a solar kick (yet they continue to bring about 6 coal plants online each day) which is why the air over there has become so thick with shit you can cut it with a knife and paying workers cents an hour over there is apparently the norm, those things make building polluting factories in China appealing to companies, that and the fines China has handed out to polluting companies are pocket change

You also forgot, short of the US actually dropping a nuke on Beijing, closing trade with the US will never happen considering the US is the biggest importer of Chinese goods, companies also have the option of moving back to the US if things ever got really bad but that would require money and actually require these companies to sort of give a shit about all the garbage they are pumping into the air, meanwhile in China you are pretty much free to pollute the hell out of everything but don't worry, if you get caught you might have to pay like 40 grand in fines