What happens if you detonate a nuke in space

For real. Fortunately for everyone, the Air Force never acted on the study. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories.

Getty Images. A new video shows what would happen if we detonated a nuclear weapon on the moon. The lack of an atmosphere would make a nuclear explosion on the moon significantly different than one on Earth. During the Cold War, the U. Air Force actually thought about doing it as a show of scientific progress and, yes, a show of force.

You love badass space stuff. So do we. Let's explore the universe together. Go Pro. This content is imported from YouTube. Register Free. Anthony Bouchard. Fascinated by scientific discoveries and media, Anthony found his way here at LabRoots, where he would be able to dabble in the two. Anthony is a technology junkie that has vast experience in computer systems and automobile mechanics, as opposite as those sound.

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The memory of that day stuck with Spriggs, who is now a weapons scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he works preserving and analyzing archival nuclear test footage.

A year before, in , international negotiations to ban nuclear testing had taken a turn for the worse. After three years of no testing, the Soviet Union and the U. It was set off in October , about 13, feet above an island in the Arctic Circle. The space race was in its infancy back then, and the U. The Department of Defense was in the midst of a separate project to put million copper needles into orbit to try to reflect radio waves and help long-distance communication.

There was even a plan, which ultimately fizzled, to set off a nuclear blast on the moon. And that was a shocker back then. During a press conference in May , President John F. After four days of delays, waiting for the perfect weather, Starfish Prime was launched on the tip of a Thor rocket from Johnston Atoll, an island about nautical miles southwest of Hawaii.

The military also sent up 27 smaller missiles laden with scientific instruments to measure its effects. Airplanes and boats got into position to record the test in as many ways as possible. Flares were set off in hopes of distracting local birds from the blinding flash to come.

Scientists already knew that a nuclear blast in space behaves very differently from one on the ground, says Spriggs. There is no mushroom cloud or double flash. Still, the test revealed some important information about radiation around Earth. The bomb released a special isotope tracer called cadmium Its original purpose was to track the fallout from the test, but it also became a valuable resource for understanding weather patterns in the upper atmosphere.

The test also helped the U. Such advances helped make a treaty to ban nukes in space more realistic. But there are other potent sources of radiation in outer space.