Nuke the moon
How big would the bomb have to be to been seen clearly from the earth?
I read that the Soviet’s once planned to use nukes to dig thier own canal thought Nicaragua.
What other fun ideas did we have for our little toys?
Don’t forget NERVA, the atom-bomb-powered rocket.
(They weren’t going to use it within the earth’s atmosphere. I think.)
Actually not all that big.
Because of some quirk of physics an atomic fission reaction (A-bomb) is brighter than the sun (who’s hydrogen fusion reaction is slow and lazy in comparison), but it wouldn’t last long (if I’m remembering it right the fission reaction lasts a few hundreths of a second).
An A-bomb isn’t like a granade or a stick of dynamite. It doesn’t create a big explosive “bang”. What happens is a lot (A LOT!!!) of free photons (light particles) are created. On earth this discharge of energy flash fries everything in the vicinity and heats up the surrounding atmosphere, causing it to expand…
Ever see the stock footage of the tests with empty houses? Thats the flash that causes the paint to smoke, then the initial “whoomp”.
…but the energy is this tremendous for only a fraction of a second, so the atmosphere cools rapidly and contracts…
Thats the “suck” you see in the footage.
…leaving only dust and super-heated debris. Thats where the mushroom cloud comes from, this dusty hot air rises and expands.
With a detonation on the moon with no atmosphere to offer resistance I suspect you’d get a initial incredible flash, a perfectly circular expanding glow caused by superheated dust, and a new crater too small to see with the naked eye.
There were actually a couple of nuclear powered rocket options explored from the late 40’s to the late 60’s. The most famous of these of course was Orion which used small atom bomb explosions behind the ship as a drive system. They developed scale models using conventional explosives and were getting some fairly decent results from it. Orion starcraft wouldn’t activate the drive system in an atmosphere, since that would require different dynamics from vacume activation. The other lesser known rocket to immediately come to mind is Pegasus. This was an atmospheric cruise missle that used an open reactor pile to superheat air for thrust and gain Ramjet ultrasonic speeds rather quickly. It would use a simple rocket to get moving, but once it hit a certain speed, the reactor would open, and the missle would go to ramjet mode…very fast acceleration…the biggest problem was that anyone under the flight path would get wonderfull fallout, so Pegasus was shitcanned.
One use for the Orion drive concept was mentioned in The long ARM of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven. Strap a nuke to an asteroid, set it off. Put another nuke in the crater from the first and set it off. Each nuke helps direct the blast for the following nukes, and each nukes helps push the asteroid into a different orbit…if planned correctly, said orbit is a better orbit for mining of the asteriod.
In a war…Bomb pumped XRay lasers are…usefull. Take a hydrogen bomb, alter its configuration a bit, so that as it explodes, the XRay’s generated are ‘focused’ along a specific vector. One very nasty beam weapon in space.
<Bump>
I was hoping to hear about other uses for our nukes.
There must have been some pretty strange ideas out there early on.
Scientific American published an interview with Edward Teller in October 1999, in which he defended a couple of bright ideas he had for the hydrogen bomb that he developed. Among them was “Project Chariot, the never-realized plan to creat a new harbor in Alaska by setting off up to six hydrogen bombs”. The article says that “Teller conceived a multitude of uses for nuclear explosions, from mining to changing the weather”.
“Mein Fuehrer, I can walk!”
DHR
Then there’s the oft-talked-about fission-powered laser…
Teller’s envisioned Project Chariot for blasting out a deep-water harbor in Alaska came disturbingly close to happening. I’d heard about this for years only in passing, but recently a book has come out about it – “The Firecracker Boys” (don’t recall the author). Scary reading!
Project Chariot was to be a test for an AMERICAN (Not Soviet) sea-level canal across Central America. This was Project Plowshare (as in “Swords into Plowshares”)Again, it didn’t happen. I understand that they came to the conclusion there would be too much fallout.
Then there’s Project Gasbuggy. hey were going to set off an underground nuclear explosion in Pennsylvania (!!) According to Walter Patterson’s “Nuclear Power” they actually signed the legislation allowing this before they decided that the natural gas it would liberate (this being the point of the exercise) would be too radioactive to be useful.
I think you might be thinking about the “Phased Array” fusion reactor located in my home town of Livermore California. A bunch of lasers at a certain frequency focused to a point and trying to create a fusion reaction in selenium.
Thing’ll never work…
Now Lawrence Livermore Lab has this three story stainless steel curvy ball thing that looks like a giant Jarvek-7 articicial heart buried in it’s backyard and congressional fundings been cut.
I bet that would make one groovy disco ball though, if they covered it with mirrors.
Obviously having nothing to add here…
Inky-
There is (was) a planned fission-bomb powered laser on the books for use in the Strategic Defense Initiative. The idea was to use laser beams from space to destroy enemy missiles. One of the many problems was to make lasers powerful enough to do significant damage. Since the lasers were spaceborne they needed a compact, lightweight but extremely powerful power source. Of course the bomb would destroy the satellite but just before it did it would beam out a blast of coherent x-rays, hopefully at the intended target, or as a second choice, Newark.