What happens if you explode a nuclear bomb in space?

Published Jun 22, 2023, 5:00 AM

Daniel and Katie touch on the explosive question of nuclear weapons and explain the impact of space-based explosions.

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Hey Katie, what's the biggest thing that you've ever seen? Blow up?

Technically soup that I microwaved too high, But I've always wanted to see one of those building demolitions.

Oh that does sound fun. I'd love to see you blow up soup or watch a building get exploded. I wonder if they sell tickets to those events.

I hope they go on tour, and I hope they come to my city. What about you? What is the biggest explosion that you have seen.

Well, there was the time that I made a strawberry smoothie without putting a lid on the blender, and I'm still cleaning up strawberry in the kitchen years later. But I did once see a shoe store explode when an air and firework hitted on New Year's Eve. It was crazy. You could feel the heat from blocks away.

That's crazy, that's amazing. I'm sure you were gonna say something more dramatic, though.

More dramatic than a flaming shoe store, but I thought so you grew up in Los Alamos, Like, isn't that the home of the atomic bomb? It is, But we don't just like set them off on holidays, you know.

That seems like a shame.

I guess you could say we've kind of blown it.

You didn't blow it, and that's the problem.

Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I hope to never be near a nuclear explosion.

I am Katie Golden. I host the podcast Creature Feature, and I hope there's never nuclear explosion anywhere ever, space, Earth, what have you. It seems like a bad sign of things to come.

Are you saying that nukes can never be used for good? You're not aware of the Peacetime nuclear weapons program or the design of the Orion spaceship, which literally uses nuclear weapons blowing up behind it in order to propel it forward.

I mean, if you're basically going to do big space farts with nukes to make your spaceship go, I'll make an exception.

All right, We have already broken down your barriers here and so welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which we dive deep into everything that happens in the universe, how it all works, how it all began, how it all might end, and how humans might bring about their own demise.

I'm a big fan of life on Earth. I love all the animals on Earth, love all the plants and the humans, most of them, ninety nine percent of humans. And you know, I have a lot of nuclear anxiety when it comes to the planet Earth, because I don't want one going off and you know, destroying a bunch of stuff, radiating things, maybe causing a new ice age with the clouds of debris. But I guess if it's blown up in space. I'm a little less worried.

Well, this to me is a really interesting area because it brings together the sort of fascinating progress we make in physics as we start to understand the way the universe works, what the forces are that underlie everything, how they weave themselves together to make our reality. Understanding that also gives us new power, the power to use that knowledge to develop new technologies, which of course can be good in peace time, like transistors and iPhones, but also can be used to make weapons of mass destruction that are pointed at civilian populations for political gain. And so, while we like on this podcast to think about the physics side of it, the scientific edge of knowledge, how we can always push that forward, and we generally think about that knowledge as purely good, as satisfying our curiosity, is scratching our itch that wonders about how the universe works. It's not possible to really live in a bubble and pretend that that knowledge can't be used in all sorts of ways that the original scientists to work on it aren't in control of personally, I did grow up in Los Almo's home in the Manhattan Project in Los Almos National Laboratory, where weapons projects are ongoing to this day, and both of my parents worked at the lab and worked on weapons related projects. What exactly they did, I don't know. I didn't know. I will never know because I don't have SART clearance to know such secrets. But such power over the universe comes with real responsibility.

Yeah, I think I remember that a lot of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project became very anti nuclear proliferation, you know, It's it's something that I think people who really understand the devastating power of nukes also are very much opposed to uncontrolled proliferation of dukes. So I don't think it's something whereas scientists are there's a bunch of mad scientists who really just want to blow up the planet. I think most of the scientists who really understand this stuff are also probably pretty anxious and would like a world with fewer nukes.

Yeah. Absolutely, I do know that my mother worked on nuclear non proliferation programs, ways that you can detect nuclear fuel and nuclear explosions, et cetera. But my father definitely worked on the weapons side of it, And I asked him once not, of course, like, tell me some nuclear secrets, But how do you feel about working on the design of huge weapons that are in the end pointed at civilian populations. And you know, back in the eighties when he started that job, it was a different era. We were still in the Cold War and developing our nuclear capabilities. Sort of felt patriotic. Back then. It felt like, Hey, you're contributing to your country, you're protecting us, you're defending us. I'm not saying that it's morally crisp and clean. I certainly chose to do particle physics because it has no weapons applications and nobody's ever going to use my research to kill anybody.

Not yet they haven't yet. They give me a pen and a piece of paper, I'll come up with something that the.

Higgs Boson bomb by Katie golden Well. Nuclear weapons are very powerful and very dangerous, and they've also captured the public imagination, and I get a lot of interest in our podcast email box about nuclear weapons. People wonder what would happen if you dropped the nuclear weapon into the sun, or could we really use nuclear weapons to blow up the polar ice caps on Mars and to make more atmosphere or what exactly happens when you drop a nuclear weapon in X? Basically I get these questions where X is anything. And so we're starting a new series of podcasts titled what Happens if You Explode a nuke in Blank? And we're going to explore everywhere you can imagine putting a nuclear weapon.

So today, where are we exploding that nuke?

Well, we're not putting that nuke in any sort of biological locations. We're mostly going to focus on the physics locations. And today on the podcast, we'll be answering the question what happens if you explode a nuke in space?

So we are definitely cordoning off any of the space whales, any of the space jelly fish, any kind of free floating space creatures that might be in the way of this nuke, and presumably we're exploding it just in space space, right like where there's not too much around, just pure space, just.

Pure space exactly. And I think this question is super fascinating from a scientific point of view because mostly what we know and what we imagine about nuclear weapons comes from the interaction of the nuclear blast with the atmosphere or with the Earth. Those shockwaves, and that doesn't happen in space. So we'll go in detail through exactly what does happen in a nuclear explosion and how that propagates through space when it's not surrounded by a cocoon of air. This also the really fascinating political and sort of militaristic side of it, as humanity tries to build a space based civilization. Space war is a big question, and so like understanding what happens when you blow up a nuke in space from a sort of political or military strategic point of view is also really interesting.

And could we go somewhere in the universe and not put wars in there?

I think only if we don't bring the humans, right, the wars come with the humans.

I think only puppies should go to space, so that don't start any wars.

But that's also a really fascinating question. You see in a lot of science fiction novels human civilization spread out through the galaxy, or humans and aliens spread out through the galaxy, able to access all these vast resources and yet still fighting right, still having wars, and I wonder if that's really true. I often pose that question to our science fiction author guests like, what are these people fighting about. There's essentially limitless resources. Like you want water, go to Neptune. It's basically a planet of water. You want gold, there's like enormous blobs of gold out there. Platinum, like this asteroid's made of platinum. If you need something, don't come kill us for it, just go get it. If you want energy, like the Sun is out there dumping out energy, it seems to me that once you make it to space, I don't know, people would still be having wars unless they're just fundamentally grumpy.

That could be. I think that if you have resources spread out relatively fairly, right, like you don't have a space king that's hoarding all the Neptune water for himself, that yeah, it would make sense that there would be fewer wars because I think when people have a lot of resources, they have a good quality of life, Why would they want to go to war? You know, what would be the purpose for the everyday person to risk it all for war? Again, if we have like space monarchies, then yeah, there might be some wars.

Yeah. Well, there are some really interesting science fiction explorations of this, like the Culture series and other like post scarcity novels where basically everybody has everything they ever want. You just ask for something and you get it, and they explore like, what would life be like in that situation. Anyway, back to the topic of today's podcast, we are not yet there. We are not yet in outer space living among the riches where everybody gets their own platinum throne. Instead, we're still down here on Earth and wondering what would happen if you blew up a nuclear weapon in space? And so, as usual, I pulled our listeners to hear what they thought might happen in this scenario. If you would like to participate in this segment of the podcast giving your informed or uninformed answers for us to hear, please don't be shy. Write to me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com. So think about it for a minute. Do you know what would happen if we blew up a nuclear bomb in space? Here's what our listeners had to say.

Probably something very similar to what happens if you explode a nuclear bomb. Not in space. A lot of energy is released. Basically, it's what the Sun is doing, so it's just a bunch of energy pouring out into space.

I think the exploding a nuclear bomb in space would have very little effect. It would be a pretty clean explosion if there are at some radioactive particles, but there's loads of them flying around in space anyway, so essentially I have no concerns.

Go for it.

So if I.

Understand right how a nukeworks, it requires a chain reaction between the atoms of our atmosphere, So in deep space without atmosphere, it will have no effects.

You'd see a big, huge round flash, blinding flash of light, and then you wouldn't hear anything, I guess because it's the vacuum of space. And then as soon as all the the fuel, the hydrogen was or uranium or plutonium was gone, it should be done. And I don't think it's any debris, because there's no like that start all lighted up.

Is this an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb? I think either way. I think you just make a tiny little sun for a second, and then not much would happen except for some more radiation in space.

I assume it would just sort of do the same thing it does here without a shock wave.

I believe that unless it's something close or is something to you know, to a planet, or maybe close to I don't know, like a nebula. Maybe it will you know, wish await that. But other than that, maybe the only thing in space that will happen if you know, if it's in the vacuum space, it will create maybe a little bit of a gravitational waves. Maybe I don't know.

Well, you won't get a mushroom cloud, that's for sure, because that only happens in the atmosphere. So when a nuclear explosion happens, I believe that it releases basically lots and lots of radiation in the form of photons and the radioactive particles. So I imagine like a big bright ball of light that will flash for a second and disappear.

I would suppose that the nuclear bomb would still explode, and having nothing for the explosion to press back against, I would expect that the explosion would be equal in all directions, and that the residual matter would fly out in all directions equally.

That's a lot of different answers, really interesting ideas. I think the main thing people are thinking of, like it in space, right, you don't have atmosphere, you don't have air, so you're not going to have the things that air and atmosphere provides like say a shock wave or sound.

Yeah, it's basically like a little sun in space. Is a great little argument. There was somebody who said something about how it requires a chain reaction in the atmosphere, so in space it'll have no effect, which I think might have some misunderstanding of how a nuclear weapon works. But on the whole, yeah, these are great answers.

Well, how I think nuclear explosions work is you take it at them and you get a little axe, very sharp ax, and yea split it in half, and that releases a bunch of energy and it explodes.

Tell me I'm wrong, You're wrong, although you could be wronger, I mean there is some elevation that's correct. Essentially, there's two ways to make a nuclear explosion. One is fission and one is fusion. Fission is when you're cracking a big heavy atom open, So you have like uranium or something which already is on the verge of breaking apart, and you take a little axe, which in this case is a neutron, and you shoot it at the uranium and it breaks open and it makes more neutrons and those neutrons fly out and hit other uranium atoms which then crack open and release energy and more neutrons, and then you get this chain reaction. And so if your ax is basically a tiny little neutron ax, then maybe that works. And actually isn't. Thor's hammer supposed to be made out of neutron star, so there's already a precedent there for like tools made of neutrons.

I knew Marvel was scientifically accurate in every way. That's the fission part, where you have a bunch of unstable large atoms being hacked apart by neutrons, and then that in turn releases more neutrons and that hacks apart other unstable atoms. You mentioned, though, there's a fusion one as well, Yeah, exactly.

So that's fission, and the design of a fission bomb is actually quite interesting, like the way you get that to blow up, because if you just have a bunch of uraniums sitting around, it's not going to have a chain reaction unless it has enough density, like you pack those things dense enough, then it's going to blow up. But what you want in a bomb is something that blows up when you want it to, not just like when you build it. Right, you want something like a fuse, and so you need a controlled explosion. And so what they do is they have two pieces of uranium, both of which do not have enough mass to blow they are subcritical masses. And then what happens in the bomb is you basically smash those two together, combine them together to make a super critical mass when they can actually trigger this runaway effect and cause the explosion. And sometimes they even have like a little trigger like a pellet of polonium or beryllium or something to get the first neutrons going. But you're right, that's all fission. And so the first bomb that was ever developed and was blown up in Alamogordo, New Mexico, not too far from where I grew up, was a fission bomb. But there's another much more powerful nuclear process that we now have a handle on, and that is fusion. Fusion is the opposite. Instead of breaking up a big heavy atom to release energy, you're sticking two light atoms together to make a heavier one. So two protons, for example, come together to make helium. It's actually a little bit more complicated. You end up with like multiple protons making multiple helium nuclei. But Squeezing light atoms together to make heavier ones releases energy, just like chopping up heavier atoms to make lighter ones releases energy.

You mentioned that the fusion bombs are more powerful. Why is that?

Yeah, that's a great question. And people also wonder, like, why is it that when you stick light materials together to make heavier ones you release energy, and if you break up heavier ones to make lighter ones, you release energy. And the answer to both questions just comes from the sort of energy structure of the nucleus. So when you squeeze two protons together to make helium, the way those two protons are bound together by the strong force contains like a deep potential well, sort of like the Earth falling into a gravitational well being captured by the Sun. Those two protons capture each other, So you need a lot of energy to break that up. Like if you want it to take helium and break it up into hydrogen, you'd have to zap it with a really powerful laser. You have to add energy to that. So the energy that's released from fusion has to do with the difference between the sort of energy structure of two protons that are far apart from each other and two protons that are bound together into helium. And why that number is big, It just has to do with the strong force and like how powerful it is on the other side of the spectrum. When you're breaking up uranium into lighter stuff. That's a really big, heavy nucleus and it's a little unstable already because of electromagnetism, which is pushing all those protons apart, and the strong force isn't as powerful because those protons are further apart from each other, just because the nucleus is like physically getting so big that the strong force isn't as powerful over those distances, so it's a little bit easier to break that up, and the strong force bonds aren't as powerful because the distance is a little bit greater. So it all has to do with like the structure of the energy levels of the nuclear formation, which you're super complicated.

So when something heavy unstable, Adam I thought that things like uranium would sort of naturally decay because they are unstable. Why don't they just spontaneously explode when they are decaying?

You mean, why don't you get runaway nuclear reactions in nature?

Exactly?

Actually, you can. The crucial thing is just having enough uranium. Uranium is typically dilute out in the world. It's in oxides and it's not very pure. But if you do happen to have a fairly pure uranium deposit, like sitting underground, it will undergo a natural fission reaction. And there's a spot in Africa where they're very certain that a couple of billion years ago there was enough uranium and it started a natural fission reaction and like cooked the rock and like heated up the whole thing. We did a whole podcast episode about it a year or so ago. Uranium, of course, is unstable and so it decays and the kind of uranium you need is getting more and more, so it's not a likely thing to happen again. Like the conditions for natural fission reactions on Earth without human intervention are no longer likely to exist.

Oh that's really interesting. So back to the nuclear bombs, Like what either for a fission bomb or a fusion bomb, Like once you have set off that reaction, what happens like on planet Earth exactly? Like what is the effect the impact of a nuclear bomb?

So all bombs essentially are just a rapid release of energy some process which is exothermic, maybe chemical for like dynamite or nuclear for fusion fission bombs, but just a very rapid release of energy. And the crucial things to understand is how that energy is carried. And in the case of nuclear weapons, it's not just different carriers of energy relative to chemical weapons, but it's also just much more dramatic. Right, there's like so much more energy released per gram of fuel because it's much more efficient at extracting energy from those bonds. Chemical bonds and dynamite don't have nearly as much energy as the nuclear bonds that we're releasing in nuclear weapons, So you get different energy carriers flying out, and you just get a lot more. So the energy comes out in terms of photons, so like infrared photons, visible light photons, UV photons, all of those things. You also get a bunch of particles. You get neutrons, you get electrons, you get protons, you get gamma rays, you get all sorts of crazy things shooting out from the explosion.

When I've seen footage of test explosions of a nuclear bomb on like an uninhabited house, it looks like this huge wave of air almost just obliterating the house as it passes through. What's causing that big shockwave of air? Is that just all these particles being released, this super energy particles, or is there some kind of heat that's also being released from the bomb.

So when you detonate a nuclear weapon, you produce all of this energy in various forms, and then you have to ask, like, okay, the shell of around the nuclear weapon, the air or the water or whatever, is that transparent to these energy carriers. Will it absorb that energy or will it just pass through? And in some cases it's transparent, in some cases it's not. So when it's not transparent, when it's opaque, when it's going to absorb that energy, then all that energy is getting dumped into the air. So, for example, a lot of those photons are absorbed by the air. The infrared, for example, very efficiently absorbed by the air around the nuclear bomb, and that heats up the air. So the energy has been transformed from lower energy photons into temperature of the air. So now that air is super duperor hot. You've superheated that air and it expands and then that heats the air around it, and so that's where the shockwave comes. From from the dumping of that energy from the particles that come out of the nuclear weapons into the air itself, and then the air becomes part of the explosion.

I see. And so you're saying, unless it's transparent, I would assume that both air and water would absorb energy from a nuke. So it doesn't seem like there'd be anywhere on Earth where you wouldn't have an impact of a nuclear explosion, right, that's right.

And so the breakdown is something like around fifty percent of the energy in the air or in the water goes into forming this shockwave. Basically it gets turned into sound. Right, sound is just matter pressing on other matters, compression waves. So like half the energy of the nuclear bomb is absorbed by the matter that surrounds it and then expands that something like forty percent of it are photons to which the atmosphere or the water are mostly transparent, so visible light UV light. Right, the atmosphere is transparent to visible light. That's why we can see each other and we can see the sun because the atmosphere doesn't tend to absorb photons in this range that we can see. And that's of course no accident that's why we can see these photons. We're evolved in a situation to see these very useful photons. So fifty percent into shockwaves, forty percent into basically photons to which the atmosphere of the water is trans parent, and then like ten percent of the energy in things like neutrons and electrons, like other particles flying out like tiny bullets with high energy, which can also pass right through the atmosphere.

So is it as hot as like having a little sun in that area where the bomb went off? Like how hot does that get?

Yeah, it gets to millions of degrees calvin. It's really incredibly hot. It's a huge amount of energy, and that sounds really hot, and it is really hot, and it's actually hotter than the surface of the Sun, which is just a few thousand degrees kelvin. And that's why it can release energy like much much higher wavelengths. To remember that the temperature of an object controls the energy spectrum that's released. The hotter it is, the higher the frequency, the higher energy the radiation. And so that's why nuclear weapons release a lot of energy in the UV where we can't even see it because they are so dag hot.

It is extremely bright as well, right, Like, I think that's something that everyone's kind of aware of, how incredibly bright a nuclear explosion is, like you said, because the light passes through the air and then we can see it. Is it a white light or a yellow light? It'd be probably a white light, right.

It's basically broad spectrum, and so if you're watching a nuclear explosion, you actually see sort of two flashes. You see an initial flash of light because it's very very bright and it's very broad spectrum and it looks very white. But then light that's released later is actually captured by the shockwave. So you have the first flash which comes out very quickly. Then the shockwave comes out, and photons, which sort of bump up against the inner side of that shockwave, don't see it as transparent because the shockwave has made that air denser and so it's no longer transparent. And so until that shockwave dissipates, it's basically blocking the light from the nuclear weapon. And when it does, then you see a second flash. You know it's producing light the whole time, but it's like momentarily blocked. So you see this characteristic double peak of gamma radiation when you blow up a nuclear bomb here on Earth, at least underwater or in the air.

The other thing I think people think of when we picture a nuclear explosion is that characteristic mushroom cloud. Why does it have such a you know, specific shape, that mushroom cloud shape. Is that just sort of basic physics when it comes to an explosion that's large enough, or is there something else going on.

That's basic physics from a really large explosion. It's typical for nuclear explosions because they are so powerful. You know, you have this sudden formation of a really large volume of lower density gases, and then you get a buoyant massive gas which rises rapidly, giving you all this turbulence and curling down around the edges. But it can come from chemical explosions also if they are big enough.

I see. Interesting. So when you have a nuclear explosion, you have this huge amount of energy released. It superheats the air, causes this shock wave, causes this a massive amount of energy to be released in heat in radiation, which you know well is a real sucker punch after the effects of the bomb, right Like, you have this radiation in the area and people can get radiation poisoning. But it dissipates, it explodes, the energy dissipates, it reaks, whatever havoc it's gonna reek, and then it kind of it settles, The dust cloud settles, the radiation settles, and then it's a big explosion. And how long does it last? Typically like the explosion part of a nuclear bomb.

So the actual reaction is very quick, but you know, the shock wave travels at the speed of sound, which is something like a thousand feet per second, and so depending on the strength of the bomb, it can be like thirty seconds to a minute or so before that shockwave dissipates. And you're right that the initial danger is very very strong. You have the shockwave, you have the radiation exposure, but then there's the lasting effect of the fallout. Right, you have released a bunch of radioactive material, not all of it has fused or fizzed. And also that radiation creates more radioactive material. While these high energy neutrons can slam into others stuff, turning them into radioactive elements, and so the whole area is radioactor for a while, and in the cloud they are radioactive elements produced. When you have a fission reaction, we know that it produces very dangerous toxic waste.

Right.

That's why nuclear reactors have such a tricky problem to deal with. And a nuclear bomb that's not contained at all, it's just blown up into the atmosphere and so the fallout can be very dangerous and it can drift, right, you have wind, for example, so it can drift over hundreds of miles.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the considerations that countries have when they're thinking of using nukes. It's like, well, if I use it on my neighbor, that might just blow right back into my country exactly, which I think is in a way good, right, because you should think a few times before you decide to ease a nuke. But we should probably take a quick break, practice our duck and cover, and when we get back talk about what happens when you explode a nuke in space, not on Earth.

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So I've practiced my duck and cover a few times, which I'm sure would protect me really well if I was in the heart of a nuclear explosion. My desk is very sturdy. But we talked about what happens with a nuclear explosion on Earth. Hopefully we'll never see one ourselves, but what happens when you explode a nuke in space? Because space is very different from our planet Earth. It's missing a few things that we have that are nice to have here on Earth that protects us in other life, and so it seems like a nuclear bomb would react quite differently in space.

Yeah, it's really different, and in a fascinating way. The actual core reaction, of course, is the same. When the bomb goes off, it doesn't need the atmosphere or water or anything around it in order to actually detonate. It's not like a fire where you're using the oxygen from the atmosphere to burn, it can go all by itself, so it's happy to blow up in space or underwater or underground or in the air. So the core reaction is no different, and the things that it produces are the same. So a nuclear bomb in space blowing up produces the same spectrum of photon energies and neutron energies and electrons, et cetera as the nuclear bomb blowing up anywhere else. But of course the immediate surroundings of the bomb are very different. And so now instead of having some of that radiation immediately absorbed basically by a pillow that was surrounded the bomb, a pillow of air or water or dirt, now there's nothing there, so everything is transparent. So all that radiation instead of getting dumped into some blanket or some pillow, just flies out. So it all stays as radiation and just flies out like a mini sun, as our listeners described, filling nearby space with very dangerous radiation.

So when I see things like in Star Trek or Star Wars, and they like fire some kind of missile and then you see this like big explosion with like a explode cloud thing. If you're doing it, just that space right like maybe. I guess if you hit a spaceship you could get some debris that causes a bit of a cloud. But if you're just firing out in space, what exactly does an explosion look like when you're just it's just happening in empty space?

Yeah, great question. Those science fiction explosions use cues from our intuition. On Earth, you know, where things are loud and they're hot, but in space things would be different. Right. There's no sound. I mean, there are some particles out in space. It's not totally empty, so technically speaking, there there is the ability to propagate sound waves, but there's no sound, and there's also no flames, right, So what you would see instead is a very bright flash of light because all those particles are just flying out. There's nothing burning there. And you say, maybe the ship itself would explode if there's like fuel on board or whatever, But there's no flame, there's no oxidization effects, no chemical burning there. So essentially it's just a very bright pinprick of light, extremely bright, like something you should definitely not look at.

So you don't get that double flash right like you do with a nuke on Earth, because there's no shockwave to absorb the light from and kind of prevent it from reaching your eyes until the shockwave has moved on exactly.

That shockwave is purely a product of a race between the photons and the sound wave that's propagatting out. But because there is no soundwave, there's no shockwave, there's nothing there to absorb that radiation. All the radiation just fly out, and so it looks quite different. And what that means is that nuclear weapons are dangerous over much greater distances in space because the radiation is not absorbed, and so if a nuclear bomb blows up in space, you can get significant radiation damage from it. Even if you're much further away.

Say we exploded a nuke somewhere in our Solar system, would that radiation potentially hit.

Earth, you still are protected by physics is one over distance squared law. The same with the sun is like one hundred times dimmer if you're ten times further away, or electric fields go down by a factor of four if you're twice as far from the charge as all these one over distance squared law on physics, which actually not hard to understand. Like from a geometrical point of view, you imagine like particles flying out from a nuclear bomb or photons flying out from the sun, the same certain number are released. And then as the radius grows, those particles are now spread out over a larger and larger sphere, and the area that's sphere goes like four pi are squared. So as that sphere gets larger, the same number of photons or dangerous particles are spread out over a larger area. So for any given area, the radiation drops like one over the distance squared, And so if you're far away from this thing, you'll be safe. Now, on Earth, you can be just a couple of miles, two, three, four miles from an explosion and be mostly safe from the radiation because so much of it is absorbed into the atmosphere. But in space you've got to be like forty fifty sixty miles to be as safe as you would be on Earth, because essentially there's no protection. Right on Earth, you're kind of protected from this nuclear bomb by the atmosphere or by the ground, or by the water, but in space there's nothing there to shield you.

Right, So is this radiation constantly spreading out or does it kind of stop dissipating after a while, Does it keep dissipating forever until it just sort of has equalized somehow.

Yeah, great question. Well, the initial explosion again is very brief. The actual nuclear detonation doesn't last very long. And so what you're thinking about is sort of like a pulse, like all this radiation in a sphere that's traveling out very very fast, in many cases actually at the speed of light, and then getting dimmer and dimmer as it goes. And so it's really just like a pulse that travels through space, washing over things and damaging them.

How long does that pulse last? Does it last like seconds or hours or years?

Well, the pulse itself would last for less than a second. The actual explosion itself doesn't take very long, so it's not like sitting there stewing, continuing to produce pulses of energy. It's one very high intensity pulse over a short time. But it's various kinds of radiation also. There's photons, very high energies, and then there's neutrons, of course, and there's also electrons. And the electrons can be particularly damaging and also kind of fascinating because the electrons are traveling at very very high speeds and they tend to radiate. So electrons when they move to a magnetic field or anything, they change direction, they radiate photons and so that creates this electromagnetic pulse. All these electrons create this electromagnetic pulse which can disrupt the flow of electricity or damage any sort of electronics. And you see this in science fiction all the time, right, that like electronics are blacked out when there's a nuclear bomb, And that's really true. It'll create like pulses of energy in electronics.

That's really interesting. So if you're a spaceship, right and you're riding up and someone decides to blow up a nuke in front of you, you're really screwed in many ways because you've just got a huge dose of radiation and then all of your electronics on your spaceship are going to get messed up by that EMP pulse. Is there anything else to look out for if you're on that spaceship cruising and someone blows up a nuke, Miria.

Well, if you're on that spaceship, I really hope you have a special leadlined room to protect yourself, like we do actually on the space station. Because the Sun, of course, is a huge source of radiation and solar storms can generate EMPs and also other kinds of radiation which can damage satellites and people. And so they have a special room on the space station where the astronauts can go like a panic room when there's going to be like a high radiation solar weather event. And so I hope your spaceship is outfitted with one of those, because if somebody blows up a nuclear bomb, it's going to damage your ship and also damage you if you're within tens of miles.

We know that for like when you explode a nuke on Earth, long after the explosion, it's irradiated everything around, and depending on how large the explosion is the nature of it, like with Chernobyl, the area in that exclusion zone is still radioactive. Like it's still not necessarily a safe place to be. It's not like you will immediately get radiation poisoning and die if you step foot in the exclusion zone, but you can get sick depending on how long you're in there and how close you get to the center where the explosion happened. But what happens like with this explosion in space, is there an area like a sort of point in the middle that continues to be sort of radioactive or does that without anything to really absorb it, it just keeps moving until it hits something that it can be absorbed by.

Yeah, great question. And remember, of course Schernobyl was a nuclear meltdown of a reactor, not an actual nuclear explosion, so nothing blew up, So you still have a lot of the fuel and all that stuff there in that same location. The larger exclusion zone is because of the weather and the air that pulled the smoke and the radioactive particles further away, so there was never actually a nuclear explosion there. And in space, you blow this bomb up, it's not gonna be really anything left in the location of your detonation to poison people. Everything is going to fly out because there's nothing stopping it, right, There's nothing holding it in place at all, So you haven't like poured radiation into a bunch of nearby dirt or water. Everything is just going to flow away. So you could probably come back in, you know, a month or so after the nuclear bomb, and the space would be no different from when you started. All of the dangerous elements would be flying out from the source in lots of directtions poisoning people or causing damage as they hit them. But the actual location of the nuclear explosion in space isn't going to be like affected in any way.

Have we ever thought to blow up a nuke? And I mean I'm sure we've thought of it, but have we ever actually done it before?

Oh? Yes, we have actually blown up nuclear weapons in lots of places. We've blown them up in war. Unfortunately, we've blown them up above ground. We've blown them up underground, and we have actually done a nuclear explosion in space. So we don't even have to wonder about what this looks like. We know we have pictures.

Well, that sounds terrifying. Let's take another quick break. I'm gonna watch the little duck and cover turtle learn some good lessons, and when we get back, I want you to tell me about blown up nukes in space, which apparently we have already done.

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So we are back to that little duck and cover turtle. He's got a turtle shell, but he's also got a helmet redundant. Anyways, now we're going to talk about how we actually have already blown up a nuke in space. It terrifies me that we may have pissed off some aliens and many generations from now they'll finally reach us and give us a real scolding. But Daniel, what happened? Why did we blow up space?

So?

Nuclear testing started in nineteen forty five with the Manhattan Project, the US, of course, the first country to develop these things and to test them and then to use them in war, where thousands of people were killed horribly. And since then there's been about two thousand nuclear explosions conducted by humans. And in the early days it was free for all, there were no laws. People were blowing stuff underground, above ground, et cetera. But we pretty rapidly realized that blowing up stuff in our atmosphere was a bad idea, creating radioactive particles and fallout that could drift anywhere. We blew up a bunch of islands, which was terrible, destroying people's homes. And so that was in the fifties, and things were of course very tense between the US and the USSR. The US had stopped atmospheric testing, but in the early sixties, the USSR started atmospheric testing again, which was sort of part of a larger political struggle within the USSR to like stand up to the US. We really should have like a Russian political expert on to tell us about why they started that up again. But in nineteen sixty two, the US wanted to know, like, well, what happens if you blow up a nuke in space? They were basically curious and they didn't want to do any more atmospheric testing, and so they tested a nuke over the Pacific in July of nineteen sixty two.

So I'm thinking, like, if we blow it up just a little bit above our atmosphere, that's not going to cut it. Like how far away did we go? Because you know, it seems like if you're too close you can still have an impact on the Earth that you're not going to want.

Yeah, exactly, if it's too far away, you won't be able to see it because we don't have great instruments in space. If it's too close, then it's basically in your atmosphere, and said, they chose an altitude of two hundred and forty miles above the Earth's surface, and they launched a one point four mega ton nuke. They launched it from Johnston Island, which is like fifteen hundred kilometers southwest of Hawaii. And the idea was like, well, if something bad happens, letes have it happen over less populated areas, I guess. And people imagined like, oh, that's far enough away from Hawaii to not be a big deal, right, And they check with a scientist and sounds just like yeah, right, no problem. Turns out those scientists were wrong.

Oh boy, yep.

Scientists, especially physicists, can be wrong.

Yeah, which is a big deal when you're talking about a nuke and talking about people just trying to live their lives. And then you're like, but we're curious to see what this will do. Yikes.

You can google this thing. It's called starfish prime and just as we expect, it makes a spherical explosion, so you don't get like a mushroom cloud that's the product of blowing up in an atmosphere. You just get this spherical explosion. It's not completely perfectly spherical, because the nuclear bomb is not perfectly symmetric. There's like some small differences in how the explosion happens based on exactly how the fuel is arranged, but it's almost completely spherical.

It kind of looks like a flower or like a drawing of a sun where you kind of make the outsides a little spiky. But yeah, it is pretty round, and you've got like this bright white point in the middle, and then you've got sort of a blue corona around it, and then a larger white corona around the blue. What is that sort of color difference? Why do you have that like bright white light and then this blue and then bright white light again on the outer edges.

Yeah, I think it's similar to the effect we were talking about in the atmosphere that there is some debris that comes out of the explosion, and then the radiation is emitted after that is partially absorbed by some of that debris, some of those heavier ions that are created by the explosion, So you get this multiple effect where the products of the explosion then absorb things that are later produced in the latter stages of the explosion. And it was a pretty dramatic event on Earth.

Yeah, I mean where people told this was going to happen.

People were told it was going to happen, and even the newspapers were aware, and they kind of advertised it. There's a headline in the Honolulu Advertiser, which is a newspaper, which says, in blast night may be dazzling, good view likely, And a bunch of hotels in Hawaii had like rooftop parties for people to watch this nuclear explosion happen.

I would be in a basement, but what would it look like to someone on one of these rooftop parties.

So you can't see the actual explosion the same way because of the atmosphere. But there aren't these great pictures that people took from Hawaii. And you see all this air glow, You see all this red light because the radiation has hit the atmosphere and it's excited a bunch of oxygen atoms which then glow. So it's basically like heated up the atmosphere which then glows in this red light.

I mean that seems spectacular, but also maybe kind of apocalyptic looking that would scare me.

Yeah, And then after the actual explosion, there's a massive aurora scene for like thousands of kilometers. You know, the Northern lights. These are high energy particles hitting the atmosphere. They're mostly funneled up to the Northern and Southern poles because of the magnetic field. But when a huge number of high energy photons hit the atmosphere, they make the atmosphere glow and you don't just get red, you get greens and blues, depending on exactly what it is that has been like like zapped and energized and then re emitted. And so whereas you don't normally see auroras in Honolulu, they had this massive aurora which stretched for thousands of kilometers over the Pacific.

Well, maybe worth it to take a chance to accidentally blow up a bunch of people. But you did mention that the scientists had not quite calculated this right, So were people actually in danger here? Like was there some negative consequences to this?

Well it like blew out street lights in Hawaii. Oh wow, So this electromagnetic pulse that was created went much further than the scientists thought. I think they didn't realize how much of that is absorbed by the atmosphere when you blow this thing up on Earth, or when you blow it up underwater. And so the radiation effects of this bomb in space were much broader than they had anticipated. And so, yeah, there were effects on Hawaii. They destroyed a bunch of satellites that were up in space. Back then, there weren't that many satellites. This is the beginning of the space era, so only like six satell lights were destroyed. These days, you blew up a nuclear weapon and that kind of location, you destroyed dozens of satellites, billions of dollars of damage, and people were able to see this thing for like thousands of miles away. People on Fiji described the light show as breathtaking.

Wow.

I mean, so you mentioned that the radiation spread out much further than they had suspected. Did that negatively impact Hawaiians? Did that hurt people on the island or did it not actually have too much of a human impact.

It doesn't have very much of a human impact because fortunately we are under the atmosphere, which is a really thick blanket to protect ourselves from a lot of this radiation and so really the only impact in Hawaii was the dramatic light show and the pulse from the EMP, which damaged some electrical devices and blew out street lights and dumped a bunch of energy basically in any conductor that can absorb electromagnetic energy for hundreds of kilometers, and so satellites and street lights are basically the only real damage. There may also be some very small amounts of radioactive material, but it distributed over such a large area that doubt has really any impact on it, like human life.

Well, it could have gone worse, it could have been wronger.

And actually some scientists were wondering if this was going to have a long lasting effect on other features of nearby space. Remember that near the Earth there are these huge bands of radiation. They're called the Van Allen Belts, and they're basically just particles like whizzing around the Earth. They were discovered in the fifties whence we sent up our first space missions. That as you leave the Earth you pass through these bands of massive radiation. There's an inner belt and there's an outer belt. They're not very well understood, and at the time they were seen as like an impediment to space travel that if you go up into space, you have to survive passage through these basically radiation guns. And some scientists were wondering if we blow up a nuclear weapon in these radiation belts, maybe it would like disturb them or dissipate them, though some people were sort of hopeful that it would blow up the radiation belts, which to me is kind of crazy. It's like, before you even really understand these things their purpose and their benefits and their detriments, you want to just like blow them up and see what happens to life on Earth.

Yeah. I mean it's kind of looking forward and not looking at the current situation, right because you're thinking, like, let's make space travel easier. But we have this functional planet that we're pretty cozy on, so you might not want to mess that up for some kind of future space highway. I think that is a lot of decisions that we make we don't often think about, like, but how will this impact the planet before we build this space highway or regular highway. Did it impact these radiation belts or did it not really have a permanent impact.

It had basically no impact on the radiation belts, which contained an enormous amount of energy which could not be affected by one nuclear bomb. But this nuclear explosion did have sort of shockwaves through the political climate on Earth. Things cooled down a little bit, and in nineteen sixty three they passed a partial Test Ban treaty which prohibited all nuclear tests except for underground testing, which was seen as safer because it really is very well contained. And so for about thirty years, the US and the Soviet Union did a bunch of underground tests until they were prohibited in nineteen ninety six. I still remember my dad traveling to the Nevada test site to participate in some of those tests. So the US was still testing nuclear weapons into the nineties. We have not blown one up since then. The last nuclear test from the US was in the nineties.

It really feels like such a scary time, though, during the Cold War, when you're having all these tests going on, you wonder about how many close calls we had in terms of a test going wrong where it actually hurts people, or a test that happens that is misread by like say that Russians are you know, by the US, and we think, well, we're being attacked, and that starts a whole cascade of nukes. It feels like this wild West time where we were just i mean, maybe not playing around with but the fact we were doing so many of these tests, and it feels like we just kind of escaped some kind of horrible fate by the skin of our teeth.

We certainly did. If you dig too deep into this history, it's terrifying. There were times when like a flock of seagulls were mistaken for the launch of a nuclear weapon, another time when like a training tape was accidentally loaded into a computer which became convinced that the Russians were attacking us. It's really terrifying how close we came to all out nuclear war several times. And you know, the US and the USSR haven't tested nuclear weapons since the nineties, but you know, India and Pakistan detonated nuclear weapons in the very late nineties, and then of course North Korea has done tests fairly recently of nuclear weapons. So it's not like we're out of the woods in terms of nuclear weapons, nop. Yeah, exactly. Israel actually is the only country we think has nuclear weapons but has never done a nuclear test that we know of, that we know of.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because at the start of the Russian Ukraine War, I started following a bunch of nuclear proliferation experts and sort of people who understood the politics, who understood the science of nukes, because I was terrified, and I'm not going to say I got less terrified after hearing what the experts had to say. I think the knowledge of exactly the kind of circumstances that we were in and stuff was helpful. Like, even though the Cold War is over the fact that there are so many nukes out there, it's terrifying, so we should probably send them all the space ball them all up, put them in space.

I guess if I had to choose where to blow up nuclear bombs, I'd probably choose to blow them up in space, over the atmosphere or anywhere else on Earth. But it is really interesting to understand what happens to a nuclear bomb when you blow it up in space. It turns out to be quite different from what happens in our atmosphere. It doesn't dump that energy and create a shock wave. It's basically like a little miniature sun, and so there is no shockwave to hurt you, but that radiation will travel much much further and damage things that are much further away, especially electronics. So let's hope that we don't end up in a nuclear space war anytime soon.

And if you're flying your spaceship and you want to fire some nukes, wear sunglasses.

And be careful microwaving your soup, and put a lid on your blender when you make that strawberry smoothie.

All of this is practical advice.

Thanks Katie very much for joining us on this exclusive episode, Thanks for having me, and thanks to all of our listeners. Tune in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.

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