nuclear-news

After Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, urged others meeting at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to consider building and orbiting huge, new nuclear weapons for planetary protection, some top Russian weaponeers lent their support.

“It was a really bizarre thing to see that these weapons designers were willing to work together—to build the biggest bombs ever,” said Melosh, an expert in space impacts who has an asteroid named after him.

Ever since, he has been pushing back against scientists who still support the nuclear option, arguing that a non-nuclear solution—diverting asteroids by hitting them with battering rams—is both possible and far less dangerous.

But Melosh’s campaign suffered a setback last month when Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz signed an agreement with Russia that could open the door to new collaboration between nuclear weapons scientists in everything from plutonium-fueled reactors to lasers and explosives research. A September 16 DOE announcement cited “defense from asteroids” as one potential area of study……

weaponeers in both countries are citing the asteroid threat as a reason to hold onto—or to build—very large yield nuclear explosives, which have declining terrestrial justification.

Depending on the nature of the work, it could run afoul of several international pacts, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty signed by 129 countries, which prohibits deploying nuclear weapons in space. Some experts worry that radioactive debris from blasting an asteroid could itself wreak havoc on Earth……

Bong Wie, the director of Iowa State University, says he has a three-year, $600,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design a “hypervelocity nuclear interceptor system,” basically an ICBM-borne warhead fitted with a battering ram.

The ram would separate from the bomb before impact, gouging a crater in the asteroid so the bomb could then blast it to bits.

Keith Holsapple, an engineering professor at the University of Washington, meanwhile says NASA has given him a five-year, $1.25 million research grant to study how either an impact device or a nuclear explosion could deflect an Earth-bound asteroid from its path…….

Melosh disagrees. He was co-investigator on a 2005 NASA mission known as Deep Impact, which launched an 820-pound copper-covered battering ram that gouged a crater out of the comet Tempel 1 in 2005. He says that 90 percent of the biggest asteroids have already been found and ruled out as a near-term threat, demonstrating there is time for find suitable, non-nuclear alternatives—such as hitting asteroids with rams, zapping them with lasers, tugging them off a kamikaze trajectory, or deflecting them with solar sails.

Even as a last-ditch effort, he says, nuclear weapons can’t work using existing warheads but only with new, even larger nuclear explosives than exist in any arsenal. “A lot more people have been recorded to have died from nuclear weapons than have been recorded to have died from asteroid impacts,” he warns.

The actual 47-page US-Russian agreement—which the Energy agency has not released but the Center for Public Integrity obtained—does not mention asteroids and instead lays out broad areas for potential cooperation between nuclear weapons complexes on civilian nuclear power, including plutonium-fueled breeder reactor research, and other nuclear-related technologies……

David Wright, co-director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, said he hoped any joint asteroid defense work would not become a “jobs program” for weapons scientists……http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/blowing-up-asteroids-nuclear-weapons-russia