I’m aware that it’s illegal to put any kind of weapon in space, for the sake of the explanation assume there’s no legal reason why not.
My Grug Smash brain has me wondering that if nuclear weapons are so difficult to properly dispose of, surely the easiest option would be to set them off somewhere where they can’t cause any damage.
In: Physics
Above all the technical objections, there’s the political difficulty of launching live fucking nuclear missiles.
“Oh, don’t worry about us, China and Russia! Don’t worry about us, Portland and San Francisco! We’re just disposing of armed nuclear warheads. In space. With missiles powerful enough to reach you. Ba-BOOM. But relax. Only sixteen thousand more launches left. What could go wrong?”
Launching anything into space is incredibly expensive- the higher the weight that you need to send the more expensive it gets. It’s not financially reasonable to launch any waste into space.
If we ignore cost- there would no reason to set them off at all. Just give them a push- there’s no friction in space so they’d travel in the direction we pushed them forever and millions of years later they’d be someone else’s problem.
For one, you’d still have to get it up there, and putting a nuke in a rocket that might explode on the way up would be a very bad idea.
There are safe ways to dispose of them without detonating them.
Nuclear weapons are not difficult to dispose of in technical terms. The “difficulty” is that countries who already have them don’t want to dispose of them, and they have no good reason why they would want to.
~~I won’t be able to explain this issue any better than Kurzgesagt (in a nutshell), so here you go:~~
[~~https://youtu.be/TRhStl7SQnM~~](https://youtu.be/TRhStl7SQnM)
It’s in english
Edit. I’m dumb and somehow linked a SciShow video instead of the kurzgesagt one. See the reply of this message for the correct video.
Why would you need to detonate them at all? You can just dismantle them.
The problem isn’t getting rid of nuclear weapons, it’s getting rid of spent nuclear fuel. Currently our best solution is to just bury it deep underground.
Several reasons:
– The risk. Rockets sometimes go boom on launch or in atmosphere. When carrying a large amount of radioactive material, that’s bad.
– Cost. Rocket launches are really expensive. Nukes themselves all you have to do is dismantle them and then go bury the radioactive material under a bunch of concrete somewhere where
– Desire: No one with nukes wants to give them up. Countries that have had possession of nukes that gave them up are mainly the USSR states which would have struggled to maintain them anyway. These are Ukraine, since invaded by Russia, Belarus, which remains stuck inside the orbit of Russia, and Kazakhstan, which the Russians are claiming is not a state and might be about to pull another Crimea on.
The only other country which gave up nukes IIRC is South Africa, because they didn’t want the blacks to have them.
Iraq gave up non-nuclear WMDs and was subsequently invaded under the false pretence of having WMDs. Libya was broadly complying with getting rid of its WMDs and similarly got invaded by proxy.
Generally, having nukes is a great place to be for a country, and giving them up makes it far more likely you are invaded. Even if others agree to guarantee your safety in exchange, that’s almost certainly a lie.
if it explodes on the launch pad or crashes before it reaches orbit, you have a VERY big problem on your hands
if it does manage to reach orbit and detonate you have just released a lot of bad shit into our upper atmosphere (where gravity will eventually pull it back), potentially destroyed lots of expensive satellites, etc. Remember that with a few notable exceptions, everything we’ve ever launched into space is in orbit around earth and will eventually come back
de-arming is a political problem, not a technical one. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to launch a nuke into space when you could spend tens of thousands to have a team of technicians just take it apart?
Launching anything into space is expensive. Rockets are not free to make or launch. What is being done for quite some time now is to use the missiles intended to launch nuclear warheads across the globe to instead launch satellites into space. So there are no missiles available to launch the nuclear warheads into space. Another big issue is that nukes will generate a big electromagnetic pulse and a lot of ions. These effects are much more dangerous in space then in the atmosphere. It means that a nuclear explosion in space will likely do a lot of damage to the satellites which are already very expensive and sensitive. This have even been suggested as a form of attack on its own. There is no need to launch such a disruptive attack in peactime.
Setting them off isn’t the best way to dispose of them.
A nuke has been detonated in space before. Since there is no air to heat and dissipate the energy more, a much higher frequency of radiation was emitted and the radiation circled the globe.
That happened a long time ago when we didn’t have so many sensitive satellites in orbit. If we done that now we would damaged so many satellites. To put them onto rockets to blast far away from earth would cost so much, it would be cheaper just to confine the radioactive elements here on earth
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