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
It sounds like you’re confusing two separate issues – *nuclear waste* and *nuclear weapons*.
The issue with disposing of *nuclear waste* (the radioactive leftovers after using nuclear fuel) is that it’s *very* heavy (one of the densest materials on Earth), and launching heavy stuff into space is expensive. You’d also need to get it far away enough that it wouldn’t just go into orbit and rain radioactive particles back onto the planet.
*Nuclear weapons* are a completely different problem. Physically, destroying a nuclear weapon without detonating it is easy (there is radioactive material in it, which brings things back to the first problem, but that’s not the main issue). The reason why countries don’t get rid of them is because no country trusts the other countries enough to enter a “let’s get rid of all our nukes” agreement. Whoever did it last could then just say “Just kidding, actually we didn’t get rid of our nukes after all, now surrender or we’ll nuke you.”
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We can, but why would we? They’re full of incredibly valuable fissile materials and rocket fuel.
As far as I understand it, the difficulty is political. And not practical. Ie nuclear weapons create a state called mutually assured destruction. Where no side stands to gain much from such a war as both would be destroyed or near enough. As soon as one country disposes of them, it exposes them to obliteration and so there are real political pressures not to dispose them as this would create an imbalance.
From a practical disposal sense Iām pretty sure they can be stripped down to their component parts safely and the nuclear materiel repurposed to civilian functions.
It is relatively easy to disassemble and decommission nuclear weapons without exploding them.
The hard part about nuclear disarmament treaties in the past was getting everyone involved to agree to them, not the actual safe destruction of the weapons in front of observers from the other side.
Meanwhile shooting stuff into space is hard. It is literally rocket science.
Lots of effort and energy has to be expended to shoot anything into space. Even the best and most reliable rockets have a failure rate still.
Space is not just space either. The region that it is easiest to transport stuff to, is closets to earth and is actually rather crowded. Shooting anything into places father away (and having the stuff stay away) is actually quite hard. Shooting anything into the sun as is frequently suggested is about as hard as it gets.
Exploding a nuclear weapon in space might result in an EMP pulse that could take out lots of critical and expensive orbital infrastructure nearby.
One final reason why you won’t want to shoot any nukes into space is that from the outside it is quite hard to tell the difference between a rocket carrying a nuke to explode in space and a rocket carrying a nuke to explode above someone else’s city. This is really not the sort of thing you would want to have misunderstandings about.
Rockets exploding on the way to space is uncommon but not totally rare [(for example)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Reliability), and you really really dont want to spread radioactive material over a huge area if one of the rockets explode or crash.
thats also why why never used stuff like [Project Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion))
Also you can use the fissile material from nuclear warheads in nuclear power plants
You could definitely blow nukes up in space to destroy them. But:
1. You’d have to do to it carefully if you didn’t want to harm your satellites with artificial radiation belts ([it’s a thing that can happen](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-us-accidentally-nuked-own-communications-satellite/))
2. It’d be absolutely the most expensive and wasteful way to get rid of the weapons
3. It wouldn’t actually stop people from making more weapons in the _future_
4. It’s not the easiest way to do it. The easiest way to do it is to take the warheads apart in bunkers, which is how they are already disposed of. The US has dismantled tens of thousands of warheads since 1945. We know how to do it. It’s not that hard.
5. It’s not the most useful way to get rid of nuclear fuel. The most useful way is to downblend it and turn it into nuclear reactor fuel. The US had a program after the Cold War where it bought excess Russian plutonium and turned it into fuel for US nuclear reactors. A very elegant solution, very win-win, very symbolic!
6. The difficulty in getting rid of nuclear weapons is not technical, in the sense that we can’t technically eliminate or render the warheads useless for weapons purposes. The difficulty is mainly political in nature ā nations don’t get rid of the weapons _because they don’t want to_, because they believe they are necessary for their security, etc.
resulting EMP will destroy electronics on earth.
also, cost is a factor.
also, recycling the materials is good.
A nuke on a rocket – what could go wrong? š
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