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
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 — nations don’t get rid of the weapons _because they don’t want to_, because they believe they are necessary for their security, etc.
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