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Comment by BrandonMarc | Hacker News Reader

... as well as once in 1968, twice in 1972, and once in 1981. 0.o

The USSR had a whole program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. [1] Sadly, some of these experiments went rather wrong, unexpectedly releasing lots of radioactive nasty near populated areas. The US also did this sort of thing from 1961 to 1973, and the program was cancelled in '77. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

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Here's a timelapse of every nuclear explosion since 1945. It really puts into perspective just how many nukes have gone off for purposes other than to kill people. It's amazing that only two were used for violence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY

According to the video, people have detonated 2053 nukes, and America has the dubious distinction of having detonated over 1000.

Only two were actually used to kill people. Most of the rest were preparations for it.

Arguably most of the nuclear tests were done to prevent war. Each side wanted to show the other they could match and one-up them in nuclear tech. Neither really wanted to ever actually use them to kill people.

Plenty of people on both sides really wanted to use them. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kissinger, being one of them. Fortunately, cooler heads held the launch codes and we all prevailed.

Is this what you are referring to? http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff...

This and a few others. Going through the wired archives you'll find many examples of nuclear false alarms and brinkmanship where the only thing stopping annihilation is an officer ignoring or delaying the order to launch [1][2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

I think a lot of people on both sides were prepared to use them. Fortunately only a very small number of people wanted to use them and were in any position to actually do so.

Pres. Nixon wanted to use them. And you can't get much more capable than the CIC. Luckily, his advisers talked him out of it.

I thought Nixon just wanted to appear mad enough to use nuclear weapons rather than actually being that daft...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

Other way around. We had the Trinity test, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and then we set off the rest. Unless you meant "preparations" for killing more people with our nuclear weapons, in which case you may be correct.

(It's completely obvious that's what he meant.)

The latter tests arguably weren't performed to improve the killing capabilities of the bombs but rather to understand the physics and physiological impacts of bomb blasts. Given that it's possible (albeit unlikely) we never see a nuclear weapon used in war again I don't see it as being completely obvious.

It's completely obvious that it's not completely obvious, as someone honestly misunderstood.

I wonder if it will help us communicating with possible extra terrestrial intelligence. If there is some kind of SETI in other world then I guess it would be easier for them to detect nukes explosions than 1936 olympics.

Maybe we'll end up using nukes as kind-of-morse code communication? ;>

I appreciate your precise wording. Makes me wonder how many deaths were nonetheless caused by these non-wartime detonations.

Not too many. Almost none directly from the explosions.

i wonder if the US tests being all in the west and pacific had anything to do with everyone in project Manhattan being in, well, Manhattan

Just FYI, the Manhattan Project did not take place in Manhattan. It was done in Tennessee at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico.

Well, mostly: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?pagewa...

it was done all over the place. the most famous one being new mexico.

but it started in Manhattan. and the CO was always in NY. as well as most of the researchers families and properties.

There are definitely more than those listed. Vela incident, for instance...

I know that this seems deep into tin-foil-hat territory, but do you recall Chelyabinsk? Lots of evidence to point to it being hit by an AMM (probably Gazelle) with a mini-nuke warhead.

s/seems/is/

Please provide any kind of reputable source as to how the Chelyabinsk meteor was actually a nuke warhead.

What?! Not what I said - the Chelyabinsk meteor was a large ferric bolide, which isn't the kind of meteor which typically airbursts - that's reserved for less dense material. Many of the videos of it breaking up show an object approaching it at huge velocity from the rear the moment before it breaks apart, with many fragments accelerating relative to the previous speed of the bolide - again, not typical break-up behaviour - that would be the Gazelle, automatically intercepting a high speed object entering highly protected military airspace. The Gazelle operates by detonating a highly directional, shaped, small, nuclear warhead, in order to utterly destroy a re-entering MIRV - their primary purpose.

> the Chelyabinsk meteor was a large ferric bolide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteorite

"Type: Ordinary chondrite LL5" (i.e. stony, not iron)

I would have thought that the detonation of a nuclear weapon near to the meteor (particularly an ABM which typically use "enhanced radiation" warheads) would have made the remnants fairly "hot" due to neutron activation.

I haven't seen any reports that the remnants of the meteor are radioactive?

Yeah, they were:

1) Refers to fireball hot enough to blind and cause second degree burns, and references two nature papers which say the energy discharged is inconsistent with airburst models http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/06/chelyabinsk-m...

2) Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs, not uniquely in ABM systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb

Fine - it's not definitely the case that this happened, but there's enough information floating about to make it far more than plausible.

"Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs"

"Neutron bomb" is another name for an "enhanced radiation weapon" - basically an H-bomb designed to give off large amounts of neutron radiation. So you would expect anything close to the explosion of such a device (and therefore exposed to a very high neutron flux) to have pretty clear indications that would be easy to test for.

My "favorite" Soviet use of nuclear explosions was for deep seismic exploration: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=deep+seismic+sounding+wi...

I can't find any reliable sources, so treat this as my own speculation. I heard that there were programs for a while in two big countries with acronyms starting with US that aimed into exploration of causing earthquakes/tsunamis that would hit across the word by using multiple underground nukes and constructive interference.

There was an American program towards the end of the second world war aiming at causing tsunamis to weaken Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_bomb

I would suspect this was more for propaganda effect -- local populations would understand better a threat if it was related to something devastating they actually had experience off.

Certainly reasonable to believe. Those countries were exploring literally any and all avenues to undermine the other.

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