On July 8, 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear weapon 400 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean. The Starfish Prime test created an artificial aurora visible from Hawaii, nearly 900 miles away, and devastated the space environment. Of the 24 satellites in orbit at the time, eight were damaged or destroyed by the blast’s electromagnetic pulse and radiation belt. For five years afterward, the artificial radiation made large swaths of space inhospitable to spacecraft. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned nuclear weapons in space, was born of the recognition that such weapons threaten to inflict indiscriminate, lasting damage on all orbiting satellites and on the domain of space itself.
This article was written by Isobel Porteous and originally published by The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists.
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