Peaceful nuclear explosions
A peaceful nuclear explosion is a nuclear blast set off as a civil engineering tool, not a weapon. In 1966 one put out a Soviet gas well fire that had burned for almost three years.
The US and the Soviet Union both tried nuclear explosives as civil tools, for digging harbors and canals and for fighting gas well fires. The Soviets set off 124 of these peaceful blasts, against 27 in the American program. In 1966 one, buried in Uzbekistan, put out a gas fire that had burned for almost three years. Nothing like it could happen now: Russia was left with over 100 sites holding buried high-level radioactivity, and a treaty opened in 1996 outlaws every nuclear explosion once it takes effect.
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- Starfish PrimeStarfish Prime was a 1962 US nuclear test 400 km above the Pacific. Its pulse put out streetlights in Hawaii, more than 1,400 km away, and its radiation crippled satellites.
- Project OrionA US Air Force study of a spaceship pushed by nuclear bombs going off behind it. A model flew on chemical charges in 1959; four years later a treaty banned the blasts everywhere but underground.
- Solar gravitational lensThe Sun's gravity bends light like a lens, bringing it to a focus at least 550 astronomical units away. A telescope there could map a planet around another star, but only one pixel at a time.
