Starfish Prime
Starfish 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.
The United States and the Soviet Union both tested nuclear weapons high above the Earth. In July 1962 a Thor missile carried a 1.4-megaton warhead up from Johnston Island in the Pacific, and it exploded 400 km overhead. Particles from the blast formed artificial radiation belts, and six of the 22 satellites then working were disabled. A treaty the next year banned tests above ground, and a recent count put working satellites at almost 10,000. Its electromagnetic pulse also put out streetlights in Hawaii, more than 1,400 km away.
Sources
- Vittitoe, Did high-altitude EMP cause the Hawaiian streetlight incident? (Sandia, SAND-88-3341, 1989)
- Gombosi et al., Anthropogenic Space Weather (Space Science Reviews, 2017)
- National Archives, Test Ban Treaty (1963)
- Mulvihill, Nukes in space: a bad idea in the 1960s (The Conversation, 2024)
- Das, How the U.S. Accidentally Nuked Its Own Communications Satellite (Scientific American, 2012)
- SpacePolicyOnline, Russia vetoes U.N. Security Council resolution on nuclear weapons in space
- UN News, Russia vetoes Security Council draft resolution on a weapon-free outer space
- Wikipedia, Starfish Prime
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An engineering analysis took one of the few Hawaiian streetlight circuits that failed and estimated how much of the pulse it picked up. It concluded the pulse did the damage. The line ran at an angle to the oncoming wave that let voltage pile up as the pulse swept along it, and the signal rose very fast. It is the most often quoted example of pulse damage seen in practice.
wormhole
No. It came out far larger than predicted, so large that it pushed much of the test's own instrumentation off scale, and the people measuring it lost the very readings they had come for. The bomb itself was big too: its yield was about 1,000 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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