Leonid Yelenin, a researcher at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and author of Asteroids: Born of Flame, spoke with TASS regarding recent discussions within the scientific community posing the possibility of using nuclear weapons to destroy an incoming asteroid that was threatening Earth.
“The more I follow my Western colleagues, the stronger my conviction that this is an attempt to shift the Overton window—to prepare humanity for allowing nuclear weapons in space,” Yelenin told TASS. “Under the pretext of protecting Earth from asteroids, the United States appears to be seeking the right to deploy nuclear weapons in space. It is crucial to prevent any country from gaining that right, because we cannot guarantee how such plans would unfold afterward.”
A scientific paper—not yet peer reviewed—recently surfaced, which proposed such a solution in order to prevent an asteroid, 2024 YR4, from colliding with the Moon, and would involve using two 100-kiloton nuclear devices targeted at the asteroid, “with each being five to eight times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945,” according to news agency Futurism.
His concerns aren’t unfounded: In the 1960s, a series of test nuclear explosions were conducted high in Earth’s atmosphere to determine their effects on communications and other activity. Called “Starfish Prime,” they wreaked havoc on several satellites, generating electro-magnetic pulses (EMPs) which knocked out several communications facilities, and caused other electrical disturbances. In 1963, a year after the last test, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned all aboveground nuclear testing.
