Hey how's it going everyone? I found this bizarre piece of history from the cold war era and it is quite fascinating from a scientific perspective. So you all know that the space race of the 1960s in the nuclear arms race going on throughout the cold war. So someone somewhere had a very disturbing idea of nuking outer space. What I mean is they wanted to put nuclear missiles on satellites or put them into orbit in some other way to enable them to make outer space or, the outer orbit of the planet as a battle ground like they had already done with land, sea and sky.
So in the early 1960s, let's say 1961 or 1962, there was this project called the operation fishbowl. And in that project there was a certain bomb that was named Starfish Prime into orbit at some 400 km of sea level. That is roughly the altitude of the international space station of today. And that bomb exploded at that height. And this had massive Nations The precautions of a nuclear bomb that was some 500 times more powerful than little boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 are amplified when it is not detonated on soil when we detonate this bomb in the atmosphere or outside that the situation changes dramatically. As the air is lighter in space, actually there is no air in space, so the radiation particles can easily flow through and spread over a wide area compared to how much they can spread inside the atmosphere as the air inside the atmosphere. First of all exists and second of all is quite heavy so the radiation particles can't travel much. So that's the general theory of it. Now, what exactly happened in that explosion? Bomb was launched from the Pacific ocean. The explosion caused the night sky to light up for around 6 to 7 minutes and make it feel like it's daytime in places that are hundreds of kilometers away in Honolulu and New Zealand. Auroras were seen from far away places, the same kind of auroras that are seen every year in the North Pole and Scandinavian countries. Countries and what was the most intriguing part is the EMP or electromagnetic poles that rendered all telecommunication and networks and electricity and every source of power that flows using electrons were rendered unusable because of the powerful magnetic field that was created by Starfish Prime.
What happened afterwards is a bunch of laws. Treaties and memorandums signed which stopped Nations across the globe to put any nuclear weapons in orbit or anywhere outside making outer space solely a place of exploration. But why is this information relevant? Now it is relevant because Russia is trying to put nuclear weapons into their satellites which violates all the treaties and laws signed back in the cold war.