Starfish Prime

Satellites make many aspects of our daily lives possible, from navigation and weather forecasting to TV broadcasts and financial transactions. Over 90 percent of spacecraft are commercial, fueling a $546 billion global space economy. Space is also fundamental to how our military fights. We use satellites to collect intelligence and to detect missile launches, and for navigation, communications and controlling precision weapons.

The idea of a nuclear detonation in space is not new. Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Is This a Sputnik Moment? (NYT)

Image:Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
[ed. Some nuclear weapons history I wasn't aware of. Learn something new every day. Re: Purported Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.]