Cold War Nukes Impacted Space Weather

[Boris13c]

Cold War Nuclear Explosions Freakishly Impacted Space Weather

The overdrawn game of nuclear chicken between the USSR and the United States—now known as the Cold War—lasted about 45 years. While neither superpower ever deployed nukes on each others’ soil, high-altitude bomb testing caused a kerfuffle in Earth’s atmosphere. Though the conflict has (thankfully) long since ended, newly declassified information suggests it might have impacted space weather in ways we never anticipated.

According to a new paper published in Space Science Reviews, the high altitude nuclear testing conducted by both the USSR and United States created “artificial radiation belts” near Earth. Our planet is naturally surrounded by Van Allen radiation belts—zones of highly-charged particles. But the energy from nuclear explosions created hot, electrically charged regions within the atmosphere that induced geomagnetic disturbances, and even produced radiation belts of its own. As you can probably guess, the results were not so great—according to the study’s authors, this resulted in “major damages to several satellites” that orbited Earth at a fairly low altitude.

Radiation and high-energy particles from the Sun frequently interact with Earth’s geomagnetic field, in the phenomenon known as space weather. When enough of these high energy particles rain down on the magnetosphere, it can severely damage communications satellites and even electrical power grids on the ground. But the radiation from nuclear blasts in the ‘60s is an extreme example of how humans can also fuck with our geomagnetic field, which is salient to understand but also terrifying.

every day comes new information about how the not-as-smart-as-we-think-we-are humans have negatively impacted the very planet on which we live and depend on

[46Blitz]

Interesting.... wonder what else this could effect (or other "test" ect.) with the planet. Although I believe that global warming is part a natural process (and yes I'm clueless and know nothing about science), humans obviously have a part in it. My question would be, how much of this could add to global warming ect?