One dark night in a small town of Roselle Park, New Jersey a fire started inside the local sausage factory. In a blink the building was engulfed in flames. The alarm went out to all the fire departments for miles around.
When the first fire fighters appeared on the scene, the sausage company president rushed to the fire chief and said, 'All of our secret sausage recipes are in the vault in the center of the plant. They have to be saved, so I will donate $50,000 to the fire company that brings them out and delivers them to me.'
But the roaring flames held the firefighters off. Soon more fire departments had to be called in because the situation became desperate. As the firemen arrived, the president announced that the offer to extricate the secret recipes was now $100,000!
Suddenly from up the road, a lone siren was heard as another fire truck came into sight. It was the fire engine of the nearby Peterstown section of Elizabeth, NJ. This fire department was composed mainly of Italian firefighters over the age of 65. To everyone's amazement, the little run-down fire engine, operated by these Italian firefighters, passed fire engines parked outside the plant, and drove straight into the middle of the inferno! Outside, the other firemen watched in amazement as the Italian old timers jumped off and began to fight the fire as if they were fighting to save their own lives. Within a short time, the old timers had extinguished the fire and saved the secret recipes.
The grateful sausage company president joyfully announced that for such a superhuman accomplishment he was raising the reward to $200,000, and walked over to personally thank each of the brave elderly Italian firefighters. A TV news crew rushed in after capturing the event on film. The 'on camera' reporter asked the Italian fire chief, 'What are you going to do with all that money?'
'Wella,' said Chief Pasquale De Luccinelli, the70-year-old fire chief, 'de fursta tinga we gonnado isza fixa de brakes on dat Bloody truck!'
By Nick Danforth XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A caliphate (in Arabic: خلافة khilāfa, meaning "succession") is a form of Islamic political-religious leadership which centers around the caliph—i.e. "successor"—to Muhammad. The succession of Muslim empires that have existed in the Muslim world are usually described as "caliphates".
The Caliph (Arabic: خليفة ḫalīfah/khalīfah) is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. Wikipedia
Hizb ut-Tahrir states its aim as unification of all Muslim nations over time in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, headed by an elected caliph. Wikipedia
The Caliph (Arabic: خليفة ḫalīfah/khalīfah) is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. Wikipedia
Hizb ut-Tahrir states its aim as unification of all Muslim nations over time in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, headed by an elected caliph. Wikipedia
Abdulhamid II, who would become one of the last Ottoman sultans and caliphs, as a prince in 1867.
(W.&D. DOWNEY / Jebulon) In 1924, Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk officially abolished the Ottoman caliphate. Today, most Western discussions of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the extremist group that has declared a caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria, begin by referencing this event as if it were a profound turning point in Islamic history. Some contemporary Islamists think of it this way, too: there’s a reason, for example, that Lion Cub, the Muslim Brotherhood’s children’s publication, once awarded the “Jewish” “traitor” Ataturk multiple first prizes in its “Know the Enemies of Your Religion” contest. Even if today’s Islamists reference the Ottomans, though, most of them are much more focused on trying to re-create earlier caliphates: the era of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, who ruled immediately after Muhammad’s death in the seventh century, for example, or the Abbasid caliphate, which existed in one form or another from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries (before being officially abolished by the Mongols). By conflating the nineteenth-century Ottoman royal family with these caliphs from a millennium ago or more, Western pundits and nostalgic Muslim thinkers alike have built up a narrative of the caliphate as an enduring institution, central to Islam and Islamic thought between the seventh and twentieth centuries. In fact, the caliphate is a political or religious idea whose relevance has waxed and waned according to circumstance.
The caliphate’s more recent history under the Ottomans shows why the institution might be better thought of as a political fantasy—a blank slate just as nebulous as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—that contemporary Islamists are largely making up as they go along. (If it weren’t, ISIS could not so readily use the same term to describe their rogue and bloody statelet that Muslim British businessmen use to articulate the idea of an elected and democratic leader for the Islamic world.) What’s more, the story of the Ottoman caliphate also suggests that in trying to realize almost any version of this fantasy, contemporary Islamists may well confront the same contradictions that bedeviled the Ottomans a century ago.
OTTOMAN REBRANDING
When the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula in 1517, Sultan Selim the Grim officially claimed the title of caliph for himself and his heirs. In addition to taking control of the cities of Mecca and Medina, Selim bolstered his claim by bringing a collection of the Prophet’s garments and beard hairs back to Istanbul.
Centuries after the fact, the Ottomans decided that they needed to make the whole process look a little more respectable, so royal historians began to assert that the final heir to the Abbasid caliphate, living in exile in Cairo centuries after losing his throne, had voluntarily bestowed his title on Selim. More practically, the Ottomans buttressed their claim to Islamic leadership by serving as guardians of the hajj and sending an elaborately decorated gilt mantle to cover the Kaaba each year.
To put the title grab in perspective, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople 64 years before Selim conquered Egypt, he had claimed the title Caesar of Rome for his descendants. To the extent that being caliph had any more purchase than being Caesar for the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, it was largely the result of a political campaign on the part of Sultan Abdulhamid II to rally anticolonial sentiment around the Ottoman state and to boost his own domestic legitimacy. His techniques included seeking to have his name read out at Friday prayers and distributing Korans around the Muslim world from Africa to Indonesia.
There is no doubt that many Muslims, faced with the triumph of European colonialism in their own countries, did come to admire the idea of a pious and powerful leader like the Ottoman sultan defying Western imperialism on behalf of the entire Muslim world. Certainly, British and French officials expressed increasing fear about his potential power over Muslim colonial subjects in North Africa and India. Although he was eager to try to leverage such fears, however, even Abdulhamid had his misgivings about how much real influence his efforts won him in such far-flung locales. One thing that particularly worried him was the fact that not everyone accepted his claims on the caliphate. Separate from those who rallied around Abdulhamid out of religious solidarity were others, motived by Arab nationalism or dissatisfaction with Abdulhamid’s tyranny, who questioned the religious foundation of his rule. Such thinkers, includingat some points Rashid Rida, justified the creation of a different, Arab caliphate by quoting Muhammad as saying that the true caliph needed to be a descendant of the Prophet’s Quraysh tribe. (The Ottomans, it seems, accepted the validity of this quote but had their own interpretation of it, in which the Prophet actually meant that the caliph didn’t need to be a descendant of the Quraysh tribe.) But in either case, the violent politics of the early twentieth century quickly outmatched theology. Despite his best efforts as defender of the faith, Abdulhamid kept losing territory and political power to Christian imperialist forces. That helped the secular leaders of the Young Turk movement, such as Enver Pasha, sideline the sultan and take power for themselves on the eve of World War I. When the Ottoman Empire then enjoyed some military success, belatedly holding its own in the Second Balkan War, Enver became an inspiration to the Muslim world. Indeed, the list of babies reportedly named after him at the time includes Enver Hoxha, the future leader of Albania, and Anwar al-Sadat, the future leader of Egypt. ARAB HEIR
Of course, Enver’s own star faded, too, with the Ottoman defeat at the end of World War I. Ataturk quickly emerged as a new hero by leading a successful campaign to drive French, Italian, British, and Greek armies out of Ottoman Anatolia. Quickly, some of the same politically attuned Muslims who had supported Abdulhamid’s anti-imperial caliphate found even more to admire in Ataturk's armed defiance of European might. In Palestine, for example, Muslims who had once turned to the Ottoman caliph for protection against Zionist settlers and British occupiers began to cheer Ataturk, leading one suspicious British officer to worry that the Turkish figure had become “a new savior of Islam.”
At the same time, the decline of Ottoman power before, during, and after World War I loaned increasing credence to the idea of a new, non-Ottoman caliph in the Arab world. But it was never entirely clear just who that Arab caliph would be. The result was that when Ataturk finally abolished the institution of the caliphate in 1924, there was no clear or coherent outcry from the Muslim world as a whole. Many Muslims, particularly those in India for whom pan-Islamic symbols such as the caliph were an important part of anticolonialism, protested. Others were more interested in maneuvering to claim the title for themselves.
Most famous was Husayn ibn Ali, sherif of Mecca, who is known to Lawrence of Arabia fans for his leading role in the Arab Revolt. As the local leader with control of Mecca and Medina—and a supposedly clear line of descent from the Prophet’s tribe—Husayn believed that after driving the Ottomans out of the Middle East, he could become an Arab king, with all the religious and temporal powers of the caliph. In pursuit of this goal, when Ataturk exiled the Ottoman sultan,Husayn invited him to Mecca. (The exiled monarch soon decided he preferred the Italian Riviera.) Several years later, Husayn’s son Abdullah—founder of the Jordanian monarchy—woulddeclare that, in ending the caliphate, Turks had “rendered the greatest possible service to the Arabs,” for which he felt like “sending a telegram thanking Mustafa Kemal.”Of course, Husayn’s plans didn't come off exactly as expected. Despite getting British backing for his scheme early in the war, he famously fell afoul of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French drove his son out of Syria, and before long, the Saudis drove him out of the Arabian Peninsula. By the time Husayn officially declared himself caliph, supposedly at the insistence of a select group of Muslim leaders, his power had dwindled to the point where the declaration seemed like an act of pure desperation. The Egyptian monarchy, meanwhile, had a claim of its own to advance. Despite being closely aligned with the British and descended from Circassian Albanian ancestors with no tie to the Prophet’s family, King Fuad covertly put forward his case to succeed the Ottomans. In the words of one Islamic scholar, Egypt was better suited to the caliphate than, say, a desert nomad like Husayn “because she took the lead in religious education and had a vast number of highly educated and intelligent Muslims.” King Idris I of Libya also seemed to consider making a bid for the title but, like Fuad, ultimately decided he had too little support to do so officially. Saudi Arabia’s King Saud, despite eventually seizing the Holy Land from Husayn, was one of the few leaders who never put forward a claim to the caliphate, although the idea was certainly discussed. Saud was aligned with the Wahhabi movement, which arose as a rebellion against the supposed decadence of the Ottoman government in the eighteenth century. Ironically, although his opposition to the Ottoman-style caliph was shared by other Arabs, his particular brand of religiosity was too radical for him to ever think he had much chance of becoming caliph himself. In the end, though, the unseemliness of such political wrangling was just one of the factors that helped put the caliphate discussion to rest for the next several decades. Many Muslims had responded to its abolition by redoubling their efforts to build secular constitutional governments in their own countries. Indeed, some of the strongest opposition to the Egyptian king’s caliphal aspirations came from Egyptian liberals who opposed any moves that would increase the monarchy’s power. Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq, in his famously controversial criticism of the very idea of a caliphate, even went so far as to claim that the Koran contains “no reference to the caliphate that Muslims have been calling for.” This was also the period where a number of thinkers, secularists and religious Muslims alike, began discussing the possibility that the caliph should be a purely religious figure, like an “Islamic pope,” unencumbered by any temporal power.
A HOPE AND A PRAYER It would be a mistake to think that twenty-first-century Islamist movements trying to revive the caliphate are doing so in the name of a clear, well-defined Islamic mandate. Rather, they are just other players in a centuries-long debate about a concept that has only occasionally taken on widespread relevance in the Islamic world. The legacy of earlier rounds of this argument can still be felt today. It is no surprise that, as a historical inspiration, the Ottoman caliphate holds most sway among Turkish Islamists, whose nostalgia owes far more to the way Turkish nationalists have glorified the empire than it does to the piety of the sultans. Conversely, the religious legacy of Abd al-Wahhab’s eighteenth-century critique of the Ottoman state, combined with the political legacy of more recent anti-Ottoman Arab nationalism, gives plenty of non-Turkish Islamists ample reason to prefer the precedent of an Arab caliphate.
By treating the Ottoman caliphate as the final historical reference point for what current Islamists aspire to, Western pundits conflate the contemporary dream of a powerful, universally respected Muslim leader with the late Ottoman sultan's failed dream of becoming such a figure himself. The circumstances uniting these dreams—and the appeal of strong religious power in the face of Western political, military, and economic power—may be the same. But so are the challenges. Contemporary claimants to the title of caliph may quickly find themselves in the same boat as Ottoman caliphs. Political or military success, rather than history or theology, can bring short-lived legitimacy, but failure in these realms will bring other contenders for power.
Several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication.
EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences. EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of US society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power.
The common element that can produce such an impact from EMP is primarily electronics, so pervasive in all aspects of our society and military, coupled through critical infrastructures. Our vulnerability is increasing daily as our use of and dependence on electronics continues to grow. The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to potential protagonists who are not as dependent on modern electronics.
The current vulnerability of our critical infrastructures can both invite and reward attack if not corrected. Correction is feasible and well within the Nation's means and resources to accomplish. FOR FULL DETAILS PLEASE READ HERE
Nukes in Space-The Rainbow Bombs (Published on Jun 18, 2013)
"Nukes in Space" provides an interesting overview of the development of the military space program of missiles and space-based nuclear weapons testing with spectacular, never-before-seen images.
Starting with the V-1 and V-2, this film takes you through missile development of ICBM's with nuclear warheads, the Cuban Missile Crisis through anti-ballistic missile systems and what implications the they hold for the future of our nation's security.
During the heart of the Cold War, the United States and the former Soviet Union launched and detonated a combined total of over 20 thermo nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere and near space region of earth in an effort to test the effects of launching an offense as well as countering an offense. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis!
Almost unknown to the public, much of the information on theses tests has been kept secret for over 35 years until recently, when newly declassified test footage and secret government documents obtained from both countries reveals everything from the ICBM to outer space testing to ABM.
From filmmaker Peter Kuran, creator of the award-winning film "Trinity and Beyond" .
Declassified U.S. Nuclear Test Film #62 (Uploaded on Sep 25, 2007 )
0800062 - Starfish Prime Test Interim Report by Commander JTF-8; Fishbowl Auroral Sequences - Silent; Dominic on Fishbowl Phenomenon -Silent; Fishbowl XR Summary - Silent - 1962 - 1:01:25 - Black&White and Color - Four Films on One Video
Starfish Prime Test Interim Report by Commander JTF-8 - 7:45 - Sound - STARFISH PRIME, was one of the high-altitude nuclear tests in the Operation Fishbowl series conducted in the Pacific Proving Ground in 1962. It was launched in the Johnston Island area to an altitude of about 400 kilometers by a Thor rocket and had a yield of 1.4 megatons.
The test evaluated the capabilities of an antiballistic missile to operate in a nuclear environment and the vulnerability of a U.S. reentry vehicle to survive a nearby nuclear blast. It also provided information on the ability of a U.S. radar system to detect and track reentry vehicles. Another goal was to discern the effects of a high-altitude blast on command and control systems, which were shown to be vulnerable in earlier high-altitude tests. The final goal was to obtain information on the feasibility of testing in outer space.
Fishbowl Auroral Sequences - 7:50 - Color - Silent - BLUEGILL and STARFISH were high-altitude nuclear tests, part of Operation Fishbowl, conducted in the Johnston Island area of the Pacific Proving Ground in 1962. These tests produced auroral effects, a special feature of explosions where the extreme brightness of the fireball is visible at great distances. Within a second or two after the burst, a brilliant aurora appears from the bottom of the fireball.
The formation of the aurora is attributed to the motion, along the lines of the earths magnetic field, of beta particles emitted by the radioactive fission fragments. About a minute after the detonation, the aurora could be observed in the Samoan Islands, 2000 miles from the detonation. These auroras could be seen for approximately 20 minutes. The video shows footage of the auroras from Somoa, Mauna Loa (Hawaiian Islands) and Tongtapu (Tonga Islands) at various film speeds.
Dominic on Fishbowl Phenomenon - 1:12 - Color - Silent - Operation Fishbowl was the high-altitude testing portion of a larger Operation Dominic I. This video is a compilation of footage of the five nuclear tests comprising Operation Fishbowl conducted in the Johnston Island area of the Pacific Proving Ground in 1962. A high-altitude burst is one occurring above 100,000 feet. The video does not identify the date, time or name of the tests.
When a nuclear weapon detonates at a high altitude, many of the effects are attenuated. Most of the x-ray energy is absorbed in the air, which decreases the fireball temperature. Absorption of thermal x-ray energy also decreases the energy available for a shock wave. This all results in the development of a toroidal or donut-shaped cloud instead of the usual mushroom shape of ground or near ground explosions.
This also shows the auroral effect of high-altitude explosions where the extreme brightness of the fireball is visible at great distances. Within a second or two after the burst, a brilliant aurora appears from the bottom of the fireball. The formation of the aurora is attributed to the motion, along the lines of the earths magnetic field, of beta particles emitted by the radioactive fission fragments. About a minute after the detonation, the aurora can be observed from as far away as 2000 miles. These auroras can be seen for approximately 20 minutes.
Fishbowl XR Summary - 34:38 - Black&White - Silent - The video shows the five, rocket-launched, Operation Fishbowl tests at various camera speeds and from different camera locations. Operation Fishbowl was the Department of Defenses high-altitude testing portion of Operation Dominic I, conducted in the Johnston Island area of the Pacific Proving Ground in 1962. In a high-altitude blast, many of the effects are attenuated, resulting in a toroidal or donut-shaped cloud instead of the mushroom cloud from a surface burst. These weapons-effects tests, launched by Strypi, Thor, and Nike Hercules rockets, were as follows:
STARFISH PRIME, July 9, 400-kilometer altitude, 1.4 megaton CHECKMATE, October 20, tens of kilometers altitude, low (less than 20 kt) BLUEGILL 3 PRIME, October 26, tens of kilometers altitude, submegaton (less than 1 Mt, but more than 200 kt) KINGFISH, November 1, tens of kilometers altitude; submegaton (less than 1 Mt, but more than 200 kt) TIGHTROPE, November 4, tens of kilometers altitude, low (less than 20 kt) Two goals of these tests were to determine if radiation and blast and heat effects of high- altitude detonations were capable of neutralizing an enemy reentry vehicle and capable of determining the blackout effects on radar and communications of various yields and altitudes of bursts
Since we're coming up on the Fourth of July, and towns everywhere are preparing their better-than-ever fireworks spectaculars, we would like to offer this humbling bit of history. Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will. Here it is:
High-altitude nuclear explosions (HANE) have historically been nuclear explosions which take place above altitudes of 30 km, still inside the Earth's atmosphere. Such explosions have been tests of nuclear weapons, used to determine the effects of the blast and radiation in the exoatmospheric environment. The highest was at an altitude of 540 km (335.5 mi).
The only nations to detonate nuclear weapons in outer space are the United States and the Soviet Union. The U.S. program began in 1958 with the Hardtack Teak and Hardtack Orange shots, both 3.8 megatons. These warheads were initially carried on Redstone rockets. Later tests were delivered by Thor missiles for Operation Fishbowl tests, and modified Lockheed X-17 missiles for the Argus tests. The purpose of the shots was to determine both feasibility of nuclear weapons as an anti-ballistic missile defense, as well as a means to defeat satellites and manned orbiting vehicles in space. High-altitude nuclear blasts produce significantly different effects. In the lower reaches of vacuous space, the resulting fireball grows much larger and faster than it does near the ground, and the radiation it emits travels much farther.
List of high-altitude nuclear explosions
The debris fireball and aurora created by the Starfish Prime test, as seen from a KC-135 aircraft at 3 minutes.
The Starfish Prime flash as seen through heavy cloud cover from Honolulu, 1,300 km away.
United States USA -- Hardtack I -- Johnston Atoll, Pacific Ocean Yucca 28 April 1958, 1.7 kt, 26.2 km Teak, 1 August 1958, 3.8 Mt, 76.8 km Orange, 12 August 1958, 3.8 Mt, 43 km United States USA -- Argus -- South Atlantic Ocean Argus I, 27 August 1958, 1.7 kt, 200 km Argus II, 30 August 1958, 1.7 kt, 240 km Argus III, 6 September 1958, 1.7 kt, 540 km (The highest known man made nuclear explosion) Soviet Union USSR -- 1961 tests -- Kapustin Yar Test #88, 6 September 1961, 10.5 kt, 22.7 km Test #115, 6 October 1961, 40 kt, 41.3 km Test #127, 27 October 1961, 1.2 kt, 150 km Test #128, 27 October 1961, 1.2. kt, 300 km United States USA -- Dominic I -- (Operation Fishbowl) -- Johnston Atoll, Pacific Ocean Bluegill, 3 June 1962, failed Bluegill Prime, 25 July 1962, failed Bluegill Double Prime, 15 October 1962, failed Bluegill Triple Prime, 26 October 1962, 410 kt, 50 km Starfish, 20 June 1962, failed Starfish Prime, 9 July 1962, 1.4 Mt, 400 km (The largest man made nuclear explosion in outer space)Checkmate, 20 October 1962, 7 kt, 147 km Kingfish, 1 November 1962, 410 kt, 97 km Soviet Union USSR -- Soviet Project K nuclear tests -- Kapustin Yar Test #184, 22 October 1962, 300 kt, 290 km Test #187, 28 October 1962, 300 kt, 150 km Test #195, 1 November 1962, 300 kt, 59 km
PART - FOUR
Some of the images in this video were until recently top secret. Peter Kuran of Visual Concept Entertainment collected them for his documentary Nukes In Space
If you are wondering why anybody would deliberately detonate an H-bomb in space, the answer comes from a conversation we had with science historian James Fleming of Colby College. "Well, I think a good entry point to the story is May 1, 1958, when James Van Allen, the space scientist, stands in front of the National Academy in Washington, D.C., and announces that they've just discovered something new about the planet," he told us.
Van Allen described how the Earth is surrounded by belts of high-energy particles — mainly protons and electrons — that are held in place by the magnetic fields.
There are two Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth (shown here in purple): an inner belt and an outer belt. The belts are contained by the Earth’s magnetic field (pictured as gray lines). Red marks a radiation-safe orbit path for satellites.
NASA
Today these radiation belts are called Van Allen belts. Now comes the surprise: While looking through the Van Allen papers at the University of Iowa to prepare a Van Allen biography, Fleming discovered "that [the] very same day after the press conference, [Van Allen] agreed with the military to get involved with a project to set off atomic bombs in the magnetosphere to see if they could disrupt it."
Why Starfish Prime Created Rainbow Skies
To understand where the colors come from in Starfish Prime, you first have to know a little bit about Earth's atmosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen are the two most abundant gases in our air. The concentration of each gas is different depending on the altitude. When Starfish Prime detonated, charged particles — electrons — were released from the explosion. According to NASA astrophysicist David Sibeck, those particles came streaming down through the Earth's atmosphere, energizing oxygen and nitrogen atoms, causing them to glow in different colors. But why? As electrons collide with the atoms, energy is transferred to the atoms. After holding onto it for a moment, the excess energy is released as light. When many excited atoms release energy together, the light is visible to the naked eye. Depending on the type of atom and the number of atoms, you get different colors. It's similar to what causes the aurora borealis, although those electrons are coming from the solar wind pounding into Earth. The electrons first encounter a high concentration of oxygen at the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, causing the atoms to release a red light. Then green appears as the electrons travel to lower altitudes where there are fewer oxygen atoms. Even lower, where more nitrogen atoms are present, the collisions throw off a blue light. But in the Starfish Prime explosion, charged particles went in every direction. That's why you see the sky filled with a rainbow of colors nearly all at once in the footage. — Meagen Voss
Discover It, Then Blow It Up
The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth's atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the belts. The scientific basis for these proposals is not clear. Fleming is trying to figure out if Van Allen had any theoretical reason to suppose the military could use the Van Allen belts to attack a hostile nation. He supposes that at the height of the Cold War, the most pressing argument for a military experiment was, "if we don't do it, the Russians will." And, indeed, the Russians did test atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs in space. In any case, says the science history professor, "this is the first occasion I've ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up."
Code Name: Starfish Prime
The Americans launched their first atomic nuclear tests above the Earth's atmosphere in 1958. Atom bombs had little effect on the magnetosphere, but the hydrogen bomb of July 9, 1962, did. Code-named "Starfish Prime" by the military, it literally created an artificial extension of the Van Allen belts that could be seen across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand. In Honolulu, the explosions were front page news. "N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling: Good View Likely," said the Honolulu Advertiser. Hotels held what they called "Rainbow Bomb Parties" on rooftops and verandas. When the bomb burst, people told of blackouts and strange electrical malfunctions, like garage doors opening and closing on their own. But the big show was in the sky.
In the audio and video versions of this story, it was incorrectly stated that the Starfish Prime bomb was 1,000 times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Starfish Prime was 100 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.
This is the one you do not want to delete! No need for cds. The whole collection is here! Just click and enjoy the music. Whoever has composed this email is just great. Lot of effort put into it