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Starfish Prime: When the US Nuked Space
On July 9, 1962, the United States launched a Thor rocket from Johnston Atoll and detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear warhead 400 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean. The blast turned the sky green across the southern hemisphere, lit Royal New Zealand Air Force night patrols from 2,000 miles away, and knocked out streetlights in Honolulu. It also created artificial radiation belts that slowly destroyed satellites over the following months. This episode traces why the US decided to bomb the Van Allen belts — the same belts James Van Allen had discovered just four years earlier — what the…
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