CAN WE DETECT A NUCLEAR WEAPON IN SPACE?
Last night on the Late Show, billionaire space entrepreneur and probable supervillain Elon Musk proposed nuking Mars as a way to terraform the planet. Creating an atmosphere on a planet with a magnetosphere is a challenge in and off itself, as are the questions of interplanetary nuclear war. Or testing. Which leads to a perplexing idea: Is it possible to detect a nuclear war in space?
Humans are already pretty good at identifying and tracking nuclear explosions on Earth. A network of seismographs, infrasound stations, and hydroacoustic monitoring can capture the aftereffects of a blast and pinpoint its location underground, in water, or in the air. Afterwards, radioactive particles can be matched to the blast. Developed during the Cold War, these sensors guarantee that any nuclear tests today are detected, very, very quickly.
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