Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [111]
Perhaps we should practice getting to these worldlets and diverting their orbits, should the hour of need ever arise. Melville notwithstanding, some of the chips of creation are still left, and improvements evidently need to be made. Along parallel and only weakly interacting tracks, the planetary science community and the U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons laboratories, aware of the foregoing scenarios, have been pursuing these questions: how to monitor all sizable near-Earth interplanetary objects, how to characterize their physical and chemical nature, how to predict which ones may be on a future collision trajectory with Earth, and, finally, how to prevent a collision from happening.
The Russian spaceflight pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky argued a century ago that there must be bodies intermediate in size between the observed large asteroids and those asteroidal fragments, the meteorites, that occasionally fall to Earth. He wrote about living on small asteroids in interplanetary space. He did not have military applications in mind. In the early 1980s, though, some in the U.S. weapons establishment argued that the Soviets might use near-Earth asteroids as first-strike weapons; the alleged plan was called “Ivan’s Hammer.” Countermeasures were needed. But, at the same time, it was suggested, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea for the United States to learn how to use small worlds as weapons of its own. The Defense Department’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the successor to the Star Wars office of the 1980s, launched an innovative spacecraft called Clementine to orbit the Moon and fly by the near-Earth asteroid Geographos. (After completing a remarkable reconnaissance of the Moon in May 1994, the spacecraft failed before it could reach Geographos.)
In principle, you could use big rocket engines, or projectile impact, or equip the asteroid with giant reflective panels and shove it with sunlight or powerful Earth-based lasers. But with technology that exists right now, there are only two ways. First, one or more high-yield nuclear weapons might blast the asteroid or comet into fragments that would disintegrate and atomize on entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If the offending worldlet is only weakly held together, perhaps only hundreds of megatons would suffice. Since there is no theoretical upper limit to the explosive yield of a thermonuclear weapon, there seem to be those in the weapons laboratories who consider making bigger bombs not only as a stirring challenge, but also as a way to mute pesky environmentalists by securing a seat for nuclear weapons on the save-the-Earth bandwagon.
Another approach under more serious discussion is less dramatic but still an effective way of maintaining the weapons establishment—a plan to alter the orbit of any errant worldlet by exploding nuclear weapons nearby. The explosions (generally near the asteroid’s closest point to the Sun) are arranged to deflect it away from the Earth.* A flurry of low-yield nuclear weapons, each giving a little push in the desired direction, is enough to deflect a medium-sized asteroid with only a few weeks’ warning. The method also offers, it is hoped, a way to deal with a suddenly detected long-period comet on imminent collision trajectory with the Earth: The comet would be intercepted with a small asteroid. (Needless to say, this game of celestial billiards is even more difficult and uncertain—and therefore even less practical in the near future—than the herding of an asteroid on a known, well-behaved orbit with months or years at our