Bombing the Belts

I caught this fascinating NPR story last week and it slipped my mind to share.

Evidently James Van Allen, of University of Iowa fame, announced his most famous discovery, the Van Allen Belts, and then promptly agreed with a curious government plan to bomb them:

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.

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, (Colby College historian James) 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."

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.

That resulted in quite a light show then (video below), and some historic second guessing now as to the wisdom of detonating an atomic bomb in the sky just to see what would happen. I had never heard of this episode.