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Nuking Venus
gndonald
post Feb 17 2006, 03:50 PM
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I was reading an online article on the various plans to explode nuclear weapons on the moon, when I spotted a reference to Soviet plans to 'calibrate' seismic models of Venus by exploding a nuclear weapon there, supposedly this planning went on until the 1970's which is well after the limited test ban treaty.

Obviously this would not have been a single craft mission, as seismographic equipment would have to have been emplaced before the explosion. Does anyone have any further information on just what was planned?
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gndonald
post Feb 19 2006, 03:46 PM
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I wouldn't necessarily classify the idea as 'crazy'. Grossly irresponsible perhaps, a bad public relations move certainly, but not insane.

The basic science objective is understandable, using seismic waves to determine the interior composition of a planet or moon has been tried by the US, successfully on the Moon during the Apollo program and unsuccessfuly during the Viking mission to Mars.

What the Soviets were probably planning to do was land several probes fitted with seismonitors on one side of Venus and detonate the nuke on the other side, this would give them the ability to amongst other things determine whether or not Venus has a liquid core.
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JRehling
post Feb 19 2006, 10:24 PM
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A friend of mine who was a seismologist certainly complained that a problem (for geologists) is that there aren't enough earthquakes. Of course, for the rest of us, there are more than enough.

The thing about nuking Venus is that presumes we would even need to create a big blast. It may very well have quakes all the time. They probably wouldn't be so nice as to occur at the moment and magnitude and location that we desire, but we ought to check...
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tty
post Feb 20 2006, 07:21 AM
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QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 19 2006, 11:24 PM) *
A friend of mine who was a seismologist certainly complained that a problem (for geologists) is that there aren't enough earthquakes. Of course, for the rest of us, there are more than enough.

The thing about nuking Venus is that presumes we would even need to create a big blast. It may very well have quakes all the time. They probably wouldn't be so nice as to occur at the moment and magnitude and location that we desire, but we ought to check...



Actually a nuclear (or sufficiently large conventional) explosion is much better than an earthquake from a seismological point of view because:

1. It's a point source

2. Time, location and energy release are known to a high precision

Actually I fail to see what is "squirrelly" or "irresponsible" with this idea. It seems to be a sensible and scientifically quite valuable concept. The only possibly dangerous part would be the launch of the nuclear charge(s), but they would in any case have to be in ballistic warheads which are built to survive re-entry and have been thoroughly researched for decades. For extra safety you could use oralloy weapons, in which case even an atmospheric breakup would have negligible environmental impact.

The main problems would be the test-ban treaty (if it applies to the surface of Venus), and a mental barrier to using nuclear explosions for any reason whatsoever.

tty
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gndonald
post Feb 20 2006, 04:08 PM
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QUOTE (tty @ Feb 20 2006, 03:21 PM) *
Actually a nuclear (or sufficiently large conventional) explosion is much better than an earthquake from a seismological point of view because:

1. It's a point source

2. Time, location and energy release are known to a high precision

Actually I fail to see what is "squirrelly" or "irresponsible" with this idea. It seems to be a sensible and scientifically quite valuable concept. The only possibly dangerous part would be the launch of the nuclear charge(s), but they would in any case have to be in ballistic warheads which are built to survive re-entry and have been thoroughly researched for decades. For extra safety you could use oralloy weapons, in which case even an atmospheric breakup would have negligible environmental impact.

The main problems would be the test-ban treaty (if it applies to the surface of Venus), and a mental barrier to using nuclear explosions for any reason whatsoever.

tty


I'm not sure about the test ban treaty, but as to the comment about using a standard ballistic warhead, I suspect that the Soviets would have used a custom built device based around the landers they were using at the time.

Why, because re-entry to Earth's atmosphere is a known factor, but the Venusian re-entries were always somewhat difficult, both the Soviets and the US had problems with electical discharges and the corrosive nature of the Venusian atmosphere.

The weight and external shape of the device would have been dependant on the period in which it was launched due to the types of boosters available at that time. Thus, had the mission been launched in the late 60's/early 70's the device would have had to fit into the Verena 4-8 lander type which generally weighed about 390 to 490 kg. The entire probe weighed around 1200kg.

Missions of this sort launched after 1975 would have used the Verena 9-18 lander type which weighed around 660 to 750 kg, with the entire probe being about 5000kg in weight.

Don P Mitchells' site is as good a source for the known aspects of the Soviet Venus program as any and is the source of the figures presented above.
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 8 2006, 05:04 PM
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I think seismology on Venus will be very valuable. Placing a number of seismographs and then detonating a few thermonuclear charges on the surface could instantly give a lot of data about the layers and densities of material inside Venus (or Mercury or Mars). Given how many nukes have been set up in the Earth's atmosphere, I would wring my hands about setting of a couple on Venus.

The legal issue is not the Test Ban Treaty, but an earlier treaty that forbids nuclear weapons in space. The US and USSR realized early on that orbiting nuclear platforms would be strategically destabilizing. Not sure exactly when this happened, but it was one reason Korolev's GR-1 missile was cancelled around 1960. The technology got rolled into the Block-L escape stage of the Molniya rocket...so this digression has something to do with planetary probes!
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Bob Shaw
post May 8 2006, 09:32 PM
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I think the various treaties covered objects in orbit around the Earth rather than in space - many nuclear devices have been launched into space! Perhaps a direct Venus transfer orbit insertion of a nuclear charge with no Earth orbit loiter would still be legal...

Bob Shaw


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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 9 2006, 12:58 AM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 8 2006, 02:32 PM) *
I think the various treaties covered objects in orbit around the Earth rather than in space - many nuclear devices have been launched into space! Perhaps a direct Venus transfer orbit insertion of a nuclear charge with no Earth orbit loiter would still be legal...

Bob Shaw


I mean a nuclear bomb of course. Reactors and RTGs are allowed. It is true that a few atomic bombs were detonated by sounding rockets well above the atmosphere. The infamous American "Starfish" test killed a bunch of comsats. They were banned by an early treaty also.

By the way, be sure to see Peter Kuran's documentary, Trinity and Beyond, if you're interested in the history of nuclear weapons.
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gndonald
post May 9 2006, 02:22 AM
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QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 9 2006, 08:58 AM) *
I mean a nuclear bomb of course. Reactors and RTGs are allowed. It is true that a few atomic bombs were detonated by sounding rockets well above the atmosphere. The infamous American "Starfish" test killed a bunch of comsats. They were banned by an early treaty also.

By the way, be sure to see Peter Kuran's documentary, Trinity and Beyond, if you're interested in the history of nuclear weapons.


Actually it was "Starfish Prime" that did the damage, "Starfish" did not even make space due to a launch failure, supposedly (I haven't seen it yet.) Kuran's later Nukes in Space has additional information on the US launches (Test Series: 'Hardtack', 'Argus' & 'Dominic') and also on four Soviet space tests, which I had never heard of.

I've managed to run down a page (in Russian) that has the information on the planned nuclear seismic mission to Venus, using BableFish I was able to translate it and the planning seems to have envisaged a flight after 1975. There is also some information on plans for long duration (up to one month on the surface) landers.
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ljk4-1
post May 9 2006, 02:26 PM
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QUOTE (gndonald @ May 8 2006, 10:22 PM) *
Actually it was "Starfish Prime" that did the damage, "Starfish" did not even make space due to a launch failure, supposedly (I haven't seen it yet.) Kuran's later Nukes in Space has additional information on the US launches (Test Series: 'Hardtack', 'Argus' & 'Dominic') and also on four Soviet space tests, which I had never heard of.

I've managed to run down a page (in Russian) that has the information on the planned nuclear seismic mission to Venus, using BableFish I was able to translate it and the planning seems to have envisaged a flight after 1975. There is also some information on plans for long duration (up to one month on the surface) landers.


The details on the long-duration Venus lander are to be found here:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...indpost&p=25800

Sven Grahn's excellent site includes an article on the Soviet plans in the 1950s
to detonate a nuke on the Moon:

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/E3/E3orig.htm

He has many other items of interest and relevance to this forum, including the
actual signals of Cosmos 359, what would have been the companion probe of
Venera 7 had it not remained stuck in Earth orbit.

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Kosm359/Kosm359.htm

When I read about these nuke to orbit failures and think of the noise made about the
launch of Cassini in 1997....

Regarding the Moon nuking above, apparently the USAF also had a similar
plan back then (the superpowers didn't kid around in the 1950s when it came to
geopolitics, did they?). In one of Carl Sagan's biographies, it actually talked
about Sagan's hope that if the USAF was going to bomb the Moon to show the
USSR just how powerful we were, there should at least be a plan in place to
somehow fly a craft through the debris cloud and retrieve samples to see if
there were any life forms, alive or fossilized, under the lunar surface.

Sound familiar?


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and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance.
I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard,
and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does
not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is
indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have
no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 9 2006, 06:18 PM
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QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ May 9 2006, 07:26 AM) *
Regarding the Moon nuking above, apparently the USAF also had a similar
plan back then (the superpowers didn't kid around in the 1950s when it came to
geopolitics, did they?). In one of Carl Sagan's biographies, it actually talked
about Sagan's hope that if the USAF was going to bomb the Moon to show the
USSR just how powerful we were, there should at least be a plan in place to
somehow fly a craft through the debris cloud and retrieve samples to see if
there were any life forms, alive or fossilized, under the lunar surface.


Ah, the cold-war. Those were the days. It's still remarkably hard to read any history of the Soviet program without it being colored by people's political feelings. Personally, I'm a "Goldwater Republican", but I try to eliminate my beliefs about socialism entirely from my work on the Venera program. Oddly enough, even during the cold-war era, Russian writings about the American program were much more extensive and positive than the almost-nonexistant information published in the West about the Soviet program. One amusing exception being when Khrushchev called Vangard-1 a "grapefruit". Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but he could have been more polite.

I admit I indulged in one slight jab at America's first rockets on my website:

[attachment=5509:attachment] [attachment=5510:attachment]
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ljk4-1
post May 10 2006, 11:19 AM
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QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 9 2006, 02:18 PM) *
Ah, the cold-war. Those were the days. It's still remarkably hard to read any history of the Soviet program without it being colored by people's political feelings. Personally, I'm a "Goldwater Republican", but I try to eliminate my beliefs about socialism entirely from my work on the Venera program. Oddly enough, even during the cold-war era, Russian writings about the American program were much more extensive and positive than the almost-nonexistant information published in the West about the Soviet program. One amusing exception being when Khrushchev called Vangard-1 a "grapefruit". Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but he could have been more polite.

I admit I indulged in one slight jab at America's first rockets on my website:

[attachment=5509:attachment] [attachment=5510:attachment]


Wasn't the main reason that Soviet rockets and probes were so much bigger on
average than US ones was due to the fact that the US was better at miniaturizing
their technology, while the Soviets had to have bigger boosters to loft their larger
and heavier craft? Of course it also meant they could carry bigger nukes as well.


--------------------
"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance.
I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard,
and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does
not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is
indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have
no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

- Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853

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ugordan
post May 10 2006, 11:42 AM
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QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ May 10 2006, 12:19 PM) *
Wasn't the main reason that Soviet rockets and probes were so much bigger on
average than US ones was due to the fact that the US was better at miniaturizing
their technology, while the Soviets had to have bigger boosters to loft their larger
and heavier craft? Of course it also meant they could carry bigger nukes as well.

I read the main reason the Soviets made larger, more capable boosters was because their guidance systems weren't as precise as their U.S. counterparts. The R7 (basically today's Soyuz launch vehicle) missile was an ICBM capable of IIRC lofting a 4 megaton warhead to the USA. The larger firepower was needed due to the guidance inaccuracies, so called CEP - Circular Error Probability was large so they needed a bigger bomb to assure target destruction even if the warhead missed the intended aimpoint by a large amount.
On a note of miniaturization - the Soviets preferred vacuum tubes in place of transistors so that probably did have a part in the size issue (though a warhead itself is largely the "physics package" so the overhead was small). That had the interesting effect of Soviet warheads being more resistant to ABM high-altitude nuclear detonations than had the U.S. experts assumed when they performed their ABM tests! Apparently, the russians always did put robustness first, high-tech gadgetry second.


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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post May 10 2006, 12:26 PM
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QUOTE (ugordan @ May 10 2006, 04:42 AM) *
I read the main reason the Soviets made larger, more capable boosters was because their guidance systems weren't as precise as their U.S. counterparts. The R7 (basically today's Soyuz launch vehicle) missile was an ICBM capable of IIRC lofting a 4 megaton warhead to the USA. The larger firepower was needed due to the guidance inaccuracies, so called CEP - Circular Error Probability was large so they needed a bigger bomb to assure target destruction even if the warhead missed the intended aimpoint by a large amount.
On a note of miniaturization - the Soviets preferred vacuum tubes in place of transistors so that probably did have a part in the size issue (though a warhead itself is largely the "physics package" so the overhead was small). That had the interesting effect of Soviet warheads being more resistant to ABM high-altitude nuclear detonations than had the U.S. experts assumed when they performed their ABM tests! Apparently, the russians always did put robustness first, high-tech gadgetry second.


These are common myths. The R-7 was designed to carry a very heavy thermonuclear warhead to a great distance, and I personally suspect that Korolev had a hidden agenda to use it for spaceflight. You can argue that they failed to miniaturize the bomb. On the other hand, the Soviets were not playing catch-up with regard to the H-bomb. They were neck-and-neck with the USA. The use of Lithium-6 Deuteride was first devloped into a practical weapon by Sakharov, the so-called Sloika bomb.

With regard to solid-state electronics, they were also not way behind. Luna-3 was almost entirely transister-based, which was quite cutting-edge in 1959. Russian physicists were also neck-and-neck with the Americans in the development of semiconducter electronics in the beginning, although I they had manufacturing difficulties years later with dense integrated circuits. The Russians use a strange mix of solid-state, vacuum tube and even electro-mechanical technology, which I think reflects cultural attitudes. They were conservative, and had different thinking about modernity and obsolecence. If they wanted a logarithmic amplifer, they'd use an acorn-sized pentode, instead of a very complex circuit of transisters. It's not obvious that is a bad decision.

The R-7's guidance system was radio controlled, and actually probably more accurate than the American missiles of that time period. They also had an intertial guidance system, but radio control with ground-based computers was about 10x more accurate. The Atlas did somewaht similar things at first, radio/inertial control. Hitting the Moon with Luna-2 in 1959 was probably beyond the technical capability of American rockets at that time (if Pioneer-4 was any indicator, a flyby that missed by too large a distance to achieve its primary objective).
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Posts in this topic
- gndonald   Nuking Venus   Feb 17 2006, 03:50 PM
- - Steffen   Amazing (crazy) plans for Venus!   Feb 19 2006, 10:48 AM
- - gndonald   I wouldn't necessarily classify the idea as ...   Feb 19 2006, 03:46 PM
|- - JRehling   A friend of mine who was a seismologist certainly ...   Feb 19 2006, 10:24 PM
|- - gndonald   QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 20 2006, 06:24 AM) ...   Feb 20 2006, 12:20 AM
|- - tty   QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 19 2006, 11:24 PM) ...   Feb 20 2006, 07:21 AM
|- - gndonald   QUOTE (tty @ Feb 20 2006, 03:21 PM) Actua...   Feb 20 2006, 04:08 PM
|- - DonPMitchell   I think seismology on Venus will be very valuable....   May 8 2006, 05:04 PM
|- - Bob Shaw   I think the various treaties covered objects in or...   May 8 2006, 09:32 PM
|- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 8 2006, 02:32 PM) I...   May 9 2006, 12:58 AM
|- - gndonald   QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 9 2006, 08:58 A...   May 9 2006, 02:22 AM
|- - ugordan   QUOTE (gndonald @ May 9 2006, 03:22 AM) A...   May 9 2006, 07:38 AM
||- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (ugordan @ May 9 2006, 12:38 AM) Ye...   May 9 2006, 09:49 AM
|||- - ugordan   QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 9 2006, 10:49 A...   May 9 2006, 10:08 AM
||- - Bob Shaw   Gordan: Any idea of how much Pu got spread over F...   May 9 2006, 11:05 AM
||- - gndonald   QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 9 2006, 07:05 PM) G...   May 9 2006, 01:26 PM
|||- - Bob Shaw   QUOTE (gndonald @ May 9 2006, 02:26 PM) G...   May 9 2006, 02:01 PM
|||- - gndonald   QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 9 2006, 10:01 PM) G...   May 9 2006, 03:22 PM
||- - ugordan   QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ May 9 2006, 12:05 PM) A...   May 10 2006, 07:50 AM
||- - Bob Shaw   QUOTE (ugordan @ May 10 2006, 08:50 AM) R...   May 10 2006, 10:49 AM
|- - ljk4-1   QUOTE (gndonald @ May 8 2006, 10:22 PM) A...   May 9 2006, 02:26 PM
|- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ May 9 2006, 07:26 AM...   May 9 2006, 06:18 PM
|- - ljk4-1   QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 9 2006, 02:18 P...   May 10 2006, 11:19 AM
|- - ugordan   QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ May 10 2006, 12:19 P...   May 10 2006, 11:42 AM
|- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (ugordan @ May 10 2006, 04:42 AM) I...   May 10 2006, 12:26 PM
|- - ugordan   QUOTE (DonPMitchell @ May 10 2006, 01:26 ...   May 10 2006, 12:53 PM
|- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (ugordan @ May 10 2006, 05:53 AM) I...   May 10 2006, 01:37 PM
- - BruceMoomaw   Overall, I think this just proves again that there...   Feb 20 2006, 01:14 AM
- - edstrick   One mission (or instrument on a mission) that is e...   Feb 20 2006, 08:42 AM
- - BruceMoomaw   Personal courtesy was not one of Khrushchev's ...   May 9 2006, 11:54 PM
|- - DonPMitchell   QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ May 9 2006, 04:54 PM...   May 10 2006, 12:24 AM
- - ljk4-1   Here are more details and useful links on the Sovi...   May 19 2006, 03:49 PM


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