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Posted by: gndonald Feb 17 2006, 03:50 PM

I was reading an online article on the various plans to http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/nuke.html, 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?

Posted by: Steffen Feb 19 2006, 10:48 AM

Amazing (crazy) plans for Venus!

Posted by: gndonald Feb 19 2006, 03:46 PM

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.

Posted by: JRehling Feb 19 2006, 10:24 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...

Posted by: gndonald Feb 20 2006, 12:20 AM

It's not so much the need to create a big blast, but to do so within the lifetime of the probes on the surface of Venus that caused the Soviets to consider this, probe lifespan on the surface was between roughly 23 mintutes for Verena 7 to about 1 and a half hours for later probes.

As noted the chance of a large enough earthquake in that time would have been remote, so the idea of starting their own would have become attractive.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 20 2006, 01:14 AM

Overall, I think this just proves again that there is no idea too squirrelly for some Soviet not to have proposed at some point. But -- when the National Academy of Sciences set forth its design for a Venus exploration program way back in 1970 -- they suggested that the first Venus lander carry two experiments: a gamma-ray spectrometer with deployable neutron source for surface elemental composition, and a seismometer which would use a chemical-explosive bomb capsule landed about 50 km away to sound the crust. I still wonder whether the latter might be worthwhile.

Posted by: tty Feb 20 2006, 07:21 AM

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

Posted by: edstrick Feb 20 2006, 08:42 AM

One mission (or instrument on a mission) that is eventually going to fly, but LONG after a Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter and Galilean sat sample returns and rovers...

The Jovian geophysics/meteorology network... nuclear powered hot-air balloons floating in the atmosphere. One instrument would be very sensative pressure sensors with the ability to detect the "boom-rumble" propagation of meteor detonation pressure/sound waves through the deep jovian interior. (and any natural seismic-frequency noise the planet generates).

Posted by: gndonald Feb 20 2006, 04:08 PM

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.

http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm 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.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 8 2006, 05:04 PM

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!

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 8 2006, 09:32 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

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 9 2006, 12:58 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.

Posted by: gndonald May 9 2006, 02:22 AM

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) http://www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/content/numbers/223/45.shtmlplanned 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.

Posted by: ugordan May 9 2006, 07:38 AM

Yes, it was Starfish Prime, the original Starfish test failed because the Thor launch vehicle was issued a destruct code by the range safety after its engine failed one minute into flight.

Another very notable failure from the same test series was "Bluegill". On the first launch attempt the rocket was destroyed in mid-flight because the missile tracking system failed. The rocket performed well for all purposes, but being unable to confirm it's on the right course, the RSO blew it up.
The second attempt, called "Bluegill Prime" was a much more spectacular failure - the Thor (again) engine failed immediately after ignition and range safety blew the thing up while still on the launch pad. Heavy plutonium contamination of the utterly destroyed launch pad followed. It's interesting to realize that when they destroy a warhead, they do so without producing any nuclear yield.
The third attempt - "Bluegill Double Prime" failed yet again due to Thor rocket failure - it started tumbling and was destroyed by the range safety officer. That has got to be an interesting job, being in charge of blowing up a rocket
They finally got it on the fourth (!) launch attempt - "Bluegill Triple Prime". Just goes to show you the persistence of these folks when it comes to blowing very powerful stuff up.

I recommend Nukes in Space to anyone even remotely interested in rockets (there's footage of Wernher Von Braun, in case you were wondering what he did for a living before Saturn V ) and nuclear weapons as it has plenty of good footage of both and it's a very interesting documentary. It could have been better in some aspects - it doesn't go into details such as the above string of failures, but it does give a good overall picture of the situation back then.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 9 2006, 09:49 AM

One of my Russian friends complained about the Starfish test. They are still pissed off about it, because it destroyed some of their satellites. Also damaged the Telstar. I guess the technical term is "oops".

Posted by: ugordan May 9 2006, 10:08 AM

What's interesting is that all of this was happening at the time Wally Schirra was supposed to go up there and there were genuine concerns about safety and radiation levels. There's an audio transcript in Nukes in Space of a white house briefing where Kennedy remarked this high-altitude testing seemed to him to be a case of "throw it up and see what happens". As a consequence, one controversial high altitude, high-yield test (code-named "Uracca") was cancelled due to concerns on what it would do to Earth's radiation belts.
I guess sanity does prevail. Sometimes.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 9 2006, 11:05 AM

Gordan:

Any idea of how much Pu got spread over Florida and it's environs as a result of those bomb tests? I bet it puts the whole hysterical response to RTGs - designed to survive almost all accidents - into some sort of perspective!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: gndonald May 9 2006, 01:26 PM

Given that the the 'Hardtack' (Orange & Teak) and the 'Dominic' (Starfish & Bluegill) tests occurred in the Pacific while the 'Argus' (1,2 & 3) tests occurred in the South Atlantic probably very little.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 9 2006, 02:01 PM

Good points, but presumably (at least) the South Atlantic tests were launched from Florida, and those that failed never reached the South Atlantic... ...not to mention the almost-on-the-pad abort!

...my question remains: how much Pu?

Oh, and was Argus an attempt to nuke the South Atlantic Anomaly? It almost makes the movie version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea seem, er, 'credible'!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 9 2006, 02:26 PM

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

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=1647&view=findpost&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?

Posted by: gndonald May 9 2006, 03:22 PM

No, the Argus tests were launched from the USS Norton Sound in the South Atlantic.

For all the details on 'Hardtack', 'Dominic' & 'Argus' the best source is the http://www.dtra.mil/toolbox/directorates/td/programs/nuclear_personnel/atr.cfm. The files for the operations being discussed are at the bottom of the page linked to, be careful though these are all large files over 10mb in size.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 9 2006, 06:18 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]

Posted by: BruceMoomaw May 9 2006, 11:54 PM

Personal courtesy was not one of Khrushchev's strong points.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 10 2006, 12:24 AM

Nikita Sergeyevich had a certain peasant charm. Certainly not a monster like Stalin, he supported the space program once he saw how politically effective it was, and after him came the utterly unimaginative bureaucrat, Brezhnev. His memoirs are fascinating.

My favorite quote of all time is also one of his: "What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying". In that era of cobalt bombs and orbital nuclear bombs, you can see what he meant.

Posted by: ugordan May 10 2006, 07:50 AM

Plutonium? Practically no Pu at all. Plutonium is actually not the greatest health factor, other fission product are much more dangerous in the long term-- cobalt-60, strontium-90, etc. All these high altitude tests had the "advantage" of being... well -- HIGH up in the air so any fission products were either launched into space (not very likely, but still) or took months and months to descend to the surface. By that time most of the seriously radioactive stuff decays.
In short, high altitude testing amounted only to a small fraction of the total world fallout because of reasons given above and the fact most of them were lower yield devices. As far as regular atmospheric tests go, you don't want to know how much fallout was released... We're not talking local contamination here -- this stuff (especially from the megaton tests) gets deposited GLOBALLY on a timescale of months. And there were tons and tons of this radioactive soup produced over the years. Tons may sound like little, especially on a global scale, but this stuff makes radium (the first radioactive element discovered) look like a bad joke.

Reading about what was done in those years (even ozone depletion was probably serious, but noone measured THAT back then), it makes me wanna cry and laugh at the same time seeing how some people feel the need to protest now about a few kilos of Pu-238 on a few probes. During the cold war they sat silently knowing that bigger bombs being tested would help defend them against those pesky commies. How times have changed...

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 10 2006, 10:49 AM

Gordan:

That's what I was getting at - the complete disparity between the two sets of facts. Add in Soviet, French, Chinese, British (and various other) detonations and it makes spacecraft risks appear in perspective. Then add the effects of Chernobyl, all the other accidents, the horrors waiting in the wings in Russia, the reprocessing plants and so on and it begins to make me question the agenda of the protestors. It's as if they just see *one* sapling, but are blind to the forest.

Bob Shaw

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 10 2006, 11:19 AM

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.

Posted by: ugordan May 10 2006, 11:42 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.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 10 2006, 12:26 PM

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).

Posted by: ugordan May 10 2006, 12:53 PM

I'm not saying their bombs were heavier or less efficient than U.S. ones. AFAIK, they were trying to catch up to the Americans in respect of the "true" H-bomb - they lagged for a while, the Sloika was not a true H-bomb, it could not have been scaled up to much greater yields. The Americans did demonstrate the awesome firepower of the staged radiation implosion in an experimental device ("Mike" - M for Megaton) back in 1952, while the Soviets were still struggling with the Sloika, almost a year later. It wasn't until november 1955 that they tested their first "true" H-bomb, a time when the U.S. already demostrated the ability to weaponize "emergency capability", dry fusion fuel bombs. Since then, the two powers were equally capable of advancing their design -- the Soviets eventually went on to create the Tsar bomba, supposedly the cleanest (though some say this is just soviet propaganda and the actual 50 Mt test was "dirty" as hell) and definitely the most powerful bomb in existence, weighing only 30 tons.

As far as the R-7 goes, I can't say I'm an expert - that's just what I read. I'll trust you on this. Perhaps the design requirement for the R-7 was assuming the guidance will turn out to be imprecise, which later turned out to be false, but resulting in an overkill of a rocket? I'm also wondering about the fact the Soviets would trust their rockets receiving guidance from the ground (especially the ones carrying a warhead) in a time of paranoia and the possibility of sabotage via intruding radio signals. Recall Dr. Strangelove and the paranoia on false transmissions from the other side, which probably was a big concern at the time. I'm implying that while spacecraft-bearing R-7s would be ground controlled, the military probably wanted the warheads to have minds of their own so nothing could interfere with them.

Posted by: DonPMitchell May 10 2006, 01:37 PM

You're right about the H-Bombs. I've read that the idea of using Lithium-6 was gleened from analyzing Soviet fallout from their early layer-cake bombs. Actually it was Arthur C. Clarke who wrote that, but I don't know if its true. Here's a nice website about the Soviet nuclear weapons development: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwpnprog.html.

The boost phase of the rocket was only about three minutes. That occures well within Soviet territory, and the trajectory was ballistic after that. Radio guidance was carried out over a scrambled centimeter-band channel. The early Atlas missile was also radio controlled at first. Both sides developed better inertial guidance systems eventually.

The V-2 guidance system was quite crude. Chertok says they were surprised to find that the German rockets contained an exact copy of the Sperry gyroscopic torpedo guidance system -- one or two free gyros. That's very inaccurate, because of precession. In the R-7, the Soviets first build a set of uniaxial gyro platforms, with accelerometers. They also extended the stabilization system to control engine throttling, to keep acceleration uniform. Sometime before 1960, they replaced this with a triaxial stabilized platform. The Germans had begun to experiment with that concept too, but never put it in the V-2.

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 19 2006, 03:49 PM

Here are more details and useful links on the Soviet lunar nuke plans:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/nuke.html

The page also includes info and images of some of the nukes detonated
in Earth orbit.

And the similar USAF plans, which included the possibility of recovering
organic matter from the debris cloud of the nuclear explosion on the
lunar surface:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/tr5939v1.html