The Good Side of Nuclear Bomb - It Can Save Humanity From a Destructive Asteroid
The nuclear bomb, is a bomb which force is due to an uncontrolled nuclear fusion or nuclear fission. The atomic (A) or hydrogen (H) bomb, are both dreaded nuclear weapons that are hugely devastating, the sheer scale of their destructive capability discourages nations from their use in warfare. History tells us that the nuclear bomb was only used once to kill humans when it was dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 1945.
Addressing the world's nuclear threat requires building a new alliance that should start between Russia and the United States who both hold special obligations, having owned 95 percent of all nuclear materials and weapons.
However, here's another side of the nuclear bomb which we usually see as "annihilative" and "a total peril to human existence" - it can actually save humanity from a major asteroid that threats to destroy civilization. Thus, this makes nuclear disarmament worldwide a risk to the entire humanity. It can save humanity from a meteor attack similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the Earth.
Developing HAIV
Bong Wie, an Iowa State University scientist said in the meeting of 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts that nuclear bombs could be used against space rocks and asteroids which head towards Earth, as reported on Space.com. Wie shared that he and his team are studying a concept spacecraft labeled Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) which would be exploded into space to destroy the asteroid via a kinetic impactor and a nuclear bomb tailing it in millisecond.
The HAIV is all that is needed to combat the upcoming Near-Earth Objects (NEO), which reports said shall threaten the earth in 2029 and 2036. The HAIV system has two space crafts that follow each other - the first shall provide kinetic energy impact crater so that the second one will efficiently disrupt the object and exploit its effectiveness of nuclear explosion in the subsurface, and shatter it into very small pieces.
Wake Up Call
Wei said that the science community got a recent wake-up call when a meteor blasted over Chelyabinsk, Russia which injured over 1,500 people. He thinks that the same thing could happen again. When a space rock or an asteroid is heading towards the earth with less time to spare, nuclear bombs are the best solutions.
An asteroid that is about 300 meters wide could be neutralized outside the gravitational pull of the Earth, a month prior to its projected impact. Otherwise, it can cause a destruction 150,000 times worse than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb explosion.