Area: F:BAMA
Date: 05-3095  18:05
From: John Powell
  To: All
Subj: ARTICLE 1: "ASTEROID DEFENSE" PLAN

 * Originally By: Truth Seeker
 * Originally To: All
 * Originally Re: Article 1: "Asteroid Defense" Plan
 * Original Area: FidoNet UFO Echo


ARTICLE 1: "ASTEROID DEFENSE" PLAN

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 1995.  NATIONAL:

                    Asteroid-defense plan proposed

            Joint Russian-U.S. tests urged to protect Earth

BY DAN STOBER
Mercury News Staff Writer

    A ranking Russian nuclear weapons scientist proposed Tuesday that
Russia and the United States jointly test and develop large nuclear
weapons to protect Earth from a potentially catastrophic collision
with an asteroid.

    Vadim Simonenko, former head of the theoretical division at
Chelyabinsk-70,one of Russia's two nuclear weapons-design
laboratories, made the proposal at an asteroid-defense conference
hosted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

    Simonenko said that if a large asteroid, a rock perhaps a mile
across, were on a collision course with Earth, only a nuclear weapon
launched from a rocket would have the power to divert or pulverize the
asteroid before it smashed into the planet. Such a collision could
cause widespread damage and death.

    "We ought to plan the testing (and) development program," he said.

    Simonenko's suggestion raised some eyebrows among the 150
government and university scientists from the United States, Russia,
China and Japan.

    To have Russians and Americans designing hydrogen bombs together
would be unprecedented, but it would also mean the resumption of
nuclear testing,which the two governments halted in 1992.

    Additionally, nuclear weapons tests in the Earth's atmosphere and
in space are banned by treaty. But Simonenko said the treaties would
not prohibit the project he proposed.

    The treaties are "a means to ban the testing of weapons," he said,
and a bomb built to destroy an asteroid "is not a weapon."

    New weapons that are larger, safer and more reliable would have to
be developed, he said.

    "It is impossible to use the nuclear weapons now in our
stockpile," he said.

    Asked to assess the possibility of such a program, Simonenko said,
"I am sure that it will happen."

    U.S. scientists did not share his certainty. Johndale Solem, a
scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, gave a
technical talk that outlined how nuclear weapons might be used against
asteroids.

    Solem said he was not advocating a testing program. But if a
nuclear weapons system eventually were devised to counter asteroids,
its use might be put under the control of the United Nations, he said.

    John Nuckolls, a former director of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory and an organizer of the conference, said a joint nuclear
program, while technically possible, was not likely from a political
standpoint.

    A divisive debate about nuclear weapons might hinder other
research into the danger of asteroid comets, he said.

    Alan Harris, a scientist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena,contended there is no reason to rush into construction of an
asteroid defense. The odds of a catastrophic collision in the next few
years are minuscule, he said.

    Lowell Wood, an influential Lawrence Livermore physicist, outlined
both nuclear and non-nuclear means of destroying asteroids. He
explained how a spinning array of pea-size pieces of tungsten might
slice an asteroid in two. Both approaches would require full-scale
testing to ensure they would work when needed, he said.


                  ARTICLE 2: "ASTEROID DEFENSE" PLAN

  SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1995.  NATIONAL, PAGE 25A:

             Nuclear-arms scientists take aim at asteroids

BY DAN STOBER
Mercury News Staff Writer

    With the Cold War at an end, the nuclear-weapons scientists of
Russia and the United States have together turned their attention
toward space, where they have found a common enemy.

    Asteroids.

    Now they are ready to try to convince lawmakers and the public in
both countries that the threat of a roaming cosmic rock striking Earth
is real enough to develop a planetary defense that might someday
include an international hydrogen bomb.

    "We must look to the politician to make it possible, in dollars or
rubles,to do what is necessary," physicist Edwar Teller, founder of
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told Russian and U.S. nuclear-
weapons scientists at a Livermore conference this week.

    Teller called for a program of telescopes to search for and
catalog the "near Earth" asteroids, those whose wobbly orbits around
the sun may change with time, putting them on a collision course with
humans.

    At the same time, he said, experiments should be conducted on
asteroids flying close to the Earth, no farther away than the moon.
Rockets could be used to place specially designed obstacles into the
path of the asteroids. The resulting high-speed crash, perhaps at
60,000 mph, would pulverize the asteroid, he said.

    "Then," Teller said, "we should make the big step to our next
stage,nuclear explosives."

    At meetings in their laboratories in Livermore and in Russia, the
scientists already are drawing up proposals to convert weaponry from
the "star wars" program and nuclear missiles to deflect, pulverize or
vaporize the space rocks if they wander too close to Earth.

    The scientists point to the latest research indicating that a
medium-sized asteroid -- as big as a football field -- splashing into
the Pacific could cause waves hundreds of feet high, crashing across
beaches and sweeping inland for miles, killing millions of people on
both sides of the ocean.

    And they note the horror of the worst-case scenario, a comet or an
asteroid the size of Mount Everest exploding into Earth with such
power that the planet is consumed with fire and those left alive
starve in a dusty, smoke-filled darkness. Livermore scientists call
that asteroid the "Great Extinctor" --something like the one believed
to have eliminated the dinosaurs.

    Turning away a killer asteroid would be "one of the most important
accomplishments in human history," said John Nuckolls, a former
director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. To ignore it would
be "one of the greatest abdication in history,"

    Nuckolls was an organizer of this week's conference, the
"Planetary Defense Workshop." It was attended by scientists from
Italy, Japan and China, but it was dominated by weapons scientists
from the United States and Russia. The realm of asteroids, once the
property of astronomers, has been captured by technologists eager to
test and build defenses.

    A proposal from Lawrence Livermore includes the use of a gigantic
hydrogen bomb -- the equivalent of 1 billion tons of TNT, or 65,000
Hiroshima bombs --to blow apart the "Great Extinctor."

    There was a rough consensus among the scientists at this week's
conference that asteroids bigger than a half-mile across could be
destroyed or deflected away from Earth only by the power of hydrogen
bombs. The most active Russian weapons scientist at the conference,
Vadim Simonenko, was as enthusiastic as Teller in his call for their
inclusion in the anti-asteroid research.

    Other scientists, however, aware of the political sensitivity of
nuclear weapons, were wary of what one called "nuclear target
practice." The final report of the conference will note the crucial
role of nuclear explosives,but will call only for non-nuclear tests
over the next few years, said Greg Canavan, a Los Alamos National
Laboratory scientist organizing the report.

    Speakers at the conference often discussed the difficultly of
persuading Congress to appropriate money. Should they, speakers asked
out loud, emphasize the possibility of extinction, the newfound threat
from tsunamis, or the benefits of basic science and space exploration?

    The key question raised by the scientists and Air Force officials,
though,is whether the public can be interested in a disaster that may
not happen for thousands or millions of years. There are no recorded
cases of humans having been killed by meteorites.

    At the closing session of the conference Friday, Canavan spoke of
a tongue-in cheek electronic-mail message his daughter, a Stanford
student, received from a friend: "I see that your father is going to
save the world from asteroids. I'm so relieved. I was getting so tired
of craning my neck looking over my shoulder."

    This week's meeting was one of a series. In 1992, a meeting held
at Los Alamos resulted in a split between astronomers who felt a
survey of the asteroids and comets was a good beginning and weapons
scientists who wanted more action.

    The relationship between those who want to just observe and those
who want to experiment was warmed since then, but the "split still
exists to some extent," said David Morrison, a researcher at NASA/Ames
Research Center.

    "I have some reservations about moving to the level of
experimentation," he said. "We haven't identified an enemy to hit
yet."

    This conference was notable for the role played by the Russians.
Speakers often suggested an international effort to shoot down
asteroids, perhaps involving the United Nations, but most proposals
described something closer to a Russian-U.S. joint venture, using
Russian military missiles.

    There was even a proposal to merge the most fearsome nuclear
missiles of both sides, creating an anti-asteroid vehicle with the
body of a Soviet SS-18 missile and the weapons-carrying head of a U.S.
MX missile.

    The U.S. government is funding science programs for the Russian
weapons labs, in part to remove the temptation for poorly paid Russian
scientists to sell their services to weapons-seeing countries such as
Iraq. Weaponeers from Russia and the United States have traveled back
and forth, forging working relationships and friendships that would
have seemed impossible a few years ago.

    Some anti-nuclear activists see a danger in the growing
relationship. Marylia Kelley, a leader of Tri-Valley Citizens Against
a Radioactive Environment, has met with Russian scientists and
environmentalists and is now at a conference near Chelyabinsk-70, one
of Russia's two nuclear-weapons labs.

    She said she discovered during her last visit there, in 1992, that
the U.S. and Russian physicists "had in essence discovered each other
and their common goal, which was to keep their enterprise going, and
their common foe, which was the people who would have to pay for
this."

Thanks, take care.
John.
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