The Pentagon Planned to Nuke the Sky
During the Cold War, the U.S. Army replaced anti-aircraft artillery with nuclear missiles
by ADAM RAWNSLEY
These days, lasers are the new hotness if you want your military to be on the cutting edge of air and missile defense. But during the Cold War, America looked to another then-cutting edge technology to keep the skies clean of enemies.
Hard as it may be to fathom now, the U.S. Army built and deployed nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules air defense missiles to dozens of sites across the U.S. and abroad. In the event that the Cold War ever turned hot, America would nuke the skies above to prevent the Soviets from nuking the ground below.
By the end of World War II, the U.S. military was beginning to realize that traditional anti-aircraft artillery just wasn’t going to cut it. The jet age had begun to reshape military aviation — and these planes could fly higher and faster than the guns could reach.
To keep up with the times, the U.S. kicked off the Nike program with the help of Western Electric Corporation, Bell Telephone Laboratories and Douglas Aircraft. The project would attempt defeat enemy air power with missiles instead of artillery.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-the-pentagon-planned-to-nuke-the-skies-7996934c8824
= new reply since forum marked as read
Starfish Prime
The explosion took place 250 miles (400 km) above a point 19 miles (31 km) southwest of Johnston Island. It was one of five tests conducted by the USA in outer space
Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian islands.[5]
After the Starfish Prime detonation, bright auroras were observed in the detonation area as well as in the southern conjugate region on the other side of the equator from the detonation. According to one of the first technical reports, "The visible phenomena due to the burst were widespread and quite intense; a very large area of the Pacific was illuminated by the auroral phenomena, from far south of the south magnetic conjugate area (Tongatapu) through the burst area to far north of the north conjugate area (French Frigate Shoals). . . . At twilight after the burst, resonant scattering of light from lithium and other debris was observed at Johnston and French Frigate Shoals for many days confirming the long time presence of debris in the atmosphere. An interesting side effect was that the Royal New Zealand Air Force was aided in anti-submarine maneuvers by the light from the bomb."[7]
In part, these auroral effects were predicted by Nicholas Christofilos, a scientist who had earlier worked on the Operation Argus high-altitude nuclear shots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
The flash created by the explosion as seen through heavy cloud cover from Honolulu 1,445 km away
trinity and beyond doc narrated by William Shatner covers everything that should scare the shit out of anyone.
