--- Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote: <snip> I'm confused on this one. If 2004MN is 320 meters in diameter, the U.S., the Soviet Union and other major powers did about 450 open air tests during the 1950s-1960s < http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab15.asp >, including 1-2 megaton bursts that dug holes over 1000ft in diameter < Operation Plowshare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshares >, why is it a big deal to vaporize 2004MN? The point is to split 2004MN up into pebbles that will result in a really neat meteor storm that will not penetrate to the ground, instead of a single mass equivalent to a 800 megaton kinetic energy bomb that will reach the surface. The consequence of the U.S., U.S.S.R and other major power's reprehensible program of open air nuke testing was to induce, in the United States, about 120,000 cases of thyriod cancer and killing 6,000. < http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html > The U.S. detonated about 200 atmospheric bombs, mostly between 10kt and 2 megatons, with the largest around 15 megatons in 1954. The Soviets one-up manshipped us with the Tsar Bomba 50 megaton blast in 1962. The result was the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty (prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons in outer space). As a child in the 1950s and early 1960s, I drank fallout-contanimated milk, and probably ended up with a 300 rad cumulative dose like everyone else did at the time in this country. I may or may not have a residual case of cancer from it. (Even if I did I would never be able to show it was caused by the atmospheric testing in the 1950s.) But the world didn't come to end from atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1950s-early 1960s. What's the big deal if you use a 1-5 megaton bomb to "pebbelize" 2004MN, if the alternative is a sub-continent killing 800 megaton blast? Even if the Earth plows into the radioactive cloud of the explosion, are the atmospheric effects going to be any worse from the U.S. in 15 megaton Castle Bravo blast < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravoatmosphere > ? If detonated several days out from Earth, part of the radioactive cloud would be trapped in the Van Allen Belt, which was the point of the StarFish Prime < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime > and Operation Argus test blasts < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Argus >. I'm no advocate of nuclear testing and feel nuclear weapons should dismantled as much and as quickly as possible. Just wondering about the physics. - Canopus56(Kurt) Doug Adams, _Mostly Harmless_ (1992): "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs