Speaker
Description
In this paper, I argue for a new perspective on the design of nuclear weapons for planetary defense missions. At the time of writing, the mandate for Sandia’s planetary defense team is to modify existing stockpile weapons as needed for employment in the deflection of a near-earth object. However, this runs up against a universally acknowledged but seldom-mentioned problem: the placement of nuclear weapons in space is explicitly banned under international law. For this reason, I urge the consideration of non-traditional nuclear explosive designs in addition to our current work scope. We ought to design a nuclear explosive device that, if used in a wartime, re-entry setting, would fail by design. This could be done by removing the ablative heat shield, or by changing the overall geometry of the device to be something that would exhibit abysmal performance on re-entry. When we take this idea seriously, it also opens up the design space.
The only use case for such a nuclear explosive device would take place well beyond the lunar orbit. This way, any gamma ray flux produced by the nuclear explosive would diminish as 1/r^2 and would not pose a threat to Earth-orbiting satellites. Any nuclear detonation within the lunar orbit is not likely to produce the deflection required of a planetary defense mission, rendering such a scenario moot.
I offer a nominal trade study on how this freer design space can be used to improve the radar performance and fuzing of such a device. We are no longer concerned with a whole host of problems that are specific to re-entry environments. We should take the freedom afforded by this change of environment and use it to tailor a device that only has one job: to target and deflect near-earth objects.
SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525