Unbelievable video shows nuclear bomb exploding in space
If you cast your mind back to the Oppenheimer craze of the summer, you may have seen what it looks like when a bomb goes off on Earth.
But what does it look like when nuclear weapons are sent to space?
We have a video from the 1960s showing just that, and it's hard to believe that it’s not from a movie.
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In 1962, in response to the Soviets announcing a three-year ban on nuclear testing, the US military launched Operation Fishbowl and sent rockets into space to set off bombs.
The operation took place to evaluate the effects of high yield explosions and its destructiveness, and there were three tests involved - Bluegill, Urraca and Starfish - all launched from Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean.
And we're able to see what these explosions actually looked like, thanks to video footage shared by The Nevada National Security Site.
The video opens with shots of the test site, and then shows a rocket going into space surrounded by a sea of smoke and fire.
The bomb explodes, resembling a mushroom cloud, and then we see a huge flash of light.
According to NASA, the absence of an atmosphere in spaces means that the blast would have disappeared completely, as there’s no air for the bomb to heat up.
But they also say that nuclear radiation won't suffer any reduction of force in space, meaning the range of significant dosages would be much greater than it would be on Earth.
The blast from the Starfish test, which used a 1.4 megaton bomb, was 500 times as powerful as the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
It blew up at an altitude of 250 miles, and was even visible on Earth.
Greg Spriggs, who watched the test take place with his family, told National Geographic: “[My dad] was trying to figure out which direction to look. He thought there was going to be this little flicker, so he wanted to make sure everybody was going to see it.
"When that nuclear weapon went off, the whole sky lit up in every direction. It looked like noon."
The effects of the bomb lasted for as long as 15 minutes after it went off, and an artificial aura was visible all the way in New Zealand.
Just one year later, the US, the UK and the then-U.S.S.R. signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
In 1968, it was even reported that some Starfish electrons had remained in the atmosphere for five years.