{"id":17544,"date":"2019-05-03T10:33:32","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T09:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/?p=17544"},"modified":"2021-11-15T09:24:55","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T09:24:55","slug":"nuclear-weapons-might-save-the-world-from-an-asteroid-strike-but-we-need-to-change-the-law-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2019\/05\/03\/nuclear-weapons-might-save-the-world-from-an-asteroid-strike-but-we-need-to-change-the-law-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear weapons might save the world from an asteroid strike \u2013 but we need to change the law first"},"content":{"rendered":"

If an asteroid were to head on a collision course towards earth, an\u00a0Armageddon<\/em>-style nuclear explosion may well be our best line of defence. But would doing so open us up to a potential space-based nuclear apocalypse instead? Reading Law Professor James A. Green explores the legal issues surrounding the ‘nuclear option’ in a recent post for The Conversation<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The schlocky 1998 Bruce Willis movie Armageddon<\/a> was the highest grossing film of that year. The blockbuster saw a master oil driller (Willis) and an unlikely crew of misfits place a nuclear bomb inside a giant asteroid heading for Earth, blow it up \u2013 and save humanity. Armageddon isn\u2019t exactly a documentary: it\u2019s packed full of sci-fi nonsense. But, 20 years on, its basic plot \u2013 of using a nuclear explosion to avert a cataclysmic asteroid collision \u2013 doesn\u2019t seem quite as silly as it did at the time.<\/p>\n

Major asteroid impact is a low-probability, but high-consequence risk to life on Earth. Large \u201cNear Earth Objects\u201d (NEOs)<\/a> don\u2019t hit Earth often, but it only takes one (just ask the dinosaurs \u2013 oh, wait, you can\u2019t). Of course, low probability risks are easily dismissed, however high the consequences of them manifesting might be \u2013 and until recently the countries of the world largely viewed the threat posed by NEOs as something best left to Hollywood.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s all changed, following the impact (in more ways than one) of the meteoroid that hit Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013<\/a>, which injured more than 1,000 people. Suddenly, the NEO threat became \u201creal\u201d, and major players \u2013 the US, Russia and the EU \u2013 all started pumping money into NEO preparedness, and developing formal strategies for response (see, for example, the production of the US\u2019s first ever National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy<\/a> in December 2016).<\/p>\n

At the UN, we\u2019ve recently witnessed the creation of an embryonic international institutional infrastructure<\/a> to detect and respond to asteroids. As part of all this \u2013 and in line with increasing scientific opinion<\/a> \u2013 there is also a notable focus at governmental and intergovernmental levels on the use of nuclear weapons as our best hope. The US and Russia have even mooted working together on a nuclear planetary defence initiative<\/a>. All of a sudden, it seems Bruce Willis and his team might be put on NASA\u2019s speed-dial, after all.<\/p>\n