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AT: No Risk of Small Asteroid Sparking War
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- AT: Small Impacts Irrelevant
AT: No Risk of Small Asteroid Sparking War[____] [____] Many countries lack the advanced technology to distinguish between nuclear strikes and asteroids, the only way to truly be safe is the detection system of the plan,higher nuclear detonation, plan increases surveillance to prevent this. A.J. Bosker, Air Force Staff Sergeant, 9/18/2002, “Asteroid Impact Could Have Triggered India-Pakistan Nuclear War, General Says”, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/752890/posts Although U.S. officials quickly determined that a meteor caused the explosion, neither India nor Pakistan have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural near-Earth object impact and a nuclear detonation, Worden said in written testimony. This is one of many threats posed by NEOs, especially as more and more nations acquire nuclear weapons, said Worden, who appeared before the commission as a scientist who has studied NEOs and as a space expert familiar with the technologies that can be used to address the NEO threat. In recent years, the Department of Defense has been working to provide data about asteroid strikes to nations potentially under missile attack and to the scientific community; however, it takes several weeks for the data to be released since much of it is gathered from classified systems. Worden suggested that a NEO warning center be established that can assess and release this data as soon as possible to all interested parties while ensuring sensitive data is safeguarded. He recommended to the commission that a natural impact warning clearinghouse could be formed by adding no more than 10 people to current U.S. Space Command early warning centers. This organization would catalog and provide credible warning information on future NEO impact problems, as well as rapidly provide information on the nature of an impact. In order for this clearinghouse to provide accurate information, NEOs must first be detected, cataloged and their orbits defined. Current ground-based systems are already cataloging large kilometer-sized objects but have a difficult time finding smaller NEOs. Most sail by the earth unnoticed until they have passed, he said. "Just about everyone knows of the 'dinosaur killer' asteroids," Worden said. "These are objects, a few kilometers across, that strike on time scales of tens of millions of years. While the prospect of such strikes grabs people's attention and makes great catastrophe movies, too much focus on these events has been counterproductive. We need to focus our energies on the smaller, more immediate threats." The smaller strikes, while not exactly commonplace, have occurred on several occasions over the past century, with potentially devastating results, he said. "An object probably less than 100 meters in diameter struck Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, releasing the energy equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear blast," Worden said. "In 1996, our satellite sensors detected a burst over Greenland equal to a 100-kiloton yield. Had any of these struck over a populated area, perhaps hundreds of thousands might have perished." An even worse catastrophe would be an ocean impact near a heavily populated shore by one of these Tunguska-sized objects. "The resulting tidal wave could inundate shorelines for hundreds of miles and potentially kill millions," Worden explained. "There are hundreds of thousands of objects this size that come near the Earth," he said. "We know the orbits of just a few. New space-surveillance systems capable of scanning the entire sky every few days are needed. They could enable us to completely catalog and warn of objects (less than 100 meters in diameter)." AT: Small Impacts Irrelevant[____] [____] [____] Smaller asteroids have the potential to destroy entire cities and starting accidental wars. Leon Jaroff, columnist for Time Magazine, 9/17/2002, “It’s the Little Asteroids That Get You,” http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,351731,00.html?) Anyhow, after all that, I had good reason to think that I knew practically everything there was to know about asteroids and their threat to Earth — until this summer, when Brig. Gen Pete Worden, deputy director of the U.S. Space Command, disabused me of that notion. Though the asteroid detection program has so far concentrated on finding the big guys, civilization-ending monsters about six-tenths of a mile across or larger, Worden thinks that the more plentiful, and harder-to-detect smaller ones present a more imminent threat. Many of these asteroids are not massive enough to penetrate the atmosphere and strike Earth. But, as they hurtle into the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, friction heats them so rapidly that they explode before reaching the ground. By now, we've all heard of the asteroid, about 300 ft. in diameter, that in 1908 exploded about five miles above the uninhabited Tunguska region of Siberia. The blast, estimated today at 10 megatons, burned and felled trees and killed wildlife over an area of several hundred square miles. And as recently as 1996, an asteroid exploded over Greenland with the equivalent of a 100 kiloton blast. Had either of these intruders from space met their demise over, say, London or New York, hundreds of thousands might have perished. That's bad enough, and we'd certainly better start looking harder for the smaller guys. But, as Worden warns, these diminutive asteroids can trigger a danger even greater that their explosive potential. Last June for example, during the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, an asteroid no more than 30 feet across exploded over the Mediterranean sea with the force of a one kiloton bomb. Had that blast occurred anywhere over the subcontinent, Worden fears, neither side could have distinguished between a nuclear blast and an exploding asteroid. Mistaking the event as a first strike, they might have launched a nuclear exchange and killed millions. 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