MOSCOW, September 26. /TASS/. The Western scientific community’s idea to nuke asteroid 2024 YR4, which is headed toward the Moon, may reflect a wish by some countries - such as the United States - to begin lifting the current ban on deploying nuclear weapons in space, said Leonid Yelenin, a researcher at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and author of Asteroids: Born of Flame, in an interview with TASS.
Previously, an article published on the arXiv platform by an international team of scientists, including NASA experts, discussed two approaches to preventing a collision between 2024 YR4 and the Moon. The researchers proposed either altering the asteroid’s orbit or destroying it with a kinetic impact or a nuclear explosion. The latter option was suggested for late 2028, when the object is poised to approach Earth.
"The more I follow my Western colleagues, the stronger my conviction that this is an attempt to shift the Overton window - to prepare humanity for allowing nuclear weapons in space," Yelenin said. "Under the pretext of protecting Earth from asteroids, the United States appears to be seeking the right to deploy nuclear weapons in space. It is crucial to prevent any country from gaining that right because we cannot guarantee how such plans would unfold afterward."
The scientist warned that the consequences of detonating a weapon in space are unpredictable. One possible scenario is that the current 4% probability of a collision with the Moon could rise tenfold. "Even with a powerful explosive, we may not be able to destroy the asteroid entirely since there is no medium for the blast wave to propagate as on the ground. Most of the energy would convert to radiation, and a significant portion of the asteroid would melt, imparting momentum. How this would affect its motion remains unclear. The risk of it hitting the Earth could increase, though it does not exist at present. I am against such experiments," he concluded.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered in late December last year by one of the ATLAS telescopes operating in Chile. Its diameter is estimated at 40 to 90 meters. Scientists predict the object could strike the Moon in December 2032.