Single house nuke may wipe out 98% of Earth’s satellites in only one week, boffins warn

Scientists warn a single nuclear blast in space could wipe out 98 per cent of Earth’s satellites within a week, crippling sat-navs, phones and bank cards for years

Modern life on Earth could be brought to its knees in just seven days if a single nuclear bomb is detonated in orbit, according to a terrifying new study. Sat-navs, mobile networks, weather forecasts and bank card payments would all grind to a halt if a warhead went off above our heads, wiping out roughly 98 per cent of the 13,000-plus satellites circling in low-Earth orbit.

The warning comes from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton University, who modelled the fallout of a one-megaton blast 310 miles (500km) above the South Atlantic.

James McKeon, Vice President of Nuclear Philanthropy, summed up the apocalyptic scenario bluntly: “It would be bad. Very bad. Very, very bad. We must do everything we can to prevent this from ever happening.”

While nuking space sounds like the plot of a Hollywood disaster flick, humanity has actually done it before.

Back on July 9, 1962, the US military carried out the ‘Starfish Prime’ test – detonating a 1.4-megaton warhead 248 miles (400km) above Johnston Atoll in the Pacific.

That blast blew out streetlights and jammed phone lines in Hawaii while creating man-made radiation belts that wrecked satellites for over five years.

With space now packed with thousands more satellites than in the 1960s, boffins say a repeat today would be off the scale.

Writing in their study, published on the pre-print server arXiv, lead researcher Zachary Peterson and his team saod: “A comparable event today would occur in a much more densely populated orbital environment.”

To see how bad things would get, the experts simulated everything from the initial burst of X-rays to satellite breakdowns, atmospheric drag and orbital smash-ups.

They found that radioactive debris would trap electrons inside Earth’s magnetic field, forming a deadly artificial radiation belt that repeatedly fries passing spacecraft until nearly the entire network is dead within a week.

The mayhem wouldn’t stop there, as the dead hardware would spark around 20 major space crashes over the next two years – leaving behind lethal radiation and shrapnel that would stop replacement satellites from being launched.

The researchers added: “Replacement satellites could remain exposed to radiation and debris for years. A single detonation could devastate orbital infrastructure and support efforts to prevent the deployment and use of nuclear weapons in space.”

Fears over orbital warfare have ramped up since 2024, when the US claimed Russia was developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon – a move Moscow denied before vetoing a UN Security Council resolution reaffirming the ban on placing nukes in space.

Boffins warn such a device could be launched on a missile or secretly parked in orbit as a payload to be triggered at a later date.