American Notes Ideas

Now that the threat of a nuclear war with Moscow is fading, atomic-weapons designers have been casting around for a mission. Some of them -- including physicist Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb -- have proposed using a Super Nuke to destroy a huge asteroid that could extinguish human life if it crashed into Earth.

Though many scientists dismiss the notion of blowing up killer asteroids as a last-ditch attempt to find some role for nuclear weapons, they do think keeping an eye on runaway asteroids makes sense. This week, after several months of studying the issue, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will urge Congress to establish a tracking and detection system that could sound the alert if a big chunk of celestial rock starts heading this way.

The watchers are probably in for a long wait. The last time such a cataclysmic collision took place was 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the planet.