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Scientists Have a Plan to Find Out if Satellites Are Secretly Carrying Nukes

An MIT physicist says Earth’s radiation belts could help detector satellites identify uranium or plutonium hidden in orbit.

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You probably weren’t worried that there might be a nuke hanging out in a satellite over our heads right now. There isn’t—that we know of. But that knowledge gap was enough for an MIT physicist to publish a paper in Nature proposing a theoretical device that could fly alongside a satellite and determine whether it’s carrying a nuclear weapon.

“But,” you might argue, “the 1967 Outer Space Treaty explicitly bans nuclear weapons in space!” While that’s true, there is a glaring loophole: we have no way to verify whether anyone has already put one up there. That treaty could have........

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