Here’s the challenge. You want to make sure your military satellite is tough enough to withstand the radiation from a nuclear blast.

Here’s the problem. You can’t just put the sat in orbit and nuke it. That’s illegal and dangerous. Plus, you’ll need to study the spacecraft after the test in order to get the results—something hard to do if it’s a cloud of radioactive shrapnel.

So how do you do it? With clever thinking and big, wacky hardware, is how.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits the deployment or use of nuclear weapons in outer space, conventionally defined as 62 miles up. Like many such weapons treaties, it came into effect because the signatories feared the consequences of certain kinds of warfare more than than they did the advantages.

Apart from the scary thought of H-bombs passing overhead several times a day, nuclear tests in space demonstrated how nasty atomic-blast side effects could be.

In 1962, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb in space as part of Operation Dominic, the last American atmospheric nuke test series.

Shortly after the 1958 discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts that surround our planet, Nicholas Christofilos—from what is now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—proposed a radical idea.

He said a nuclear weapon detonated hundreds of miles up might create an artificial Van Allen belt orbiting Earth. Its effects might disrupt communications, radar and ballistic missile flights.

Project Argus confirmed Christofilos’ ideas in what some termed “the world’s largest scientific experiment.” Very-high-altitude nuclear detonations could indeed affect Earth’s orbital environment.

Five years later, Operation Fishbowl—the high-altitude part of Operation Dominic—followed up these results with a much larger detonation. After several false starts including a spectacularly awful explosion that heavily contaminated the launch pad, weaponeers successfully lofted and detonated a 1.4-megaton warhead at an altitude of 248 miles.