Outer Space Treaty

Meanwhile, the United States managed to conduct two more high altitude nuclear tests, codenamed Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish, before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 finally put an end to all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, ocean, and outer space.

Four years later, in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty also banned the stationing of both nuclear and conventional weapons in outer space.

However, both superpowers continued to develop plans for space-based weapon systems, the most famous being the ill-fated US Strategic Defense Initiative anti-ballistic missile system, aka Star Wars, which among other components would have included giant lasers pumped by nuclear warheads.

This all now brings us to what if you went further and, say, detonated a nuke on the moon? What would that look like, and what would the effects of that be? Interestingly, the United States once proposed doing just this.

What are the ethics involving that?

So on the Moon, there is actually the Outer Space Treaty, um-

Right.

So this is a treaty, um-

You take note of the tension between existing international law and the ideas expressed by folks like Elon Musk.

The Outer Space Treaty makes Earth's governments responsible for all the activities carried on in space by public agencies as well as private companies.

But Musk has been saying that the people who go to Mars should choose their own government.

And it sounds as if you favor Musk's view and you suggest that Earthlings should put the bill for building an independent Mars with no expectation of a return on investment for Earthlings.

It only takes one of the major space actors to not participate in that for it to be largely ineffective.

And so your things like that, I think just being really pragmatic about what we expect will help us to prepare for what actually comes.

And I think one of the scenarios that you outlined, and this is probably one of the more idealistic scenarios, is that someone, for example, SpaceX, establishes a settlement on Mars, and they are able to get the United States to agree, okay, we're not going to assert our rights or our responsibilities under the Outer Space Treaty, and we're just going to say, you are an independent settlement.

You don't have to answer to the United States.

It's quite ancient.

Well, we are parties to the Outer Space Treaty.

There is a moon agreement to which we are not parties.

And it's important to note that because that agreement would... potentially be an issue if we were signatories but the outer space treaty to which we are signatories does allow resource use and the development of resources on the moon and on other celestial bodies the artemis program our nasa's nasa's program to go back to the moon has as part of it the Artemis Accords, which are agreements between the United States or joint statements of principle between the United States and its Artemis partners.

Among those are the idea that you can use resources and that you can acquire them, you can use them, you can trade them, you can sell them, you can live off the land, as it were, in space.

Those are really important.

Why don't we call it the Cis-Trump space? I don't know.

But this is kind of like in violation of the 67 Outer Space Treaty.

Did you know this exists? Wait, again, listen to yourself, Michael.

You did not know this? This is what makes Moon

These frameworks must balance the scientific imperative to study extraterrestrial material against the precautionary principle, the recognition that unknowns in biology and ecology demand conservative risk management.

The proposal also intersects with existing international agreements, such as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which obligates nations to avoid contaminating celestial bodies and to prevent harmful contamination of Earth.

A lunar quarantine facility would operationalize these principles in concrete infrastructure and procedure.

This represents an important shift toward treating space exploration through a quality and safety lens, viewing sample integrity and Earth protection as mission-critical objectives rather than afterthoughts.