As you know, we have a longstanding treaty with the Soviet Union preventing any atomic explosions in space. But we were guilty of that a long time ag… - Jimmy Carter

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As you know, we have a longstanding treaty with the Soviet Union preventing any atomic explosions in space. But we were guilty of that a long time ago. I think it's time to reexamine that question. I believe that this recent incident with the Soviet satellite has shown that we don't have an adequate, guaranteed safety requirement on nuclear fuel in space. This particular satellite and all those that we've ever launched—I think the first one we put up using nuclear power was in 1965—they have what's called a subcritical mass there's not enough radioactivity there to cause an explosion under any circumstances. And when the satellite is first launched, it's relatively clean; you could get probably close to it without having radiation. The longer it burns, the more byproducts are made and the more radioactive they become. This particular satellite was designed, as are most of them, to be elevated into a higher orbit when it had served its purpose. And when the Soviets attempted to elevate it into a higher orbit, which would have kept it in space for a thousand years or more, some mechanism failed—I don't know the details of it. But I think that we now are in the process of deciding' what we can do to minimize this danger from space. One possibility would be to design such a nuclear powerplant, which is very small, so that it would surely burn completely as it came down through space itself by increasing the drag of friction, and so forth. Another one would be to have standby mechanisms, so that if the first one failed to eject it into outer orbit, another standby would be required. This is something that we have not yet gone into in any definitive way. We have a much higher reliance, as you may know, on solar panel power supplies, and we do not rely on the atomic power supplies as much. But you have a good question. It's something that we have not yet addressed with the Soviets, but I'm sure it's something that we will address.