I'm curious - did the people testing space nuclear weapons predict the intense effects? AKA killing 7 satellites and more impressively to me, causing an aurora seen from New Zealand to Hawaii (!!!).
> I'm curious - did the people testing space nuclear weapons predict the intense effects
No:
> Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights
"Destroyed by radiation" after 4 months is a bad joke. Virtually all radioactivity produced has decayed by then, so if something wasn't kicked out in the first hours and days, it will be safe later.
Long-term disruptions in the Earth's magnetic field resulting from explosion, effectively exposing satellites to space radiation as if they were in the Van Allen belt instead of LEO, could do that. But certainly not the radioactivity produced by the explosion proper. It probably didn't have any impact on anything, either short or long term. Certainly not on satellites.
> Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, wrote that, “To our great surprise and dismay, it developed that Starfish added significantly to the electrons in the Van Allen belts. This result contravened all our predictions.
Nothing ever impacts the rate of radioactive decay. That's basic school physics.
This isn't radioactive products of the explosion itself (that is, gamma quants and beta particles produced by decay of fission products). They probably had no impact at all on any of the satellites (prompt radiation - neutrons produced in fission reaction itself - of course could and probably had some impact - but it lasts milliseconds to seconds).
What they are speaking is impact on Earth natural radiation belts with the electrons produced in the explosion. Electrons of course, do not decay at all. After that it was due to natural processes in the Earth's magnetic field to return things back to normal. This is a geophysical process that has nothing to do with the radioactive decay of any of the fission products produced.
