The Stanford Dish: Nuclear Explosions in Space (Score 2, Interesting)

The radio telescope in the Stanford foothills, now generally regarded as a benign feature of the landscape, pretty at sunset, and occasionally used for research, was originally commissioned to study nuclear explosions in space. I don't know very much about the history of the project, except that its true purpose was almost certainly kept secret. That was military S.O.P. for weapons research, and there had been massive protests against Stanford Research Institute, the owner of the dish, for its involvement in "evil" military research. Even today few people are uneasy about the origins of the dish, because few people know.