[techdragon]

Two theories off hand without research to double check.

1 - nuclear explosion involves the conversion of a tiny amount of mass into rapidly expanding cloud of energy conveyed by various particles. The significance being the drastic density difference before and after it’s blown to bits. This difference is equivalent to a sudden moment of regular mass since energy and mass are equivalent and energy has gravitational attraction. This is roughly the same as attempting to catch the gravitational waves theorised to be produced by a supernova. We can’t catch these yet due to insufficient sensitivity, but despite the nuclear explosion being ridiculously tiny compared to a supernova, we are also ridiculously close compared to the supernova, so the proximity to the event may “win” and make it strong enough for the detectors to see it.

2 - the equivalence of nuclear explosions to earthquakes in terms of energy displacement into the earths crust, and in particular underground tests of them, has been established. (This is obviously dependent on the size of the explosion and if it’s an underground test or not, since underground tests dump basically all their energy into the surrounding geology they make it a “more effective earthquake”). Earthquakes can speed up or slow down the earths rotation, which has tidal effects which involve the moon, so between the seismic and seismically induced tidal changes, we get to affecting the moons orbit and consequently we get a tiny gravitational wave which once again is detectable only because of how much closer we are to the source compared to the things we built LIGO to detect.

Of course I might be wrong on both of these. They were just fun to think about on my ride home from work. :-)