[madaxe_again]

What?! Not what I said - the Chelyabinsk meteor was a large ferric bolide, which isn't the kind of meteor which typically airbursts - that's reserved for less dense material. Many of the videos of it breaking up show an object approaching it at huge velocity from the rear the moment before it breaks apart, with many fragments accelerating relative to the previous speed of the bolide - again, not typical break-up behaviour - that would be the Gazelle, automatically intercepting a high speed object entering highly protected military airspace. The Gazelle operates by detonating a highly directional, shaped, small, nuclear warhead, in order to utterly destroy a re-entering MIRV - their primary purpose.

[ceejayoz]

> the Chelyabinsk meteor was a large ferric bolide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteorite

"Type: Ordinary chondrite LL5" (i.e. stony, not iron)

[arethuza]

I would have thought that the detonation of a nuclear weapon near to the meteor (particularly an ABM which typically use "enhanced radiation" warheads) would have made the remnants fairly "hot" due to neutron activation.

I haven't seen any reports that the remnants of the meteor are radioactive?

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, they were:

1) Refers to fireball hot enough to blind and cause second degree burns, and references two nature papers which say the energy discharged is inconsistent with airburst models http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/06/chelyabinsk-m...

2) Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs, not uniquely in ABM systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb

Fine - it's not definitely the case that this happened, but there's enough information floating about to make it far more than plausible.

[arethuza]

"Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs"

"Neutron bomb" is another name for an "enhanced radiation weapon" - basically an H-bomb designed to give off large amounts of neutron radiation. So you would expect anything close to the explosion of such a device (and therefore exposed to a very high neutron flux) to have pretty clear indications that would be easy to test for.