It's 2023 and Telford's days are numbered

A TEAM of British space scientists has devised a plan to nudge an asteroid out of its solar orbit and send it hurtling into the centre of Telford.

The impact on the Midlands new town would trigger an explosion the equivalent of 15 hydrogen bombs, wiping Telford - birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and which now boasts "one of Shropshire's larger shopping centres" - off the map. Most of the Midlands and part of the North, including Birmingham and Manchester, would go, too.

The plot may sound like something dreamed up by an under-ambitious James Bond villain but the researchers say their study is a serious attempt to show how asteroids could be turned into weapons of mass destruction. Nigel Holloway and David Asher, who insist that they have nothing against Telford, unveiled their plans for the destruction of the Midlands on Oct 16, 2023, at a conference at Charterhouse School, Surrey,last week.

Astronomers have repeatedly given warning that the risks of an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth are greater than many people realise. In 1908, an asteroid exploded in Siberia, flattening trees over 400 square miles. Comets probably finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and triggered mass extinctions 250 million years ago.

Now, Dr Holloway, of the astronomer pressure group Spaceguard UK, and Dr Asher, from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, have demonstrated that it is possible to turn an asteroid into a weapon. Using a computer model, they have shown that it would take 15 small nuclear bombs to push a rock on to a collision course. The impact would be accurate to within a few hundred miles.

Because an asteroid could be deflected without anyone on Earth realising, the devastation could be made to look natural. For their simulation, they chose an asteroid a few hundred yards long called 1998 HH49. Telford was chosen because it was central. The team also happened to have the co-ordinates of its observatory to hand.

Dr Holloway said: "It would totally wipe out everything within 60 miles, and for hundreds of miles there would be serious damage from blast winds and debris." Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham would all be destroyed, killing 10 million people.

Mr Holloway, who works on risk assessment at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, likened the approach to one of a bad golfer. He said: "It is extremely difficult to get a hole in one, but even a bad player can get the ball in the hole if they take enough strokes. On its normal orbit, 1998 HH49 is due to miss the Earth by at least 600,000 miles in October 2023.

The team proposed sending a 10-ton satellite on a nine-year journey to within 6,000 miles of the asteroid. The satellite would carry one-megaton nuclear missiles. In July 2022, while the asteroid was hidden from view behind the Sun, a bomb would detonate every 24 hours, a few hundred feet from the asteroid, nudging it into position.

The researchers say their plans are not science fiction. The Russians have talked about deflecting asteroids, while America is considering investing more in "planetary defence". Dr Holloway said: "The point of this is to show how it could be done secretly. But the more asteroids we know about, they harder it would be for a country to find one and use it as a weapon."