US planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over USSR

Daily Mail (U.K.) ^ | 25 November 2012 | Daily Mail Reporter

[DogByte6RER]

Revealed: How the U.S. planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union

- Scientists were hoping for giant flash on the moon that would intimidate the Soviet Union

- Aim of mission was to launch the nuke by 1959

- Plan was later scrapped due to possible danger to people on Earth

It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s.

At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America's Cold War muscle.

The secret project, innocuously titled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' and nicknamed 'Project A119,' was never carried out

However, its planning included calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, then a young graduate student, of the behavior of dust and gas generated by the blast.

Viewing the nuclear flash from Earth might have intimidated the Soviet Union and boosted U.S. confidence after the launch of Sputnik, physicist Leonard Reiffel told the AP in a 2000 interview.

Reiffel, now 85, directed the inquiry at the former Armour Research Foundation, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He later served as a deputy director at NASA.

Sagan, who later became renowned for popularizing science on television, died in 1996.

The author of one of Sagan's biographies suggested that he may have committed a security breach in 1959 after revealing the classified project in an academic fellowship application. Reiffel concurred.

Under the scenario, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact.

[a fool in paradise]

Brak Obama DID blow up the Moon.

This is what has p!ssed off the muslims worldwide. We attacked their Moon God.

NASA Will Use 2 Ton Kinetic Weapon to Bomb Moon on Oct. 9 Breaks UN Treaty (Scientific American June 19, 2009 Paul Sutherland)

Cold War got nothin' to do with. I was gonna say Commies got nothing to do with it, then I remembered...

[a fool in paradise]

Needless to say, the Moon was not amused.

[a fool in paradise]

And now, for the REST OF THE STORY.

[a fool in paradise]

Psshaw, Russia would have responded by blowing up the sun producing a Pravda headline that they'd blown up the sun, US academics would agree with the statement.

[Darksheare]

May we use this as the December Undead Thread?

“I have declared war on the moon!” -Strax from Doctor Who.